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#Queens Thief
klexos · 7 months
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I inherited this country when I was only a child, Nahuseresh. I have held it. I have fought down rebellious barons. I've fought Sounis to keep the land on this side of the mountains. I have killed men and watched them hang. I've seen them tortured to keep this country safe and mine. How did you think I did this if I was a fool with cow eyes for any handsome man with gold in his purse?
― Megan Whalen Turner, The Queen of Attolia
Finally finished this piece! It's good to be back on this website:)
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UNRELIABLE NARRATORS; FINALS.
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Eugenides Propaganda:
the entire plot hinges on a detail he lets the reader (and every other character) assume is true. I don't want to spoil it because it's a really fun reveal but he is lying from the first second he appears on the page and you can't trust him to tell the full truth about ANYTHING related to himself and his goals. he mostly does it to keep his advantage and not have other characters be suspicious of him but it's just so fun when you realise he's been lying the whole time
Lemony Snicket Propaganda:
(I would like to preface this by saying that Lemony Snicket is the author's pen name, not a real person, and he exists as a character in-universe as well as being the one in-universe who writes the books!) I'd say he's unreliable because he spent time collecting information about the Baudelaire kids and then... wrote books about it. He has no idea what any of their dialogue actually was, what they were thinking, or even the whole plot, he's just doing research into the incidents and then filling in the gaps to make it a story. What ACTUALLY happened to the Baudelaires? Nobody really knows for sure
While the Baudelaire siblings are in potentially life threatening danger, he will randomly start talking about his own life and just leave the siblings hanging. For example, once Count Olaf was threatening to kill Violet, and then Lemony randomly began talking about how he met the love of his life at a costume party. This man CANNOT stay on topic. Usually when a new character is introduced, Lemony tells us right at the start that they’re either going to die or that the Baudelaire siblings will never see them again. Foreshadowing is not subtle in these books. CONSTANTLY emphasizes how miserable he feels while writing these books. At one point he admits that he had to put his pencil down and go cry for a while because of how sad it made him. Once he filled an entire page with nothing but the word “ever” to emphasize how dangerous it is to put forks in electrical outlets. He also repeated a paragraph about deja vu later on in the book to give the reader deja vu.
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captain-hooks · 4 months
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Attolias! I've never managed to pin down designs for Queen's Thief characters, and I'm not sure I've got it yet but Momma didn't raise a quitter
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emilybeemartin · 3 months
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"Irene---"
"Don't call me that."
"You were the princess Irene the first time we met."
"It means 'peace,'" Attolia said. "What name could be more inappropriate?"
"That I be named Helen?" Eddis suggested.
The hard lines in Attolia's face eased, and she smiled. Eddis was a far cry from the woman whose beauty has started a war.
-The Queen of Attolia, Megan Whalen Turner
Revisiting the Iliad made me think of this exchange with the most important Helen of my heart. One thing I love about the Queen's Thief is how MWT threaded in these sparing links to existing mythology, so that even though all the pantheons and legends are made up, the story is placed in a greater context. It makes the worldbuilding feel so huge and real even while the struggles are intimate and contained.
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selkieskies · 7 months
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"Phresine," the queen said without turning her head to look at her attendant, "I can read your mind."
Phresine moved her hands, stilled during her thoughts, back to their tasks. "Then you know there's no harm in old Phresine," she said.
-Queen of Attolia
Finished this gift for @lechatelierite for donating during @fandomtrumpshate They requested Phresine from the above scene and I, glutton for punishment that I am, decided to not only include Attolia, but a mirror too.
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dandelion-fish · 2 months
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I've been rereading "The Queen's Thief" series by Megan Whalen Turner...
I have nothing to say for myself lol
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mothsartart · 8 months
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i have a million things to do so i redesigned The Queen of Attolia cover instead
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fredgolds · 6 months
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costis gets sent on an international espionage mission purely because he is nice+fun. his king, a master manipulator, admits that there is no move he could have made in this moment that would have been more effective than simply letting his favourite guy have fun and be himself. kamet is enduring the most stressful months of his life in one of the most audacious political heists in history and costis is just getting some enrichment
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noncompliantcyborg · 4 months
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Little Offerings
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I don't think I've shared much of my scannography on here yet. Here's a piece I made exploring objects I've collected that I felt "rhymed" whether visually, emotionally, or tactilely.
This piece definitely has influences from the work of @meganwhalenturner - I've placed a number of earrings on altars over the years. I was also thinking a lot about Cy Jillian Weise's cyborg sonnets.
There's a lot of complexity and intentionality in what may seem like chaos, and more and more I cite my sources in art but I don't explain myself because I'm doing so much of that in the mundane.
If you like this, there are prints and I'll be sharing more related work along with my usual marine science focused musings.
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deadmomjokes · 7 months
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The fastest I've ever read a book was 3 days and that was a short lil classic back in High School because I was procrastinating writing a paper.
