#leviathan books

[a-witch-in-a-dumpster]

we're back with shitposts

edit: credit to all the amazing people on Leviathan discord for half of the jocks

[kolioo]

poor boy alek going through his 95461th mental crisis

original idea by the very smart & very funny folks of the leviathan discord server

[aelithart]

A continuation of my previous post.

Hey. Sometimes you forget your friend and the boy you want to be like is actually a girl. (Maybe, idk, they're pretty nonbinary if you ask me, lol)

I love Oblivious Alek with all my heart and soul. The Dummkopf. I will continue to draw silly stuff. :)

[kajaono]

Happy Pride month indeed 🏳️‍🌈

[number1wifemisser]

One of my headcanons about leviathan is that Dr. Barlow thought Sharp was coming out as transfem in the chapter in Goliath where they were telling her they were a girl.

[liposcelidae]

Alternate history, happy endings, and the kinder 20th century

Major spoilers for the Leviathan anime and the book series.

I think the anime's ending fit the story they chose to tell.

As an alternate-history fan and occasional alternate-history writer, I've thought a bit about what it means to make certain kinds of choices in your alternate timeline.

The Leviathan books are WWI-lite - the war is winding down by December 1914, there's a peace conference in early 1915, there's a formal Coexistence Treaty by 1916. (No Somme, no Verdun, no Passchendaele; Wilfred Owen probably never enlists, let alone gets gassed.) And meanwhile there's a giant flying whale! The world is brilliant and fascinating but also frequently goofy in the best way.

The anime creates an alternate timeline to that alternate timeline, stepping back a bit from the romp of the books and back toward the grittiness of war. Nobody is throwing non-lethal spice bombs in Istanbul: it's a shooting battle. Hoffman, Newkirk, and Klopp now die to show us the stakes and seriousness of the conflict. And the gonzo worldbuilding is just a bit dialed back- the bats don't poop, we don't see the elephant walkers using their trunks, there is nothing horrid about the spottiswoode rebreather.

In Goliath, when Alek chooses to stay with Deryn, it's a victory for joy. (For looking toward the future instead of holding on to the past, for choosing life after loss, for personal happiness.) It's the perfect ending for their story and the perfect start to the hopeful future for their world that's become possible with the avoidance of most of the war.

But in the anime, we don't get to end on joy, because the world isn't quite as light. Alek chooses duty and responsibility over love and freedom because the heavier world makes responsibility sit more heavily on his shoulders. There is hope, but only if everyone is willing to do their part and make peace a collective priority (pursued through collective rather than individual action, as the Tesla arc hammers home).

I can only speculate why the anime team chose to make that change. Maybe it just spoke to them more as a story! Maybe it felt more realistic, or respectful of real-world awfulness past or present, to rein the story in from its wildest fantasies of a kinder world. Maybe it felt like a step too far to make a romance with a happily-ever-after out of even an alternate version of such an ugly part of real history. Maybe somebody saw Casablanca or Roman Holiday a few too many times, I dunno. One of the interesting things about adaptations is seeing what someone else thought was essential about the work and what they wanted to reimagine, and the anime team said, hey, we think this works for the core of the story we care about.

And that's great. That's fine.

But the Leviathan I love is the one that goes big; my timeline is the timeline that is so much more hopeful that we get hope practically for free, where the worst horrors can be avoided just because the world isn't that bad. My Alek chooses Deryn not to dodge responsibility but to fully embrace and demonstrate that the two worlds are better together, and also because yay. Tu felix Austria nube. It's meteoric. :)

[figofswords]

Commission for @grilledcheeseandgravityfalls ! I have yet to read Leviathan, despite it being on my to-read list for approximately forever, but these characters were a lot of fun to work on!

Commissions post ~ Ko-Fi

[waystoannoy-leviathan]

Y'all remember that one drabble that shipped Deryn with the Leviathan ?