books i read in may-jun 2024
Jul. 3rd, 2024 11:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhodochrositebeen doing a lot of staring blankly at walls to cope with the eofy work horrors lately which hasn't given me a lot of spare time or energy to do basically anything else let alone read but here's a couple of reviews from may I think. spoilers for the cruel prince and the wicked king – holly black; sound the gong – joan he:
the cruel prince / the wicked king – holly black
having decided that I'm in my cclare extended cinematic universe era, next up on my list was holly black. funnily enough I never got very far into the faerie side of ya supernatural romance, I was always a vampire main even though faeries have all the advantages of vampires (beautiful immortal inhuman killers with weird rules and hierarchies) and none of the disadvantages (I find the whole blood drinking thing kind of landminey which I know is the entire conceit of vampires in the first place but skirting landmines has always been my passion) but also after I read wicked lovely I simply did not believe any other faerie romances needed to exist. I still stand by this tbh and I plan to reread the series after I finish book3 but I did enjoy tcp (which I have been calling a court of poppy and war in my head) regardless!
tcp made me realise I do not care for bully romances but as soon as cardanjude moved out of the schoolyard bully stage and into their hateristic puppet king x puppeteer henchman power struggles dynamic everything clicked into place and I was giggling and twirling my hair at the beautiful haterom. you can imagine the oprah.gif I did when jude graduated from evil grand viziership to political marriage, I am always saying that political marriages are the funniest solution to pretty much every imaginable problem. she did almost instantly fall from grace to queen in exile which made me feel somewhat ill as guy who hates it when actions have consequences but I think it was narratively interesting to have her so brutally undercut at the moment she finally obtained power in her own right, so I'm very curious to see how she claws it back as she has been trying to do all series.
rather unusually I did not enjoy the semi military academy arc it just wasn't giving what I want military academy arcs to give. I've been comparing the school arc in tcp to sinegard arc in tpw to try and figure out why sinegard was so much more appealing to me even though both involved the protag going through heavy bullying/mistreatment/erasure and i think it's because rin had genuine camaraderie and first love to sustain her through the trials and tribulations and she also later looks back on her academy years with somewhat historically revisionist fondness whereas jude does not really gaf about school and didn't have any positive memories there and never thinks about it once she's out of it, and I think that twinned longing/resentment exhibited by rin and other military academy graduates is vital to my enjoyment of military academy arcs. like it's gruelling and terrible but in hindsight the best years of your life. obviously that is not the case for jude and this is one of the reasons why book2>>>>>>book1 to me. I loved seeing jude trying to play the game of thrones so much more than her underdog struggle upwards a position where she can be a player. the part where jude gets kidnapped by the undersea and starved and forced to drink saltwater and tortured while having to pretend that the brainwashing is working and she believes she's having a ball in that bitch did severely landmine me but then I meditated on it a bit more and decided that actually it was extremely sxc of jude to be suffering and consciously having to repress and pretend she's doped up on happiness.
now let's talk about girls girls girls ): the tragedy of the duarte sisters is so fucked up to me ): I love a good gift of the magi / grass is always greener in how vivi is a faerie who wishes she were human and jude (and taryn) are humans who wish they were fae. taryn makes me so unbearably sad they could never make me hate you taryn… the love is neverending but so is the grief. being twin sisters who are explicitly ideological mirrors of each other and can't stand the inverted reflection of themselves in the other even though they love each other is the most terrible thing in the universe!!!!! jude and taryn were by far the most compelling dynamic in book1 and taryn's betrayal of jude right at the end of book2 gutted me almost as much as it gutted jude, but I get it… you do what you have to so you can survive and protect the people you love and get the outcomes that you think will lead to your greatest desires. it's only another distorted reflection of jude's attitude. but my god I wish nothing more than for jude and taryn to properly reconcile and understand each other in the next book at least in some aspect I needddddd siblings to enemies to end in It's All Love Always Has Been.
