#brambleheart

[carriagelamp]

Rememberance Day is over so I’m legally allowed to start getting into Christmas-y books. This month has been weird as hell around here... we sure are still in a series of ongoing global crisis? So books have been holding me in a protective, loving embrace...

Brambleheart

Brambleheart is about a young chipmunk, Twig, who lives in an animal society deep in the woods, who make a living from the nearby human trash, which they repurpose into all sorts of things. Learning how to work with this trash is an important right of passage for the young animals, as it defines their eventual role and status in society. Twig is concerned he won’t earn a respectable place in society and on a long walk away from home he stumbles across a strange, magical egg...  

This is a book that was cute… and not much else. A fun read for an eight year old maybe, and for everyone else it’s just… there. And it’s fine! But considering it’s about a trash-based animal society that includes finding a dragon egg, it’s surprisingly basic. Nothing I would go out of my way to read.

A Christmas Carol

I have watched A Christmas Carol basically every year since I was a child, but this is my first time reading the book. The writing is truly phenomenal, it’s clever, funny, and evocative. I’ve read other Dickens’ books that have bored me to tears, but this is one that makes you appreciate why he’s such a beloved author. And, despite seeing it just about every year, it still made me full-on cry during the graveyard scene. I’m furious that this was apparently written in six weeks.

The Christmas Pig

[Mandatory disclaimer: yes I am aware of the gross politics here, yes I find them abhorrent, however JKR is still an author deeply rooted into my childhood and I can’t cull it that easily, so yes I did read her new book. I totally understand anyone that would make the choice to boycott her work and I respect that. Please feel free to scroll on. This review is based off the actual experience of reading the book and nothing else.]

I got this book out of the library, and during out Weird As Hell Week my mom and I took turns reading chapters out loud. It was exactly the sort of soothing comfort I needed. The Christmas Pig was a really enjoyable book. Despite being new, it felt like a Classic Kid Christmas Story. It reads like games I used to play as a child around Christmas time -- there was something incredibly nostalgic about it. 

The story is about a boy whose life goes through a string of changes. His parents’ divorce, his father moving away, going to a new school, and finally his mother dating someone new. He manages to weather it all with his beloved toy, Dur Pig, at his side. However tragedy strikes and Dur Pig is lost, and is replaced by a new imposter, the Christmas Pig. He can’t accept this, but the magic of Christmas Eve is at work, and the Christmas Pig comes to life and offers to bring the boy down to the Land of the Lost, to find Dur Pig before it’s too late...

A Dog’s Way Home

Sometimes you just need a good, well-written animal adventure. This felt like The Incredible Journey, but for an older audience. An adorable puppy is rescued by a man, and her entire life soon centres around him and their shared love. However things can’t stay peaceful, as she finds herself being persecuted for her perceived breed, and is taken away from her human… leaving her no choice but to embark on a perilous journey to get back to him.

Hercule Poirot: The Mysterious Affair at Styles // Adventure of the Christmas Pudding

It’s been long overdue but I’ve finally started reading Agatha Christie! I stared with The Mysterious Affair at Styles and it filled my heart with joy. This is the pinnacle of the “cozy murder mystery” genre. I get a funny, fussy little Belgian man, and a good-natured English man who very cheerful and very, very dumb. Absolutely thick as a brick. I relate to him so much and I adore him, bless Captain Hastings. And damn, is it ever clever! The whole way through it’s so thrilling to read a mystery that is slowly being pieced together when you can tell there’s some very clever machinations behind the screen. 

I also read the “Christmas Pudding” short story because I’m getting into a Christmasy mood! Also very fun, and a little less murdery than Styles which was nice for a festive story.

The Lost World

What I’d been hoping for — Jurassic Park meets Dinotopia

What I got — Colonialism, Racism, and Genocide: The Novel

We spent way too little time checking out the cool dinosaurs and way too much time trying to commit wholesale mass murder against the indigenous “monkey people”. Thanks for that Doyle, very cool.

Monster and the Beast v2

Enormous, shy monster, meets shameless monsterfucker. They go on an adventure! The monster is able to hide in the human’s shadow and see the city for the first time! Try new foods! Meet new people! He’s excited to be around someone who, for the first time in his life, isn’t scared of him and treats him the same as he would treat anyone else. A surprisingly charming series, I can’t help but enjoy it; the human is a bit of an asshole and the monster is a sweetheart. It’s a fun spin on things, I’m looking forward to reading the third book.

