#firebreak book

[layaart]

ARCHIVIST WASP FIREBREAK CHARACTER DESIGNS part 6

mal & jessa, & their game avatars!

mal’s not super described, other than black clothes. same with jessa: other than a jacket covered in pins and patches, and fandom shirts.

I decided to go full neonpastel, which I feel like suits her personality, and is a contrast to mal. (I did make the shirt and shoes black though, because it was looking Too bright considering the tone of the book and also like, they're not exactly rich, mismatched clothes is gonna be a given.

for the game avatars: i know it’s like, more of a hyperrealistic military game but a) i’m already drawing in a cartoon style and b) it’s just more fun to make them cartoony fortnite vibes (note: I barely know any games). so giving them that kind of everyone’s-the-same-height-(tall) body shape

nycorix is basically as described, clothes-wise, (in hindsight, I think she probs has a tie? forgot that lol) & she’s holding the battery or whatever it is they get. (dee mentioned this is like a ghost jar........I’m gonna pretend that was intentional)

queenoftheraids: only thing that’s mentioned is two blasters (which I would have drawn bigger if the right hand one wouldn’t obscure so much), otherwise just upped the neon sporty vibes!

#firebreak #Nicole Kornher-Stace #character design #books #book fanart #firebreak book #2023 fanart

[angelwiththeblue-box]

i spent all day listening to firebreak and i needed something to work on during so post ending fanart

(designs inspired by @layaart)

.

taglist: @joshkiszkashusband @thedrowningpoetofdionysus @thedragonemperess @genuine-possum @depressedtransguy @someguyiguess @blueskiesandstarrynights @ayraluv (lemme know if you want to be added or removed)

#val draws #firebreak #PLATONIC ART!!!!! #firebreak book #book fanart #book fandom #my art #fanart #mallory firebreak #jessa firebreak #platonic #aroace mc

[nycorix]

Season 2 of Shadow and Bone sold me 1000% more on my headcast for Freddy Carter as the Ghost/22. He's got the intensity, the depth, the tightly bottled Feelings, the unhinged bloodlust, the economy of motion/microexpression game, the cheekbones, the eyes, and the aroace vibes

#shadow and bone #freddy carter #nksverse #firebreak book #archivist wasp #fancast #i know he's weird looking but for me that just adds to the appeal and I'm not sorry #i also know that there's a snowball's chance in hell of this series ever being filmed and even if it was he wouldn't be cast #but i can dream okay #i just think it'd be neat. #go watch his performance in the middle of s2 ep4 and tell me you don't see it #kase rambles

[aroaessidhe]

ARO WEEK 2023

just some of my favs to end the week :)

THE WOLF AMONG THE WILD HUNT / adult fantasy novella / centres a QPR between and aroace & enby

BAKER THIEF / adult urban/high fantasy / one of the two MCs is aro bi

FIREBREAK / adult sci-fi/dystopia / aroace MC, platonic besties and friend-crushes

FIRE BECOMES HER / YA historical fantasy / demi-demi MC

EVERY BIRD A PRINCE / MG Contemporary fantasy / questioning Aro MC dealing with amatonormativity

KAIKEYI / adult historical fantasy/retelling / aroace MC

SAILING BY ORION’S STAR / adult historical fiction / multiple aroace MCs

COMMON BONDS / anthology / focused on aros & platonic relationships

AN ACCIDENT OF STARS / upper YA/adult portal fantasy / secondary MC is a polyam married aro woman

*as a note, some of these only briefly explore aromanticism, and/or explore the ace part of the aroace character more. If you want more details on how much things are explored, see my database!  

