#Have never read Temeraire but I will check those out | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

snotsloth · 4 days

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10 Characters/10 Fandoms/10 Tags

Tagged by @icehearts

Tagging, but don't feel pressured! (Also you do not have to make pretty pictures. Graphic Designer brain just took over and this happened.) @physicalvocalist, @sarenraegalpaladin, @vorpalbun, @captainqster, @leagor-majere, @sundered-souls, @ardberts, @hinganskies, @lilbittymonster, @janzoo

1. Harrowhark Nonagesimus - The Locked Tomb Trilogy

Harrow has true scrungly wet cat energy. I want to put her in one of those little backpacks with a window and carry her around in it for her enrichment. She's an absolute bitch. She is a pathetic little meow meow. She lobotomized herself to save the soul of the woman she refuses to admit she's in love with. She tried to kill a saint with soup made from her own bone marrow. She is a war crime. I like her so much!

2. Magneto - X-Men

He is the platonic ideal of my favorite trope, "Does all the wrong things for all the right reasons." Magneto has gone through the polar opposite of villain decay. The longer he exists, the longer the universe has to prove him increasingly correct on most things. All I can really say is, "Magneto was right."

3. Wei Wuxian - Mo Dao Zu Shi

Truly the most blorbo of all time. Are you also an ADHD burned out gifted and talented submissive brat with a praise kink? Boy howdy, do I have a character that you are going to imprint on like a baby goose! Wei Wuxian also has a hearty dose of, "Does all the wrong things for all the right reasons." Also like who multiclasses in wizard (specifically necromancer) and bard? This fucking guy apparently.

4. Hythlodaeus - Final Fantasy 14

I am so normal about Hythlodaeus, I made an entire AU around him. That is a reasonable thing to do about a character that you like a normal amount, right? The idealized lost love, trapped in amber, untouchable but also incorruptible by the sands of time that keep eroding the edges of your soul. And then they gave him lavender dead anime mom hair!

5. Varric Tethras - Dragon Age

I literally have a semi-viral post about how much this character has consumed my thoughts. Rule Number 1 of Dragon Age: Varric lies. He's a charming scoundrel. He's loyal to a fault. He knows everything worth knowing about Kirkwall. And he's a dirty fucking liar. The only reason Varric isn't romanceable in DA2 is that no other romantic interest would get any attention if Varric was on the table. I desire him carnally.

6. Temeraire - Temeraire

My most precious and smartest boy! I adore Temeraire so much. Swear to god, I did not read the Temeraire books before creating Orion as a character, but the parallels are so strong, you would think I had! He's a bookworm, a little awkward but full of opinions, and he has an unwavering moral compass. Temeraire will forever be one of my favorite dragon characters.

7. Jaina Solo - Star Wars Legends

I will never forget what Disney took from me. As a weird, nerdy girl who was also kind of a guy growing up, Jaina meant so much to me. She was an active participant in the stories she was in. She was an ace pilot, a skilled mechanic, and a Jedi to boot. She had her dad's sense of humor and her mom's moral certainty. I thought she was the coolest. Still do.

8. Ansur - Baldur's Gate 3

Ansur! My beloved! If you had told me that the character I would be most obsessed with from BG3 would be an undead bronze dragon who you don't even know about until the third act -- actually, no that checks out. He was so in love, and so loyal, and so bitter at Balduron for embracing his corruption! And that reveal! All the build-up, only to find his bones and then wham! the entire narrative of the Emperor gets turned on its head. I still get chills. Also, they were absolutely fucking.

9. Viktor - Arcane

Listen, as a disabled, obsessive nerd with too much to do and not enough time to do it all in, Viktor is my gender. I love just about everything about Arcane, but Viktor's storyline is my favorite part. I, for one, am very excited to watch his fall from grace and further corruption. I have already forgiven all of his atrocities. I do not care. He's babygirl.

10. Clark Kent - DC

You thought I was going to say Jason or Dick for a DC character didn't you? (Or even Roy!) Those would all have been very reasonable expectations. I am pretty obsessed with all of them. However, Clark Kent is a very special character to me, and yes I specifically am focusing on the Clark persona and not the Supes persona. Yeah, they are ultimately the same guy, but I much prefer Superman stories grounded in his Clark Kent identity. Superman is at his best when he is attached to the mundane world by things like his job, his family, and his love for Lois. (Lois/Clark is the ultimate het ship. I will not be taking questions on this. It just is.) Clark is essentially a demigod, and yet he chooses to spend his time loving people and living as one of them, and I think that's really fucking cool.

#PS: do not ask me how long this took to make #The brainworms took over

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checkoutmybookshelf · 1 year

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In Defense of Full-Cast Audiobooks

By the time I was teaching Dracula as a PhD student, I was getting *that close* to being done, I was burned out as all hell, and I just could not bring myself to sit down and read the OG vampire book. I tried. It wasn't grabbing me, and there were days I literally could not make my eyes focus on the words on the page. So I didn't bother reading my physical copy. I'm actually not sure I ever opened this book to read it (although I did use it to check stuff in classes, so like having the physical copy was useful).

Instead, I got the full-cast audiobook on the strength of the fact that I liked Tim Curry's voice work on any number of childhood cartoons and Simon Vance's work on the Temeraire audiobooks. I went from being meh to actively antagonistic with this book to absolutely, completely enamoured with it, and I credit the incredible full-cast audio performance with that. Let's talk Dracula and the merits of full-cast audiobooks.

Reading is reading, whether you do it with a physical book, ebook, or audiobook. That's not up for debate. However, amongst audiobook afficionados, there are generally two schools of thought.

Camp one is the "just read it to me" folks, and they tend to prefer a single narrator (although I've met a few who will accept two readers, one male and one female, to do characters of those respective genders. No word on how that works with nonbinary characters, so if you have a preference on that, let us know!). This camp also tends to be on a sliding scale in terms of how much performing they like their one narrator to do. I've known people on the "yes, do all the voices and put some feeling into it" end and the "the narrator should be more or less invisible" end.

Camp two is those who prefer full-cast audiobooks. These tend to read like full-on radio productions, with voice actors for all the main characters, and sometimes music and/or sound effects for emphasis and flavor. I've been in this camp since I was a teenager and discovered the full cast audio versions of Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic books. I was sold. I have them basically memorized at this point. And when I found out that I could get Dracula read this way, I leaped on that with both feet.

The audiobook version of Dracula I listened to was the Audible exclusive full-cast version, and I have to say, I think it worked particularly well for an epistolary novel. You never ever get lost or consfused about who the speaker is when every character has their own unique voice actor (which honestly tends not to be an issue for me, but my students would periodically tell me they had this problem when reading). With some music and performance as well, the story really pops. All the interpersonal relationships between characters get just that much more real, that much more impactful.

The ability to "read" the book on my walks to and from school and on the bus to and from work was a massive plus too, because that was right in the middle of my "I'm working three jobs and getting a PhD and TA-ing simultaneously" phase, so using every scrap of time I could was important to my ability to EVEN. I was in a position to pay for the audiobook, but I also tracked down a single-narrator (probably bootlegged, I genuinely don't know) version on YouTube and made that link available to my students in case they weren't in a position to pay for an audio version. I don't know how many of them used the link, or even took my advice to try aduiobooking it if they were struggling to read the book, but I know that the full-cast audio version was how I got through it and how I really ended up loving the book.

In terms of Dracula itself, I don't have a lot to say other than it really IS that good; it's a classic for a reason. The vampire hunting shenangins are never not fun, and seeing vampires before Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer got on the scene is fascinating. If anyone out there hasn't experienced Dracula, I strongly recommend reading it in your preferred medium, and Dracula Daily is an option as well that I'm planning to get in on one of these years, because I haven't done that yet and I think that would be a truly fascinating way to engage with the novel.

#dracula #bram stoker #bram stocker's dracula #audiobook #dracula daily #gothic literature #vampire books #yes i know its nosferatu on the cover but you'll have to take that up with penguin

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themonkeycabal · 3 years

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re: Fantasy Recs

riseoftherose said: If you don’t mind a slightly younger aimed author, I still enjoy a series I first read as a kid, always thought it deserved more rep. The Land of

Sorry friend, it looks like your rec got cut off a bit there.

msprufrock said: Also aimed slightly younger, but I really enjoyed Akata Witch (and the sequel Akata Warrior) by Nnedi Okorafor. It’s a YA fantasy series set in Nigeria

Oh nice. Sounds like fun. Scarlet Odyssey is also set in a very Africa-like world, really loved that.

gerundsandcoffee said: I liked Uprooted by Naomi Novik. It’s a stand alone original but heavily rooted in Eastern European folklore.

I think I might have read that one. It sounds familiar. I’ll have to look again. Thanks!

solysgoldensun said: The Invisible Library series by Genevieve Cogman is pretty fun, involving dragons, fae, and librarians (oh my!) in a multiverse semi-portal fantasy deal with steam punk elements.

