january

February 01, 2022

Things I enjoyed in the month of January:

Seanan McGuire's, Every Heart a Doorway

"She thinks she's going back. Don't you, Nancy? You think you're going to open the right-wrong door and see your stairway to Heaven on the other side, and then it's one step, how d'you do step, and you're back in your story. Crazy girl. Stupid girl. You can't go back. Once they throw you out, you can't go back."
Nancy felt as if her heart were trying to scramble up her throat and choke her. She swallowed it back down, and said, in a whisper, "You're wrong."
Sumi's eyes were bright. "Am I?"


What happens after?
What happens to Alice once she returns home from Wonderland?
Does Max mourn his Wild Things?
We all know Susan was unceremoniously booted out of Narnia, but what did that do to her?
What happens after to these children spirited away to distant, impossible lands once they return?
It's something I've honestly never thought about.
The story simply stopped, or moved on to characters still welcome in those lands and I moved on with them, callously leaving behind those who came before because I'm still welcome and always will be.
Even the idea of them mourning the loss of a place that felt more home than home itself, their desperate need to return, and the trauma of being cast out causes them didn't pass my mind.
Why didn't it pass my mind?
We've all experienced this, not in an otherworldly way (although do tell if you've been sucked down a rabbit hole, I'd like to know if the Caterpillar is as much of a wondrous, upptiy douchebag in person), but in the loss of a friend group, moving away, breaking up, the death of a loved one.
We've all felt that intrinsic barrenness of losing something that felt integral to your being.
In childhood I would say it most specifically relates to that point where adolescence meets adulthood.
All of a sudden you're supposed to put away childish things, develop more grown up interests and forget the things you loved ferociously for over a decade.
And if you don't? If you hold on to these things, continue to love them and treasure them with the same intensity as a child, you're persecuted, shamed, forced to leave them behind.
I see this, and perhaps because I'm a part of it, in nerd culture the most acutely.
It's okay to fawn obsessively over cars, or beauty product, or music, et al. but to collect figurines, or spend weeks on a cosplay outfit, or fill your walls with fanart, then you're deemed juvenile.
Not grown up - whatever that means.
A Peter Pan complex in full swing.
And it hurts to feel so outcast and judged because of the things you love and refuse to part with simply because somebody else, somebody deemed "grown up", says you have to.
I experience it constantly.

You read so much, why don't you read some proper literature instead of all that Fantasy?

Graphic novels aren't proper reading, they're just silly pictures.

Fanart isn't real art.

This show has no depth, it's just people in bad wigs, swinging swords and spells around.

The barrage of insults to mediums I adore and respect is soul-sucking and exhausting; rationally, I know these opinions are wrong.
Just because you don't like something, it doesn't speak to you on a base, cellular level, doesn't make it bad, and it's no reason to demean its importance and place in not just culture but its contribution to people's quality of life. 
Just like every other genre, Fantasy is full of drivel but also complexity and inconceivable talent, beauty and moments to make your heart ache and sing.
But it's picked on.
Nerds may be "cool" now but those of us who are and always have been a "nerd" don't really give a shit about being cool.
We just want the things that make us happy.
And my happy place, the place I feel most at home, is in Fantasy, in other worlds where I can experience an endless supply of adventures, friendships, impossible creatures and unfathomable knowledge.
If you took that away from me, if you refused me entry, it would quite honestly break me just the way the children who arrive at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, blocked passage to their otherworlds, are.
The place they finally felt most at home, snatched from them by the curse of ageing, breaking the rules, or simply to make sure they absolutely wanted to stay, is a special kind of cruelty.
Every Heart a Doorway is all about the cruelty and misery of not being like everybody else and being barred entry to both your home before and your home always.
These children fit nowhere and Eleanor provides them a place to stay, to learn to move on, or to wait and hope their door reopens.