#not like. These Are The Best Out Of Everything Mentioned just what came to mind when i wanted to make a favs post idk #aromantic #aromantic books #aroweek2023 #arospec awareness week #aro books #THE WOLF AMONG THE WILD HUNT #BAKER THIEF #FIREBREAK #FIRE BECOMES HER #EVERY BIRD A PRINCE #COMMON BONDS #AN ACCIDENT OF STARS #asaw #aro week #aroweek #aro week 2023

[theriversarebroken]

September’s display. Got a little impassioned about the cards. Please feel free to rain anarchy down onto your opressors :)

#these are so much fun to do #not a lot of people buy off the table #but when someone does #it makes me so stupidly happy #bookstore #booksbooksbooks #book displays #bookseller #the bone shard daughter #my favorite fucking booooook #firebreak #it has an aro/ace protagonist! #jasmine throne #still ashamed to say I haven’t read it yet

[anarchohobbitist]

im getting to the last third of latchkey and i can already tell im about to get absolutely wrecked

#archivist wasp #latchkey #nicole kornher-stace #firebreak #jillian vs. parasite planet #omg where is this universe’s fandom?? i cant believe tumblr is not all over these books

[franticvampirereads]

🌻 Sunny Reading Tag 🌻

Thank you so much for the tag @booktheraepy!

🥞 favourite book:

All time: so hard to pick, but it’s gotta go to Lady Knight by Tamora Pierce

Current: again, really hard to pick, but The Hourglass Throne by KD Edwards absolutely wrecked me and is still sitting in my top spot for the year

🌾 tropes that make you go “asfgrthgj”:

Found family, idiots in love (mutual pining), and I can’t think of any others right now 😅

🌻 comfort book:

WebMage by Kelly McCullough, I’ve read this book so many times that the spine is barely holding the book together anymore.

🌙 death in a book you would take back:

Spoiler alert for Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace, I would take back the death of 22. I was sobbing through the whole end of the book because of what happened.

💡 book you wish you could read again for the first time:

On A Sunbeam by Tillie Walden

Therapy Game by Meguru Hinohara

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

And so many more books that I wish I could reread for the first time.

I’m gonna tag: @appleinducedsleep @bookishfreedom @themelodyofspring @sleepyreads @therefugeofbooks @ninja-muse and anyone who would like to do this tag! 😊

#booklr tag games #booklr #books #reading #bookish #bookish tag games #Firebreak spoilers #the hourglass throne #tamora pierce #keladry of mindelan #webmage #on a sunbeam #therapy game #therapy game manga #the house in the cerulean sea

[thepointofclicking]

Firebreak #2 Comic Review

#Firebreak #Superhero #comic review #comic #review #indie comics #indie #comics #comic books #graphic novel #crowdfunding #crowdfunded #kickstarter #indiegogo #zoop #fundmycomic #crowdfundr

[justabooklovingmetalhead]

“Is there an answer here? Or has this, all of this, gone on too long for anyone to even be able to conceptualize an alternative?” - Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace

#Firebreak #This line really really resonated with me #I’ve heard that a good dystopia takes things present in our society to a logical extreme #And I just. This book has so much to say and so many echoes #This part and the part with the grass and the artificial scarcity of the water just hit me so hard ig #Anyway this is a new favorite book :)

[gwen-tolios]

Ace Book Review: Firebreak by Nicole Kroner-Stace

Summary: Two corporations have replaced the US, splitting the country between them: Stellaxis Innovations and Greenleaf. New Liberty City is the only amalgamated city split between the two and is in a perpetual state of war. Here, Mallory streams Stellaxis's wargame, SecOps, to eke out a hardscrabble living from tips. A chance encounter with one of the game's rare super-soldier NPCs leads to a side job for Mal--looking to link missing children to SecOps characters. Mal's sudden burst in online fame rivals her deepening fear of what she is uncovering about BestLife's developer and puts her in the kind of danger she's only experienced through her avatar.

Buy Link

Ace Rep: ⭐

I hate to give it one star, it is own voices ace rep, but the truth of the matter is the only reason my ace book club knew it was ace rep was that we were reading it for ace book club. The single line referencing it could mean anything, and I like my rep a little more obvious.

Ace Friendliness: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

While the rep was low, the ace themes of this were high. Mal and her streaming partner aren't quite at QPR levels, but it's obvious the relationship is important to both of them and it's extremely platonic. Mal also has a fandom friend crush, a type of relationship that most of us have experienced even if it is rarely seen in media, which made this book relatable in a unique way. We appreciated how deep, platonic relationships (and not family ones!) drove character growth and the plot. There's also not a single romance mentioned anywhere, even with side characters.

