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Latest Posts by obiwallskenobi

I don’t care about it at all (I have carried its weight around like a rock on my chest since the very day it happened)

losing the idgaf war badly (I want to be in love and to have someone be in love with me)

i love alex. god i wish men were real

remember your life doesn't end at 20. dante alighieri got exiled from florence at 36! you still have time <3

Book review: Nightbane by Alex Aster

Lightlark…2!

I’ve already made my thoughts on the first book quite clear (read that review first if you haven’t already; I don’t feel like rehashing all the context), and were I a bit more sensible, I would have stayed away from its sequel. I am, however, somewhat of a literary masochist, so of course I borrowed this from Hoopla the day it was released (November 7th, not too long ago). Very pleased that I was able to write this review much faster than the first one, though this review is shorter, at only 2,100 words long. Was the experience worth it? I don’t know, you tell me.

(There are spoilers ahead, on the off chance that you care)

The plot and style

After the events of the first book, Isla is trying to learn her several powers as well as get a hold of this “leading two different realms” thing while trying to move on from getting betrayed by four different people she used to love. At a celebration for a Wildling holiday (in which no Wildlings other than herself are in attendance), Grim magically crashes the party from afar and announces that the Nightshade army will destroy Lightlark in thirty days. The other realms start preparing for the invasion, and Isla tries to recover all her lost memories of being with Grim in hope that they will reveal what his goal is and how to stop him, especially after receiving a prophetic vision of him standing in the ruins of a village he destroyed with his powers.

Put simply, if the plot of the first book is split between “Isla and Celeste search for a MacGuffin” and “Isla and Oro search for a different MacGuffin”, this book is split between “Isla and Oro do basic defense building stuff” and “Isla remembers the time she and Grim searched for a third MacGuffin”. There’s also a subplot about a rebel group trying to capture Isla, but this is inconsequential and could’ve been dropped entirely.

It feels like there was an attempt to address some of the criticism of the first book, but not nearly enough of an attempt. On the one hand, metaphor usage has improved to the point where it actually feels like it was written by a human being and not a neural network (no throbbing and raw glaciers this time around), the book acknowledges that no longer having a power no one else had in the first place is less bad than having a maximum lifespan of 25, and Isla realizes that Grim let her win the duel in the first book and that she did not win against a 500+ year old army general on the strength of her own skill. On the other hand, it does not address questions like “how does Starling society even function if none of them ever live to 26?” or “if Oro always knows when someone is lying, why didn’t he call bullshit the moment Celeste said ‘Hi, my name is Celeste’?”

Speaking of that last thing: I didn’t mention it in my review of the first book because it didn’t really feel relevant to anything, but each ruler has a ‘flair’, a special power that is unique to them. Oro’s is that he can always tell when someone is lying. Grim’s is that he can teleport. This book reveals that Isla’s is that she is immune to curses. Glad to finally have an answer to one of my biggest questions of the first book (checks notes) 75% of the way through the second one, when this explanation should’ve been given the moment we learned the original stated reason does not apply.

Wildling elixir and its (lack of) consequences

Much of this book centers around the presence of the Wildling elixir from the first book, a potion that is super effective at healing wounds. As you might imagine, this kills a lot of the tension. Used in conjunction with Isla’s magical teleportation device, “teleport away, use Wildling elixir, teleport back” becomes an easy way to recover when the characters get their flesh ripped apart. And indeed, they do this all the time! The book tries to nerf this strategy by stating that the elixir is rare due to the flower used to make it being rare, but 1) this is at odds with Isla’s very liberal use of it, and 2) aren’t the Wildlings the “make flowers grow instantly” people? Why can’t they just use those powers on it like they do for every other plant?

There was a bit of potential for an interesting theme with these flowers: Isla eventually learns that while the Wildlings use them to make the healing elixir, the Nightshades use those exact same flowers to make the titular nightbane, which is basically fantasy heroin. I was intrigued by this motif (I like it when things have a dual nature like that), but unfortunately this doesn’t really go anywhere, other than some vague gesturing at “wow, just like Isla”. Speaking of Isla…

Isla

This time around, Isla is clearly traumatized by the events of the last book, trusts very few people, and is aware that she is in over her head with leading two realms full of subjects she barely knows while also being the king’s unofficial consort. Not a bad start for a character arc, but in effect, she has gone from naive and impulsive to naive, impulsive, and guilty about those things while making little effort to amend them. It feels like her attitude towards leadership is basically “I’m allowed to call myself a bad leader but nobody is allowed to agree with me on that.”