"I let my parents send me here because Miss West said she understood what had happened to me and could help me learn how to live with it."
"And because you were hoping that if you understood it, you'd be able to do it again," said Kade. Nancy didn't say anything. He laughed ruefully. "Hey, it's okay. I understand. Most of us are here because we want to be able to open our doors at will, at least at first. Sometimes the desire goes away. Sometimes the door comes back. Sometimes we just have to learn to deal with being exiles in our home countries."
"What if we can't?" asked Nancy. "What happens to us then?"
Kade was silent for a long moment. Then he shrugged, and said, "I guess we open schools for people who still have what we want most in the world. Hope."
"Sumi said 'hope' was a bad word."
"Sumi wasn't wrong."


There's nothing soft or generous in Seanan McGuire's descriptions of the ruthlessness of their grief, how they're tormented by the need to return, or the knowledge they never will. She pulls no punches in absolutely letting you know that everything her characters are experiencing, to put it bluntly, really fucking sucks.


"Most children who go through [doors] don't come back, either one their first trip or after making a short return to their original world. So while we have records of several, the chances of finding a stable door that resonates with the story you need are slim."
"What about, like, Narnia?" asked Christopher. "Those kids went through all sorts of different doors, and they always wound up back with the big talking lion."
"That's because Narnia was a Christian allegory pretending to be a fantasy series, you asshole," said one of the other boys. "C. S. Lewis never went through any doors. He didn't know how it worked. He wanted to tell a story, and he'd probably heard about kids like us, and he made shit up. That's what all those authors did. they made shit up, and people made them famous. We tell the truth, and our parents throw us into this glorified loony bin."


And oh, her characters.
My Fae-loving heart was already firmly and resolutely hers forever the second I read the first chapter of her October Daye series. I had no chance against a half-fae, eye-rolling, heart-of-mush PI with a soft spot for feline, rosebush goblins  and flirty Cait-Sidhe kings.
Seanan McGuire knows how to write characters full of depth, complexity, and chagrined mirth; the October Daye is full of them and she continued that pattern for her rabble of wayward children.
Nancy, a sullen, unfeasibly inert returnee from the underworld with asexual anxiety and absolute defiance that her door will reopen.
Sumi, a nonsense child full of vicious, glitching whimsy but impossible to dislike.
Kade, taken for being a girl and banished for being a boy, a polished prince in an attic of books and thread, respectfully waiting his turn.
Jack and Jill, apprentices of the macabre, crepuscular queens, dissections and dimity, outcasts outright.
And Christopher, boy of bones, serenader of the supine, a smiling skeleton king
Not one of them alike or returned from the same place but kindreds, nonetheless; shoved together by the inexhaustible force that is Sumi but bound together by their longing to return to lands no one else could possibly understand.


"Where did you find that whipped cream?" [Kade] asked.
"You had milk, I had science," said Jack. "It's amazing how much of culinary achievement can be summarized by that sentence. Cheese making, for example. The perfect intersection of milk, science, and foolish disregard for the laws of nature."
"How did the laws of nature come into this?" asked Nancy, walking over to claim one of the mugs. The smell was alluring. She took a sip, and her eyes widened. "This tastes like . . ."
"Pomegranates, I know," said Jack. "Yours was made with pomegranate molasses. Christopher's has a pinch of cinnamon, and Kade's contains clotted cream fudge, which is stole from Miss Eleanor's private supply. She'll never notice. She has the stuff shipped over from England by the pound, and her next delivery is due in three days."
"What's in yours?" asked Nancy.
Jack smiled, holding her mug up in a silent toast. "Three drops of warm saline solution and a pinch of wolfsbane. Not enough to be dangerous―I'm human, despite what Angela might say to the contrary―but enough to make it taste like tears, and like the way the wind smells when it sweeps along the moor at midnight. If I knew the taste of the sound of screaming, I'd add that as well, and never drink anything again, as long as I chanced to live."
Christopher swallowed a mouthful of cocoa, shook his head, and said, "You know, sometimes I almost forget how creepy you are, and then you go and say something like that."
"It's best if you remember my nature at all times," said Jack, and offered Kade his mug.
"Thank you," he said, taking it from her and wrapping his long fingers around it.
"Say nothing of it," said Jack. Somehow, coming from her, it wasn't politeness: it was a plea. Let this momentary kindness be forgotten, it said. Don't let it linger, lest it be seen as weakness. Outwardly, all she did was twitch one corner of her mouth in a transitory smile. Then she turned, hands cupping her own mug, and moved too find a seat on the piles of books.