locke can die though. i think it's pretty explicit in the text that taryn picked a faerie to be in love with because she wanted to be in love with a faerie to legitimise her standing and then sunk cost fallacy'd herself into going through with everything that entailed. and while I support self-delusion and women's wrongs I really wish she'd picked another guy. also dare I say repressed lesbian trait. maybe I should open nicaisia/taryn? crown princess of the undersea would be a pretty good target for taryn's social climbing ambitions. anyway I hope taryn kills that man 🙏
I like jude, I love schemers and ambitious women generally and I'm always extremely partial to volatile female protags… her real not fake henchman era as dain's agent was pretty funny also. cardan took a while to grow on me to the point where I was tinhetting dainjude in book1 because what am I gonna do, say no to girl desperate to be a weapon x her direct military superior who gives her purpose but is also pretty awful to her and forces her to choose to stab her own hand to prove her loyalty? wait this is making me realise that jude being in situations where she has to ""willingly"" allow herself to be physically and psychologically harmed because the plausible deniability of supernatural compulsion has been withheld from her and she needs to grit her teeth and persevere for the sake of a greater goal is a Two Nickels thing and I am eating it up every time I do love whump and I do love jude going through trials.
anyway turns out literally all that needed to happen for me to be sold on cardanjude was the bullying part to end and the crazy power dynamics enemycoworkers with benefits without benefits to begin. it's very good that even when their physical chemistry boiled over and they couldn't not hook up they still hated each other, that's exactly what enemies to lovers where the sexual tension resolves before the emotional tension does should be giving. this is REAL kismesissitude. jude is so caught up in her machinations she doesn't really reflect on her feelings and that's what I loooove in a heroine every time there's nothing I like more than a lack of emotional self-awareness. also I can't even express how much I was crying and screaming and throwing up over everything going to shit at the end of book2 because cardan did what taryn-as-jude told him to do even without compulsion because he wanted her to know that he trusted her to lead him true. my man kevin on the ledge… god!!!
as stated i have been too scared of Actions Having Consequences to start book3 (I KNOW THAT FUCKASS SMITH IS GOING TO BETRAY JUDE!) but I will do that eventually I want to see both the cardanjude / judetaryn and the political endgames. you know the series got me when I care about the plot lmao. jude may be at her lowest rn but I believe in jude's counterattack… let's get that black<->red quadrant vacillation going properly girls! 6/10 for tcp and 8/10 for twk.
favourite lines:
"What did he give you?" I ask Taryn, finally tiring of the silence. "Madoc gave me the sword Dad made. That's the one we were fighting with. He said he had something for you, too."
She's quiet long enough that I don't think she's going to answer. "A set of knives, for a table. Supposedly, they cut right through bone. The sword is better. It has a name."
sound the gong – joan he
this was my tds3 plane trip read and it was… fine. i didn't like it as much as strike the zither but I didn't hate it as much as the inheritance games book2 whose title I can't even remember so like, as far as sequels to books I liked go it could be worse. I was definitely disappointed because book1 was one of my top reads of 2023 but if I hadn't had such high expectations going in I probably would have had a better time. I feel like every aspect (other than the rivalmance) that I liked in book1 was absent from book2. most annoyingly there was a lot less girls the world and zephyr spent too much time away from xin ren. the ghost protag who bodyhops concept was interesting in theory but came at the heavy cost of dynamix because zephyr was hardly ever interacting with other people as her actual self… I think I do need protags to have corporeal form or at least a permanent host, I think it works in yugioh style situations but not so much in evernight style situations.
obviously I took the rivals to enemies who talk about their enemyship in words that connote romance bait, and what could be more romantic than both of them successfully killing each other several times and zephyr vengefully stealing crow's body after murdering him to evict his soul and then gifting him immortality as her last act before she gets obliterated from existence for real. it was frustrating that they spent most of the book with one or both in ghost form, but I get that it was necessary for the story to progress. ultimately I think I still preferred their alive corporeal rivalry and ambiguous feelings in book1 though. like they were fine in this book but the zither newtype flash duel-conversations meant soooo much to me. and so many missed opportunities for the incredible romance of recognising zephyr's soul in another body ):
my favourite part was when xin ren and cicada both went against zephyr's careful plans and came back to rescue zephyr and november because they loved their strategists more than they cared about victory. i really like those chokepoints where zephyr forgets that normal people aren't perfectly rational beings like she plans them to be and gets surprised by the capacity of the human heart. my girl needs to take a behavioural finance class. it's not fully clear to me whether the assumption that everyone acts as rational players is part of zephyr's personality or if it's linked to her divinity as the flipside of zephyr developing normal people feelings because humanity is contagious to the point where she gains enough of a human soul to reincarnate by the end of the story. probably both? I definitely think this should have been more of a focus of the story and most of all zephyr's blindness to her own emotional vulnerabilities, which is always my favourite trait in a goal-driven heroine.