Much of Isla’s internal conflict in this book is based around her Nightshade heritage on her father's side. She is convinced that there is an inherently evil part of her because her father was from the Inherently Evil Realm. This may not come as a surprise, but I do not like when stories have such a thing as an Inherently Evil Realm. Not only does Nightshade fill this role, but the book never even gestures at pushing back against Isla’s conviction that her heritage taints her, and in fact ends up affirming it.

This book really told me to my face that Isla is the first person in millennia to have both Wildling and Nightshade powers. I do not buy that even for a moment. Maybe my disbelief is because the series discarded the “only one realm’s power set per person, even if their parents are from different realms” thing in the same book it was introduced, and I would expect there to be Wildling/Nightshade couples way more often than once per few millennia. But no, that highly plausible thing can’t happen because then Isla won’t be the most special person currently alive!

The other characters

Sadly, the rest of the cast did not improve, and in some instances, got worse.

Oro going from "world weary, distant king" to "official love interest" has unfortunately sanded down all his interesting aspects, and everything I liked about his character in the first book now takes a backseat to being overly protective of Isla and making stock Love Interests threats to kill anyone who hurts her. I swear, he turned so generic that some of his lines were indistinguishable from something Grim would say. But hey, if nothing else, he at least didn’t get character assassinated like I was sure he would!

While Grim actually does stuff in this book, he still has no personality traits other than what's included in the Sexy Villain Starter Pack. Like, it actually upsets me that he's such an absolute nothing of a character. Everything about him begins and ends with “what if the villain…was sexy?”, and there are about a morbillion stories out there that provide more interesting answers to this question. You’d think focusing on him this much would be the perfect opportunity to give him any unique traits at all, but Aster certainly did not take that opportunity, nor did she ever answer the question of why he likes Isla, despite the sheer number of pages dedicated to their relationship.

As for everyone else? Azul, our beloved token gay black man who runs his realm like a democracy, still receives woefully little page time. Cleo, the bitchy ruler who hates Isla for no reason, receives even less, but at least we get to hear about her dead son, I guess. Ella, Isla's Starling assistant, is mentioned so rarely I wonder if Aster forgot she exists. There are also several new average citizen characters introduced, but none of them are remotely interesting. They're all defined solely by whether or not they're on Isla's side. It says something when the best new character is Isla's new animal companion (a panther named Lynx, who rules because he does not give a shit about Isla).

The chili pepper emoji, as the TikTokers call it

Because I must do as the book did and address the topic of sex before I get to the final important bits.

This book is much hornier than the first one, but in a way that makes large parts of it feel like one of those dreams where you're trying to have sex with someone but your attempts keep getting interrupted. I regret that I did not count the number of times Isla was about to fuck someone and then got denied for some reason or another.

There are three times she actually succeeds, and luckily these scenes do not read like they were written by Sarah J. Maas, despite her obvious influence on everything else. This doesn't seem like much of a compliment, but this series needs all the W’s it can get. That's not to say everything is fine, though. There's one scene that's obviously using all the "first time" stuff for characterization, and I can't help but feel this would be more effective had they not already slept together a few short chapters beforehand? Like c’mon, all you had to do was switch the order of those two scenes.

The ending

Shortly before the Nightshade army is set to storm the island and destroy it, Isla learns Grim’s (and Cleo’s) real motivation for doing so: there’s a portal on the island leading to another world, one in which the original founders of Lightlark came from before making Lightlark in the image of the world they left. Grim and Cleo want to open that portal and reach the other world, which will just so happen to destroy the island. They’re not actually trying to kill everyone for the evulz. Isla, in her naivety, accidentally opens it for them before they even arrive.