This was also super important for the author to portray, as she tells Culturess in this interview.

Reading Experience: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

As a bookclub member said, this book is grounded in reality. Sometimes that reality was a little too close and it made me uncomfortable - scenes of police brutality, laws that exist for the benefit of corporations, marketing as propaganda, the sense of wanting to do something but not sure what or how. The enemy in this story is Stellaxis, and the overreach of a company that controls your utilities, food, stores, rights, and medical care only for profit is not hard to imagine.

This is a fast, tight book that bounces between video game scenes, real-life battles, and domestic scenes that are all about the struggle for survival. Sometimes I wish I had longer transition scenes, but it's not hard at all to relate to Mal. How to protect yourself while helping others. What to do with information only you have. Striving for change, without knowing exactly what that change would be.

This is a solid book well worth the read.

#ace books #aro books #ace things #asexuality #asexual #aro ace characters #book recs #queer books #queer scifi #sciencefiction #cyperpunk #corporate dystopia #firebreak

[layaart]

06 & 22 barbie meme to celebrate Flight & Anchor coming out tomorrow! 

#flight & anchor #Nicole Kornher-Stace #firebreak #they're 12 in the story i feel like I've drawn them slightly older than that here but... #books #barbie mugshot meme #tumblr you can get it early #2023 fanart

[ryansholin]

Book twoooooooo

#goodreads #books #firebreak #2023 goals

[nycorix]

Consequences [10/11]

[fic post]

|part 1| |part 2| |part 3| |part 4| |part 5| |part 6| |part 7| |part 8| |part 9|

Aaaand we're almost done!! This part is short and (I hope) sweet, so I really don't have much to say about it except that it contains one of my favorite paragraphs I've ever written for this fandom (the "obedience" paranthetical). Also: have I mentioned how much I love Catherine Foster <3

[The part in which 22 is still out cold and Kit is overwhelmingly Kit about it]

_______

10. 

06 faces down this unique predicament the same way she always does. One arm akimbo, head tilted, worrying the nails of her dominant hand through her glove with her teeth.

She’d expected 22 to be in bad shape, but this—this is new. She can count on two hands the number of times she’s seen him pass out in the years they’ve been paired, and most of them have involved head trauma from training incidents, or else been on the operating table so they don’t even really count.

She crouches by his head, checks his pulse. Heat roils off his skin, soaking through her glove while she counts. A minute passes and she pulls her hand away, chewing her lip—forty-six beats, much too low. She brings up a chat box, hesitates, closes it. Finds his arm, heals the broken finger and the torn skin beneath his glove, fully expecting the pain to jolt him awake.

He does not stir.

He looks strange like this, expression wiped smooth, no trace of his usual scowl. He looks young, vulnerable, as close to fragile as she’s ever seen him. Without consciousness to keep it at bay, the illness is free to taint his features, circling his eyes in charcoal and turning the rest of his skin ashy pale. Only his sharp cheekbones burn, high color painted over them from the fever. His lips, oddly parted, are chapped. 

She hates it. 

Another minute sees her scooping him up, all one-hundred-eighty-something pounds of him like nothing in her arms. One around his shoulders, the other tucked under his knees, her exactitude of force never more precisely calculated than this moment.

His head lolls, and she shifts him so that it rests against her shoulder, his hot slow breath on her collarbone.

A memory washes over her as she takes a step, and for a moment it stalls her, locking her muscles in place as the images bleed through her vision unbidden.

A surveillance video, coercively shown her by the Director, of a scene she has no memory of herself: 22, age twelve, marching down the street with her in his arms like he is in hers now, bleak determination in every line of his posture. The Director trailing beside him in her personal car, snail’s pace.

