Hey, um… with the whole “Bluejay!Jason” concept… has anybody ever considered it as an Inkheart reference instead of just a play off his name?

Follow me here, and sorry in advance, this turned into a ramble.

In the second book of the Inkheart trilogy, Inkspell, one of the main protagonists adopts a Robin Hood-esque approach to defeating the tyrant king, and adopts the name of ‘The Bluejay’ from famous folk legends and songs written by a beloved poet and often sung by travelling minstrels. He’s -Inkspell spoilers ahead, though this book is unironically older than I am- known for toppling said tyrant’s throne through the binding of a magic book (a recurring theme throughout the series, if you’ve never read it, which you should). He’s a champion among the Motley Folk, who were that world’s equivalent to a travelling circus and also regularly aid him in his quest to topple the Adderhead (the tyrant king mentioned above), and sought to help the poor and downtrodden. The Bluejay is aided and abetted by his family and friends, which include a shapeshifting wife, a daughter with the ability to make anything she reads come true, a fire-dancer who can speak to the flames, and a knife-throwing 'circus' prince with a black bear companion. (They're not called the Motley Folk for no reason, people!)

Now, consider for a moment: Little Jason Todd, in the local library, absolutely devouring the Inkheart series. It's everything a little kid could dream of in a fantasy book! And there's three of these fat books, what more could you possibly want? And he has an excuse to sit in a warm, safe building for a few hours.

Now imagine, Inkspell becomes his comfort book. Of course it does- every kid had one, and I can't imagine an orphan who grew up alone on the streets of Gotham picking anything other than a story about a strange man helping the opressed and downtrodden in a land he grows to call his own with the help of his family- and The Bluejay is an excellent father to his daughter, too, of course Jason pictured himself as part of that family, as whisked away into that world.

And of course, the rest of the series is wonderful too -Inkheart is where it all began, after all, and Inkdeath is the final triumph over evil!-, but Inkspell is a story about becoming. About learning to be more than you were born as- after all, if Mo the simple bookbinder could become the hero The Bluejay, what could Jason the street orphan become?

Maybe, instead of discovering this book in a library, he found it in the trash. And maybe he wondered, as he read it, why anyone would ever want to throw away the tale of Mo the Blujay, of Meggie the Silvertongue, of Resa the brave swift, of Dustfinger the loyal Fire-Dancer? (And maybe the last one took a while to get there, but he did get there! Eventually! And maybe Jason can understand why it took Dustfinger so long to truly come to trust someone again, because trust is a terribly dangerous thing to give to someone, because you can never really know what they'll do with it.) Maybe he read it through without knowing anything about Capricorn or The Shadow or why they feared the man named Basta, because they hadn't thrown away the first book, only the second. Maybe he wept for the death of Dustfinger, at the very end, because he didn't know that Death wouldn't keep him, because they hadn't thrown away the third book.

Maybe Inkspell found its place among his most treasured possessions. Maybe, when he met Batman and Bruce Wayne in one night and his life changed forever, Inkspell came with him, with its familiar story and characters and world and sorrows.

Maybe one of the first things Bruce did, upon seeing Jason reading that same battered old paperback, was to order Inkheart and Inkdeath and leave them in his room. Maybe that was when Jason started to realize that he wasn't going to leave forever.

(Maybe Jason and Dick would play Motley Folk together, because Dick was in the circus and could most certainly throw knives, even if it gave Bruce a heart attack every time he saw it.)

And maybe, after he could no longer have Robin, he remembered that old paperback book, that old story and that old world, and he thought of a new name for himself.

Bluejay, he thought, as he picked up the book that had been his constant companion for so many years. I'll be The Bluejay.

(I don't really know what this is. I saw some Bluejay!Jason art the other day and just started thinking of the Inkheart trilogy and the fact that Jason would absolutely have read it and probably loved it. And then it spiralled.)

the Inkheart books ask the important questions: what if you could talk to your favorite blorbo? What if your blorbo thought you suck? What if your blorbo would like to see you dead?

The difference between Inkheart and Inkdeath are literally insane.

The bad guy in Inkheart is like… a local mafia boss and his handful of cronies. Oh no, he put us in the animal stables and people talk about that he enjoys killing but we don’t ever see it and the worst thing he does is giving Mo a cut on the face and putting people in cages I guess.

The bad guys in Inkdeath, however, are the ruler of the land but also Death herself and we desperately fight against destiny. Every other chapter there’s a fight and people get brutally killed. We are about to scatter Mos fucking kneecaps. Mind torture while experiencing actual torture in the underwater dungeon. Everything is out to kill you but with everything going on death is kinda the least of our worries??

Like boi… that’s full a 180,,,,

Sketched fellas cause I’m rereading the trilogy AGAIN

Captioned who’s who in this

Paul was the perfect choice to play dustfinger but in these photos he's exactly how i imagine Capricorn

Day 20 - 4 Panels comic

I love them so hard now (≧▽≦)🤍🤍

Ahh, I almost forgot, but I'd run another Inkworld Appreciation Week this year if anyone would be interested?

polyamory would have solved like 75% of the conflict in the ink world trilogy. Mo/Theresa/Dustfinger/Roxanne had no reason to be sneaking around behind each others back like!!! Just get a bigger bed 🫶🏼

if they had tiktok in the inkworld i would fully expect them to post things like this

Gwin.......................

You know who’s great? Cornelia Funke

1) she used to be a social worker that helped kids from deprived backgrounds

2) she wrote several fictional series about children confronting and overcoming adversity in several ways

3) She worked with the UN during their “United Nations Decade on Biodiversity” 

4) she doesn’t use her fame and influence to platform ideologies and people that attack marginalized groups 

Seriously, why don’t people talk more about her? 

in 6th grade we had to do a book report, and either make a poster about the book or a box.

I made a box about Inkdeath, which had just come out a few months earlier at that point (why I didn't just do Inkspell idk--my class saw a theater performance of Inkheart a few days before my presentation, so everyone knew about that. But I still had to give a quick run down of everything happening in Inkspell rip)

TCoR has me reminiscing, so I dug it out my closet. Featuring:

the Prince's bear made of clay (which my mom and I couldn't get to stand straight so we ended up having him lie down)

some newspaper clipping about the book idk

a gallows made of matches I have absolutely no memory of making, so that was probably my mom

the complete contents pages written out by hand

a map of the Inkworld, artfully burned (another shout-out to my mom)

The fact that the piper of all people tolerated jacopo and even let him sit on his lap has no reason to be so funny

Prince and his bear :)

the blue jay and the fire dancer 🔥

Day 26 Fireworks