During the final battle, while trying to steal Grim's powers so she can kill him and save Lightlark, Isla finally remembers the last two important memories: 1) she and Grim actually got married right before he memory-wiped her, and 2) what she thought was a prophetic vision of him killing an entire village was actually a memory of her doing so. Convinced that she'll accidentally kill Oro if she stays with him, she agrees to go with Grim, whom she just realized she is still in love with, in exchange for a promise that he'll withdraw the attack.

I cannot remember the last time I had this strong of an "are you fucking kidding me" reaction to the end of a book. But after some thinking, I decided that it actually makes for some great tragedy material. “Traumatized woman with a supportive partner becomes convinced that she’s too horrible to be with him and goes back to her terrible husband” would make for a good story if this was a more grounded book written by anyone else. Alas, this concept just had to be tackled here.

I also naively thought that because the deal was for two books, that means this would be a duology. But it feels like there will be a third book, and I'm hoping there is, not out of any desire for more (unsure how much more I can take), but because it would be straight-up authorial malpractice to end the series on that note.

Conclusion

This honestly wasn’t quite as bad as the first book, but the problems that persisted outweighed the ones that got fixed, and the severe case of Middle Book Syndrome certainly did not help its case. It’s a very small improvement stylistically, but when the nicest things I can say about it are “there were some concepts that could’ve made for an interesting story in the hands of a better author” and “the sex scenes aren’t atrocious” and “the cat is kinda cool”, then I feel justified in calling it terrible overall. It’s a good thing that Lightlark…3! is presumably a long ways away, because I will need all that time to recover from having read this.

AAA KANON YEAH

SHREK 2 (2004)

Kanon: If I can't be the best, I can sure as hell be the WOOOOORST!

no body / no crime

no body no crime

no body no crime (2020)

me when my daughter asks why she had to get a boating license at 15

GOOD THING MY DADDY MADE ME GET A BOATING LICENSE WHEN I WAS FIFTEEN

AND IVE CLEANED ENOUGHHOUSES TO KNOW HOW TO COVER UP A SCENE

GOOD THING ESTE’S SISTERS GONNA SWEAR SHE WAS WITH ME

(she was with me dude)

GOOD THING HIS MISTRESS TOOK OUT A BIG

LIFE INSURANCE POLICYYYYYYY

they think she did it but they just cant prove it they think she did it but they just cant prove it... she thinks i did it but she just cant prove it nooooo

no body no crime, i wasnt letting up until the day HEEE

no,no body no crime, i wasnt letting up until the day

HEEEEEE

noo, no body no crime!!

I WASNT LETTING UP UNTIL THE DAY HE....

died.

taylor swift (evermore lyrics lockscreens) pt.1 ✨

like or reblog if you use them 

is this me?

When they accuse you of being sus and they float you.

Then as you fly by they look, expecting to see the impostor....

i was on twitter when i found an among us character generator and i HAD to make sykkuno and corpse

(here is the link if you want to make one https://picrew.me/image_maker/479995)

im laughing so hard why is he like that

Liam’s first impression of the 1D boys

THE BOYS POSTING ABOUT 10 YEARS OF ONE DIRECTION

Wild Tales (Relatos Salvajes) 2014, dir. Damián Szifron.

i swear to god im going to try this

sorry just had to drop in and say, YES OMG i love your avatar!! ;)

OMG YES WE LOVE OUR QUEEN

Harry Potter is authorless.

don’t you dare to kill her now

One Day - Part 11

A/N: Hello lovelies! I wanted to post this chapter on Saturday, but when I was about to do it, it just disappeared completely. I was so mad and frustrated I just gave up and watched LOTR lol So here we have chapter 11 and tomorrow it’s done! I want to know your thoughts on what happens next. How would you want it to end? Also, don’t kill me for the drama of it all. I hope you like it! 

Draco x reader (she/her pronouns) 

Word count: 1725 Summary: One day AU. Post-war. Since The Battle of Hogwarts, Draco and y/n meet one day a year.

Masterlist 

Enjoy!

3 May, 2010

“How are you doing, Draco?” asked Harry as he sat by his side.

“Managing,” he managed to say with a small and tired voice.

