astarion is like “but we could control the POWERFUL PEOPLE and it would be GREAT let’s rule the nobles with the tadpoles” and judah, of noble background, has zero love lost between her fancy family and their class who forced her into choosing between exile or death, already went through her angsty “let’s kill all of them for what they put me through” phase like fifty years ago, is like “interesting thought, my dear! counterpoint, what if we never interacted with the nobility again.”

Nothing wrong with a stabby boi, but let us have our polearm archers and shield archers too!

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Judah went back down to the scene in the sitting room to find the man’s body was already half gone, eaten cleanly away by the bottle of carnivorous mosses that Rosaire had scattered across it. Rosaire himself was nowhere to be seen, but Judah heard him retching in the kitchen, and took a seat at her chair by the grate to wait for his recovery, and to watch the decomposition process. It was lovely, in its own way. The clumps of moss brightened as they moved in nearly imperceptible spirals over the corpse, becoming greener and greener as the attacker became less and less. A small clump of it had fallen in the man’s open mouth, and, far from being drowned in the blood pooling there, the moss had swelled like a sponge and gone a deeper shade of emerald as it ate its way down through the blood and out the back of the man’s head. Skin was exposed through the layers of clothing, and then muscle and tendon, and then bone, and then nothing. Bits of corpse moved and rolled and settled as they were severed from the whole. Judah rested her cheek on her fist and observed. To be so satisfied, she thought, that I become beautiful. “Decency,” Rosaire croaked as he emerged from the kitchen. “You simply weren’t born with it, were you?”

table manners aside, friendship is when your worstie helps you dispose of the bodies of your would-be murderers even though you're a body horror freak and he's got a weak stomach

Sweeping the flower petals aside with her foot, Judah shifted the vase and let the door swing open. Rosaire slipped inside, and she quickly redid everything she had undone; the ribbon was unhappy about being moved, but the spell would hold. “An attack, then.” “I see,” Rosaire said. He had already gone up to the corpse and knelt beside it, drawing one finger through the red pool. “A gun, really. Animals.” “Stop that,” Judah snapped, and Rosaire stopped with his dripping finger halfway to his mouth. “I have a guest.”

everyone thinks the drawbacks to being a vampire is "can't go out in the sun," "have to drink blood to survive," "can't eat garlic bread," but the real trial is having friends who can't fucking mind their table manners

apollo & artemis

UH OH first ttpd song going on judah's playlist (it's "who's afraid of little old me?". because of course it is)

Female characters who are the sole voice of reason <<<<<<< Female characters who think of themselves as the sole voice of reason but who are actually just as insane as those around them

editing jatatyla's first chapter and adding some things, smoothing out the rough corners, and it's like... how does she start her story. her sections of the book are her telling her own story, first person, and it's easy enough once it gets started, but how DOES it get started. there's really only two options and they're 1) the blood and bodies and violence and 2) her magic. and the trick is figuring out which she would offer up to a listener first. does she use the violence like a shield, the listener can't hurt her with it if she's already got a hold of it, or does she start with something that is more beautiful and more hers, to take the listener off guard. does she use her reputation or does she distract from it.

love when characters have to have a domestication arc before you can even consider giving them a redemption arc

tag the oc that is The Heart

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wdnftp bg3 ficlet (jat!tav)

The transition between home and here is a blur in her memories. Most of what’s left is the blaze of magic she summoned, a shield of icy air that hardened into spikes as she and Loreleaf grabbed each other and held on for dear life. The magic sang in her blood like plucked harp strings, sharper than a dagger’s edge, growing louder and louder — but not in the way that meant it was getting stronger, the way she was familiar with. The timbre of it, the rush of it in her blood, the colors — everything sharpened and rose and began to whine. The shield held through it all until it didn’t. The moment Jat saw the sky change colors between bits of the vessel that had scooped them up, the magic screamed in her ears like glass being shattered, or like the scrape of a blade against a blade, and the shield exploded away. The sudden, wrenching silence hurt more than anything. More than anything else that has ever hurt her, the silence hurt — it should have killed her, she thinks sometimes. She’s grateful it didn’t, mostly, but living with the silence isn’t much of a runner-up prize. She still talks to it, although it doesn’t talk back. She can’t bring herself to give a shit about any of the gods here, so who else is she going to pray to? The mysterious dream visitor who looks so much like Doli Lin, whose voice matches his, with twice the real Doli Lin’s confidence and half his comfort? Nah. He’s no god, and he hasn’t earned Jat’s prayers. What else is left but the hollow where her magic used to be? A little shrine in her chest, hollow, without so much as her heart to fill it with.

That pretty t boy with a disorder WILL save you.

i've seen some posts about The Gender Of It All Or Lack Thereof in the mars house and started to respond but it felt dickish to disagree on someone else's post when their take on it is as equally #valid as mine is so, my feelings, briefly: i don't think the genderlessness was done perfectly by any stretch, but i also don't think that this was a book that was meant to Solve Gender, or even take steps towards it. i don't think we're supposed to assume that tharsis is better for "abolishing gender." the thing is that while i wouldn't call her books "romances" natasha pulley writes books that are primarily about relationships in difficult atmospheres - no one Solves Colonialism in the bedlam stacks, no one Solves Homophobia And Racism in watchmaker, and i didn't really go into the mars house expecting them to Solve Gender. gale being a senator does place more stress on the idea that these people, in particular, have the power to make changes and help people, so that may be why there's more frustration with the story than in bedlam stacks (where tbh merrick's involvement with the EIC bothered me a lot more than gale's political stances did).

again, i don't think it's wrong to not like how pulley dealt with gender politics; at the same time, it feels like a lot of people who did the bad reviews think that tharsis was supposed to be gender utopia, and i just. don't think we're supposed to assume that. there's so much else wrong with tharsis that i see no reason to think gender is the one thing they got Exactly Right. it's a "what if?" world, not a "here's how it should be" world - the people who built tharsis saw a deep wound throughout humanity's long past and said, "how do we deal with this?" and came up with an extreme solution for a society in extreme conditions. like.......they think it's weird and gross to have kids biologically, why should i think they have perfect ideas on anything???

tl;dr i read the Gender Abolishing as a flawed, wounded, but well-meaning and sometimes beneficial reaction to millennia of gender-based suffering. by no means do i think i was supposed to go "yeah, let's do that in the real world!" after reading the book, nor do i think it's a problem with the book itself that abolishing gender ended up not being as great at solving problems as they thought it would be. people will be people! they try to fix things and sometimes cause as many problems or more as the ones they fixed. but people try to fix things anyway.

i miss valery kolkhanov when is valery coming back. please i need to tell him about No Gender On Mars

General question to reblog and tell me in the tags;

You go into a used bookstore - what are the two sections you head to first?

You know, if I were establishing a new society on another planet, I too would choose mammoths over gender.