in general zephyr's godhood really felt like such a pointless aspect of the story. her relationship with her divine sisters was so underdeveloped it didn't feel like any kind of sacrifice for her to choose mortality over them. it's an unfortunate corollary of them having been introduced so late in book1 but then they didn't get any real character or relationship focus after that anyway. I liked the reveal of zephyr's divinity after her unexpected death in book1 and the genre pivot into fantasy but book2 constantly felt like it was floundering through narratives, unable to decide what exactly it was trying to do and doing nothing as a result. it was a little bit romance, a little bit fantasy, a little bit politics, a little bit historical, a little bit feudal lord x handmaiden (handstrategist?) but too dilettanteish to commit to any of those aspects so it just ended up being unsatisfying on every front. and this is coming from #1 superpowers fan in the world but in particular I think zephyr became overreliant on her superpowers and it took away from her strategic prowess and 4d chess manoeuvring. even though she literally expressly realises this in her narration which is one of the reasons she picks crow's body to possess so she can be a strategist again the issue is not ever really fixed. reading this book after tcp/twk which went all out on both the romance and the war politics really made stg feel so much midder in comparison.
also the coda had some of the worst writing in the whole duology i was a little shocked. something weird going on with the grammar but also one of the weakest immortal character timeskip epilogue life recaps I've ever read ngl, although crow and sikou hai half-developing into strategist4strategist 2.0 Zephyr Widowers Club Edition was pretty funny in theory. if only crow didn't randomly have a moral boundary about replacement goldfishing zephyr with her protégé ):
overall maybe a 4/10 I think the ending was so lacklustre it pulled down my enjoyment level of the entire book. it's a shame since there were some really fun and flirty lines in here but they weren’t enough to save the muddled narrative.
favourite lines:
"Then don't watch," I say, but the stone grows when I find the scar behind my shoulder, where Crow took that arrow for me, and even though I know he saved me just so that I could burn Miasma's navy, my next words are choked. "Go haunt someone else."
"I'd never be disloyal to you."
the cruel prince / the wicked king – holly black
having decided that I'm in my cclare extended cinematic universe era, next up on my list was holly black. funnily enough I never got very far into the faerie side of ya supernatural romance, I was always a vampire main even though faeries have all the advantages of vampires (beautiful immortal inhuman killers with weird rules and hierarchies) and none of the disadvantages (I find the whole blood drinking thing kind of landminey which I know is the entire conceit of vampires in the first place but skirting landmines has always been my passion) but also after I read wicked lovely I simply did not believe any other faerie romances needed to exist. I still stand by this tbh and I plan to reread the series after I finish book3 but I did enjoy tcp (which I have been calling a court of poppy and war in my head) regardless!
tcp made me realise I do not care for bully romances but as soon as cardanjude moved out of the schoolyard bully stage and into their hateristic puppet king x puppeteer henchman power struggles dynamic everything clicked into place and I was giggling and twirling my hair at the beautiful haterom. you can imagine the oprah.gif I did when jude graduated from evil grand viziership to political marriage, I am always saying that political marriages are the funniest solution to pretty much every imaginable problem. she did almost instantly fall from grace to queen in exile which made me feel somewhat ill as guy who hates it when actions have consequences but I think it was narratively interesting to have her so brutally undercut at the moment she finally obtained power in her own right, so I'm very curious to see how she claws it back as she has been trying to do all series.
rather unusually I did not enjoy the semi military academy arc it just wasn't giving what I want military academy arcs to give. I've been comparing the school arc in tcp to sinegard arc in tpw to try and figure out why sinegard was so much more appealing to me even though both involved the protag going through heavy bullying/mistreatment/erasure and i think it's because rin had genuine camaraderie and first love to sustain her through the trials and tribulations and she also later looks back on her academy years with somewhat historically revisionist fondness whereas jude does not really gaf about school and didn't have any positive memories there and never thinks about it once she's out of it, and I think that twinned longing/resentment exhibited by rin and other military academy graduates is vital to my enjoyment of military academy arcs. like it's gruelling and terrible but in hindsight the best years of your life. obviously that is not the case for jude and this is one of the reasons why book2>>>>>>book1 to me. I loved seeing jude trying to play the game of thrones so much more than her underdog struggle upwards a position where she can be a player. the part where jude gets kidnapped by the undersea and starved and forced to drink saltwater and tortured while having to pretend that the brainwashing is working and she believes she's having a ball in that bitch did severely landmine me but then I meditated on it a bit more and decided that actually it was extremely sxc of jude to be suffering and consciously having to repress and pretend she's doped up on happiness.