Draco was absolutely distraught. He hadn’t properly slept in weeks and everything in his demeanour oozed fatigue and pain. St. Mungo’s had become his permanent residence, only this time he was not playing the part of the Healer.

“How about you?” he asked, more out of politeness than genuine interest.

“It’s chaotic. I feel like it’s 1999 all over again, you know? The paranoia, the panic attacks and the nightmares, all full-blown. The Ministry’s bodyguards aren’t helping either.”

Every time they had talked, Harry had tried not to exert too much of his own burden on Draco, but for some reason today he felt like blurting things out. Draco’s eyes were still glued on the bed in front of them. He really didn’t feel like partaking in that conversation, but his friend seemed to be in the mood to talk so he indulged him.

“Tell me about it. We have a whole team of aurors roaming the manor. I know it’s for the best, but I can’t even let my child go out and play. I fear something terrible might happen to him whenever he’s out of my sight. It’s…scary,” he admitted, realizing how much he actually needed to talk.

“Yeah, I get it. We don’t let the kids out either and we are all going crazy.”

Twelve years after Voldemort was defeated, some of his runaway death eaters were still trying to seek revenge. In the first few years after the war, Harry and Ron had led the operations to incarcerate as many as they could find. Their efforts had put most of them in Azkaban, but some others still loomed in the most unexpected places. Every once in a while, the death eaters on the loose would pop up. So far, they had tried – unsuccessfully – to harm Harry and Ron. The attempts were so poor it would ruffle everyone’s feathers for a while and then everything would go back to relative peace.

That was until (Y/N) moved to Paris. Even if her house was full of traps and charms to protect her, she was living alone, which made her an easy target. She was not difficult to track; her status as a literary celebrity and her connections to the magical French jet set made her appear in Le Monde Magique every other day. The network of dead eaters that were still active and underground followed her for three years before striking.

The night they did, Draco and (Y/N) had a date. That’s what saved her. (Y/N)’s plan was to relocate back to England, but as she managed to get everything in order both of them apparated back and forth. They saw each other every day, went out for dates and parties with their friends and even had family strolls and dinners with Scorpius. That night, they were going to take a roam through the Champs Élysées and eat on one of their favourite muggle restaurants.

Draco arrived to her flat, excited for the night to come, only to find a scene that could’ve easily come out of a Goya painting. (Y/N) laid on the floor, covered in blood and seemingly unconscious. A man – later identified as Rodolphus Lestrange – had his foot on her throat and was flicking his wand to perform the deadliest spell. Draco’s vision turned red. Without thinking, he immobilized his uncle in law, sent him flying to the other end of the house and beat him to a pulp. He could have killed him with his own two hands, hadn’t he been so worried about (Y/N)’s state.

With her in arms, he had called the French Ministry of Magic. Draco tried really hard to act professional, check her vitals and perform the right spells like a good Healer would, but he was paralyzed. He couldn’t imagine a life without (Y/N). Draco could only think about this as he held her tight to his chest. That’s how the aurors found him: trembling, covered in blood and sobbing, unable to let go of his benumbed girlfriend.

A month and a half after the assault, she was still unconscious. No signs of change and very weak vital signs. As soon as the Healers at the Sacre Coeur hospital in Paris had deemed her stable, Hermione had helped with the paperwork to take her back to England. Since the day they had put her in that bed on the fourth floor, Draco had barely ever left her side. Their friends and family would come and go. Even if they were all sad and grieving, they’d try to console him.

Seeing her like this, so pale and lifeless, the wounds that had taken so long to heal wide open again, haunted him. Whenever he tried to sleep, he had these nightmares of her being tortured by Rodolphus Lestrange and he couldn’t keep himself from staring at his fading mark and blaming himself for everything.  

“I…I have never seen somebody lit up the way (Y/N) would whenever she saw you. Merlin, just mentioning your name made her a happier person. Since we all became friends, I thought you two belonged together,” Harry commented after a prolonged silence.

Draco really wanted to feel soothed by Harry’s comment. He tried. But as he turned it around in his head, everything about it made him feel disheartened and enraged: the quivering voice, the profound sadness and the past tense. He felt just like when he was younger and didn’t know how to deal with his emotions. So, Draco just snapped.

