percabethsbluecookies

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Is this anything

#hazel levesque #pjo #heroes of olympus

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The mischaracterization of people from PJO is so funny, but ESPECIALLY from HOO onward like.

“Hazel’s such an innocent little angel. She’s always nice and kind and confused.”

Hazel, who’s always ready to fight in the same way Percy is? Hazel, who made it explicitly clear she probably would’ve rocked Octavian’s shit had he not been blackmailing her? Who gets so angry on behalf of the people she loves, to the point where she doesn’t forgive those who have wronged them? Who Percy described as cursing up a storm in one of their first interactions? Who’s been shown time and time again to be FAST to anger? That Hazel?

Or Nico, who’s “a misunderstood emo. A small bean. Cute like a wet cat and innocent like a bunny.”

Nico, who’s cannonically described by most characters as “scary and unnerving?” Nico, who, for a long time, is one of the angriest characters in the series? Who’s only sassy and sarcastic because it took him FOUR YEARS to mellow out? Who’s described as being one of the most powerful demigods, who a lot of people still consider the scariest? Who’s come into his own as a character from TTC to TSATS? That Nico?

Or Annabeth who’s, “cold and calculating. Doesn’t show emotion or express herself”

Annabeth, who’s the most expressive person in the series? Who cries in EVERY book in the OG series? Whether it be for Luke, or Thalia, or Percy, or Chiron, or a literal DOG? Who expresses passion like no other when it comes to architecture and her other interests? Who’s expressed compassion for people she didn’t know? People who at times posed a threat to her? Who isn’t afraid to be angry, or happy, or snide, or rude, or excited, or scared, or ecstatic? Who’s been unapologetically herself since the moment the series started? That’s who doesn’t show emotion? That’s Annabeth?

#pjo #percy jackson #annabeth chase #hazel levesque #nico di angelo

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15 DEAD, 37 INJURED

#taylor swift #florence + the machine #florence welch

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screaming my thoughts into the void

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thinking about hazel levesque and death and rebirth and belonging and a world that will never really be home again… something something regret, forgiveness, resentment regarding a life that could have been

#like ?? #makes me so sad #and crazy thinking about it all #the ~implications~ #themes and what not #hazel levesque #hoo #heroes of olympus #marie levesque

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the inherent horror and tragedy of seeing the boy helped provide a sense of stability and family become someone - something - else. And it’s still him, just twisted and warped due to manipulation and his beliefs and desire to break the cycle (in doing so continuing the cycle of creating pawns out of children, however inadvertently that may be)

#this is so incoherent lol #luke castellan #annabeth chase #thalia grace #thinking about their relationship yet again #percy jackson #pjo #rick riordan

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After reading some NtN discourse, which is all about Jod, like I get it but someone start discourse about the Angel or something so we have variety. But anyway, there’s a context I feel is missing for the Jod discourse, and it’s, 1.There is a centuries long history of Māori healers who suddenly found themselves gifted with miraculous powers to heal. 2.New Zealand has a history of sending police and government forces to kill Māori healers.

Americans when they think of police raiding ‘cult’ compound are probably imagining Jonestown or those US full of guns fortified cults from TV and that is how Jod’s healing and the raids that lead to the meatwall and dead cops are being framed but from the Prophets of the 19th century, the invasion of Parihaka or the hunt for Te Kooti all the way to the Tūhoe Raids of 2007, NZ police when they surround and raid are there for colonial purpose. And the way the healing part of John’s story is explained, word spreading and travellers amassing, it could have come out of a textbook of Rātana or Te Māiharoa. In NZ, police being massed to raid a ‘cult’ lead by a Māori miracle healer, has different bagage from the US police surrounding a fundie cult in gun country.

#the locked tomb #tlt meta #john gaius #replacing the us-centric tlt discourse one post at a time ☝️

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frank left no crumbs like okay i see you!

