thing about deltora quest that only occurred to me in hindsight is not only just how much jasmine carries the entire party on this quest but also how genre-defyingly brutal she is lol. like, this is a kid's series that hinges on riddles and puzzles far more heavily than combat - even when deaths occur, they're often the result of cleverness in some way rather than straight up combat ability. that said, let's look at the villain kill count at the end of book five of eight of the first series:
- lief: 1 - even there it's with a well-thrown bottle of cursed water rather than his sword.
- barda: 0 - i'm not counting that one unnamed sand beast, that's an animal not a villain.
- filli: 0 - he is a squirrel, this is unsurprising.
- kree: 1 - killed an invincible sorceress all by himself, good bird best friend.
- jasmine: 5 - dropped a tree branch on a mf, drowned two cannibals in quicksand, cut a giant snake's throat, shoved a dude down a pipe full of toxic mold (after having to be told not to cut his throat while he slept jfc).
idk it just suddenly struck me as really funny how this one character who isn't the protagonist is almost from a different, far more brutal story, and uses that fact to consistently be the mvp and save everyone else's asses. i need to read this series again it's been too long.
every TOTK roleswap I see where link gets sent to the past instead has link dressed like rauru and I think with my HC, there would be conversations to be had.
Adapting itself to obstacles and bending around them, wood in the earth grows upward without haste and without rest. Thus too the superior man is devoted in character and never pauses in his progress.
— Hexagram #46 from the I Ching · Pushing Upward · via Ask The Oracle
remember when delirium was worried about destruction being gone and it was rooted in her loneliness and genuine love for her siblings and the other endless wanted to ignore her sudden upset over this because she's delirium and she gets this way sometimes, don't worry about it, she'll forget soon enough so it really doesn't matter at all. I should get to bludgeon all of them with a bat for that.