Queer Book Character Tournament Round One
Christopher Wolfe- The Great Library Series
Arthur Lecomte- Mysteries of Pittsburgh
Grace- On A Sunbeam
Ognena Maria- The Bone Season
Character, book, and author names under the cut

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Queer Book Character Tournament Round One
Christopher Wolfe- The Great Library Series
Arthur Lecomte- Mysteries of Pittsburgh
Grace- On A Sunbeam
Ognena Maria- The Bone Season
Character, book, and author names under the cut
Taking the Gays to book fair so Chris can see what could've been
Nic is coming along for emotional support and because they're a packaged deal.
(Progress pics and pattern below the cut)
So, I'm poking around in canon for an idea I have brewing, and it is surprising how little the series plot changes if you reduce Wolfe's autonomy. Sword and Pen is really the only notable change. Poor guy really does get blown around in the wake of the children and the events that unfold.
young chris & nic from stormcrow prequel live in my head rent free and i'll never let them go
imagine you found this blog and then 💥BOOM💥
santiwolfe kissing sketch
CHRIStmas Card
It's for my friend (who must not see this before Christmas Eve!), but you may use it as a colouring page if you like. Original size is A6 for the first and A5 for the second.
I do think making Santi high commander is a huge leap and I’m not really a fan of the pacing of it all, but on some level it is truly a perfect encapsulation of who he is as a character. I’ve said before that he doesn’t change and his lack of character development fascinates me, and this sort of exemplifies said lack of character development.
Wolfe and Santi have both seen what horrors the library is capable of, they’ve both helped enact those horrors, but they start out with this unwavering loyalty towards it. we see this with Wolfe in Stormcrow (which is fascinating on its own given that he is literally the result of systemic sexual abuse carried out by the library but I digress) and that loyalty gets tested by what happens in Moscow. when we first meet Santi in Stormcrow, he already has the attitude that Wolfe comes to adopt by the story’s end: the library as an institution is broken but fixable if someone can find the right way. may it change.
and Santi, crucially, keeps that view throughout the entire series, without seemingly doing much to act on it. for example, while the creation of a printing press solves a legitimate question of efficiency, it’s also undeniably an act of humanity. the idea that a printing press will fix everything (or at least most of it) is held by a lot of characters in the series. and even when that’s pretty decisively shown to not be true, they still hold onto the hope that it could be a solution even if it’s not the solution. not Santi, though. his relationship to the printing press is “thing that got Wolfe tortured and almost killed but if it’s important to him I guess it’s important to me too”. this holds true for a lot of his “betrayals” of library; it’s for Wolfe and nothing else.
Wolfe, though, eventually arrives at a different conclusion about the library: whether or not it’s always been there is a matter of debate, but there is something horrible at the center of this institution, and it might not be reparable. he’s offered his own huge leap in power with the title of archivist, and he immediately turns it down (again his choice to name Khalila instead is its own post). for a lot of reasons, certainly, but I don’t think it’s much of stretch to read that as at least a partial rejection of the library as an institution.
Santi keeps the position of high commander, and while we do see changes made (particularly with the iron tower), I don’t know how much real military reform he’ll actually be motivated to do. it’s less of “we’ll stop doing atrocities now that I’m in charge” and more of “the atrocities will be justified now that I’m in charge”. what he sees of Rome affects him, certainly, and I do think he genuinely wants to make sure what happened to Wolfe doesn’t happen again, but to what extent?
Gregory: You know nothing.
Wolfe: As one of your more notable failures, I’d say I know everything.
~Rachel Caine, Paper and Fire
Photo credit: Tamino Amir as photographed by Ryan McGinley for U la Repubblica