Oh nice. I’ve got a little bit of a weakness for steampunkish-ness. (oh, bonus, the first book was only $2.99. I picked it up. thanks!)

anomaly-nerd said: The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison is my current favorite. It’s a little plot heavy but the worldbuilding is fantastic and the protagonist is impossible not to love

I don’t mind plot-heavy if I feel like it’s going somewhere. Love good worldbuilding, though. So great.

Anonymous said: I highly recommend Temeraire. That series was amazing. It's 9 books, complete storyline that begins in Napoleonic Wars era Europe and then expands into almost every continent. It was just mwah *chef's kiss*. The lead characters (one human, one dragon) are both absolutely adorkable and I thoroughly enjoyed every chapter. There are serious matters and some dark chapters, but it's a very optimistic series overall, not grimdark in the least.

Oh, thank you for reminding me of that one! I have the first one, I think I read it when it came out, but I never followed up on the rest of the series.

emilise284 said: any/all of Diana Wynne Jones’s works: Howl’s Moving Castle, Dogsbody, and Fire and Hemlock are among my favorites.

Robin McKinley is also gr9, I especially love Pegasus and Chalice

if you’re looking for recent fantasy Gideon the Ninth (and sequel, Harrow the Ninth) by Tamsyn Muir are GREAT fun and very gay (but also maybe edging a lil further towards grimdark than you’re in the mood for rn)

Cool. Thank you!

backwardsandinhighheels said: For urban fantasy, I’ve really enjoyed the Guild Codex series by Annette Marie - funny with found family vibes and slooow burn romances, and the heroine of Spellbound is a normal human girl in a magic guild which gives me serious Darcy vibes

That sounds like a lot of fun. Thanks. (score, the first one is $3.99 and has Margarita in the title. Can’t go wrong there. I grabbed it.)

lady-of-luthien said: The first fantasy author I really got into was Tamora Pierce. She writes a lot of YA stuff. Song of the Lioness, The Immortals, and Protector of the Small series. All awesome.

Oh yes, I read some of those. Definitely fun.

furyleika said: Absolutely second Robin McKinley, particularly The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown. Also Tamora Pierce. If you don’t mind younger aimed, my absolute favorites of all time are Patricia C. Wrede’s Enchanted Forest Chronicles. Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels straddle the fantasy/sci-fi line depending where in the timeline you’re reading. The Harper Hall series is a great starting point.

I also really like Garth Nix’s Old Kingdom series. They may be closer to grim than not, but things turn out okay! Way less depressing than GRRM. I liked Holmberg’s Paper Magician series if you haven’t read that from her.

Swordheart from T. Kingfisher is awesome and funny and romantic. It says it’s in the same series as something else of hers, but I didn’t read those and enjoyed it anyways. Okay, I’ll stop. (Oh wait! Have you read Neil Gaiman’s stuff? I like almost all of it.)

Oh, I’ve totally read Anne McCaffrey, very into Pern back in ye olden tymes.

I have the Paper Magician, but I haven’t read it yet. I just finished Spellbreaker/Spellmaker and I wanted to try somebody else first.

T. Kingfisher sounds familiar, but I don’t recognize any of the titles (maybe I read Clockwork Boys, that sounds really familiar. Or I started to read it and got distracted and forgot -- this happens). I will check out Swordheart.

Garth Nix sounds familiar, too (I am bad with names, so this happens a lot, too). I’ll check out the first one. Thanks!

And, yes, I’ve read all the Neil Gaiman things lol.

owl-librarian said: Echoing Diana Wynne Jones, Tamora Pierce, and Garth Nix rec’s. I also recently reread a bunch of Patricia C Wrede books, which are delightful. If J/YA isn’t your jam, try Mercedes Lackey; HIGHLY prolific fantasy writer. Some of her stuff is a little dated now, but gosh a lot of it is still awesome. I particularly like her Arrows of the Queen trilogy.

Oh, yes, definitely I’ve ready Mercedes Lackey. Back in ye olden days with Anne McCaffrey and Terry Brooks (I was very into the Shannara books in high school).

gothfirefaerie said: If you like amazing world building and word porn I can not recommend Patricia a McKillip enough! My favorites are alphabet of thorn, fantastic beasts of eld and ombria in shadow. Also great for world building is Michelle Sagara and her chronicles of elantra but while I wouldn’t call them grimdark they are heavy.

Those sound fun. Thank you. Love worldbuilding.

owl-librarian said: Have you done any Terry Pratchett? He’s the right kind of fantasy for me, definitely not too heavy “high fantasy” - and full of real characters and great humor! If you are intimidated by his Oeuvre start with “Guards! Guards!” or “The Wee Free Men”

Oh yes, absolutely. Great fun.

owl-librarian said: I also highly suggest the Bordertown books edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling; it was a shared world created back in the 80s for authors to play in - there are several short story collections and a couple of novels set in this town that is the border between our world and faerie. It was revived in the 2010s with Ellen and Holly Black in another short story collection.

That sounds familiar, but I don’t think I ever read any of it. Thank you, I’ll check it out.

cathsith said: @sarahreesbrennan In Other Lands is *amazing* and lots of fun and the furthest thing from grim!dark that I can think of

Awesome. Thank you.

lover-of-the-starkindler said: *nods along for most of the recs and takes notes of the others* Summers at Castle Auburn by Sharon Shinn is good; Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope is a Tam Lin retelling set in Elizabethan England and is amazing; Woodwalker by Emily B. Martin if you like sneaking through forests and political plots…

Sweet, thank you.

Thanks everybody I will check out all of your lovely recs.

#book recs #book rec list #so many things to read #wonderful!

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evilwriter37 · 3 years

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I know that interest in one dragon franchise doesn't equal interest in all others but have you ever read anything from Naomi Novik's Temeraire series? I keep thinking that you might like the way those books portrait the relationships between the captains and their dragons. (Or, more accurately, the dragons and their captains.)

Oh, I’ve never even heard of it! I do like dragons as a broad spectrum, so I’ll definitely have to check that out. Thank you!

#asks #book recs #whumpy-words-main

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oldshrewsburyian · 4 years

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Escapist fiction rec round-up

@stripedroseandsketchpads

I recommend Treasure Island because like. Everyone already knows the plot but it was pretty entertaining iirc and like. Over the top pirates!! Hooray!

Also, it’s completely absurd but I LOVE the Master and Margarita by Bulgakov which isn’t really the same genre but it’s historical in that it’s set in the 30s and escapist in that it’s a bunch of highly chaotic and amusing demons destroying the day to day bureaucracy of Soviet Russia for kicks

True story: I read Treasure Island when I was 10, and I am still terrified of Blind Pew, Long John Silver, and the black spot. Currently loving Black Sails, though. The Master and Margarita is one of those I keep meaning to get around to!

@junomarlowe

I'm currently enjoying Golden Hill a great deal. I suppose it's a literary picaresque swashbuckler, with bickering and fun 18th century vocab

This sounds amazing.

@lochtayboatsong

Swashbuckler: Pirates! by Celia Rees has been one of my favorites since I was a teen. I haven’t read it recently to see how it holds up when read as an adult, but it immediately came to mind.

...delightful.

@literarymagpie

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is about a young woman in 1920s Mexico who has to help the Mayan god of death reclaim his throne. (The MC is a young woman, but it's not a YA novel.)

Obviously something I never knew I needed.

@ressiart

Sarah Perry, The Essex Serpent or Melmoth for some historical gothic romance. The Temeraire series by Naomi Novik if you'd like to dabble with dragons, the napoleonic wars, fuck colonialism and trips to Turkey, China, Africa, Australia and Brazil. Circe by Madeline Miller, for a lovely first person retelling of the witch's story. The Ancillary Justice series by Ann Leckie. This one's a space opera/SF, but I think you'll appreciate the parallels to the Roman Empire.

You know, I read about how The Essex Serpent deals with cultic Protestant communities and I’ve been emotionally unprepared ever since. I’ll look for the Ann Leckie. Somehow I thought Naomi Novik was YA, so I’ll have to check that out. I found Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles to be so boring, reductive, and unimaginative that I’m loath to give her another try, I confess.

@msmaple

Oxford Time Travel series by Connie Willis is a pleasure

Yes, yes it is.

@kirstenseas

Well, at the risk of being a bit juvenile, the Temeraire series is really good - Napoleonic wars with dragons. It is a constant delight with only a few weak moments and some really brilliant character arcs.

Has Naomi Novik been writing for grownups this whole time? My mistake.

@novelogical

I would like to recommend to you all of Susanna Kearsley’s books - specifically The Winter Sea, The Firebird, The Shadow Horses.

Ooh. The plots look more interesting than the prose, but I might give them a try. Thanks!

