hello humanity nice to meet you. i am non-threatening come into my notes pspspsp
I have a side blog problem ✨
EU-posting @unstaerker
Charlie Bone Universe: @children-of-the-red-queen
Tolkien stuff: @1-small-world
& some other less relevant/active ones, ask away!
@halogenwarrior A sales pitch to you & anyone else reading this lmfao.
In short:
Children of the Red King (also called Charlie Bone) is a fantasy series aimed at middle schoolers that follows the titular Charlie as he gets into misadventures such as looking for a stolen baby, helping his time traveled relative, and trying to stop an ancient evil sorcerer from taking over the city, and more. Most of the cast has a unique power (called endowments) that helps or hinders Charlie along the way, from boosting electricity to hypnotism to conjuring ghosts with spears. There's a heavy focus on family as well, from Charlie's missing father to his quarreling relatives to the ancient and powerful magician-king almost everyone is descended from. There's very little romance, but not zero romance.
I'm not going to say it's the greatest of all middle school magic books ever, but I do think they're pretty good and worth looking into (add me at K_0809 on Discord for help getting digital versions of the books). If you like reading about preteens with magic powers who go to a gloomy school and get wrapped up in saving other characters from the villains, definitely give it a read!
Unless you're averse to stories where animals are injured (no animal death that I can remember offhand though), then due to an event in book 1 you'll want to exercise caution. There's also a 10 year boy who is blatantly neglected by his parents. As far as more direct harm to children, there's a line in book one about a child getting hit and references to a girl that might have maybe been killed and left behind a tattered cape. Otherwise, the villains prefer to hide children away, leave them for dead, throw them through time, trap them in paintings, and the like. It's a series for children, and nothing is very explicit, so most people should be ok to read the books.
In long (I start rambling so no offense taken if you stop reading here lmfao):
Ok so as far as my tags go:
#obligated to mention Children Of The Red King#is it a book for middle schoolers? yes#but does it have a 12 y/o half mermaid who's constantly attempting murder and is emotionally unwell and has a tragic backstory and#is under a curse to kill his father? yes#it also has a stolen hypnotized baby and a guy who turns into a beast every night and a long haired vaguely goth hypnotist#the hypnotist and the beast boy are even toxic friendship. yaoi if you're enlightened
Sadly, the incredibly awesome ocean boy does not show up until book 6. BUT. We get the black-clad hypnotist and his beloathed pet beast-guy from the very first book.
The hypnotist is Manfred Bloor, and he's a student (staff after he turns 19) at Bloor's Academy, which is arguably where the characters spend most of their time. Yes, his family owns the academy, and yes, they live there full time. Manfred is a bratty, tantrum throwing, petty little bitch, and I say this with affection.
The beast guy is Asa Pike. He and Manfred are NOT friends. Manfred is NOT shy about the contempt he holds for Asa. Even so, Asa obeys Manfred and often does dirty work for the Bloor family, like spying, chasing children, and generally haunting the castle ruins behind the Academy. He's a silly guy :3
As for their relationship... don't listen to me, listen to these Actual For Real Canon Quotes I'm Taking From The EPubs:
(note that the epubs did something to the punctuation and sometimes the spelling, and the physical books are written better than this)
Shipping them is something you do because you love angst and suffering and mutual misery. "Toxic yaoi" and it's because of [redacted spoilers but trust me that things get soooo bad between them].
As for ships in the vein of characters who like each other, we have canon romance Paton/Julia, a slowburn between an antisocial bookworm and a kindhearted bookseller. They have a bit of a rough start, but quickly become a couple to root for.
Speaking of Paton, he's a great character. He hates going outside in the daylight. He's forever writing a book. He used to keep his head down, but during the series he grows into a brave man who helps the good side. He kills someone (intentional) and burns down their house (not as intentional, but it's not like he feels bad either). Very cool guy.