“Why are you talking about her as though she was dead, Potter?” he sneered. His tone and accompanying glare remined Harry of their schooldays. The difference was that now he knew that the former Slytherin was suffering and that sorrow encircled his every breath.

“Draco…”

“She’s not dead!” he screeched.

“She is not dead.” This time, he murmured so softly Harry knew it was not meant for him.  

Draco leaned forward and buried his face in (Y/N)’s hair. His suppressed sobs broke Harry’s heart. Never in a million years he would’ve imagined that this is how things would turn out, but he soon found himself hugging Draco as he wept on his shoulder.

“She can’t die, Harry. She cannot leave me.”

He was desperate. Why couldn’t they be happy? So much time wasted with life’s twists and turns, time they could’ve spent together lost because of hushed feelings and unspoken words. So much time living like two parallel lines, always in tandem and never intersecting. And when they finally connected and they lived some of the most blissful and placid months of their lives, she was snatched away. Their happiness crushed.

As it downed on him that maybe she would never wake up, Draco’s mind focused on the conversation they had a few weeks before the assault. They had just arrived in Malfoy Manor from a party at the Potter’s. (Y/N) changed into one of Draco’s shirts and was sitting on the sofa in Draco’s humongous bathroom as he unbuttoned his shirt.

“You know, Dray,” (Y/N) said as she crossed her legs.

“Yes, darling?” he asked. Draco looked at her through the mirror and smiled.

“This is going to sound extremely rushed and weird coming from me,” her voice was timid, yet it held an underlying dreaminess to it that lured him.

Immediately, he stopped his task, turned around and knelt in front of her. (Y/N) smirked, pleased to have his full attention now. “What is it, love?”

“I want to have children. I want a quidditch team worth of kids with the love of my life.” As she said this, Draco couldn’t help but smile wholeheartedly.

He had thought about that as well. Having a proper family with (Y/N) sounded like a dream. They were already a quaint little family, she, Scorpius and him. They were so happy, at times the thought of having children together was almost automatic. He knew even contemplating it was a long shot; they had been dating for a little less than a year. But those were some of the most wonderful months of his entire life and he wanted more. As in “till death do us part” kind of more. As weird as he thought it was, Draco concluded that their lives had been intertwined forever that day after the Battle, so time counted differently for them.

“And if the love of my life is not available, then there’s you,” she added cheekily. Draco chuckled, feeling his heart fuller than ever.

Draco thought it was funny how they never had this conversation before. In all of their years of friendship, they had never asked each other what they thought about having a family. Paternity had just happened to him and he received it as one of the most important tasks in his life. Regardless of the circumstances, it was indeed the best gift life could’ve ever given him.

(Y/N) was good with children. Since James was born, she had become the next generation’s preferred babysitter. Draco always thought she seemed to understand the language of children more than any other adult he knew. Maybe that was an effect of being a writer? He didn’t really know. As much as she loved her godson and her little nephews and nieces, (Y/N) never showed a desire of having kids of her own. She always seemed so focused on other things, so passionate about healing and reconciling with life that having children didn’t seem like something she wanted.  

And yet.

“I’d love for us to have our own quidditch team, my love,” he said, gently uncrossing her legs and caressing her tights, “on one condition”.

She raised an eyebrow playfully. “Let me remind you I’ll be the one going through pregnancy.”

Draco was all smiles now. “Marry me, (Y/N),” he said almost too casually. That was the essence of their relationship; a flamboyant proposal didn’t fit in the language they had created for themselves as they watched that sunrise on that windowsill. His hands on her tights, the glint in his eyes, that feeling that pulled them to each other said more than words could.

(Y/N) had said yes.

That’s all Draco could think of as he sobbed on Harry’s shoulder.

tags: @fandomscombine @oldfashionedlovergirlsblog @cleopatera @naomi02hook @okaydraco @iliketoast23 @winnsmills @happycomb @xtrashmouthxtozierx @hopplessdreamer 

@animelover09556 (your blog disappeared and I couldn’t tag you, honey, but if you ever get to read this I hope you’re doing well). 

John Boyega at Hyde Park demonstration #BlackLivesMattter