@counterwiddershins

For something swashbuckly, I might recommend Georgette Heyer's "The Masqueraders," but if you want some political intrigue and fantasy there's Bujold's Chalion series with "Curse of Chalion" and "Paladin of Souls." (I know Chalion is a familiar rec so you may have read either book by now.)

Thanks!

@countingnothings

if you haven't picked up any Guy Gavriel Kay, that would be my recommendation! he calls what he does "history with a quarter-turn to the fantastic," and his older stuff is more fantastic while the newer is more historical. if you're in a mood for the former, Tigana or Sailing to Sarantium are my recs! if the latter, Under Heaven or A Brightness Long Ago. his first trilogy, The Fionavar Tapestry, riffs on Tolkien & Arthuriana but is a bit heavy-handed

Another author I was sure was YA... maybe I was confused because I read his books in my teens.

@thelibraryiscool

The Lies of Locke Lamora gets old after a while but the first book is very solid. The Cadfael chronicles are some of the most calming escapist books I know (but you’ve probably read them). The rivers of London series is also amusing. Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrel is a delight. And I suppose Poldark, while, in my opinion, much worse than Outlander, has some of that same vibe if that’s what you’re after.

Thanks! I do love Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and I really should get around to Rivers of London. I’m afraid I have the Cadfael books semi-memorized by this point. “Much worse than Outlander” is, uh, not a ringing endorsement, and I’ve heard enough opinions on Poldark’s misogyny that I might give it a miss.

#adultbooklr #book recommendations #fantasy #historical fiction

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cywscross · 5 years

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Any recs from fandoms you don't follow that closely or just fandoms you've only read a few fics from?

Hmm.. some. I can rec a few fics from a handful of fandoms.

LUCIFER

Devil's Bargain by WolftheForsaken (WIP)

Trixie gets kidnapped. Lucifer disapproves.

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NIRVANA IN FIRE

implacable tide by forbiddenstars for One_Hundred_Zeros

When Lin Shu turns ten, he is fostered into the household of the Empress. Jinghuan grows up alongside his new, irrepressible foster brother. This changes everything.

Like Thunder Under Earth by troubleinmind

"Once I have my official post in the military, I will ask General Mei to appoint me as your personal guard.”

Lin Chen at Meiling in four portraits, and a long apology.

Events As They Happened by aboxthecolourofheartache

Xiao Jingrui and Yan Yujin get themselves into a scrape. Lin Chen saves the day. Mei Changsu brings everyone back from the edge.

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JURASSIC WORLD

Pushing Boundaries by Macx (WIP)

Owen Grady had always had a talent for animals. Like his grandfather. It was a talent that ran in the families.

Masrani Global recruited him to train raptors. It was an intriguing, novel idea, something only a crazy or insane person would attempt.

Owen wasn't crazy or insane. He knew he could do this.

He just didn't know how deep he would get into it, how strong the connection to the pack would become, how close... they, the four of them, would become to him.

His grandfather had always warned him: don't get too close. Don't let them connect. Well, it was too late for that now.

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KUROKO NO BASKET

Designation: Miracle by umisabaku (WIP)

It's been three years since seven human experiments, called "Miracles," escaped Teiko Industries, alerting the world to the presence of super-powered children. Now they're finally integrating into society-- going to normal high schools, playing basketball, falling in love-- and trying to find out if it's possible to truly escape their past.

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LOG HORIZON

Begin and End by Rikkamaru (xHP crossover)

This is how it begins: a boy rejected by his family, a boy reunited with his brother by his sister-in-law's intervention. A boy who found a family in an online game. But how will it end?

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X-MEN

your head caught in a waking dream by addandsubtract

in which charles is sent to a mental institution as a child and by the time raven breaks him out, he's irreparably damaged. because this is me, there's also a road trip involved.

and these, from atoms by kay_cricketed (WIP)

Five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Charles and Erik find themselves in a situation where they must rely on each other for survival. Trapped in a coal mine deep beneath the earth's surface, and having lost his wheelchair to a disaster, Charles fights the nature of his physical limitations while Erik struggles to remain distant. Ironically, in the dark, it is impossible to hide your heart.

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GOOD OMENS

Open your eyes, look up to the skies and see by Azzy

For some entirely unfathomable reason, after the end of the world hadn’t happened, Crowley didn’t go back to his flat for a solid month.

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THE MENTALIST

the dead outside my window by pprfaith

In one world, the lie Patrick Jane tells is, "I am not a psychic."

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GINTAMA

Pandemonium by Xparrot

The Yorozuya trio gets an unexpected reward. They really should've checked their daily horoscope before accepting: Beware of old women bearing gifts, don't count your lizards before they're hatched, and be careful when life seems too good to be true, because it might be a sign that everything is soon going to go very, very badly.

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HAMILTON

177(6) by ashilrak, lol-phan-af (lol_phan_af)

Reincarnation is normal in this verse.The Hamilsquad is at college guys, and guess what, they all fucking remember lol

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DELTORA QUEST

On Paths Unseen by lovelyleias

It was supposed to be a temporary secret, but it tore them all to pieces.

(Or; what would happen if Faith was real, and Lief and Doom knew).

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LEGENDS OF TOMORROW

The Saga of Kollr by oneiriad (xVikings crossover)

One minute Leonard Snart is standing with his arm deep in the Oculus, waiting to die in a temporal explosion. The next he's stuck in the Scandinavian winter at the beginning of the 9th century.

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HUNGER GAMES

The Avalanche And Little Pebbles by Dyce (WIP)

What if someone else caught the eye of the public and the revolution before Katniss? When a boy from District Seven wins the Games and captures hearts everywhere, the revolution comes when Katniss is only fourteen. Tiny, poor District Twelve may be an afterthought for everyone during and after the revolution, but to Katniss, it's all that matters.

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K-PROJECT

Building Up Walls by DarkrystalSky (WIP)

Deviates from episode 7: Shiro decides to let himself to be captured by SCEPTER 4 at the stadium, in a twist of events that will bring him face to face with the Gold King himself.

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KEYS TO THE KINGDOM

Arthur in the House by taywen (WIP)

The AU where the Trustees decide to raise Arthur.

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CRAZY RICH ASIANS

Siege by Ashling

“Either you meant it when you asked me to marry you,” she says, “or you didn’t.”

Love and loyalty, war and witchery, Nick and Rachel.

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XXXHOLIC

The Professor's Wife by foolish_mortal

The students all said that Professor Doumeki had a wife who made him lunches and impeccably pressed his shirts. Watanuki found this hilarious. For the wtfholic fest prompt: "The only people who can see Watanuki are customers with wishes."

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TWILIGHT

Swansong by pprfaith

She's Swan and she's just passing through, accumulation of all you never knew.

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HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE

Hearts and Their Consumption by setepenre_set (SO MUCH LOVE FOR THIS TBH)

Wizard Howl eats hearts. This isn't just a metaphor.

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TEMERAIRE

All True-Hearted Souls by mardia

"For God's sake, if someone doesn't talk Laurence out of these constant heroics, I wouldn't bet a farthing on his chances; no, and not ours either.” Four times that John Granby helped save William Laurence's life.

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ME BEFORE YOU

but I'm not ready to say good night by violentdarlings

Before Louisa has to face a world without Will, Will has to live in a world without Louisa.

Or: bizarre twist of fate = happy ending. Happyish ending.

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THE MARTIAN

i'm coming home by kearlyn (WIP)

Mark Watney never manages to make contact with Earth and NASA never realizes that he survived the storm and evacuation on Sol 6. So, needless to say, the crew of the Ares IV is incredibly surprised when they land on Mars to find a scruffy, malnourished, mentally unbalanced, but still-alive astronaut waiting for them.

These are the stories of Mark's long journey home and the lives of the people he touches along the way. (Mostly told from not-Mark POVs.)

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FAST AND THE FURIOUS

Along the Way by nightrider101 (WIP, very very old, prob long abandoned, but this was my first F&F fic I ever read and I loved it)

Dom has questions. He hopes Brian has answers.

The Next Quarter Mile by astolat

“We going to get somewhere anytime soon?” Dom said.

Brian was staring out the windshield. “Do you trust me?”

“What the fuck kind of question is that?” Dom said.

“If you say yes, I’m going to take you on the worst fucking ride of your life,” Brian said. “Do you trust me?”

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KINGSMAN

Care and Custody by esama

Eggsy takes out the medal in slightly worse circumstances, asking for a miracle.

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HIKARU NO GO

Watch and Learn by Trial and Error by esama (wip/abandoned)

When God gives Hikaru his wish, he begins his journey again with a new goal in life, to prevent Sai from fading.