now let's talk about girls girls girls ): the tragedy of the duarte sisters is so fucked up to me ): I love a good gift of the magi / grass is always greener in how vivi is a faerie who wishes she were human and jude (and taryn) are humans who wish they were fae. taryn makes me so unbearably sad they could never make me hate you taryn… the love is neverending but so is the grief. being twin sisters who are explicitly ideological mirrors of each other and can't stand the inverted reflection of themselves in the other even though they love each other is the most terrible thing in the universe!!!!! jude and taryn were by far the most compelling dynamic in book1 and taryn's betrayal of jude right at the end of book2 gutted me almost as much as it gutted jude, but I get it… you do what you have to so you can survive and protect the people you love and get the outcomes that you think will lead to your greatest desires. it's only another distorted reflection of jude's attitude. but my god I wish nothing more than for jude and taryn to properly reconcile and understand each other in the next book at least in some aspect I needddddd siblings to enemies to end in It's All Love Always Has Been.
locke can die though. i think it's pretty explicit in the text that taryn picked a faerie to be in love with because she wanted to be in love with a faerie to legitimise her standing and then sunk cost fallacy'd herself into going through with everything that entailed. and while I support self-delusion and women's wrongs I really wish she'd picked another guy. also dare I say repressed lesbian trait. maybe I should open nicaisia/taryn? crown princess of the undersea would be a pretty good target for taryn's social climbing ambitions. anyway I hope taryn kills that man 🙏
I like jude, I love schemers and ambitious women generally and I'm always extremely partial to volatile female protags… her real not fake henchman era as dain's agent was pretty funny also. cardan took a while to grow on me to the point where I was tinhetting dainjude in book1 because what am I gonna do, say no to girl desperate to be a weapon x her direct military superior who gives her purpose but is also pretty awful to her and forces her to choose to stab her own hand to prove her loyalty? wait this is making me realise that jude being in situations where she has to ""willingly"" allow herself to be physically and psychologically harmed because the plausible deniability of supernatural compulsion has been withheld from her and she needs to grit her teeth and persevere for the sake of a greater goal is a Two Nickels thing and I am eating it up every time I do love whump and I do love jude going through trials.
anyway turns out literally all that needed to happen for me to be sold on cardanjude was the bullying part to end and the crazy power dynamics enemycoworkers with benefits without benefits to begin. it's very good that even when their physical chemistry boiled over and they couldn't not hook up they still hated each other, that's exactly what enemies to lovers where the sexual tension resolves before the emotional tension does should be giving. this is REAL kismesissitude. jude is so caught up in her machinations she doesn't really reflect on her feelings and that's what I loooove in a heroine every time there's nothing I like more than a lack of emotional self-awareness. also I can't even express how much I was crying and screaming and throwing up over everything going to shit at the end of book2 because cardan did what taryn-as-jude told him to do even without compulsion because he wanted her to know that he trusted her to lead him true. my man kevin on the ledge… god!!!
as stated i have been too scared of Actions Having Consequences to start book3 (I KNOW THAT FUCKASS SMITH IS GOING TO BETRAY JUDE!) but I will do that eventually I want to see both the cardanjude / judetaryn and the political endgames. you know the series got me when I care about the plot lmao. jude may be at her lowest rn but I believe in jude's counterattack… let's get that black<->red quadrant vacillation going properly girls! 6/10 for tcp and 8/10 for twk.
favourite lines:
"What did he give you?" I ask Taryn, finally tiring of the silence. "Madoc gave me the sword Dad made. That's the one we were fighting with. He said he had something for you, too."
She's quiet long enough that I don't think she's going to answer. "A set of knives, for a table. Supposedly, they cut right through bone. The sword is better. It has a name."