He’d been sick then, too—only much, much worse, all of his organs in perfectly cascading failure as they rejected four years of treatment in a matter of hours, systemically, cell by cell; and though she’d had no way of knowing this at the time, she’d nonetheless been absolutely useless, falling for the Director’s trap like a fucking idiot.

She sets her jaw, shakes the memory out of her head. Dispels the Director’s commentary—You see, Catherine? 22 exhibits model obedience no matter the circumstances, you’d do well to follow his lead—and grits her teeth, fighting the sting of shame echoing out of that memory. Nothing about that poor sick 22 from the video says obedience to 06; no, she understands him far better than that. Desperation, sure. Necessity, probably. Loyalty, absolutely. He brought her back that day to save them both, nothing more.

Today, she will do the same.

(Obedience, the Director will say, a grudging acknowledgment in passing that would once have earned her a cookie and now simply falls hollow on uncaring ears. But 06 will think of that video shown in secret, of small 22 clinging to his dignity then and the 22 she carries unconscious through the black glass doors who fought her for the same, and she will look that bitch in her cold, soulless eyes and say, loyalty.)

It starts to snow as she starts to walk again, fat icy flakes brushing her face and melting where they kiss her skin, and she throws her head back and grins, determination flowing back into her with every careful step.

#firebreak book #06/22 #fanfiction #boxcar thing #consequences fic #kasey writes #flight & anchor #one more to go!! #actually possibly two - i found an epilogue of sorts that i forgot i was writing and i may finish it and tack it on lmao #anyway herein lies my imagining of how the director would have spilled 22's 'secret' #and how 06 would have interpreted it the entirely wrong (right) way #for someone so intelligent diana reyes really is an idiot.

[rosieethor]

Aromantic Books Let's Go!

Dread Nation by Justina Ireland

The Reckless Kind by Carly Heath

Black Wings Beating by Alex London

This Dark Descent by Kalyn Josephson

The Siren, the Song, and the Spy by Maggie Tokuda-Hall

Fire Becomes Her by Rosiee Thor

Not Even Bones by Rebecca Schaeffer

This Golden Flame by Emily Victoria

Immoral Code by Lillian Clark

Tarnished are the Stars by Rosiee Thor

The Last 8 by Laura Pohl

Hullmetal Girls by Emily Skrutskie

Summer Bird Blue by Akemi Dawn Bowman

Loveless by Alice Oseman

Take Me To Your Nerdy Leader by Hailey Gonzales

Being Ace edited by Madeline Dyer

Queerly Loving edited by G Benson and Astrid Ohletz

Common Bonds edited by Claudie Arseneault, C T Callahan, and RoAnna Sylver

Beneath the Citadel by Destiny Soria

Godly Heathens by H. E. Edgmon

The Grimrose Girls by Laura Pohl

The Butterfly Assassin by Finn Longman

At the End of Everything by Marieke Nijkamp

Switchback by Danika Stone

Tell Me How It Ends by Quinton Li

Awakenings by Claudie Arsenault

Stake Sauce by RoAnna Sylver

The Ice Princess's Fair Illusion by Dove Cooper

The Threads That Bind by Cedar McCloud

Not Your backup by C. B. lee

Fallen Thorns by Harvey Oliver Baxter

Natural Outlaws and Fractured Sovereignty by S. M. Pearce

Wander the Night by Sydney Cobb

Stones Stay Silent by Danny Ride

The Story of the Hundred Promises by Neil Cochrane

Two Dark Moons by Avi Silver

The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia

An Accident of Stars by Foz Meadows

Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace

Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel

Syncopation by Anna Zabo

Dear Wendy by Ann Zhao

The Loudest Silence by Sydney Langford

Lord of the Empty Isles by Jules Arbeaux

Our Deadly Designs by Kalyn Josephson

The Final Curse of Ophelia Cray by Christine Calella

#aromantic #aromantic spectrum #aroace #aromantic awareness week #aromantic books #aroacebooks #queer books #lgbtqia books

[aroaessidhe]

Queerplatonic book recs, that actually have QPRs, inspired by me seeing someone listing qpr books that were literally just queer people being friends 🤦‍♀️

These all have the main characters in queerplatonic relationships,  explicitly and/or unambiguously in most cases.