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STAR WARS

Re-Entry by flamethrower

Re-Entry is an alternate universe epic that spans time and possibility. Obi-Wan Kenobi, while still a young Padawan, suffers an injury and wakes up with all of the memories, experience, training, and Force-strength of Old Ben Kenobi. It isn't long before the Jedi discover that Anakin Skywalker, a five-year-old slave from the Outer Rim, has undergone the exact same change. Obi-Wan and Anakin bear the scars of harsh lessons learned; those who love them must learn those lessons quickly, before the mistakes of old are repeated.

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YOWAMUSHI PEDAL

One of the Better Days by heihua

Based off the anime post-ending scenes: Imaizumi, tired of having to watch Love Hime but unwilling to hurt Onoda’s feelings, ends up asking Onoda for anime recommendations. Everything goes downhill from there.

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qvincvnx · 5 years

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link for the longfic?

https://m.fanfiction.net/u/3489773/murkybluematter

it’s an alanna the lioness pastiche fic in which harry is a girl who wants to learn potions from shape, and tom riddle never became voldemort - instead, he went into politics, and hogwarts has been pureblood only for a decade. how will harry get to hogwarts? crossdress and trade places with uncle sirius’ son, her cousin archie. it’s really more origfic set more or less in the hp universe, but i tend to read hp fic primarily based on 1. length 2. being plot-driven genfic, so this is like… perfect, for me. it suffers from some significant and persistent SPAG issues and could probably do with some heavy edits but it’s always exactly what i want to be reading, ie, as i said, more or less Densely Plotted Crossdressing Shenanigans. warning for cis author but again i have more or less found this series MUCH less upsetting than the actual alanna books from a gender perspective so there you go. also i love a lot of the ocs.

anyway i also got some requests for other long gen fic recs - a quick rundown of non-hp gen longfics i like, above the cut: daemorphing (animorphs/hdm), republic of heaven community radio (wtnv/hdm, complete), imagine the ocean (atla, katara is the avatar), the stone gryphon (narnia), amarguerite’s “a monstrous regiment” (temeraire/pride & prejudice; her other fic is quite good as well but definitely shippier), chosen man by sineala (eagle of the ninth; def shippy but good immersive historical fiction), carpetbaggers by cofax (narnia), through a looking glass darkly (alice 2009 miniseries)

some other hp longfic recs (under the cut to save a dashboard & bc some of these reviews are a little franker about the things i don’t like than i feel comfortable putting where an author might see them unprompted):

basically if you’re reading for “mostly gen” and “longfic” you have to be flexible about some things incl. writing wonkiness (usually minor SPAG/copyediting issues but often super enormous longfics are in need of like… tightness/pacing issues), bad politics, and presence of snape, a lot of the people who write good longfic love to write him

if you want ship recs i do have those but you’ll probably be better served looking at a shippy reclist. most of these are more or less gen, or sometimes shippy but that’s not what i read them for, etc.

•brilliantlady (ao3 & ff.net) has a series called something like “perfectly normal” that’s very good & a LOT of fun, including a harry whose best friends are neville and hermione, who has some distant cousins in the slytherin crowd, and who’s leaned into his fame a little. does posit that most muggleborns are descended from squibs which i sometimes find intolerable but i do like this fic a lot.

•of course all of arsinoe de blassenville’s fics - “the golden age” is a kind of bleak view of how they all got from the end of DH to the epilogue, including some interesting concepts. “the best revenge” is one of the more tolerable snape raises harry longfics out there and has a cute harry. in general i like the way she writes characters behaving badly and well and complciatedly

•i haven’t reread this one in a while but there’s a really good hermione fic i loved about muggleborn rights. background snarry but i scrolled past it so it’s def possible to read without getting into that. it’s called in loco parentis and it’s by dolores crane on ao3 and possibly other places as well

•forging the sword on ff.net hasn’t updated, last i checked, for about three years but it’s one of my faves. ginny dies in the chamber, and the trio get… intense, so nothing like that ever happens again. but also they’re still like. 12.

•gatewaygirl’s stuff - of course blood magic is her famous severitus fic but i actually just recently read her snakes and lions series, which is one of the few fics i’ve read that has trans wizards in it and i like the way she writes teen nastiness and kindness and shenanigans. it hadn’t updated in a year and a half but i just checked and it’s also recently updated, in the last few weeks i think. sometimes wanders into Pureblood Culture Tm stuff but mostly in a way i can stand.

•i like laventadorn’s never ending road but it is like snarry endgame which i have been trying to ignore and not think about bc of how much i love every girl harry - this one is particularly convincing, tough and fierce and more or less the same as boy harry but read totally differently by the world at large, and i really like some of the side plots (asteria! wolfsbane!). the series starts at second year.

•brilliantlady’s ff also has an “hp for kids” reclist, which is mostly stories that don’t contain too much romance or gore and there’s some good long stuff in there.

•there’s a series called mary potter - ff and ao3 but i don’t remember the authors name - that’s also long and readable; it’s very slytherin and i don’t like the ocs or some of the characterization choices as much as i might, but i like a girl harry

•standard extremely conflicted rec for the sacrifices arc - i have really serious issues with the way that series handles a lot of stuff around abuse recovery and things like reconciliation and justice for past crimes but on the other hand it’s like five million words long and i HAVE read it in its entirety three times. i deeply and passionately love a lot of the OCs. this is also the only hp fic i’ve ever read that unilaterally and unequivocally states that, eg, house elf slavery is wrong and needs to stop, and that magical creatures that are people ARE PEOPLE, and makes this an enormous and critically important plot point throughout the series. hate that this is the only series that does that, especially given my ENORMOUS reservations with what this series considers a “forgivable mistake”

#i DID write this reply on my phoen sorry for typos #I ONLY READ LONGFIC!!!!#hp longfic fandom #that post about how victorian authors just did whatever and published the first draft #is like. my favored genre.#Anonymous

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ladytemeraire · 6 years

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What shows or books were you big into in your preteen/teen years? Did you make up any fanfiction (or just "continuing adventures") when you were watching/reading?

Awww, you just took me way back with this ask!

Shows were never much of a thing for me; we didn’t have cable, and I was never really one for sitting down and watching shows for long periods of time anyway. But middle school was right about when I really started getting into anime - I’d been sneaking bits and pieces of YuGiOh episodes for a few years (my parents were unfortunately of the “anime is evil” mentality), but my bestie introduced me to Fullmetal Alchemist, and somehow I got into Escaflowne at one point, and it just spiraled from there. (There might have been others but most of middle school and parts of high school are... kind of an unhappy blur for me, so nothing really stands out at the moment.)

...I vaguely remember watching bits of JAG and Babylon 5 with my parents when I was younger too, but they didn’t stick with me as much for whatever reason. (Though JAG did lead to NCIS, which I completely and utterly fell in love with.)

In terms of books, obviously the Star Wars EU novels were hugely formative for me in my teen/preteen years, by which I mean the Thrawn trilogy, Hand of Thrawn duology, and bits of Rogue Squadron. Oh, and a bunch of the comics, mostly Rogue Squadron and Mara Jade: By the Emperor’s Hand. I also really loved reading Frank Peretti’s novels - his Cooper Kids YA series was one I read and re-read to death, and I started getting into his more “grownup” books along the way too. Eragon was a big one, and inspiring to me at the time because it was written by a young person rather than a “grownup”. I also got into Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, and E.E. Knight’s Dragon Champion and its sequels, and eventually Discworld, which I’m still working my way through to this day. There were others along the way, but those were the ones I stuck with and returned to multiple times.

...a lot of these were literally me just going to the library and checking out anything with a dragon on the cover or in the title, to be perfectly honest.

The earliest and longest-running one for me, though, was the Pern series, which started my lifelong obsession with dragons way back in fifth grade. (It helps that there are just so many books in that series, so I had plenty of material to devour.) I started with the Harper Hall trilogy, which is probably the easiest read of the lot and one of the best places other than the original trilogy or Dragonsdawn in terms of “where to jump in”. Some of the concepts sailed right over my head (...in retrospect I probably should have figured out I was ace a lot sooner than I did, or at least suspected something was up), at least until I re-read them years later. But I absolutely loved the books and they still hold a special place in my heart even while I recognize their flaws and “problematic” material, and the concept of a dragon forming an unbreakable bond with their rider just burrowed its way into my brain and never really left.

Pern was actually the source material for my first fanfiction - though I didn’t know the word for it at the time - which never saw the light of day beyond a Word document that’s long since disappeared. It was about a girl who was meant to be a candidate for a queen rider, but ended up having a bronze dragon Impress on her instead. The story underwent a couple iterations before falling by the wayside, partly because I somehow either found out or was informed that other people couldn’t write Pern books... at which point tiny little twelve-year-old me stubbornly went “fine, I’ll write my own book with dragonriders,” and the rest is history.

It’s still evolving, and will probably evolve more before it (hopefully) gets finished, but that core nugget of dragons bonding with humans never really left. Neither did the little girl from that first fic - she’s grown and changed quite a bit with me, but she’s always been in my stories in one form or another, and is currently still hanging around as my OC Alastrine. I’m rather attached to her at this point, and I doubt I’ll ever be able to let her go. (And yes, she’s still bonding with dragons she’s not supposed to.)