In the last 48 hours I have consumed two novels in their entirety and I think I'm gonna hurl if the third doesn't get returned to the library immediately so I can pick it up
I'm positively FERAL at the moment, nobody look at me or touch me unless you have all the art of the first two Queen's Thief books to fling at me from a safe distance because I'm GOING to bite someone's fingers off about this series
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asmywhimseytakesme · 30 days
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Queens Thief series said,
“What if the divine right of kings were really a thing? I think it would kinda suck for the king, actually.”
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excessivebookshelf · 6 months
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Me: I'm going to reread this book
Cat: nah it's mine now
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UNRELIABLE NARRATORS; SEMI FINALS
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*NOTE; propaganda is out of order due to the post length!
Eugenides Propaganda:
the entire plot hinges on a detail he lets the reader (and every other character) assume is true. I don't want to spoil it because it's a really fun reveal but he is lying from the first second he appears on the page and you can't trust him to tell the full truth about ANYTHING related to himself and his goals. he mostly does it to keep his advantage and not have other characters be suspicious of him but it's just so fun when you realise he's been lying the whole time
Kim Dokja Propaganda:
I haven't read orv but he's fucking gotta be from what I've osmosised
He tries to remove his emotions out of the narrative soooo much, literally the most repressed guy ever. Okay so for context orv is about how this guy, Kim Dokja, has been the only reader of an obscure post-apocalyptic webnovel for years and the novel suddenly becomes reality. And at first you'll probably get the weird impression that his behavior is pretty strange for, you know, a literal apocalypse happening in his world - like yes, he is concerned with survival but he doesn't seem all that scared and he kinda treats it like a video game where he has to grind to make himself stronger and he also treats his companions like a party in an rpg. Then there's also the way he approaches the protagonist of the webnovel, from the start he just kind of describes him as a ruthless psychopath and jerk that is unfortunately a pretty useful ally. And also there's the fact that he carefully omits any mention of his past and when somebody asks if he's worried about his family when the apocalypse starts he just kinda... brushes it off? Anyway so yeah, this bastard is definitely traumatized, although I don't know how much of spoiler territory that would be, considering the fact that literally when he first reveals his trauma he's also unreliable about it. And turns out he does indeed, care A LOT about this world and the people around him. Because well, he kinda didn't care to mention that this webnovel that has become reality was like... literally his whole world before it literally became his whole world. Like, it was the only thing keeping him going for 10+ years and the protagonist that he likes to call a stupid jerk was his comfort character who he pretended to be when he felt like he couldn't handle something in his life by being himself. The protagonist is also canonically the person he loves the most according to a prophecy and he literally can't fathom the thought of him dying, even the timeline versions of him that directly oppose him. And I haven't even mentioned the Fourth Wall yet but I feel like this propaganda is a little long already
misreading the intentions of his companion (yoo joonghyuk) so many time.
YOU DON'T UNDERSTANDDD DOKJA IS SUCH A UNRELIABLE NARRATORRRRRR GOD I COULD WRITE AN ESSAY BUT I KNOW YOU LOVE DOKJA TOO BUT OMG HE'S JUST SO AAAAAAAAAAAH
Rest of Propaganda under cut!
he is the worst like actually. he starts the story talking about how normal and average he is. he is not. he is constantly mischaracterizing his friends and he's so good at lying to the readers that you don't even realize it at first. almost every single time he cries we have to be told by other characters because he never says it himself. there is literally a scene where his narration says "i wasn't crying" and then the in-universe entity that narrates the actions of people (orv is really weird and meta) says that he was, in fact, crying. honestly genuinely anything he says about himself (or doesn't say) cannot be trusted. he is just so frustrating. he drives me mad. i love him dearly. but he drives me so mad.
Dictionary definition of unreliable narrator. Does not tell the reader anything and then things happen and he's like oh yeah btw there was also this and this earlier but i just didn't feel like mentioning it. There's even a thing called the "Fourth Wall" that is able to see through kdj's bs so occasionally you get gems like,
Kim Dokja: I didn't cry
The Fourth Wall: [Kim Dokja was crying]
Imagine being so unreliable as a narrator you need a more powerful narrator to call out the actual narrator.
^ same submission, just spacing it out
This goes into spoiler territory, but; Kim Dokja is in possession of a skill called the Fourth Wall, which on the surface seems like it appears because he read the book that reverse-isekai’d into his own. However, as the story goes on it becomes clear that it’s pretty much a souped up version of his pre-existing dissociation. You cannot trust him to be honest about his feelings, his past traumas or his feelings about his past traumas, not to mention his tendency to just outright omit information that only gets revealed later on either when it becomes relevant or when an outsider POV reveals what’s actually happening.
Exhibit A: he says (in 1st person POV) that he’s not crying. The Fourth Wall immediately contradicts this (as it is literally words of the novel) by saying (in 3rd person POV) ‘Kim Dokja was crying’.