- weibocrylaugh SERIOUSLY THERE IS NO APP FOR THIS… you can always get me with warrior/lady two sides of the same coin sisters.
sound the gong – joan he
this was my tds3 plane trip read and it was… fine. i didn't like it as much as strike the zither but I didn't hate it as much as the inheritance games book2 whose title I can't even remember so like, as far as sequels to books I liked go it could be worse. I was definitely disappointed because book1 was one of my top reads of 2023 but if I hadn't had such high expectations going in I probably would have had a better time. I feel like every aspect (other than the rivalmance) that I liked in book1 was absent from book2. most annoyingly there was a lot less girls the world and zephyr spent too much time away from xin ren. the ghost protag who bodyhops concept was interesting in theory but came at the heavy cost of dynamix because zephyr was hardly ever interacting with other people as her actual self… I think I do need protags to have corporeal form or at least a permanent host, I think it works in yugioh style situations but not so much in evernight style situations.
obviously I took the rivals to enemies who talk about their enemyship in words that connote romance bait, and what could be more romantic than both of them successfully killing each other several times and zephyr vengefully stealing crow's body after murdering him to evict his soul and then gifting him immortality as her last act before she gets obliterated from existence for real. it was frustrating that they spent most of the book with one or both in ghost form, but I get that it was necessary for the story to progress. ultimately I think I still preferred their alive corporeal rivalry and ambiguous feelings in book1 though. like they were fine in this book but the zither newtype flash duel-conversations meant soooo much to me. and so many missed opportunities for the incredible romance of recognising zephyr's soul in another body ):
my favourite part was when xin ren and cicada both went against zephyr's careful plans and came back to rescue zephyr and november because they loved their strategists more than they cared about victory. i really like those chokepoints where zephyr forgets that normal people aren't perfectly rational beings like she plans them to be and gets surprised by the capacity of the human heart. my girl needs to take a behavioural finance class. it's not fully clear to me whether the assumption that everyone acts as rational players is part of zephyr's personality or if it's linked to her divinity as the flipside of zephyr developing normal people feelings because humanity is contagious to the point where she gains enough of a human soul to reincarnate by the end of the story. probably both? I definitely think this should have been more of a focus of the story and most of all zephyr's blindness to her own emotional vulnerabilities, which is always my favourite trait in a goal-driven heroine.
in general zephyr's godhood really felt like such a pointless aspect of the story. her relationship with her divine sisters was so underdeveloped it didn't feel like any kind of sacrifice for her to choose mortality over them. it's an unfortunate corollary of them having been introduced so late in book1 but then they didn't get any real character or relationship focus after that anyway. I liked the reveal of zephyr's divinity after her unexpected death in book1 and the genre pivot into fantasy but book2 constantly felt like it was floundering through narratives, unable to decide what exactly it was trying to do and doing nothing as a result. it was a little bit romance, a little bit fantasy, a little bit politics, a little bit historical, a little bit feudal lord x handmaiden (handstrategist?) but too dilettanteish to commit to any of those aspects so it just ended up being unsatisfying on every front. and this is coming from #1 superpowers fan in the world but in particular I think zephyr became overreliant on her superpowers and it took away from her strategic prowess and 4d chess manoeuvring. even though she literally expressly realises this in her narration which is one of the reasons she picks crow's body to possess so she can be a strategist again the issue is not ever really fixed. reading this book after tcp/twk which went all out on both the romance and the war politics really made stg feel so much midder in comparison.
also the coda had some of the worst writing in the whole duology i was a little shocked. something weird going on with the grammar but also one of the weakest immortal character timeskip epilogue life recaps I've ever read ngl, although crow and sikou hai half-developing into strategist4strategist 2.0 Zephyr Widowers Club Edition was pretty funny in theory. if only crow didn't randomly have a moral boundary about replacement goldfishing zephyr with her protégé ):
overall maybe a 4/10 I think the ending was so lacklustre it pulled down my enjoyment level of the entire book. it's a shame since there were some really fun and flirty lines in here but they weren’t enough to save the muddled narrative.
favourite lines:
"Then don't watch," I say, but the stone grows when I find the scar behind my shoulder, where Crow took that arrow for me, and even though I know he saved me just so that I could burn Miasma's navy, my next words are choked. "Go haunt someone else."
"I'd never be disloyal to you."