This was a lovely little trip down memory lane. Thank you for asking!

#replies #anonymous #about the author #I just got super nostalgic over my own writing and OCs #Anonymous

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katistrophe · 7 years

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10 Book Questions

I got tagged by @tatzelwyrm - thanks!

1. What is your favorite book of all time?

... you are making me choose? I can’t really. I guess the one I have the longest emotional connection to is Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone - I got it when I was tiny, I read it over and over, I listened to the audiobook often enough I basically hear Rufus Beck’s voice in my head when I think of it... (Though the one I’ve read most has to be Les Mis, before my phone ate most of them every page was covered in annotations in five different colors and I could still go back and annotate more...)

2. What are you currently reading?

I got started on The Golden Slipper yesterday in my quest to burn through every public domain mystery novel on my phone, and in print I’m currently torn between starting one of two Star Trek tie-in novels: the German translation of Enterprise: The First Adventure and The Abode of Life (might end up being the second one just because it’s in English and doesn’t have Those Damned Soup Ads in it). (I can’t help it, I love the continuity some of the old TOS tie-ins built up, showing all the alien crewmembers without having to limit themselves to a budget or whatnot too...) And then there’s a couple of books I started and kind of lost track of.

3. Have you ever thought about writing a book?

Maybe when I was younger. These days... eh. I tend to write fanfic of canon characters or at best OCs in an existing setting. I’m not sure I can actually plot my way out of a box, and I’m less sure I could do the worldbuilding for anything I’d ever like to write. (Particularly since I’d get tangled in the details down to the level of goddamn molecular biology, so I guess what readers would be getting would be a textbook with a bit of story in it.)

4. What’s your favorite series?

I gotta say Discworld, though there are so many others I also love I’m not sure I can list them all.

5. What is a book you want to read?

“A” book? Well... *deep breath* everything of the Temeraire series since Empire of Ivory, everything of the Aubreyad I haven’t read yet, I need to catch up to Rivers of London again, there’s luckily so much of Discworld I haven’t read yet...

6. What’s in your TBR list?

Of books I have... there’s a whole box of Star Trek tie-in novels I found in the cellar, and on the phone I downloaded a whole bunch of public domain mystery/crime novels.

7. Who are your favourite fictional characters?

The first type that springs to mind is “honorable but misguided, also very likely dead as a doornail”. Aside from that, there are so many. I could write for days and not be done.

8. What is your favourite ship?

Clearly HMS Surprise :P Seriously though, I don’t think I’ve ever been much of an active shipper.

9. Open the first page of the book closest to you and write down the first paragraph.

That’s.. The Abode of Life, because I got it to check the title.

There was the unmistakable ringing song of transporter materialization that suddenly filled the air of the glade.

If the preview bit that’s for some reason in front of the whole thing counts. Otherwise...

“May I call to your attention, Captain, that our present course takes us disturbingly near the reported gravitational turbulence reported by Federation ships in this sector of the Orion Arm?” As usual, Spock was both punctilious and logically correct in his assessment of the situation.

10. What’s the first fandom you were in?

Books alone? The first one where I actually sought various fandom aspects out was Harry Potter. Though I feel like I never really created own content much, I just read and read and read and was insecure about my own writing so I basically deleted anything I posted for most anything pretty quickly. The one fandom where I’m sort of actively creating stuff in is not a book fandom, though, it’s Fallen London.

I’m tagging, let’s see... @toooldforthisbutstill, @theherondaels, @hohtohopeainen, @sinilakki, @nebty, @toipilas, @jade-cooper, @mater-lachrymarum...

#tag meme #tag thing #how do i tag these?

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anamelesstraveler · 7 years

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Fic Rec Sunday - 5/28/17

Finally jumping back into this! I’m so happy to rec stuff again.

Scileson

Untested Limits by QuickLikeLight (@quicklikelight)

He was shaking - not scared or cold or hurting, not her brave darling, no - but overwhelmed, lost in the sensation she was giving him, overcome by need.

Sterek

For Varying Degrees of Tired (tumblr post) by alocalband (@alocalband)

“Please, Derek, please, I–“ Stiles chokes back the beginnings of tears and clutches harder at the sleeve of Derek’s jacket. He’s on his knees, having tripped in his scramble to get to Derek from the other side of the loft. “I love you, okay? And I’m sorry I didn’t say it before, I’ve been a coward about this whole thing, but I love you. And I know you love me too. I know you do, and I need you not to leave like this, fuck, Derek, please don’t do this.”

Derek stares down at him for a long time, heart clenched in his throat.

And then he looks up at where the other Stiles is pursing his lips in a hard frown as he watches the scene.

“It isn’t real?” Derek asks for the hundredth time since the other Stiles, the real Stiles, showed up in this apparent dreamscape.

it’s only nature, I live for danger by Marishna

One could say it smacked Stiles in the face but, in actuality, it was Derek slapping him on the ass with a wide grin and laughing eyes that gave him the epiphany.

Mutually Assured Dating by @andavs

‘You were singing really loudly in the shower when I broke into your apartment but then i heard you slip and crash and oh god i should probably check on you in case i get done for murder instead of just robbery’ AU

It took all of fourteen seconds for Derek to realize he was in the wrong apartment.

No, Wait, You Got it All Wrong by @troubleiwant

Amanda glances towards the bar, probably considering a fourth round, and then visibly perks up as something near the front catches her eye.

“Oooh, Stiles,” she croons. “Look over at the door, like, just glance over.” She’s adjusted her gaze down at the table now, faking casual disinterest. Badly.

Stiles raises his eyebrows at her.

“This dude just walked in, he’s so your type,” she hisses. “C’mon, look! I’m telling you, six feet two inches of ‘yes, please, give it to me’ muscles, with some salt-and-pepper scruff icing. Unff.”

Non-Emergency (tumblr post) by dragon_temeraire (@dragon-temeraire)

Stiles has never been in a hospital waiting room with a guy as hot as this.

Cut for mobile

A Road That’s Built to Last by twisting_vine_x (@twisting-vine-x)

Stiles is driving the Trans-Canada highway, all the way from Toronto to Vancouver. He's always been told that it's a bad idea to pick up hitchhikers, but, somehow, he's still got someone riding shotgun with him, and he's starting to think it might be one of the best decisions he's made in a long time.

stress baking (tumblr post) by bibliosexual (@bibliosexxual)

Derek doesn’t usually start conversations, but today he feels like making an exception. “Are you okay? This is a lot more baking than usual, even for you.”

“What? What do you mean?” Stiles says, dropping his hands to his sides. His face cycles through about five or six different expressions before settling on something that’s probably trying to say “innocent and oblivious,” but… well. Derek might not know Stiles that well, but he knows Stiles is definitely not either of those things, ever.

“The cookies,” Derek says slowly. “That you leave on my doorstep a few times a week while I’m out on my morning run.”

Stiles glares down at the cookies Derek’s holding like they’ve betrayed him.

“We don’t talk about it,” Derek says slowly, unsure, “but I thought you knew that I knew it was you."

Tell Me True by @troubleiwant

Abby loves a lot of things about being a cop, but handling vagrancy calls isn’t one of them. The only worse option is if it ends up being a drunk and disorderly, too. Just, she hates forcing people to move along when they’re only trying to survive on the streets. And while she can’t blame those who react poorly to her thinly-veiled orders, she doesn’t love getting cussed at either.

Luckily, her partner Stiles is always willing to step up. He intuitively grasps how to balance his authority with a friendly sympathy that reads as honest respect, not pity. Most of the city’s homeless accept Stiles as at least a friendly acquaintance, at this point. Considering he’s best known among his peers for his sharp tongue and a borderline troubling disregard for social norms, it’s a bit of a surprise, but when it comes to empathizing with the genuinely downtrodden? Stiles is your guy.

Which is probably why they get called to deal with the vagrant in the woods in the first place, and that’s when all the trouble starts.

untitled by @effectricis

Does anyone ever think about the fact that after everything with Kate, maybe Derek goes to New York with the decision to never to be hurt that way by anyone again. Not the losing his family part, because how could he ever lose so much again, right? (Right? I’m not crying at all!)

untitled by @petals42

Stiles was lost.

Very lost.

So fucking lost, and he didn’t even know why he was here in the first place.

He could at least admit that much. He didn’t want to, but he could admit it. Reluctantly. Because he was standing on a very dark corner, with the one very much not-on streetlight, next to a burnt down, probably arsoned, Chinese restaurant called Lucky Dragon, and he was drunk.

So drunk.

So very, very drunk.

you know you’re on my mind (tumblr post) by bibliosexual (@bibliosexxual)

If there’s one thing Derek’s learned in life, it’s that crushing on someone who lives on an entire other fucking continent is probably a bad idea.