The Thread That Binds

solarpunk-fantasy about queer bookbinding witches, 2/3 MCs are an aroace & an ace in a QPR

Baker Thief

superhero fantasy with a bigender aromantic superhero / demisexual woman QPR 

Not Even Bones

YA supernatural trilogy where the main characters initially seem to be developing a romantic relationship, but eventually realise neither actually feel that way, and settle into more or less a QPR (without labels, but it’s pretty clear)

Two Dark Moons

YA fantasy where an arospec girl & ace lizard kid accidentally get fantasy-married & develop a friendship/qpr

The Wolf Among The Wild Hunt

dark fantasy novella with an aroace wolfman & nonbinary knight qpr

Our Bloody Pearl

NA fantasy with a siren & ace pirate, originally marketed as a romance, but it is pretty much a qpr and that’s what the author intended!

The Reckless Kind

historical YA with an aspec girl becoming a family with her best friend and his boyfriend

Fire Becomes Her

YA, 1920s inspired fantasy world, demiro girl breaks free of her relationship and instead ends up in a QPR with a nonbinary transmasc ace.

If It Makes You Happy

YA contemporary about a girl navigating her queerplatonic relationship with her best friend, and a possible new romantic relationship.

Royal Rescue

high fantasy with an amatonormative royal marriage system, where the aroace MC has had enough, rescues himself, and starts to dismantle the system, finding a QPR on the way

The Heretic’s Guide To Homecoming (duology)

slow introspective high fantasy following two characters on a journey, doesn’t explicitly have them define their relationship in a QPR-like way, but undeniably focuses on complex platonic relationships and narratives

Mindtouch

this is one that’s been on my tbr forever - a sort of cozy/slice of life sci-fi that centres a platonic relationship between two aliens, which is quite reminiscent of a QPR. apparently there’s like 5 books now, I’ve only read the first so far!

Archivist Wasp / Firebreak

honorable mention because it’s not explicitly a qpr - but all of the author’s works focus on platonic m/f relationships in a very aspec way, and have absolutely no romance anywhere. one of the central relationships is very much platonic soulmates/ qpr vibes (postapoc ghosty sci-fi/fantasy YA & dystopian anticapitalism)

#queerplatonic books #aromantic books #aromantic #ace week #laya talks

[lgbtqreads]

Hi, do you have any recommendations for books where a primary character is an asexual adult (~20+)? (Bonus points if they’re aroace.) I love that we’re getting so many MG and YA ace characters but I’d love to read about characters closer to my age.

Sure, these are all books with adult aroace MCs:

Good Angel by A. M. Bauslid

Seafoam and Silence by S.L. Dove Cooper

A Promise Broken by S.L. Dove Cooper

We Go Forward by Alison Evans (Amz)

The Bruising of Qilwa by Naseem Jamnia

Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace

The Faerie Godmother’s Apprentice Wore Green by Nicky Kyle

“Backgame” by Lev Mirov, in Myriad Lands Volume II

Seafoam and Silence by Lynn O’Connacht

A Promise Broken by Lynn E. O’Connacht

Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel

Vengeful by V.E. Schwab (Fantasy)

I Want to Be a Wall by Honami Shirono (Manga)

Holding Onto Day by E.H. Timms

Create My Own Perfection by E.H. Timms

They're mostly (all?) SFF, though, so for contemp with ace MCs but that are mostly (all?) Romances, try:

A Milky Way Home by Hsinju Chen

Thaw by Elyse Springer

The Charm Offensive by Alison Cochrun

Learning Curves by Ceillie Simkiss

In My Dreams by Elin Annalise

My Heart to Find by Elin Annalise

The Heartbreak Handshake by J.R. Hart

The Romantic Agenda by Claire Kann

How to Be a Normal Person by TJ Klune

Rising From Ash by Jax Meyer

Love Limits by Reese Morrison

#Asexual #LGBTQReads #Ace lit