Because not all otherworlds are rainbows and talking animals, they're muted and cruel but beloved by the children who've been banished from them because they fit there.
Nancy in her unstirring underworld and Jack (my creepy love) and Jill, their rainswept, blood-soaked moors.


"...I attempted to make friends with with my fellow students. I gave up trying before Jill did. All they ever wanted to do was talk about how strange the Moors must have been, and how inferior to their own cotton-candy wonderlands. Honesty, I don't blame them for thinking I could be a killer. I blame them for thinking I would have waited this long."


It's something that's often forgotten or ignored because it's been Disney-fied, but Wonderland, specifically, was a terrible, gruesome place. Alice is constantly in danger of being killed, outright threatened by most; she isn't safe at any moment but once she returns home and is then given another chance at adventure, she walks through that bloody mirror with nary a second thought.
Because she fits there. Because maybe she's a little dangerous. Because maybe she's more fearsome now than any of the monsters lurking back in Wonderland.
And if she hadn't been gifted reentry, what lengths might she have gone to for a second chance?
That's the resounding question throughout Every Heart a Doorway as Eleanor's misplaced children are picked off one by one by an unseen killer.
Body parts taken and questions left in their stead.
Who would do this? Why those specific parts? What are they making? Where are they going?
The answer, in the end is fairly obvious; I started to get suspicious about three fifths of the way through but I wasn't frustrated by that knowledge, if anything it made the anticipation of the reveal all the more thrilling.
There's something grimly satisfying about watching characters try to solve as her a riddle you already know the answer to.
And also something quite devastating when they finally understand.
And this one really hurts.


"I should have seen it sooner. I suppose I did, on some level, but I didn't want to, so I refused it as best I could. [...] She's the one who went and became beloved of a monster. [...] She would have made a beautiful monster, if she'd been a little smarter, [...] she certainly had the appetite for it. Eventually, I suppose she would have learnt subtlety. But she didn't learn fast enough, and they found out what she was doing, and they took up their torches and they marched."


Every Heart a Doorway is one of those stories you feel at the back of your thoughts, a niggling feeling of disquiet that tugs and tugs but never quite makes it through.
Seanan McGuire took those thoughts, that ponderance of what happens after?, and gave them a school, a gothic landscape to act out those what ifs and why fors of what happens to all those spirited away children when they're mercilessly thrown back and never taken again.
It's beautiful and cutthroat, full of whimsy and sharp mundanity, and it answers none of those tugging questions.
It just is.
As frustrating and understandable as expected.
An unending thread of what ifs and why fors.
Just like Eleanor's Wayward Children.
Lost but not abandoned.
Let's see what comes next in this story.


Nobody gets to tell me how my story ends but me, she thought, and the words were true enough that she repeated them aloud: "Nobody gets to tell me how my story ends but me."



Ps. I'm obsessed with Tor's novella-sized hardbacks.
They're so satisfying to hold.

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All triceratops are called Cera in my head.

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I'm so not evolved enough to think this way.
There be horrors under my bedstead.
The Monster Under My Bed on Make a GIF

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The Witcher season two:

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In the immortal words of Geralt of Rivia:

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What the fuck am I supposed to do now?
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Oh, okay!


In true second season form, I didn't love this one as much.
BUT only minimally less than the first season.
It was just little things:

⚔️ I missed the non-linear, vignette style of storytelling they suckered us in with initially.
⚔️ Yennefer [spoiler] not having powers until the very end [spoiler] was interesting and inevitable but a little underwhelming? Full boss bitch is where I love her best.
⚔️ Geralt and Ciri spending waaaaay too much time in one place.
⚔️ Barbie Witcher Ciri. It wasn't just me, right?
⚔️ Too little Tissaia. If she's available, you have her in every scene. Because I love her. Her pretty boyfriend can come along, too, for the visuals.
⚔️ Where the fuck was Jaskier for most of it? 