#eternalsterek #Sterek #Scileson #McArgentski #Teen Wolf #StilesDerek #ScottStilesAllison #fic rec #Fic Rec Sunday

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barbecuedphoenix · 7 years

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200 Followers: 11 Things About Me

So I was re-tagged a week ago by @eldarya-scenarios. (I had no idea I tagged you twice, dear. ^_^ Having two aliases is awfully sneaky.)

If you’re a little curious on who your friendly fan blogger is behind the Leiftan icon and the barrage of text-winks, feel free to read on. Watch out though: it’s a long post like everything else I write...

And if not, please continue to enjoy this blog’s smart-assery and the text-winks. ;)

1) Why did you name your blog the way you did? ...Because that’s the screen-name I use for my main Eldarya account. I’m not very creative with names. :( Not to mention that it’s probably very politically-incorrect to say ‘Barbecued Phoenix’ in the faery realm. Huang Hua would not be amused. And my blog is guaranteed to be politically-incorrect as far as folklore and faeries are concerned. ;) My screen-name is actually homage to a Neil Gaiman short-story called ‘Sunbird’, which is still one of my favorites from its double serving of dark humor and culinary catastrophes. And it sounds really funny when you say it out-loud (at least that’s my opinion).

2) What was your last meal? *checks bowl next to laptop* Eh… a fruit salad I scraped together from some Rainier cherries and leftover cantaloupe slices. It’s summer here, and I enjoy my fruits. :)

3) Jeans or skirts? …I must have at least nine different pairs of jeans in my closet, half of which I don’t even wear most days. And just one pencil skirt. Because at least once in my life, I’ll need to go to a court room. So there’s your answer. :)

4) What’s your favourite letter of the alphabet? In the English alphabet, ‘L’ is my favorite. It just rollllls off the tongue so nicely. :)

5) Favourite fandom/shipping? I’m a mercenary crack-ship writer. Anything goes so long as characters are in-character. ;) *cough* Truthfully, I haven’t shipped anything in a fandom since I was eleven or twelve, and that was waaaay back when the cartoon series Avatar the Last Airbender premiered. I think that experience has inoculated me to serious shipping. So now, while I enjoy seeing a well-developed, well-paced canon romance (because it means the creators have really thought the story through), it’s never a huge concern for me who’s paired up with whom. Romance isn’t actually the selling point for me for a lot of stories; it’s individual character development and plot direction that counts. And anyway… fan shipping is really a fabrication. With a bit of imagination, effort, and tactical writing, functional relationships can be spun between anything and anyone, and unraveled in the same way. Even when keeping all parties in character. So why blow a gasket over shipping? To each their own dirty little fancies. ;)

As for my fandoms… they’re a patchwork quilt of games, books, movies, TV shows, anime from a lot of different sources, and it changes every year. For the sake of time, I’ll give a rundown of just the fantasy/supernatural genres I’ve been following for a while (translating some of the titles to English when possible):

Games: the Dragon Age series, Folklore (also called FolksSoul), Uncharted, the Persona series

Books: Discworld, His Dark Materials, the Dr. Siri Paiboun series, the Temeraire series, The Tiger’s Wife, Brisingamen, pretty much anything done by Neil Gaiman… the list goes on. With a few rare exceptions, I’ve shifted from being a high fantasy lover (those tropes get old after a while) to an acolyte of more low-key genres like magical-realism, fantasy-historical-fiction, and satirical-fantasy.

TV Shows: Supernatural

Anime & Cartoons: the Fate series (even though my fanfiction ends up making fun of it 95% of the time, it’s still a really intricate universe), the Avatar series

Movies: Practically anything done by Studio Ghibli and Tomm Moore, ‘Coraline’, ‘Corpse Bride’, ‘Therapy for a Vampire’, ‘Let the Right One In’, ‘Groundhog Day’, the very first installation of ‘The Hobbit’

6) What’s your favourite sport? (You don’t necessarily have to play it) Favorite sport I can’t do, but love to watch: Surfing. Forget berserk football matches; give me a crazy Australian riding a tunnel wave any day. :D Favorite sport I can do: Bicycling. I’m no Tour de France candidate, but my bike regularly takes its share of unreasonable hills and descents in the city where I live. Personally, It’s a great way to get around. ^_^

7) What’s your idea of a perfect day? Getting everything on my list done with minimal coffee and hair-pulling. -_- Sorry… I’m still listening to the robot half of my brain. Switching over. Start the day by making a difference and sharing a good time with both the students I see where I work, and the odd friends and colleagues I do have. Attend a really good lecture. Then take a quiet bus ride to the beach or an aquarium, where I can watch all the wildlife shenanigans I want. Tourists included. Cook something awesome for lunch or dinner, and eat it to discover that it’s still more awesome. End the day with a good book, an avalanche of blankets, and a conveniently-rainy night. And maybe a quick Skype/phone call with my dad. ;( Oh there I go, listening to the sappy half of my brain. Switching over.

8) What animal do you hate with all your soul? The logical part of my brain tells me I have no cause to loathe any animal for existing. But the cave-woman part of my brain still gets creeped out by a few of them…. Geckos especially. Because the house where I grew up was infested with them (like a typical equatorial house, actually). The geckos could be found on absolutely any flat surface, even the underside of the table and on the ceiling, so we always had to check right before sitting down that something cold, bug-eyed, and squirmy wasn’t going to drop on us in the middle of dinner. And they also liked to appear in other surprising places: like in your shoes (as my father found out one day while rushing to work), inside drawers, inside trash cans, crushed between door hinges, trapped in the kitchen sink, and inside the refrigerator a couple of times (worst idea ever, for a lizard). One of the best things that happened to me on moving to this corner of the United States: no geckos anywhere. I can clean my apartment with an easy heart. \o/

9) Can you dance? Besides some lingering muscle memory from my early days doing classical ballet... no. :( I’d really like to take up Spanish Flamenco though. Generally, I do better with choreographed dances rather than impromptu club-dancing. As all my friends have told me. I’ve given them so many priceless memories on the dance-floor…

10) What’s the name and age of your favourite character? (OC or otherwise) I can’t decide on a ‘favorite’ character in media; there’s too many of them. So how about a favorite OC instead? ^_^ Right now among the Eldarya OC cast, my favorite would have to be Zephania ‘Zee’ Tantiango because she’s a magnet for trouble as a protagonist very dynamic heroine to work with. (She’s 23, in case you’re interested.) Zee is actually the latest incarnation of the ‘funny-but-unlucky action heroine’ archetype I’ve spent years working on, and I’m happy with how she’s turning out so far. On one hand, she’s the typical small-town heroine who’s sharp, plucky, energetic, and more than a little kooky herself; the story never stops moving once she starts improvising in a tight situation. :) But there’s a strong undercurrent of tragedy in the way she continues to isolate herself through her pride and her decisions, especially because she’s allergic to either admitting that she’s in real trouble, or cutting herself some slack for her mistakes. There’s a lot of sadness behind that finger-snap smile. I’m still debating on whether to give her a good ending, or a bitter one. :( No, that was not a spoiler for the fan-fiction that’ll one day hit this blog.

11) What got you into your favourite activity?(i.e how did you start?) Favorite activity? Like… a hobby? Well the longest-running hobby I’ve ever had is writing (no guesses there). And it was more-or-less self-taught. As a kid, nobody could take me anywhere without a book in my hand, or some other adventure happening inside my own head (which made it awfully inconvenient to get my attention in a mall… but hey, I never wandered off). And writing short stories was always the most entertaining school assignment for me. But it wasn’t until I started home-schooling at thirteen that I found the time and need to write something for myself, putting to paper those increasingly-complex sagas and fan-fictions that lived in my head (because my short-term recall just couldn’t keep track of all the dialogue and plot twists anymore; I needed to start recording my stories to make sense of them.) And I haven’t stopped since. :)

Uh-oh. Here come… my questions. For @mentacomchocolate, @areyntheheartseeker, and @the-irish-hoor.

Why did you name your blogs the way you did? ;)

What would your honest personal reaction be if you accidentally stepped into a fairy ring, landed in a strange place, and got threatened by a fox-lady wielding fireballs?

What’s your dream job in this life?

Is there anyone you have a crush on that you’re still really embarrassed to admit? Would you like to mention them anyway? ;)

If there’s only one book genre you could spend the rest of your life reading, what will it be?

What are the top 5 things you geek out over? (Today, at least. ;) )

If you’ve been given a 24-hour advance warning that the world is definitely going to end (i.e. via Death Star), what will you do?

And if you’ve been given an exclusive two-person escape pod during above scenario, what/who would you bring with you to escape the planet? Would you want to?

If your friends can agree on one thing about you, what would it be? Do you agree with them?