- zephyr stealing crow's body and feeling the scar that is the physical proof of crow almost dying to save her life when she had her own body is crazyyy
no subject
Date: 2024-07-10 10:58 am (UTC)I spent a good portion of my original read of tcp praying for cardan’s downfall truly… he was a pain in my daughter jude’s ass n mine as well LOL ur so real for swooning over jurdan’s teetering dynamic SO GOOD SO BEAUTIFUL NEVER CHANGE U TWO <3 i think ur onto something as well on the political marriage front,,,, it might actually be the be all end all of everything hehe. Jude immediately losing everything js when she had it in her LITERAL grasp had me gasping… insane of cardan rlly to put wifey in exile likeeee T_T a big part of her character is she will do rlly anything to get what she wants/needs. as seen by multiple instances (betraying cardan by making him king, betraying madoc as well #sorrydad, poisoning herself for the sake of The Goal n Vision etc etc) her determination is beautiful.
I will confess that i did not in fact finishing tpw ( the mortifying ordeal of losing interest halfway thru is strong and will put u in a chokehold i fear) but it’s military school was ten times more intriguing and exciting to read compared to Jude and The Gentry’s Sliced Up School Scenes. U rlly hit the matter on the nail bcs T__T jude could care less abt school and her classmates and so-called best years of her life (correction: worse) if i may, even, it felt like miss holly black js required a reasonable setting for jude and taryn to be accosted by cardan and friends LOL n fairy school was the best choice for that. tho tcp will always have my fondness, jude flourished sm better in twk. teenage girl trying her hardest to deal w the machinations and chaos of the folk n court, severe and immense daddy issues+twin sister issues, the highs n lows of being unfortunately attracted to ur most hated childhood bully who is not lifting a single finger in making any of this easier for u, n so so much more. U SAID IT BEST: jude’s very own game of thrones moment [moment of silence for her hardships] every other second there was some joe discrediting her position or hey, even her own dad (something abt jude being the high king’s schenescal yet feeling like the 7yr old girl she used to be in front of madoc… OUCH) jude’s undersea arc will never fail to make me feel as tho i was right there alongside her going Thru it. js like u, the landmines also had me XoX a small reprieve i suppose was balekin getting gutted :,) jude deserved to do at least that much. the way daughter has no time to sift thru any of what she goes thru n is thrown into the heat of things once more… queen of repression and compartmentalizing YES
r u normal or do u think abt the duarte sisters n the tragedy that is them ?? 😭 😭 😭 😭 i am not normal thankfully ! the parallels of vivi wanting to be human and going to live in the mortal world but still exhibiting inherent faerie traits (extreme nonchalance/ignorance? towards what jude n taryn go thru as humans raised in faeirieland) jude desiring so bad n for so long to fit in amongst the folk being accepted by them but still being so unabashedly human in her ways and taryn being a mix of both her sisters in that she is both human-like for wanting what she will never have (being a faerie, loved by one, etc) and faerie-like for going along with locke’s proposal even KNOWING it would break jude’s heart. (it’s so like the faeries to play w the hearts of one another n for taryn do that js for some boy’s affection bcs she desperately wanted to fit in… makes me insane. At the cost of her relationship with jude as well locke can die though. i think it's pretty explicit in the text that taryn picked a faerie to be in love with because she wanted to be in love with a faerie to legitimise her standing and then sunk cost fallacy'd herself into going through with everything that entailed. and while I support self-delusion and women's wrongs I really wish she'd picked another guy. also dare I say repressed lesbian trait. maybe I should open nicaisia/taryn? crown princess of the undersea would be a pretty good target for taryn's social climbing ambitions. anyway I hope taryn kills that man 🙏
IM GIGGLING no one every likes locke which is always the right n true opinion, god speed. hes so funny to me bcs he rlly thinks he’s the story-maker or wtv he was going on abt it n then he gaslit taryn into believing hed make her the hero of her story. LIKE NO MY PRECIOUS GIRL THAT BOY IS SCUM N DOESNT DESERVE A MILLISECOND OF UR TIME RUN FOR THE HILLS. but i suppose a part of motherhood is stepping back n letting ur daughters go thru things so theyll come out better. Or maybe not even better but js Changed irrevocably sigh.. I see the repressed lesbian trait, i rlly do🫡 i love nicasia <3333 shes honestly a fave, #1 jude hater since day 1 give her her laurels fr also broke cardan’s heart by choosing locke (which, um, side eye sorry) n then regretting that decision n then for some inexplicable reason she gets jealous n shoots at him w a bow, but wait it was an accident n she was aiming for the girl he was T_T iconic of her rlly. ngl ive always imagined that if it came down to any of the duarte sisters, the energy would break between jude n nicasia. their chemistry was superb omg. like the tension between the two of them in this scene in twk ?? (“I lost Cardan’s love for Locke’s easy words and easier kisses, sugared like these flowers,” she says. “Your sister lost your love to get Locke’s, didn’t she? But we all know what you lost.” “Locke?” I laugh. “Good riddance.” Her brows knit together. “Surely it’s not the High King himself you were gazing at.” “Surely not,” I echo, but I don’t meet her eyes.”) this one as well → (“This will never be your world, mortal,” she says. “This is mine,” I say, anger making me reckless. “My land and my king. And I will protect them both. Say the same, go on.” “He cannot love you,” she says to me, her voice suddenly brittle.