I do think what I love most about the series is that there's a lot of characters who have cool powers and use them to do cool things. Storm guy literally blows other children into the air and out of the scene. Spirit Summoner guy summons ancient ghosts with spears. Ocean guy is constantly trying to drown people. Bird girl invents a new type of bird to turn into. These kids are great.
A lot of personalities are also just. fun. There's a flamboyant theater kid. Storm guy has wind around him that reacts to his moods. The moon influences how much of an asshole the half-mermaid is. There's creepy twins. There's an evil 6 year old. There's two grandmas that can't stand each other.
There's also a few different locations in the series that are cool. There's the gloomy school I mentioned earlier. There's a castle made of mirrors (they go there one (1) time). There's the crumbling ruins of a (different) castle. There's a cafe that only serves animals (humans may accompany their pets, but the cafe is FOR the pets). There's a gloomy land found inside a painting. There's a street called Darkly Wynd with three number 13s at the end where evil old sisters live. There's a bookshop.
As far as the hypnotized stolen baby... That's actually the main plot of the first book. Charlie learns about a girl whose father sold her years ago and searches for her so she can be reunited with her aunt.
Is the series perfect? No. But it's a fun read and I do recommend it a lot.
Also this post by @children-of-the-red-queen. I feel like this post is a very good argument for reading the books
Here's some of the notes, starting with the things multiple people brought up:
SHRIMP COCKTAIL:
banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol
generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is
#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro
And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!
POMEGRANATES:
zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple
thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute
sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.
FRUIT TREES:
zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''
salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE
baander: #cranberry trees
DOUGH/BATTER:
maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre
livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles
lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY
Some other topics:
ANIMALS:
catenarwhal: #mandatory 'how cows produce milk' mention#i'll never recover from that one I fear
piromantic: #one time i saw someone fake their way through describing how spiders behave
pluto-lichen: horses
misskittypotter: #stardew valley faking its way through what fresh fish smell like
pa-pa-plasma: #saw someone faking their way through knowing what a seal is once #i still am fucked up over that one to this day. they just straight up did not know #& they were NOT good at guessing it either like it was clear they had never googled that animal ever #& was only just now realizing via answering questions from anons that seals are not!! what they assumed. initially
SEX:
dykevandyke: #what a prostate is #and where it is located #as in. external.
dreamyeyedrose: #I remember back in the ff.net days reading an Ichigo/Renji fic where the writer assumed the penises go inside each other #and I was like “I mean I don't know how it works for sure I don't have one but idk if that's how it works”
SOME OTHER FOOD STUFF:
thetrekkiehasthephonebox: #add another one to the list bloggers#this character is cooking a salad
shosta: #still baffled about the published work that didn't know food could freeze
sun-dari: #once i read a fic where the author didn't understand cinnamon
alto-tenure: #read something recently where the author was just. blatantly wrong about spices
dramatic-dolphin: #i saw someone try to fake their way through what ramen is once. like 14 years ago.#but i remember.#i was very confused about ramen for a few months. they were writing it so authoritatively.
the-celery-stalks-at-midnight: #i will never ever forget someone putting leftover fries in the microwave to reheat them and setting the timer for five minutes
typeghost: #this sparked a memory of a hannibal fic where the author had to fake their way through writing about gravy
draculin: #the one fanfic where the author knows about coffee only as a concept wrote a character as a coffee drinker#was very interesting#I don't remember the fandom or the plot but I was mesmerized by the coffee actions and choices
11235811235811: #there's a lot of faking their way thru congee in the svsss fandom i'll also note
fishali3n: #read one where the person clearly didnt know what tofu is
emmy-everafter: #in the aftermath of shadow and bone s2 i saw a lot of people pretending to know what stroopwafels are #babes they are more like cookies than breakfast waffles #like yes there is a waffle pattern but you're not gonna cut into a stack of them with syrup and sugar#🤣🤣🤣
NON-FOOD STUFF:
red-umbrella-811: Shoutout to Dame Agatha Christie for faking her way through what a wrench is in a very popular published work.