What’s the most embarrassing thing that happened to you this past week?

What do you remember as your most incredible feat of endurance to date? Physical, mental, and/or social?

*looks up* ...All right, those are some weird questions. I won’t blame you at all if you ignore them.

#Q&A #tag post #blog milestone #200 followers #OC: Zephania

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kcrabb88 · 7 years

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Rules: Complete the qualities with books you’ve read or want to read (novels, plays, stories, etc.) then tag some friends.

I was tagged by @amarguerite! :D

Book I love: Les Miserables. I’ve read a lot of books in my life and loved a lot of them, but no book has ever changed my life to the extent this one did. My feelings are strong and will be forever.

Book I hate: Man, I honestly don’t know if I could even tell you what the PLOT is anymore, too much time has passed, but Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner. I read it in my so-called American Masterpieces class in college (my professor thought Richard Brautigan was a genius and hated Haper Lee. Fight me) and I hated it SO MUCH I threw it against the wall of the library study room when I finished. God, if you can’t write good, understandable stream-of-consciousness, then don’t DO IT AT ALL. I know I can’t, so I don’t. What is your plot what is even happening. People are like read the Sound and the Fury instead and I’m like no, I will not.

Book I think is underestimated: See, I should wait until I can get home and look at my shelf to do this, but I’m too impatient so the first thing that popped to my mind are Sarah Waters’ books? I’ve only read one but SHIT if it didn’t pull me in so hard I read it in like three days? Tumblr is often like “where are books about lesbians?” and I’m like well her books often are so check those out.

Book I think is overvalued: Anything Earnest Hemingway ever wrote? In his life? I am never impressed and his writing’s not particularly pretty. I can do without most of the male American modernists, to be quite honest. Let me tell you how much I don’t care about your impotence, dudes. I DO like T.S. Elliot, but then, he was British so maybe that’s why. You want to talk to me about classic American male authors? Give me some Poe any day, thanks.

Book I want to see in a movie version: The Temeraire series!! Or a mini-series/Netflix series, WHATEVER just let me have it. Peter Jackson bought the film rights forever ago WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR. I want dragons and swords and ships and fussy British aviators. I want it now. Also give me closure scenes with all the main characters that for some reason weren’t really at the end of the last book, which is my main complaint about the end.

Last book I read/in progress: I just finished the Temeraire series (sob, now I’m listening to all the audio books cause I was not ready to read the last book), and now am fully reading The Republic of Pirates by Colin Woodward. I grad school read big bits of it for research and now want to read all the way through.

Book or saga I want to finish: I haven’t started it yet, but I have In The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss in my queue on the recommendation of @diminutive-fox! That’s the next fiction book I intend to pick up. As far as things I have read, I need to catch up on my Phillipa Gregory books. I read like, six of them one summer (mostly the Tudor focused books, I have an old childhood interest in their bizarre antics) and there have been new ones that came out that I haven’t picked up yet. I also want to read Count of Monte Cristo this year. And the Gollum and the Ginny.

Book or saga I don’t want to finish: I started reading this prequel to Treasure Island called “Flint and Silver” and I liked the characterization of the main two, it was awesome, but I got distracted by the author using sailing lingo every few sentences, like I dunno I feel like you can write about sailing without trying to say “look how much I know about sailing?” Plus the way he wrote about women made me uncomfortable. I WANTED TO LIKE IT, other people liked it, by all rights I should have but oh well.

Next book: Probably The Insurgent Barricade!

The worst end: Hmm. I can’t really think of an end of a book I super hated, that seems to happen more often with TV shows and movies. I do remember feeling annoyed at the end of the Gospel Of Lamb, because I liked almost all of it except ONE big thing I would have liked to see, but it was more mysterious and I was like come onnnnnn.

I shall tag @flaviamarquesart. @midautumnnightdream, @fixaidea, @spacestationtrustfund, @minstr3lsong, @librarianladyx (only if you like, of course!)

#Thanks for the tag friend!#KCrabb does memes

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rrrawrf · 7 years

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11 questions

tagged by @praise-the-lord-im-dead

1. How many WIPs do you currently have?

uhhhhhhh several ????

2. Do you/would you write fan fiction?

not really, closest i get is a roleplaying world styled after temeraire

3. Do you prefer real books or e-books?

i don’t really care. i like both because it’s easier to carry sixty books on a plane with an e-reader rather than a backpack, but i also like looking at book covers. however, e-readers (not tablets, bc i just play games on those instead of, you know, actually read) currently have the edge because i am a very tactile person, and sometimes the paper they make books out of just. bugs me. also i don’t like the smell of new books. i’m satan, according to one gr8 person here on tumblrdotcom.

(will kill a cactus for any book that has an embossed cover tho bc those are so tactile-friendly i love them)

4. When did you start writing?

13ish, courtesy of the neopets.com roleplaying boards :|

5. Do you have someone you trust that you share your work with?

just you nerds on tumblr (sometimes my sister but she rarely shows interest so)

6. Where is your favorite place to write?

i don’t have one, i’ve never had the room to make a personal writing space

7. Favorite childhood book?

SHRUGS ????????

8. Writing for fun or writing for publication?

i wanna be published but also for fun

9. Pen and paper or computer?

computer when i have it, but i am more productive when i’m writing in my tiny notebook at work instead of checking people into their flights

10. Have you ever taken any writing classes?

twice in college, but they were more like workshops than classes. i enjoyed them. 10/10 would recommend except everyone thought ‘alohilani’ was too long a name for a character and wanted me to change it lol screw u nerds have you even seen a real hawaiian name

11. What inspires you to write?

idk man stories are in my head and i gotta get em out?

#about me #most of this could be answered with #SHRUG #tumblr games #praise-the-lord-im-dead

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dailybestiary · 7 years

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Knight & Megapon Ants

Knight ants are a special caste of ants dedicated to defending their colony’s home. They grow particularly wide heads to protect their colonymates, who also benefit from the greater coordination signaled by the knight ants’ pheromones.

Megapon ants, meanwhile, have the rare distinction of being (in the editions I own, anyway) the only Bestiary species I’ve seen to not merit a description. (Heck, I can’t even Google a good definition for megapon.) But at CR 6, they’re nothing to sneeze at; they can carry prodigious amounts of weight; and their Strength-sapping poison suggests the sting of a fire ant or some aggressive, prehistoric lineage.

A clan of dwarves uses alchemical scents to tame and coax behaviors out of their ant livestock. A local war calls most of the clan elders away from the hold, and when they return they discover that the artificial scents have spoiled. Their knight ant guards now bar the way to the lower levels, no longer recognizing the dwarves as friends.

A martial arts master with some training as a druid believes in basing his forms and stances off of those in nature. In order to learn his specialized skills (in game terms, teamwork feats), adventurers must study knight ants in the tunnels of their hill—without killing a single one.

Adventurers are racing through the canopy of the great god’s-home trees, fleeing cannibals hot on their trail. They come across a column of megapon ants using their bodies to create a bridge for themselves and their giant aphid thralls. If the adventurers can find a way to sneak across the ant bridge, they will easily lose their pursuers. Otherwise they might have to fight the enormous ants and the kuru-maddened cannibals at the same time.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5 27

I recently relistened to the audiobook version of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, read by the outstanding Simon Prebble. I first listened to it during a massive, speeding ticket-filled, two-day road trip from San Francisco to Portland via Crater Lake several years ago. I’m happy to say I loved it then—so much so that in my hunger for more I discovered Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series and Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin books—and I loved it now—so much so that I accrued $28 in overdue fines because I had other books checked out and didn’t want to give any of them back. (If you throw in the speeding tickets, that’s compelling evidence that good books make me make bad choices, apparently.)

JS&MN truly is an extraordinary book—all the more so because it’s a first novel. (Neil Gaiman’s quote about a fragment from one of Clarke’s early drafts—“It was like watching someone sit down to play the piano for the first time and she plays a sonata”—still holds up.) The true-to-the-1800s language, the sense of place, and the treatment of academic arguments as being as important as a battle are nearly perfect. I love the characters; I love the world; I love the faerie lore; I love almost everything.

Because I love it so much, certain things still drive me nuts. Most of these little things are insufficiently answered (to my mind, at least) questions or breakdowns in verisimilitude: How can Mr Norrell justify obstructing the progress of all other magicians if he publicly claims to want to restore English magic…why does Childermass remain with Mr Norrell for so long even after the meanness of his master’s character is revealed…why do Lady Pole and Stephen Strange’s maladies go so long undiagnosed, even with a faerie glamour to blame…things like that. In reality, the book may be better for not answering these questions, but they still leave me fidgety with agitation.

A second listen did also confirm a major beef I had the first time I listened to it, though: It is a figure eight of a work, its whole shape constantly circling around two black holes of noninformation.