#go frank go! #frank zhang #hoo #heroes of olympus #percy jackson

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Jason Grace

#jason grace #heroes of olympus #percy jackson

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heartbreak high season 2 felt like this the entire time

#heartbreak high

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I find the concept of nona so funny… like imagine if you knew harrow, this violent psychotic nun who has the personality of a particularly wet cat, someone who willingly gave themselves a DIY lobotomy, and now her body is smiling and giggling and telling you she loves you soooooooo much

#the locked tomb #nona the ninth #locked tomb spoilers

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It's occurred to me that although many Locked Tomb characters have died and still managed to hold on to their positions as major onscreen characters (or gained a new position as a major onscreen character after death, e.g. Ortus) it's not really a "death is cheap" universe like Homestuck was for example, where every single character has died at least once and it was all no big deal. But it's clearly also not a "death is final" universe. So I want to propose a new category for the Locked Tomb: "death is expensive". That is, if your blorbo dies, there is still a solid chance that they will reappear onscreen at a later date, but you will have to pay a hefty fee of body horror and/or self-destructive codependent body-sharing or equivalent value for that privilege

#the locked tomb

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#the locked tomb #harrow the ninth

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queering futurity in crooked kingdom

if I had any real time for this (I do not) I'd be tempted to write a real essay about it, but I have a dissertation and two other real essays for my actual degree, so let's do a bad tunglr bullet point analysis. I'm... largely generalising and paraphrasing here, and I suspect this has a billion things to iron out or that I forgot about, but I hope this might be a bit interesting regardless of how much you may or may not know abt queer literary theory lmao.

in extreme short, there is a subset of queer theory around what is, in essence, queer time. there is a heteronormative future/'futurity', and it is marriage, children, a good job, a nice house, and dying at a good age after a fulfilling life. queer* and trans people both reject and often cannot access this: plenty couldn't/cannot get married or have children, or had to surpass lots of obstacles to do so, many queer and trans people were or are killed young, or died prematurely in the aids crisis. and so we get queer temporality; a resistance to the heteronormative future that is refused or inaccessible, and to reproductive futurism; the concept that people value the future over the present... and this manifests in kicking back against things like the symbolic 'child' as a representative of futurity. not real children, but empty platitudes like think of the children! think of the future for your children! there can also be a development of a death drive, which is sometimes literal and sometimes metaphorical, which is, again, basically a rejection of 'the future'.

while the grishaverse doesn't have homophobia as such, you can still do queer readings, bc it is ofc influenced by our world, by virtue of being Written By A Person From Our World. and especially in kerch, there's still stuff like patrilineal inheritance... buuuut reproductive futurity & friends are very deliberately destroyed by the end of crooked kingdom. mostly by the usual culprit (taps sign that says IT'S KAZ AGAIN LOL) but by the narrative and the other characters as well. walk w me! I don't think this is a real analysis more just a lot of Thoughts but... nvm

*used here as an umbrella term since the theory I'm pulling from is the field of queer theory

the two men (van eck and rollins) who are most concerned with reproductive futurism (having heirs and a legacy, 'building something that will outlast them'), are promptly buried under the rubble of their building efforts by our usual culprit. kaz uses the mentality of legacy and lineage against them both; he kidnaps van eck's pregnant wife to use as a bargaining chip, and he uses rollins's son and heir against him, because he knows what's most important to these men is their line, their work being handed down. he deduces that rollins has a son through rollins' vanity around building something to 'last', and his naming of the kaelish prince. rollins is literally themed around monarchy and descent; the king of the barrel, the kaelish prince, the emerald palace. kaz, for his part, is the bastard of the barrel. the illegitimate son, not produced by any conventional family structure, ketterdam his mother and profit his father... and therefore he is the perfect person to blow up this imagined monarchy

wylan is rejected by van eck for his disability, for being supposedly incapable of continuing his father's legacy; and so we gather that the actual child doesn't matter to van eck, it's what The Child represented to him, which was the future of the van eck company. the illegitimate kaz restores van eck's disowned son to the succession through sheer trickery, and jan van eck's trading empire is succeeded by his son he attempted to reject, and his farm-boy barrel-tough boyfriend. they bring home the first wife that van eck had committed, for failing to produce the 'perfect' heir. no perfect heteronormative future here!