She obviously doesn’t like the idea of my claiming Cardan, obviously is still infatuated with him, and just as obviously has no idea what to do about it.”) oh nicasia oh my dear nicasia I like jude, I love schemers and ambitious women generally and I'm always extremely partial to volatile female protags… her real not fake henchman era as dain's agent was pretty funny also. cardan took a while to grow on me to the point where I was tinhetting dainjude in book1 because what am I gonna do, say no to girl desperate to be a weapon x her direct military superior who gives her purpose but is also pretty awful to her and forces her to choose to stab her own hand to prove her loyalty? wait this is making me realise that jude being in situations where she has to ""willingly"" allow herself to be physically and psychologically harmed because the plausible deniability of supernatural compulsion has been withheld from her and she needs to grit her teeth and persevere for the sake of a greater goal is a Two Nickels thing and I am eating it up every time I do love whump and I do love jude going through trials.
jude, to me, is rlly girl of all time. no one is doing it like her. putting herself in the most outrageous situations n thru the most outrageous things, w the payout only being 30% guaranteed is js wow. i love her silly always moving always thinking always planning self, u said it best, schemers and ambitious women r It for me <3 powerclimbining till the end, that’s my daughter !! im no better than u rlly bcs why was i batting eyelashes at jude n dane n their scenes. So embarrassing to find out he isnt a big player n is killed by balekin (embarassing for him too, like balekin of all ppl?? ) I TOO AM EATING UP THE TRIALS N TRIBULATIONS OF JUDE DUARTE !!!! makes for a good narrative, sadly at the expense of jude's sanity, but dw queen it won’t always be this way.
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Date: 2024-07-10 10:59 am (UTC)'enemycoworkers with benefits without benefits' obsessed w this phrase. it sums up jurdan so well likeeeee they have to work together for both their sakes but they dont want to !!!! one of my favorite things abt cardan is his agony over the fact he finds jude attractive n quite literally wants her carnally. Down bad so bad that it’s MORTIYFING for him. that one line where he was like, don’t expect everyone to share my depraved tastes, literally do not quote me or @ me at all but it went something like that n JS WOW. ok cardan yeah pretty loser of u to go n get the hots (n more) for the girl u spent hating everything abt. Reputation through thre floor at this point LOL jude also avoiding cardan after the Hookup (™) so real of miss girl. no self-awareness whatsoever but post-hookup everything is up in the air n ohmygoddidirllyjssleepwfuckingcardan. yeah yeha… also I can't even express how much I was crying and screaming and throwing up over everything going to shit at the end of book2 ME N U BOTH ME N U BOTH !!!!!! it was fuckin crazy jude being like oh why would u even do that cardan?? n him being like, : I Trusted You. it all comes down to the trust doesn’t it. cardan’s main issue w jude is her lack of faith within him n tendency to withhold information. jude holding onto their deal like a lifeline bcs she rlly believes that the second it’s done cardan will get back at her n she’ll be powerfless,,, (god that’s sickening it rlly is. why is she girl who has never had power n control over anything in life n once she’s gotten it it’ll quite literally have to be pried from her cold dead hands :;;;;;;;) Not him tho. He trusted her, he wanted that mutual understanding n faith, n literally sort of doomed them both bcs of that. I know what you r cardan greenbriar n its sooooo [incoherent noises]
ur so valid for being apprehensive in starting tqon,,, this was me once upon time. (actually the reason my reread has gone stagnant is bcs i havent been able to muster the will to finish twk n begin the tqon knowing everything that goes down even with my memory issues… RIP ME) plot snatching us into the world like it’s real is 😭 i wish all the best of luck to u when u eventually get to it, n a hand to hold onto for dear life when things get crazy !
