yesterday my grandma found a penny on the floor and said to my grandpa “there’s that penny again, pa!” and i absolutely lost my mind because i couldn’t shelve the thought of a single panel Far Side comic of two old people on the front porch in the middle of nowhere and a giant penny angrily and inexplicably rolling through the wastes
“there’s that penny again, pa!”
this is hands down my single favorite post ive ever made that got notes
i just know pyrrha was working her butt off to woo camilla, meanwhile palamedes was throwing himself at her
this is the canon from which I draw my Cam interpretation. i will take no further questions
reblogging for newer folks: i’ve seen some comments about Cam’s hair length, & while there is a wide range of interpretations around her exact cut/style that often skews shorter - all valid - i genuinely do take my interpretation directly from @anaeolist’s marvelous Cam design!
America slaughtering buffalo and moving whole tribes for the sake of building railroads only to decide they dont actually like trains is giving the same energy as the english conquering the world for spices and then deciding they didnt like any of them. like father like son
LETS GO!!!!! THE SHITBAG YOUNGER BROTHER ALSO COMMITS GENOCIDE AND OTHER COLONIAL ATTROCITIES!!!!!
chekov’s cat: if you see a cat, it will probably be relevant later.
schroedinger’s gun: there’s no way to know if a gun is loaded or not until you physically inspect and check it yourself, so it’s safest to assume all guns are loaded.
okay this thing with the yelling dirty suggestions from the mountaintops is ridiculous. how does Rodrigo know Nino is banging the queen? how was this determined as the best possible distraction? do i love it or hate it? nobody knows.
Honeymoon Book Reviews continue with The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavriel Kay! This was a @pagemelt rec- they said it was their favorite read of the year so far and now it is mine too!
The Lions of Al-Rassan
Are you a fan of sweeping historical fantasy where the greater epic conflict is consistently grounded in carefully drawn characters? Do you love an instant and erotic connection between two men destined to die at each other’s hand or no one else’s? Do you believe that it’s possible to love more than one person at the same time, not in a way that leaves any room for the common jealousies of infidelity, but is instead marked by the understanding that each love is made greater and stronger by the existence of that other love? Then do I have a book recommendation for you.
When Fitzgerald wrote “They slipped into an intimacy from which they never recovered.” He was actually talking about the three protagonists whose love story is the centerpiece of The Lions of Al-Rassan. I have a specific fixation on this kind of entanglement- not a love triangle but something far more interesting. What was refreshing here was to see it allowed for adults. I’m the kind of reader who can still enjoy books written for every level at any age, but when I seek out YA now it is often because I’m looking for this specific kind of friendship that I have trouble finding in adult fiction. The message being sent to me is that this kind of obsessive intimacy- deeper than mere friendship and more perfect than romantic love, yet not entirely divorced from desire, is reserved for the young. Something so intense is the terrain of teenagers. The mandate is that your life is a process by which you must funnel your varied attachments into neat and expected categories, that these fraught entanglements are something you “grow out of.” Guy Gavriel Kay says, “No!” He writes three people, not old yet but mature when they are struck by the lightening of their connection, and lets that connection be the defining one of their lives. The book places this love at an equal importance to the large machinations of history at play in the story- it is as significant as the lost great cities built and burned by men, as intense as the faith flaming across a conquered continent. When the brief time allowed for such love ends, you feel the loss like the death of an empire.
Look, there are just not enough people talking about Guy Gavriel Kay’s books. I finished The Lions of Al-Rassan 2 days ago and I cried over it at least twice today. I’m not even exaggerating when I say that. I cried through the last several chapters and I’ve cried on and off since I finished it. I am just blown away.
i just cannot get over the complexity of love in the lions of al-rassan. like, most obviously there is the love between ammar and jehane, and rodrigo and miranda; and then there is the equal-yet-largely-unspoken love between jehane and rodrigo, and ammar and rodrigo, which cannot be pursued due to society and circumstance. and there is the love between parents and children (jehane and her parents; rodrigo and miranda and their sons) and parental figures and children (jehane and velaz, ammar and almalik, ibero and the twins) and between siblings (diego and fernan, idar and abir). alvar loves rodrigo as his commander and something of a parental figure; he loves jehane in a way which is simultaneously shallow and very deep. and all of these are both unified and divided by a love for one’s religion, culture, and home, and it’s all so complicated and difficult and beautiful and i’m going to go and scream in a field.
ALT