(also by virtue of wylan and jesper being a mlm couple, there is now way less emphasis that can be put on the idea of biological children 'continuing' the line, and it somewhat stops the expectation that ruined wylan's life from being passed down)

the two m/f couples are also very distant from this idealised reproductive futurity. matthias dies, ruining any idea of a 'conventional' future he could have had with nina, and while his death is generally more about the extremist brainwashing stuff explored w the drüskelle, it does blow to shreds that futurity even more, and nina's power is also a very literal HEY GUYS. LET'S THINK ABOUT DEATH... plus she leaves ketterdam to take matthias to be buried at the end of the book.

kaz and inej both do very dangerous jobs and separate for long periods of time. they may marry or they may not, they may have children or they may not, they may be physical with one another or they may not. it doesn't really matter; they'll try, but we don't get to find out how far they may or may not get, which honestly I kinda like. their future is open, the river running carrying inej to the sea. also, inej makes an explicit rejection of this kind of 'normal' future:

So he wasn’t fit for a normal life. Was she meant to find a kindhearted husband, have his children, then sharpen her knives after they’d gone to sleep? How would she explain the nightmares she still had from the Menagerie? Or the blood on her hands?

we don't really know whether or not kaz as a character is queer (I do not think kaz knows either lol) but it doesn't really matter, you can still read him as a queer figure both a) just if you want to! and b) in this sense of queer temporality, bc he's the crux of a lot of it. we already covered the bastard thing and his happy habit of kicking reproductive futurism when it's down, and as Edelman says: 'If the fate of the queer is to figure the fate that cuts the thread of futurity...' well, kaz 'build something new. watch it burn' 'he knew exactly what he was going to leave behind: damage' brekker is our man!

he does not give a single flying fuck about the future. he destroyed van eck and rollins' legacies, and he'll do that shit again. he doesn't have enough of an ego to consider a 'legacy' for himself besides destruction, which is a rejection of a legacy in itself. his plans for the future amount to fucking shit up and making a bunch of money to use to do more damage, until he gets shot/stabbed/hanged/drowned/whatever, which he constantly anticipates.

kaz also has a massive distrust and disdain for traditional family structures, because he's seen them crumble twice; his actual family are all dead, and the hertzoon con was built on creating a convincing family mode to lure them in. "my mother is ketterdam, she birthed me in the harbour; my father is profit, I honour him daily" is a sneer at paterfamilias type families where the mother is there to just give birth and the father is the head of the family, to be honoured and served, rather than loved. he also has zero sympathy for the 'think of the children!' thing, bc he knows it's disingenuous; who thought of him? no one. rollins was happy to con kids with the false promise of family and safety, and all the people he paid off were happy to turn the other way. was there no one to look after you? no, there wasn't. his mother is ketterdam: filthy, feral ketterdam. no nurturing mother has he!

So he threatens Alby and Hanna with no qualms, because while he doesn't actually ever intend to hurt children (...not physically anyway, apparently upsetting them is fair game FJJFJD), he knows the power of the threat— the idea of the child— is often more impactful than the actual act itself. ("Inej, I could only kill Pekka’s son once. He can imagine his death a thousand times.") it certainly works on rollins and van eck! he'll make you think of the damn children alright!

inej takes direct action to defend actual children, not just the idea of them, and then we hear in rule of wolves she's hated by the kerch government for it because she's fucking with their profits. (look also to how they flapped about searching for wylan, one rich man's kid, and are completely useless about hundreds of forced indentures. what a surprise...)

she reunites with her parents, but she worries persistently about whether or not they will accept her for who she has become, and we are never quite told whether or not they do. we like to think so, but we don't actually know. and although she gets to see her parents again, her future is on the wraith, not with them.

most people have dead or splintered families, actually. only inej has both parents, and for three - four years, they didn't have a daughter.