...
Okay, apparently I had more quibbles than I thought BUT, another big BUT, it was still an awesome season.
Plenty of creepy slavic monsters (Baba Yaga! Chernobog! The Wild Hunt!) to keep my equally creepy self entertained.

Geralt. Just Geralt.

Confirmation of Jaskier's broken heart (it's canon, bitches, our bard is bi and hot for Witcher).
#the witcher from So many fandoms, so little time.
#the witcher from So many fandoms, so little time.

And just generally being delightful and brightening the whole show the moment he appears.
#tvedit from thirst enabler

Finally getting the Yennefer/Jaskier buddy-ship I've been pining for.
#the witcher from i like it when men beg

Yennefer in general. What a goddamn goddess.
#thewitcheredit from the end is the beginning

The Witcher babysitters club.
#witcherdaily from O' Valley of Plenty
#lambert from Lost in translation

I don't why I love Lambert so much, he's such a shit.
Giada Carboni's Lambiss/Trissbert fanart isn't helping, either:

Or her Witcher fanart in general:

She's killing me.


Also, this popped up in my feed while I was watching the show:


Fated?

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Forever in love with hollis's Crowziraphale fanart:

And a little Geraskier snack:

I just cackle when people say they're not romances.

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The December Monthlies were such a last minute blur thatI may have posted these already but as per usual, zero fucks to give and even zero-er energy to check, so...
Enjoy It Schitts Creek GIF by CBC

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The antithesis of The Witcher.
Po-faced, humourless, and worthy.
Everything your typical High Fantasy usually contains.
It's tried and true and I may not have the patience for it in literature these days (give me all the Urban Fantasy and  contemporary High Fantasy-lite, please) but I'll happily gobble it up in visual form.

The Wheel of Time may be kinda crap but it definitely ticked all those Fantasy endorphin boxes that live inside my brain and need feeding on a daily basis or they freak out and start destroying villages.
Plus, hello pretty:
#the wheel of time from surii

Everyone else can go, Lan Mandragoran can stay.
(I call him Mandragon in my head because, well, look at him)

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Jocelin Carmes', Conductor series:

Like something straight outta The Umbrella Academy, right?
    
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Linda Yan's Tiny Frog Café

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Catching up on Christmas confectionary:

Catfishing at Christmas! Yay!
...
Eh, fuck it, I'm too tinselled out to care right now.
comedy movies Tumblr posts - Tumbral.com



This is one of those times where the book is infinitely better than the movie.
I fucking lovedddd the book; as in, completely lost my shit over it, so there was no chance it was going to live up to my expectations, and... it didn't.

BUT Lucy Hale is my Lucy Hutton.
Shortcake, through and through.
She was built for that role.
Austin Stowell, however...
He was not my Josh.
I'd've preferred Robbie Amell to stay in the role, even if he wasn't the right fit, either but... I just really like that big dumb puppy man.
Look at his stupid face.

I love it.



...
I didn't like it.
*cries eternally*
Damn my allergy to Hallmark movies.
Damn it all to Christmas hell!
#single all the way from Is this thing on?

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Why do I feel this in my soul?
Potato Tired GIF - Potato Tired GIFs

Adorable follow up:
...
Monster Beat GIF by Stephanie Gonot

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This one goes out to my eldest sister and her boys, courtesy of Anastasia Solitudee:
(pat pat)


Thirst quenched, big sister?

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Superstore's final season: 

It started with glow in the dark stars and it ended with glow in the dark stars.
https://bethanyactually.tumblr.com/post/185690338971/otp-meme-amy-sosa-jonah-simms-superstore

This series has been such a soft place to land.
Even with their final season set during the pandemic, it still felt silly and safe and surreal.
All those lovely s-things.
I'm really going to miss it but especially Glenn's Fozzie Bear muppet voice.

...
2.18 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs | Tumgir

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My brain can't process this.
I watch, and I watch, and I watch, and it still doesn't compute.
Digital artists are sorcerors, the end.
Tumblr: Image

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How to watercolour: A lesson.