The first is that the actual working of magic is barely shown and never explained. Clarke has said that she “really like[s] magicians,” but weirdly she seems willing to gloss over the magic they do almost entirely. (Early in the book this is amusing—even the characters are impatient to see magic done—but by 2/3s of the way in it’s infuriatingly coy.) We almost never get a sense of how it feels for the magicians to do magic, or why these two men have succeeded where almost no one else has. (That they were prophesied doesn’t cut it.) It’s a staggeringly strange omission, especially to a fantasy fan audience used to reading about how it feels to come into one’s power, whatever that power may be. Strange in particular stumbles into magic and then the narrative curtain closes; when it reopens he is already a thaumaturgical Mozart. That is, as the South Park kids would say, some total BS right there.

The second problem is that this is a work of alternate history that refuses to share its alternate history. True, the novel purports to be written by someone from Strange’s acquaintance only a generation or so later, so much of this knowledge is assumed to be held by the reader. But despite all its many, many, many footnotes, the book barely gives us a coherent alternate timeline, and so much of how the novel’s history diverges from our own is unclear. (For comparison, Philip K. Dick is a downright clumsy author compared to Clarke, but I can tell you more about the history of Man in the High Castle, and it’s a mere pamphlet next to the Bible-fat JS&MN.) I don't need much more detail, but I do need more.

Worse yet, not only has Clarke created a fictional northern England with a fictional Raven King that we don't know enough about, but she also seems to have fallen a little in love with him. (Strong evidence of this is that the characters positively won’t shut up about him; he even gives his name to the novel’s third act.) It is dangerous to fall in love with fictional people or settings, and doing so is a surefire way to undermine the story. (Notice, for instance, how Tolkien burns the Shire, and how J. K. Rowling—whose writerly smarts are often underrated—is careful to get her characters out of Hogwarts after the love letter to it that is The Order of the Phoenix. Now compare that to, say, The Name of the Wind, which struck me as loving its central character just a bit too much, or the insufferable anime Clamp School Detectives, whose love for its own impossible setting is a veritable fountain of onanism (see what I did there?) that eventually feels like a taunt to the viewer who will never attend there. You can’t love your fictional children too hard, and Clarke loves John Uskglass.

So as I said, a great novel, but a figure eight thanks to these two crucial holes. Do not under *any* circumstances let these prevent you from reading it though!

Unfortunately, a new qualm came up as I was listening this time: the novel’s hagiography of Englishness. In a 2005 interview with Locus, Susanna Clarke practically quoted Tolkien word for word in her lament that England did not have a myth of its own. (Sidebar: English culture is odd in that its most famous legend, Beowulf, takes place in Denmark, a divorce of a people from its mythic geography that seems to really bother certain writers. In fact, this lack is responsible for both The Silmarillion and JS&MN. King Arthur doesn’t work for them for some reason; he’s either too British rather than English—a distinction too arcane for my American mind, but there it is—or too Welsh, and his legend has definitely become too French. Robin Hood doesn’t work either, for some reason, despite his being safely nestled in the East Midlands. The tl;dr of all this is that there is no understanding the English mythic imagination when you’re a fat Yank git.) So Clarke fills JS&MN with her love for England—its people, its cities, and its countryside, especially the North, where she revels in its preindustrial wildness. And Englishness as a laudatory attribute fills nearly every page. (More on this can be found over on Wikipedia, but don’t go there until you’ve read/listened to the book, because it’s spoiler central.)

The thing is though, Clarke is smart enough to know that glorifying England, Englishness, Englishmen (emphasis on the “men” there), and king/queen and country has caused a lot of pain for other folks in the world. So she works very hard to undercut this worship of Englishness, giving strong roles to women, nonwhite, and poor characters, and amplifying their voicelessness in the society of that time through the narrative. It’s all a genius balancing act, and it all serves to intentionally undercut and deflate the project of England worship that the novel is busily engaged in…

…And yet, Englishness, in the end, wins out. England remains the hero. The English countryside itself is instrumental in turning the tide in the final encounter. Lovely, lush, green, hilly, moor-covered England is still the hero.

Which should be all well and good, but… Well, I’m just not on board with cheering for England right now.

I’m a Top Gear fan. And I watched Jeremy Clarkson’s no-one-is-better-than-us casual racism—as an American I’m spared the overt racism of his other appearances—wax stronger with every season, slowly curdling my affection. And I watched Brexit throw my expatriate scientist friends’ careers into a tumult and imperil their research. It was also, more to the point, a triumph of Englishness over the needs of Britishness.

And here on this side of the pond, I’ve watched a similar dynamic play out, as many Americans have taken to celebrating America—or at least, their mean, small-minded, and resentful notion of it—to the point that pride of place and race have become more important than the principals that make America work.

So I still love JS&MN. And I think you should read and even love JS&MN. And zero of what I’ve said in the previous two paragraphs is Susanna Clarke’s fault. But in JS&MN, a country is a character—the protagonist even. And right now, in 2017, loving a place more than people doesn’t feel that good.

So I’m going to return JS&MN back to the library for another 7 years or so, or maybe for longer. And the next time I get it out, I hope I’ve fallen back in love with England and America.

Because that is the magic I most want to see.

#pathfinder #paizo #3.5 #dungeons & dragons #dungeons and dragons #d&d #dnd #knight ant #megapon ant #ant #vermin #jonathan strange and mr norrell #jonathan strange & mr norrell #susanna clarke

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scenarios-on-ice · 7 years

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Nah, no reason to be sorry! Like I said it’s all for the best :)

You can find the full soundtrack on youtube and a quick google search will reveal the bits of missing dialogue you might need to understand the plot better! :D It’s honestly such a good musical, like, I saw the Korean version last week and was completely blown away. Fun thing is that the MC Usnavi also has Hamilton’s non-stop, rambling motor mouth and his half adorkable, half ridiculous attitude which results in moments like:

(After scoring a date with Vanessa, his long-time crush) “OH SNAP! Who’s that? Don’t touch me I’m too hot! YES! Que paso(What happened)? Here I go! So dope! Y tuo lo sabes(and you know it)! No pare, sigue sigue(don’t stop, keep going)! Did you see me? freaky freakit!”

(Keep in mind that he didn’t even ask her out himself; his cousin did it for him because he kept backing out at the last minute lol)

(Flirting with a random girl at a club) “BARTENDER! Let me get an amaretto sour for this ghetto flower! How are you so pretty? You complete me! You had me at hello, you know you need me truly, madly, deeply- let’s get freaky! Oh, I get it, you’re the strong and silent type! Well, I’m the Caribbean island type, and I can drive you wild all night! But I digress! Say something so I don’t stress!”

(random girl): “…no hablo ingles(I don’t speak English).”

also this

“Yeah, I’m a streetlight, choking on the heat. The world spins around while I’m frozen to my seat- the people that I know all keep on rollin’ down the street. but every day is different so I’m switching up the beat! ‘Cuz my parents came with nothing, they got a little more, and sure, we’re poor, but yo, at least we got the store! And it’s all about the legacy they left with me, it’s destiny, and one day I’ll be on a beach with Sonny writing checks to me!”

(Come on that’s such an Alex thing to say)

Haha, I can kinda relate to that because I never rest when I’m sick- I get bored too easily and end up hopping out of bed to entertain myself (unless I have a really high fever, in which case I huddle under the blankets and sulk).

(Why are we such Hamilpun trash) But really, you know what else is non-stop and never throwing away its shot? My mouth/my fingers. I don’t understand how you can write a short, cute little message and I produce this monstrous, never-ending piece of nonsense as a reply XD

Then I’ll definitely look it up tomorrow ^^ It has a Korean version as well? That’s pretty cool! I think I remember you mentioning you’re Korean before, correct me if I’m wrong.

Y’know, Usnavi does remind me of Alex, but he also reminds me of Phillip for some reason. Cute little nerd. I feel kinda sorry for him when he was flirting with the random girl… Such a speech and it’s all for nothing.

Okay, he really is like Alex. He know he’s poor, he knows it’s the only way to rise up. ((I almost wrote the entire song here whOOPS))

I get so easily bored it’s ridiculous. Today, I rewatched Magi, got mad at Ren Hakuryuu for his inability to make proper life decisions, played Love Live, cried over the fact that I don’t have an UR Maki, got ridiculously mad over the Love Letters who were either sent on anon or were left unsigned and deleted them, then narrowed it down to the first 20 that were sent in, laughed over bad memes, thought about how boring my life is, studied a bit and read over 300 pages of Temeraire, all the while managing not to answer the love letters… I am a literal potato when it comes to those, and this has taught me just that.

Hamilpuns are amazing, don’t try to convince me otherwise.

No, I always feel extremely guilty because you always write wonderful, long messages while I never seem to match them in length and it makes me so sad, because you take your time writing all of it and I never seem to reply properly >_<

#evans #tokyo ghoul anon #luna talks #submission

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