Exhibit B: Fails to mention entire actions when it shows him emotionally honest even in the slightest; we had to read from another character entirely when Kim Dokja was being physically affectionate with his companion. It’s so bad that there’s this entire paragraph about Kim Dokja describing himself hiding his eyes in his hands in jerky, weirdly specific detail and just AVOIDING EVERY WORD THAT MIGHT SHOW HE’S CRYING. The brilliance of ORV is that when you re-read the entire thing you get hints that ‘yes, this WAS hinted at the entire time’ but you have to dig it out of Kim Dokja’s repressed, depressed self-hating internal dialogue with your own two hands.
^ same submission, spacing it out (i really should've done this earlier.)
i am a simple man (not a man). i see a tumblr text post with the words “unreliable narrator in it”. i read nothing else. i reblog & tag #kim dokja okay but in all seriousness i’m just going with the musty basic example: so there’s this moment where he sacrifices himself to save this guy. as he lays on the ground bleeding out, he says “hey, you don’t like me, right? you should kill me to get some money” the guy says “no kim dokja i cant do that (going through the five stages of grief except there’s only one and it’s anger)” the constellations (twitch viewers irl) are like omg he (the guy) doesn’t want to kill his companion (kim dokja) and shower him (the guy) with money kim dokja: oh, he’s not killing me for the money. smart!
as i quote a brilliant youtube video (all of omniscient reader’s viewpoint in 6 minutes) “yoo joonghyuk sees kim dokja as a c_____”
yoo joonghyuk: companion
kim dokja: cunt
^ same submission, once again. spacing it out.
Hides his true feelings, tells the readers what he thinks is convenient for the plot and that his own personal feelings don’t matter or are not so significant. Has unreliable thoughts abt his companion and is a liar. And is also an omniscient reader.
Kim Dokja always perceived his companions in this like nonchalant way like “oh yeah we get along but really we’re just fighting to survive (apocalypse setting) it doesn’t run that deep” when they all do genuinely care for him and he does in turn. He just, doesn’t think of it as an equal relationship? Dokja’ll sacrifice a lot for them but will get seriously flabbergasted if they do the same thing, so fricking problematic. Not to mention Yoo Joonghyuk, his “Life and Death Companion” (read: husband). Kim Dokja always seems to think that Joonghyuk has it out for him, which is kinda true, but he is literally blind to the fact that he’s attached to him. Like, it’s so obvious??? Also they have hella sexual tension but that’s another thing entirely
se get some many pov changes where kdj in his pov just assumed things based on what he knew the characters would do. however because of his interference the characters have changed and he wouldn’t know that if it hit him in the face
He's an unreliable narrator because he lies to himself and thus the audience. He literally rewrote his own childhood core memory. If someone says, "this guy is my friend!" He will go through so many hoola hoops in his mind just to rationalize it. Because he fundamentally believe that no one could love him and even if they did they couldn't know him and he's just gonna hurt them. He cries sometimes in canon but a lot of those times it's not even mentioned as crying he's that unreliable of a narrator. No joke, one time this guys he has a gay thing with called him his "companion" to someone who had just killed him (long story) and this bitch thought "oh wow he's doing it for the coins (another long story) he's so smart i wish I'd thought to that. He's terrible. He literally has an exchange with something called the Fourth Wall (an even longer story) where it said "you're crying" and he said "no I'm not" but he was crying. He makes me insane because the reader is supposed to project onto him. He made me see how much of an unreliable narrator I WAS. ORV is just like that tho.
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Quarterfinals
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Jagganath is a divinity from Hindu Mythology. He forms a triad with his siblings Balabhadra and Subhadra. Some consider him a representation of Vishnu or Krishna
Eugenides is the god of thieves from Eddisian mythology, fantasy Greek style pantheon mythology of the little peninsula of the book series’ nations (description provided by a submitter)
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emilybeemartin · 1 month
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I recently had someone very kindly say they read Woodwalker and felt like I had tricked them into re-reading The Thief; well I just listened to the Eagle of the Ninth and guess what
------
"Find anything?"
I looked down at the seal ring still hung around my thumb... In the sunlight I could that the emerald was flawed, milky white on one side. The seal engraved in it was a curving fish, maybe a dolphin. The white flaw was a breaking wave.
The magus leaned over to lift it off my thumb.
..."I'll put it in my bag, so that it doesn't get lost."
"You will not," I said. The ring didn't belong in a bag, it belonged on a finger. My finger.
-The Thief, Megan Whalen Turner
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artbymyth · 6 months
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“Do not offend the gods.”
I have been working on this one for months! Bunch of fun hidden details throughout. Falling scrolls, feather pens, golden cups, oranges, and wooden swords. Earrings and signet rings and coins. Embroidery of the knife dance on the tunic hem, griffins of eddis, lions of sounis, and lilies of attolia on the neck line (also one earring each)! Oranges from the garden on the blue cape and Hero’s earrings. And that’s only some of it!
This piece is a labor of love for one of my favorite series of all time. Go read the Queen’s Thief you haven’t already. You won’t regret it.
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