“I Think Being With You Guys Is Good For Me.”

the idea of fame is like the greatest tragedy, the human soul was never meant to be consumed & the old stories warned us about what demons eat. anyways

tattoo artist who can encode magic into tattoos but doesn’t want people to know she can so she just puts low-level luck spells on her clients’ bodies without telling them

jeweller who makes body jewellery and pendants which have amulet properties and draw love and luck and happiness to their wearers without them realising it

piercing artist who keeps the remnants from her piercings and puts them all in little jars in the back of her shop to work sympathetic luck spells on all her clients

and then all three of them slowly realise what the others are doing and end up in a poly relationship living in a little shop in the shitty end of town, which gets curiously less shitty the longer they stay, and people think it’s just the development of the area but the three artists know

and they’re never rich and they’re never famous but they’re always happy because they have everything they need

they have the shop and they have their customers and they have each other

and when their customers are happy and content, they pack up and move on, all together now, to find another space with skin to be coloured and jewellery to be made and magic to be done.

self healing

In winter, some voices are like coats.

Ahlam Mosteghanemi  (via thefelixkot)

I bought a Marquee board

Idk if I skipped this out in the books or something but how does Gansey get his mint leaves? Does he buy them or does he have a mint plant called Richard Campbell Gansey IV? Its something that's been bugging me for a while now

Dear rico-di-angelo,

I don’t like to talk about this because children read this blog too, but I guess they’re on Tumblr, they can handle the truth. 

Once a week after his Ethics class Gansey gets in the Pig and he meets a guy parked in a Taurus behind the Henrietta Dairy Freeze and he says do you have anything for me and the guy says yeah man mentha spicata just like always I know what you like and then Gansey thumbs through his wallet and gives him, like, four laundromat tokens. The guy is all hey I always wondered why you didn’t just chew mint gum like all the other Aglionbros? and Gansey snaps I don’t pay you to ask questions. 

Also it says in the books there’s a mint plant on his desk but that could be a coincidence.

urs,

Stiefvater

MmmMMmm thoughts on the raven king,

it could have stayed in the oven a little longer tbh.

like i loved some parts, some chapters, buttttt gosh it was missing so much.

im going to have to reread to really get into the parts and aspects that are really bothering me but this is really just the first batch of complaining from me. 

i didn’t care about piper when i feel like i should have. i loved her in the last book but this time i was like ‘yawn ok piper’ it was boring, her death was anticlimactic too. that entire “auction scene” was boring to me like.... i could have done without it.

i wanted to care more for henry and i think i was supposed to but he was still gooey in the center. more oven time. fics are probably going to make me love henry more. but yeah, boring. not him as a character per se but his entire story. (i do secretly ship ganseyxbluexhenry now wow let me have that.)

i didn’t enjoy the pynch scenes really but i have to reread to get into that since i cant pinpoint what about that was bleh to me. 

 but on to something that really pissed me off,

the discovery of glendower. the lack of fanfare, the fact that he was just a dead dude. that - pissed me off. not because it happened, but because of when it happened. maybe if that happened a whole book ago, i would have been more excited to be honest? like ahhh shit where do we go from here? but since that happened with a few chapters left i was like ‘ok so....’ and i got mad because i knew it would be a crappy ass end like... there’s no build up from that just a straight line of question marks.  im still mad. i thought that was so boring. i thought explaining the kill gansey and bring him back to life plan was boring. i thought the demon destroying cabeswater was also a bit boring like... mmm i feel like the demon + piper thing could have been played out a bit better....

these are just surface thoughts like please discuss this w/ me if you had similar feelings because im just <:  

Neil: i'm fine

Everyone else: you keep using that word. i do not think it means what you think it means

living in the countryside really strikes the fear of god into you at the most random moments. you’ll just make eye contact with a cow or stare for too long into a brook and all of a sudden you’ll think something like “these are old bones and i am merely a passing occupant” and then you have to go and put the kettle on to cope

Why The Raven Cycle isn’t getting any diver$ity cookie from me.

This contains mild spoilers, and text from The Raven King.

The way Henry was introduced in BLLB was unforgettable. We saw him making an offhand rape comment. This is pretty common. See All For the Game series by Nora Sakavic where their lone!good!moc could be seen making the same proclamation throughout the series. I am willing to let it slide, maybe, this is not about race.

Moving forward to The Raven King, we get to know Henry Cheng better. He’s half Chinese and half Korean. His mother Seondeok is a Korean dealer of illegal antiquities. White authors can’t seem to write East Asians without associating them with mob, yakuza, and mafia? Another example: All For the Game series by Nora Sakavic

This is the part where it gets nauseating. 

“Principles? Henry Cheng’s principles are all about getting larger font in the school newsletter,” Ronan said. He did a vaguely offensive version of Henry’s voice: “Serif? Sans serif? More bold, less italics.”

Blue saw Adam both smirk and turn his face away in a hurry so that Gansey wouldn’t see, but it was too late.

“Et tu, Brute?” Gansey asked Adam. “Disappointing.”

“I didn’t say anything,” Adam replied.

It was explicitly stated Henry’s second language is English. I’m going to assume Ronan is mocking the way Henry speaks, the intonation or accent of his voice. Whichever fucking way I look it is racist. Nobody even called Ronan out. The gross thing, the author made it into an “inside joke” for pynch.

This didn’t end right there. We have another pynch scene where they made a punchline out of Henry’s ethnicity.

“Adam made puerile jokes at Henry’s expense (He’s half Chinese? “Which half?”) and sniggered clannishly; Blue called them on it (“Jealous, much?”): Gansey told them to put aside their preconceptions and think about him.

Really? This made into the final publication? Minority’s ethnical identity isn’t a subject for crass puns.  Blue and Gansey’s meek intervention is not going to pacify me. I’m not here for this. Once again, this become a “cutesy” pynch scene.

These vile ~scenes~ about Henry’s otherization serves no purpose. It doesn’t contribute anything to the plot. You can reason out the narrative is implying Adam and Ronan are jealous (of Gansey’s new attachment to Henry,) but the author could’ve made a different approach of executing that. This is deliberate.

Another troubling scene with Henry and Blue

It was this: Blue, teetering on the edge of offence, saying, I don’t understand why you keep saying such awful things about Koreans. About yourself. And Henry saying. I will do it before anyone else can. It is the only way to not be angry all of the time.

Great another Korean character written by white author who might or might not be experiencing internalized racism. Sounds familiar? See Ellen Oh’s intake of Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell.

I see a lot of bloggers here are now clamoring for Henry, maybe it’s because he’s greatly sculpted, or because he’s Asian and his characterization speaks to you. If your reason is the latter, I have news for you. There are plenty of Asian authors specifically Chinese, and Korean, who are out there doing a spectacular job at it. Here are some of them; Jenny Han, Renee Ahdieh, Cindy Pon, Malinda Lo, Ellen Oh, Maureen Goo, Marie Lu, Lydia Kang, Amy Zhang, Celeste Ng, S. Jae-Jones, and more.