The general proximity to death in general is very potent; nina's power, kaz's whole backstory, the camping out in a graveyard. jesper's recklessness and love for fights, inej being ready to die rather than be a captiver again and kaz's response to that being 'not just yet', rather than not at all...

all following into the whole no mourners, no funerals thing!!! the fact that they know they won't be remembered or cared about if they die!!!

Edelman: 'Choosing to stand, as many of us do, outside the cycles of reproduction, choosing to stand, as we also do, by the side of those living and dying each day with the complications of AIDS, we know the deception of the societal lie that endlessly looks toward a future whose promise is always a day away.'

SOC:

Inej's mother and father might still shed tears for the daughter they'd lost, but if Inej died tonight, there would be no one to grieve for the girl she was now. 

“No mourners, no funerals. Another way of saying good luck. But it was something more. A dark wink to the fact that there would be no expensive burials for people like them, no marble markers to remember their names, no wreaths of myrtle and rose.”

pick up what I'm putting down guys please please I don't have time to tease this out properly but like. I think kaz and wylan are the linchpins here. (again)

#this is so interesting to think about! #I love literary analysis ! #six of crows

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I think many connections could be made in terms of water and rebirth, life, and death regarding the locked tomb series and the six of crows duology but I fear my brain is slightly fried from uni so that idea is going on the back burner for now

#I am aware this idea is not unique nor some crazy out there thought #but here i am #standing before you with approx one (1) braincell #soc #six of crows #six of crows duology #tlt #the locked tomb #gideon the ninth #crooked kingdom #harrow the ninth

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Rick Riordian has many, many crimes to answer for but I think one of the most petty ones is the fact that he never let Percy fight with a trident.

Like there's so many ways he could've incorporated it:

In tlt Ares curses Riptide so that it would fail him in his times of most need - which is a serious weakness. But the curse is also limited to Riptide. Percy should've gone, "okay bet," and gotten a secondary backup weapon when he got back to Camp. Like a curse-free trident. Stick the middle finger up to Ares twice by beating him and his curse.

In ttc/botl it's established by Luke/the enemy demigods that Percy's one fighting weakness is his inability to use long ranged weapons like a bow and arrow (honestly wtf was Chiron thinking trying to teach a son of Poseidon, a fish for all intents and purposes, to use a bow and arrow aka a weapon of the sky?) Like no. Come on. Guess what else is a long ranged weapon, that's actually associated with water/Poseidon? A trident. You couldn't have taught him that, Chiron? Hmm?

By tlo it's established that Percy is on close terms with not one but TWO master forgers. Tyson and Beckendorf. You're telling me neither of them would've made Percy a top tier celestial bronze trident if he asked? Or even if he didn't ask and they were just curious to see what Percy could do with it?

And then in HoO we could've had someone inspect Percy's blade to make sure its up to speck for protocol (or maybe Neptune comes around, curious about Percy and sees it), and then realize that Percy is walking around with a weapon that is guaranteed to fail him when he needs it most so they make him choose a secondary weapon: a trident.

Or even when Percy retrieves the imperial gold weapons from the bottom of the bay in SoN after freeing Thanatos. Percy should've just found a trident, swing it skillfully a few times and gone "huh. Neat." And decided to keep it.

Like I know the movies were complete shit, but even I have to admit that they did 3 things right. 1. "This is a pen." 2. "Don't walk on my roof." And 3. GIVING PERCY A WATER TRIDENT TO FIGHT WITH!!!

The lost opportunities!!!! Rick Riordian you better hope I never show up to an event you're at-

#give him a trident!! #percy jackson #pjo #percy jackson and the olympians

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Personal branding is important for business.

#six of crows #kaz brekker #inej ghafa #kanej