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A little Charlie ASMR:


If he could breathe fire, I'm almost certain he'd set me on fire.
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But look at his little face!

Anyone else have a crazy complicated animal?

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Tumblr: Image

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Instantly:

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I'm sorry to those I lied to about liking the His Dark Materials series.
Because I didn't.
I really fucking hated it.
Lyra's such a little shit, I would've left her with the nuns, too.
...
Dr House Gregory House GIF - Dr House Gregory House Oops GIFs

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The 1994 Winona Ryder version of Little Women is important to me. To my sisters.
We were raised on it, practically. We've watched it countless times. Will watch it countless more.
It makes me cry and laugh; it's a visual and aural feast.
And when I heard Greta Gerwig was adapting it, I was... nervous.
Not unwelcoming, but definitely nervous.
As I tend to be when something I love is being remade (hello, live-action Cowboy Bebop, I couldn't finish you, you were that painful) but in this case?
There was no need.
It was everything I wanted, and had before with Gillian Armstrong's take on Alcott's tale of chaotically devoted sisters, and something a little different as well.

Actors I wasn't sure could play their parts were surprisingly perfect (Pugh, Chalamet, Odendirk), and those I had no worries over were just as wonderful as I imagined (Ronan - a perfect, perfect, perfect Jo, Dern, Garrel).

It looked beautiful, sounded beautiful.
#Little Women from don't stop me now

It was funny and made me sob in all those moments I know are coming and still destroy me.
Greta Gerwig Movie GIF by LittleWomen

It wasn't a carbon copy of ones made before, nonlinear but still framed seasonally.
Greta Gerwig Movie GIF by LittleWomen

Unexpected and comforting in its familiarity.
GIF by LittleWomen

In short, it was lovely.
It didn't surpass my love for the 90s version but it certainly doesn't rank below it.
I think, unexpectedly, I'll hold them side by side and love them equally but the proof really lies in the rewatching.
I guess I'll just have to watch the March family exist time and time again.
Sisters Wrestle GIF by LittleWomen

Oh, the hardship.
#Little Women from don't stop me now


Fanarts:
Luz Tapia

Elle

Bethany Mannion of SPILT MILK PRESS

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Rachel Brown of Tender Being Dolls:

A doll person, I am not.
But now I have a distinct craving for a feline, stopmotion Jane Austen projected directly into my brainpan.
Come on Netflix, do me a solid.

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Every. Single. Time!

I'm 1000% sure the Hairdressers Association had a meeting when I was born and set into motion their vendetta against my follicles.
1000% sure.
Even my sister had a go.
Hello, toddler bowl cut, let's never speak of you again. 

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I'd quite like to throat-punch Ted Hughes, thanks.
I liked this movie, though.
It pisses me off when I like a Gwyneth Paltrow movie, because she's honestly just bad for the environment.
And lady-parts.
No Gwyneth Paltrow GIF - No Gwyneth Paltrow Nope - Discover & Share GIFs

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Fetch me a Pilot Parallel, right this second!
I wish to slice words into existence.

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SORTEDfood; or as I affectionally like to call them, the Idiot Boys:

Watching people make things on YouTube is kind of my family's view it in the background so your brain doesn't wander off somewhere dark and stormy kinda thing.
And these chaotic food-boys are our current soundtrack of choice.
My face hurts from laughing and I'm really, really hungry.
...
But my sister keeps anthropomorphising pizza dough, so it's alright.
Henceforth, I would liked you to meet:
Princess Pepperoni

Peenypapple

And Brekkie with the Good Eggs

I love my sister, she's a ridiculous weirdo.
And she's currently doing her 12 days-ish of Christmas and putting my word vomit to shame.
Go look.
I demand it.

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Hannah Hillam being us all:

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I'd been coveting this for a while and my sisters picked it out of a list of many and gave it to me for Christmas.
My idiots know me so well.
#Gif from DIABLITO 666

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We're going to finish with boobs and Betty White. I think she'd like it that way:
Sveta Shubina

J. Shari Ewing


She was a gift.

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