…Seven Heroes We Remember

he/they/she, aroace, very passionate about obscure fandoms I have so far convinced two (2) people to read this series. Who’s next? My main blog is 4ce-of-2pades

[the-lektric-tinker]

This is a blog dedicated to my favorite obscure book series, The League of Seven by Alan Gratz.

You don’t have to read the books to interact with this blog, but it’s going to be very confusing if you don’t. I will not tag spoilers exactly, but I will tag “#book 1” or 2 or 3 depending on the level of spoilers (for example, if you’ve only read book 1, block the “book 2” and “book 3” tags, and you should be spoiler free (no guarantees about the notes)).

Enjoy!

[valtsv]

i loooooove giving my ocs perpetrator trauma. you hurt people, used and abused and destroyed them, and you will never wash out that stain. you will grow resentful of forgiveness because you refuse to forgive yourself. they don't know what you did like you do. you wear that knowledge like armor, like a sick badge of shameful pride. you can't cut off the hand that struck out and throw it away. you can't pull out your teeth and become something kinder, something more vulnerable.

[passacagliaofficial]

INVETNING

[molabuddy]

really specific trope i like that i feel like can only be explained in a diagram

[the-lektric-tinker]

New grayscale markers :)

[the-lektric-tinker]

Caravan Palace - Lay Down

[the-lektric-tinker]

See, I want to use the fun steampunk slang from my favorite obscure book series in everyday conversation, but “brass” just sounds like “ass,” and “slag” is British for “slut,” so I’m basically out of luck.

[spaghetti-aldente]

More stuff from my thesis (that I am uploading woefully out of order)...Archie finds Uncle John's journal. This one was a pain to figure out but I'm quite happy with how it looks.

[the-lektric-tinker]

Wait wait wait wait, is this what Alan Gratz meant by “bandolier” this entire time?????

[the-lektric-tinker]

I’m terrible at making character playlists. I don’t care to seek out songs for them, I just wait until I happen to come across songs that work.

Meaning that I don’t have a full playlist for any of these characters, but several characters do have one or two songs that I associate with them. (They wouldn’t all work for an overall TLO7-vibes playlist, many are rather character-specific.)

Archie:

The Wolf (SIAMÉS)

Home (Theo Adler)

Fergus:

Live to Fight Another Day (The Cog is Dead)

The Junker (LVDS)

Hachi:

When the Chips Are Down (Hadestown)

Gonzalo:

Roundtable Rival (Lindsey Stirling)

Martine:

The Depths Below (The Cog is Dead)

[the-lektric-tinker]

Fergus:

Sledgehammer (Postmodern Jukebox)

Hardware Store (“Weird Al” Yankovic)

[the-lektric-tinker]

Archie:

Lay Down (Caravan Palace)

[the-lektric-tinker]

Okay, Fergus’s turn. I’m still trying to figure out how I want to go about drawing curly hair, but either way is an upgrade from scribbles. And I may still not understand how circuits work, but at least they look a little better now. More like an actual circuit board, less like a paper diagram.

It’s Archie’s hair that’s really driving me crazy trying to figure out. I just can’t get it to look right. But it’s okay. It’s not like he’s the main character or anything.

[spaghetti-aldente]

I'm gonna start trying to post things for my junior thesis, where we have to adapt a book into a series of illustrations. I chose The League of Seven. Here's the scene where Archie saves Fergus.

Over the next several weeks I'll post all the things I've made for my project - most likely out of order, though.

[the-lektric-tinker]

I think I’m starting to get somewhere (both with Hachi’s design and drawing with a brush pen).

[thatsbelievable]

[the-lektric-tinker]

I started making this storyboard last year, for Fergus’s first appearance in book three (but way more dramatic and action-movie-ish than in canon). I thought I would make a more polished version, but I never got around to it, so here are the (very) rough sketches. Hopefully you can tell what everything’s supposed to be.

(Part of the purpose of this is to be a very cool first showing-off of Fergus’s new automatic leg brace that lets him jump off railings and land with bent knees and stuff. In the closeup at the end, you would have seen the new brace right front and center, brass gleaming in the light, but I didn’t actually sketch out the gears.)

[the-lektric-tinker]

I’ve had the vague idea in my head for a while that Archie Dent, after the events of the trilogy, might get better at controlling both his anger and his strength through making pottery. Wheel-throwing. The idea came at random, but it really does fit well, I think. When you’re wheel-throwing, you have to be very precise with your movements. You have to use enough force to shape the clay, but not so much that you crush it, and if your hands aren’t steady enough, it’ll turn out lopsided. Even using the foot pedal to spin the wheel requires careful control if you don’t want it at top speed. Archie’s feats of strength in the series have mostly required him to work near his limit, and his lack of precision can make a mess of things. This would help him practice using a lower level of force to achieve a strength-involved task, in a lower-stakes setting.

Additionally, the fact that one wrong movement can ruin your precise sculpting, and sometimes require you to start over entirely, would really test Archie’s temper. Wheel-throwing has a steep learning curve to get good at it. I’ve tried it many times throughout my life, and I’m still terrible at it. It’s a little infuriating to suddenly see your creation spin lopsidedly and know that you definitely won’t be able to push it back into proper shape. To try to pinch it into an interesting curve and accidentally tear part of the clay away. I can picture Archie losing his cool very quickly. But if he only takes it out on the clay, crushing or ripping it apart, there’s no harm in it.

If Archie wants to make anything, he has to stay calm enough to be gentle with the clay. He has to train himself out of immediate frustration and learn to enjoy the process with or without the result. But the fact that there is a result to strive for is important. In other cases, there are terrible consequences for him failing to keep his head, but no reward for doing so beyond “you haven’t done anything horrible this time.” With wheel-throwing, if he improves, it results in artwork that didn’t exist before he started trying. There’s a positive result. He has motivation beyond simply guilt. I think that’s important.

[thatsbelievable]

A Toast to Free Water

Undated photo of unnamed jurists toasting with water, following the lengthy U.S. vs Thomas Edison trial. Edison tried to patent water, claiming he had in fact invented both oxygen AND hydrogen. The case bogged down in courts for years, during which time Edison tried to collect one-half penny for every 3 ounces of water consumed by each U.S. citizen. The courts found against Edison, arguing successfully that in order for his claims to be true, he would have to have been “many billions of years old.”