#mikaila

[skypendragonarts]

And then something entirely ridiculous and silly while I still have some free time and before I go to bed lol

Until proven otherwise, this is my canon reunion with these two~

[fantastickkay]

From Teen People, November 2000

[poorunfortunatesolanin]

Alright, I’m gonna randomize my ✨Chronically Cringe™️✨ playlist and make a poll of the first 5 songs for you to vote your favorite of!

I’ll also link all the songs so you can hear them to make your decision, here we go!

✨ Which is your flavor of cringe? ✨

Primadonna - Marina & The Diamonds

If You Seek Amy - Britney Spears

Kiss Me Again - We Are The In Crowd

Hold Me - Jamie Grace & TobyMac

So In Love With Two - Mikayla

Voting ended onAug 7, 2025

If this gets 10 votes I’ll make a part 2 :)

[2000mallow]

[hk-rara]

I randomly remembered this song today and found it fitting for Joost's relationships with mascots lol

[lily-orchard-gossip-blog]

So I just watched the Bitch eating grass video, no surprise Lily lied and got like...every thing that happens on this blog wrong. But that's not what I came to talk about. No I came to talk about the horrifying reveal of Lily's new puppet, and it is not pretty. Like what's wrong with its eyes? Why is one SO much bigger then the other? Lily looks like an alien. Was that done on purpose?

Just so everyone else can see the new puppet:

There are a lot more of them, with differen't mouths and eye posisition, but they all ruffly look the same.

Part of the problem is that Mikaila drew the eye over the hair, so it makes the eyes look like their floating/huge.

And since we're talking about the puppet...

The lipstick should be put on the bottom lip, not the top. It drives Lily's lip to close to her nose, and in some poses, like this one:

Look awful. Just by moving the lipstick on the bottom lip, you would get a lot more space on the top lip, so it woudn't look as tight.

The hands also need work, but that's just kind of been how Mikaila draws them for a while now. The ring is a nice touch though.

I think with just a few slight tweeks, the puppet would look a lot better.

I do feel bad for criticising the puppet like this though, because Lizzy's puppet is the definition of "Tough Act to follow".

[silkywishes]

so in love with two - ren/nora/jaune

[businesstiramisu]

I took Duane Adelier at his word for 7 years (aka I’m still not over Monday)

I first discovered Unsounded while chapter 10 was updating, so probably in late 2014 or early 2015. I've re-read it and discussed it in the Discord so much over the last seven years that at this point I don’t really remember my initial impressions, with one exception. When I got to this page in Ch. 3:

I thought “no idea who this blonde girl is but she’s definitely dead.”

(they’d just been discussing Cara too, and Duane predicted that in Cresce they’d see “more dead children dying in the dark”. So, y’know, not exactly what you’d call subtle foreshadowing)

And eventually I got to chapter 7 and sure enough

There’s been a LOT of speculation through the years that she lived though. 1) Depending on your assumptions, there was technical leeway -- we’ve seen that wounds that serious are ABSOLUTELY survivable in universe if treated by a skilled doctor -- and Bastion was right there! However, he was also interrupted in his “resurrection” of Duane by an attack that nearly killed him, so I definitely thought he wouldn’t have had the chance to treat Mikaila.

(In fact it seems REALLY telling to me that he took the time to save MIkaila from his co-conspirators’ mistakes before finishing on his Grand Experiment with Duane. Did they just need to wait for Duane to bleed out, or is this a moral choice Bastion made?)

2) Mikaila was such a loveable, easy-to-root for character in Ch. 7 that a lot of us still WANTED her to be alive. (I was definitely in that camp, despite thinking that most reasonable narrative assumptions made it implausible). Even though things were.....precarious, for her, as female wright in Alderode, we imagined bright futures where she managed to forge her own path. Unmoored from the prejudices and constraints of canon, we could imagine her as happy and successful as we wanted. or y’know unhinged anime crossovers if that’s more your speed but I digress  But now we’re getting both our wish come true and possibly a monkey’s paw... we’re getting a Mikaila who grew up in Alderode’s  apparently fraying society, under the tutelage of Lemuel or who knows who else (the wright-killer who caught her on page 122 maybe?!). She’s no longer an innocent child for us to project our fantasies onto -- are we going to like the person she became?

Aside, but I want to point out that Mikaila should be about 14 now... the same age as Lem in the Ch. 14 flashback. We saw how badly he was already doing there, has Mikaila reached that age more unscathed?

3) Even as we went back and forth on the in-story likelihoods, and what we as readers wanted, what kept me from really buying into any of the explanations of Mikaila’s survival was the *narrative* arc. We saw the impact of Mikaila’s death from Ch.3, and as the story goes on her narrative shadow over Duane only grows. If she turned out not to be dead, it would completely undermine his narrative arc and motivation. Like, it would make most of book 1 feel irrelevant.

And I think that’s my mistake -- hence the title of this little essay -- it undermines the narrative impact *from Duane’s perpective*. Which we’ve already seen hinted over and over was wrong and due for an update. Frankly, it’s really tempting now to look at this chapter as an escalation of Increasingly Big Things Duane Is Wrong About. (Though obviously there’s a lot of other things going on too.) But still....

Basically, until last week I believed Duane’s (admittedly very compelling) perspective that his arc, his tragedy, was the most important thing shaping the story until the end of this book. But it’s not. Maybe Mikaila’s struggles and takeaways from that violent night are more important. Maybe it’s something else. But the narrative weight of that tragedy has shifted -- it’s no longer about Mikaila’s death, but (from Duane’s perspective) his own misunderstanding, and I don’t think I’m explaining this very well but to me that still has a TON of narrative weight.

I wanted to get this post out before this coming week’s updates because I *do not know* what’s going to happen from here.  How is Mikaila going to react to this encounter? (did she even recognize Duane? I think not but I, uh, still haven’t backread the discord discussion so I’m probably missing a lot) What’s Lem going to tell her? And frankly WHAT IS LEM’S ANGLE both here and in Ch. 7 (that needs its own essay though)?? I’m hoping we’ll see a little bit of the fallout but that dramatic swing is also the PERFECT chance to cut away to one of our other half dozen subplots in the thick of things this chapter.

But whatever we see next, I’m fully invested in the story, and still trying to make sense of things.

So thank you Ashley!