bluebeetle: #once saw someone have a character put an entire phone book in their pocket
nonametis: #- sex talk in languages other than english #<- or just the petnames in a different language other than English
sadisticpony: #the fanfiction i saw this week where op DIDNT KNOW HOW AUTOMATIC DOORS WORKED #and that they arent in peoples homes!!! of course. also opening the automatic door for someone is unironically very funny but its not #its not like. grabbing the door handle to let someone in. helpppp
danmeichael: #reminds me of the fic with the figure drawing class where the character started with the feet. #i love you feet first figure drawing author
meowmix1100blr: #me watching this one fic absolutely obliterate what the board of directors does
vexedhexes: #one time i read an architect character making a doorway bigger by building a bigger door #what a beautiful world. #OH. also gravity falls fic where they go 'oh piedmont is in california so its warm all year round'
leveragehunters: #characters going to a beer garden #And it's literally a garden outside the pub#It was a very cute mistake
fitofpique: #yes! #grown men do not get blind drunk off two beers #but i am possibly guilty of the hypothermia one #assuming it does not make you very horny?
dadvans-likes: #always thinking abt the soup kitchen fic #the entire setting of the fic was 'soup kitchen' #and i very quickly realized #the author did not know what a soup kitchen was #and they thought that soup kitchens only served soup #fic
msmargaretmurry: #i love fanfiction #once read a fic where the characters played 20 questions #but the author seemed to not know how to play 20 questions and was just kind of winging it........ #immaculate
shakespeareaddict: #Look I know not all of us are hockey experts #But it takes about ten seconds of research or any attention paid to the show to realize #That the Stanley cup playoffs are not in fucking September
baejax-the-great: #the funniest one i saw #was someone faking what church is like #like 1. they really didn't have to write an entire church experience for their fic #and 2. they had clearly never even watched a show where people went to church #it was bonkers weird
twosunson: #things ive seen authors faking #knowing how to unclog a drain #knowing. literally any history #knowing what ketamine looks like (apparently- oregano) #(you know who you are)
waterhorseyblues-ao3: #beltane being celebrated in winter #wales being portrayed as a completely separated land from england (i wish) #characters getting up after weeks of bedrest like that dosnt completely fuck you up
violetfairydust: #i once read a fic where the flight time from london to seattle was 3 hours
purekesseltrash: One time, in a fic set specifically in Des Moines, IA, two of the characters casually drove 20 minutes to the ocean. The memory continues to delight me. I want to know where that author thought that Iowa was.
beat the shit out of each other in an empty parking lot at 2 am (in a sexual way)
play any car racing game for 8hrs straight, eat instant noodles and fall asleep tangled on a couch together
become a priest and fuck his throat in a confessional
go swimming at midnight, try to drown each other - great for bonding if you end up saving his life (learn first aid beforehand)
run away together, become cowboys
sneak into a medieval castle and fight for dominance with big ass swords (the winner gets to fuck the loser with his sword) (the actual, metal, covered in warm blood sword)
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
A regular part of my job is trying to reach out to people who have been quietly trying to make their community a better place; the volunteers, the teachers, the fucking. People who rehabilitate injured wild owls in a Quonset hut in the woods, and to a one this is the kind of person who immediately reviles at recognition. The kind of person who immediately says that they never got into this to get praise for it, and that they’d infinitely prefer to quietly plug away at this anonymously forever.
And from this I’ve always drawn two conclusions:
To always distrust Mr. Beast and his ilk who always want their acts of charity done on film, because the people who really want to do good and have no motives to do it besides the doing it never want recognition for it, and
That there are, in the dark, in the quiet, always people who are doing good, and the reason you don’t hear about it is because they’d rather die than receive recognition for it, but they’re real; they do exist. And you are never alone