Otter Lagoon

A youth graphic novel series based in the West Coast, with a bit of a Gravity Falls vibe. It’s about friends in a small island community who run into strange supernatural creatures and struggle with the ethical issues of living alongside them. I really adore this series. The art style is fantastic and unique, and the story feels like it’s doing something interesting with just a teensy bit more edge than a lot of the bubblegum soft kid series that have been coming out these days. In this book, the main character is trying to make up for an earlier mistake but only ends up compromising her own morals and digging her hole deeper...

Pryce and Carter’s Deep Space Survival Procedure & Protocol Manual

The DSSPPM is a fictional manual that exists in the world of Wolf 359 (one of my all-time favourite podcasts) and it was actually written out in its entirety as a part of the Patreon rewards. It has 1001 off-the-walls tips and tricks to survive in deep space on a life-threatening long-term scientific mission without compromising the company’s bottom line. Along with Doug Eiffel’s helpful commentary written in the margins.

Tintin

I finally invested in getting the entire English series of Tintin. We always had a number of books at home while growing up, we borrowed plenty more from the library, and I have another handful in French, but I wanted to reread in chronological order for the first time and decided I was ready to have them all on hand.

For anyone unfamiliar, Tintin is a Belgian comic (bande dessinée) about a young reporter who goes on many highflying adventures all around the world. He’s sincere, kind, and capable of surviving an truly stupendous number of head injuries, gunshot wounds, and blatant attempts at poisoning, maiming, and murder. Tintin is one of my all time favourite series, I passionately adored it as a child and that passion has never once dimmed.

While I’ve read most of them before, this was my first time reading The Land of the Soviets and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I expected all kinds of atrocious given what the early series is like in general (cough*Congo*cough), but blatant propaganda aside it was actually a lot of fun. Just pure silly slapstick goofiness. In America was a nightmare that I won’t be rereading again any time soon. And then we hit Cigars of the Pharaoh and the series starts in earnest, and it honestly only gets better and better from there. Can we all agree that The Crab with the Golden Claws is the best in the series? Captain Haddock, my beloved.

Witch Hat Atelier v1-2

A manga I enjoyed way more than I expected! It really feels like a unique gem. In a very strange way, it reminds me of +Anima... maybe not in story but in art and general vibe. We have a young girl who accidentally stumbles across the secret of magic — that it’s not hereditary, like it has always been claimed, but that it can be drawn by anyone who knows the patterns and has the appropriate ink. However she makes the mistake of experimenting with that, and ends up cursing her mother… she now has no choice but to join a senior witch at his atelier and begin to study magic with fellow apprentices, in the hopes of learning how to save her mother.

You Are Asexual

A fun little oddball of a book. It’s parodying both Choose Your Own Adventure stories, as well as dystopian you-are-assigned-to-a-single-faction ya stories, but this time with sexuality-based factions. Everyone has their sexuality repressed until “Orientation Day” when it’s revealed… except “you” don’t notice any change to your attraction. As a “forbidden asexual”, you then get to go on an adventure of discovery and/or death. It’s very silly, filled with all the old jokes and memes that used to make up the ace community. It was a sort of lightheartedness I haven’t seen since the destruction of the ace community almost a decade ago, so it was a fun read.

[legionairemutt]

TNP REWRITE REF: Brambleheart a large, broad-shouldered and fluffy dark brown tabby tom with white underbelly, scruff, muzzle, paws, and tail tip. He has yellow-green eyes and a torn right ear.  Brambleheart is the youngest son of the late ShadowClan leader Tigerstar and the ThunderClan warrior Goldenflower. He was mentored by Firestar, and his siblings include Lynxclaw and Swiftwing, of the couples first litter, and his littermate, Tawnyshade. He has been assigned to mentor Squirrelpaw. His mate is Ferncloud, and they currently have a litter consisting of Birchkit, Hollykit, and Larchkit. 

[sunnymoon-sunshine]

Brambleheart noticed for the first time, as the clans moved from their ancestral home to a new promised land, that he and Squirrelpaw had two striking similarities.

Mind, it was only two. He and Squirrelpaw were about as opposite as one could get - he thought himself more reserved, a quiet thinker, someone who looks before he leaps. Squirrelpaw, on the other paw, was prone to letting everyone know exactly what she thought, as loudly as she possibly could, with a penchant for charging forward with reckless abandon. To her, thought might have been important, but action doubly so. Brambleheart spoke when he needed, Squirrelpaw filled the air with noisy chatter. They were as different as two ThunderClan cats could be.

But he noticed, upon reuniting with their clan, that they both tended to be judged against the legacies of their fathers.