Choosing this line is insane of u. Thank u. taryn jude, thee sisters… god. it always gets me.
literally no one asked at all, but my favorite tcp line is: “Father, I am what you made me. I’ve become your daughter after all.” a bit cliche of me ik but im such a whore for daughter/father estrangement n the esp gritty nitty dynamic between jude n madoc. i love madoc. So much can be said abt that twisted redcap n how he loves his children but that won’t sway him in the slightest in the face of his ideals.#duartesisterstraumaticdhildhoodflashback
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Date: 2024-12-29 10:30 am (UTC)omg the way i dropped my phone when cardan exiled jude immediately after marrying her... truly i did not expect it but it really is a testament to how strong jude's character voicing / unreliable narration is that i didnt think she would experience Consequences Of Her actions - i was as caught up in her schemes and powerplays as she was. i love that she's so ruthless, it's a trait i adore in heroines and i feel that it is sorely underutilised especially in ya (or the story will pretend that she's so #girlboss and #mean but never actually follow through in terms of having her do anything actually morally questionable). queen of repression and compartmentalising indeed 😭
my feelings about tpw are ummmm ambivalent at best so i'm not recommending that you hurry to finish it lol but yes ia that it was likely a deliberate narrative choice on hblack's part to have fairy school suck so bad - which is fine, it's just not my preferred take on the trope. but at the same time i understand it had to be that way in service of the actual story hblack wanted to tell. just had to get through the ordeals of tcp to enjoy the rewards of twk 🙂↕️ "the highs n lows of being unfortunately attracted to ur most hated childhood bully who is not lifting a single finger in making any of this easier for u" LOL and we love to see it! i didnt talk about madoc in my original post but i think his relationship with jude is sooo interesting - the paternal and paternalistic love (ofc filtered through faerie alien mindset) madoc genuinely does have for jude, jude's resentment and bitterness but also unkillable desire for madoc to respect and acknowledge her, the power struggle and Complicated Feelings that results between them <3 one of the most interesting father-daughter relationships i've read in a while.
high five on being soooo abnormal about the duarte sisters ): i always love a Love Is Not Enough type story and the fact that both taryn and jude have desires they prioritise over their difficult but true love for each other makes me want to blow up. i'm glad you see the repressed lesbian vision!! i do also loveeee nicaisia/jude - it's very easy to read their antagonistic exchanges as another type of tension, especially since i don't read nicaisia's attachment to cardan as romantic love necessarily but perhaps the possessiveness and powerplay is inherent to faerie concepts of love. and nicaisia/jude/cardan could be such a beautifully toxic not-throuple of all time...
no it actually was so embarrassing that i, like jude, invested myself in dain as a cool guy power player only for him to die so easily 😭 but it's ok he had to be sacrificed so that cardan's love interest stocks could skyrocket astronomically afterwards <3 the scene where jude finds the paper where cardan's just written her name a million times is so funny. this get out of my school note energy.
"cardan’s main issue w jude is her lack of faith within him n tendency to withhold information. jude holding onto their deal like a lifeline bcs she rlly believes that the second it’s done cardan will get back at her n she’ll be powerfless,,, (god that’s sickening it rlly is. why is she girl who has never had power n control over anything in life n once she’s gotten it it’ll quite literally have to be pried from her cold dead hands :;;;;;;;) Not him tho. He trusted her, he wanted that mutual understanding n faith, n literally sort of doomed them both bcs of that." YES..... GOD....... EXACTLY...... AND IT KILLED MEEEEEEE Likeeeeee the ideological mismatch... the narratively justified inability to communicate... cardan wanting jude to trust him and jude having too many Problems And Issues to be able to.. it's so good but it's so painful.
thank u for sharing your favourite line !! i love that one too, the fact that jude did grow into madoc's image and this being yet another point of tension and bitterness and horror in the mix just adds to the entire familial tragedy. not a single relationship dynamic in this entire series is easy huh... embarrassingly i still have not worked up the courage to start on tqon but hopefully i will be reporting back shortly in 2025 with my finale thoughts 🙏