Not that any ThunderClan cat could ever call him a shadow of his father. He had made his choice in front of all the clans, denouncing his murderous, power hungry father before every cat, refusing to ever join his side, because how could he? How could he ruin his beloved clan in a conquest that only ended in pain and so, so much blood to be spilled. The thought of Tigerstar sickened him, and everyone that knew Brambleheart even marginally well knew that.

Instead, they often bent over backwards to make sure he knew that he was nothing like his father. He didn’t care for fighting, never aspired for leadership (at least, as far as they knew) and he certainly didn’t hate half-clan cats. He was so used to hearing himself compared to Tigerstar, not in similarities, but by contrast.

And the fascinating thing was that Squirrelpaw was, too. He heard it from her mentor, when Dustpelt scolded her for her recklessness, stating, “Firestar wouldn’t have done that.”

Or when she spoke out of turn, met with, “I can’t believe Firestar’s kit would be such a loud-mouth.”

Or when she stood up, her eyes blazing, and told everyone exactly what she thought. Though, that could more be attributed to her mother, Sandstorm, than Firestar.

But the point still stood. Whenever she messed up, or ruffled someone’s fur, Firestar’s name was quick on their tongues, eager to set him on a pedestal far higher than she could ever reach, and force her to look up at an unobtainable idol. “Why aren’t you like Firestar?” is spoken almost as much as, “You’re nothing like your father.”

Which personally, he found hilarious. Not just amusing, or funny, but downright hilarious. Because he knew Firestar all his life, from deeply anxious deputy to stable leader, and his recollection seemed to be a lot different from everyone else’s. He might not have had the loudmouth fury of Squirrelpaw, but the Fireheart went on all sorts of stupid, reckless adventures to bring a murderer to justice, to save his leader and his clan on multiple occasions.  His hunt to bring Tigerstar to justice alone shown that father and daughter had more in common than they seemed. He knew Fireheart fed RiverClan, helped WindClan, and had been known to blurt out exactly what he thought - that’s what made him a ‘heart above all else. And that was something that shone bright and true in his little ball of spitting fury he called a daughter.

And that was something he felt he could share with her. Because for all the clan tried to bury Tigerstar’s past in ThunderClan, to simplify it to “bad ambitious cat was terrible”, he knew the traits that made his father a good warrior, a popular cat. His mother was sure to stubbornly tell them, not to explain away Tigerstar’s horrible deeds, but to explain what she saw in him that made her love him, and what they all had seen in him. His quiet intimidation, his keen sense to watch, wait, listen, and strike when the moment was right. It made him such a horribly clever killer, and yet those traits were the ones that he passed to his son.

And he found it odd, really, that cats were so eager to pick and choose what they remember - from both the living and the dead. To strip someone down to their barest, and lay them out as if that were a whole. Brambleheart would never, not in a thousand moons would he ever walk the same path as his father, but he never wanted to be touted as the warrior Tigerstar never was. The shadow of his kin’s dark legacy would haunt him forever, it seemed.

And yet the same, but opposite was true of Squirrelpaw. She would always be overpowered by the brightness of her father, criticized not as a frustrating apprentice but almost like a failure of a daughter, compared to a cat touted as a martyr he never wanted to be.

And with that in mind, he stayed close beside her, traveled with her, even as the clans seemed to merge as one. There was a fire in her soul that wasn’t the warmth of Firestar’s, but more an blazing spirit that made him want to push himself forward, constantly reaching towards new heights. If nothing else, he would try and appreciate her snap and wit, because over the great journey they took together, he realized their other greatest similarity:

They both spoke from the heart when they needed to.

Just one a little more often than the other.

[everybody-loves-purdy]

I just checked the poll and it was fixed. Leopardstar is winning once more! :D ~Brambleheart

Wooop!!

Now let’s watch as Onestar gains a 20% lead just before the poll closes lol

[driftchasing]

some cats of mine from @moineirwc, featuring, in order: Brambleheart of Sorrel Colony; Snowy, a rogue, and Cootface of the Night Colony. Brambleheart and Snowy are both adoptable cats in the rp so if you love em go snatch em up

[sadly-unfortunate]

💙

[squirrelfire-leafheart]

how does bramble get along with squilf? is it the same as in canon

Brambleheart doesn’t have many chances to talk to her and usually avoids her since she looks like Firestar too much and he misses his mentor.

[squirrelfire-leafheart]

Are bramblekit and tawnykit still there?

They are warriors now, but yes!