one thing abt thalia and percy's dynamic that is often overlooked is that percy was punished for the same things thalia was rewarded for. there's a prophecy abt one of the big three kids? percy is treated like a liar and thief and ppl refuse to talk to him. thalia? everyone respects her (including gods!) and assumes she'll do a great job saving the world. thalia is accepted immediately at camp and threatens the place percy spent two years proving he deserves. percy wants to go on a quest to save his friend? he's an attention seeker and glory stealer. thalia? well, she's the obvious choice. thalia comes up w a plan to win capture the flag that's basically "leave everything to me" and percy comes up with a plan that's basically "if you see a good opportunity, go for it," but percy is viewed as the control freak.
what i'm saying is percy had every reason to resent thalia and he didn't. he chose not to. and thalia had every reason to look down on percy and didn't.
even when they were fighting, i never saw it as a power struggle. they were being pit against each other, and instead of doing what everyone expected them to (kronos was fully expecting thalia to kill percy), they chose to love and respect each other. because they're not their parents. they're just two kids who started cracking under the pressure but refused to break.
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I feel the lack of her presence like a hole in my conscious being . Like i can feel the emptiness of the space she fills as something so tangible
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Kaikaina Grif doesn't have a name.
Well, she does. okay not really. More like a title.
Kaikaina.
A word meaning younger siblings, younger sister.
That's who she is, who she's always been, always will be.
When mom wasn't bothered enough to soothe her cries it was Dexter who would hold her, his chubby hands holding onto her little fingers, he wasn't much older than her by any means and still he held her and whispered to her as she cried, my Kaikaina, my sister.
So Kaikaina is who she became, the little sister toddling after her brother, following him all the way to a box-canyon in the middle of nowhere. Because she's his sister and that's all she's ever been.
And when her teammates call her sister she wants to correct them, thats a title, a noun, not a name. But then she stops and wonders.
Does she have a name?
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ive attended six total therapy sessions in my life and it was with a free university counsellor and i told her one thing that ill admit was pretty concerning but aside that spent the entire time waffling about shit that isnt actually super important i was 100% just talking for the sake of talking with 0 intention of receiving help and then when she asked me to come back i never rebooked and now i think daily about the fact she has information about me written down and i sometimes convince myself she’s going to use it maliciously and it is something i actively regret because of aforementioned conviction. so all in all i’d say i handled the whole thing with the mental fortitude of someone in need of significantly more therapy
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the siren scene in som lives in my head rent-free. like here is this kid and her fatal flaw is hubris and what do the sirens show her? what does she want? well, she wants to build a better world...where her family loves her. she refuses to accept the loss and believes that she can fix her broken family. she can do it. she'll make her parents proud and she can make them love her. she knows better than you, so stop trying to tell her luke is gone. she can reach him. she can fix what no one else can. she can build a better world. she'll make them see her. she can fix it.
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I’ve been thinking lately about the romances in the wheel of time books. RJ gets a lot of (deserved) flack for the romances in his books, but I do think there’s some stuff I really like that I don’t always see in fantasy, especially in the 90s when RJ was writing. Massive book spoilers under the cut
Okay so for all that RJ was Not Good at writing romance build up (Egwene/Gawyn, Nynaeve/Lan, and Thom/Moiraine as maybe the crowning example) I absolutely LOVE how he wrote female characters who were 1.) deeply in love and 2.) primarily motivated by things that had nothing to do with their romantic partner.
Elayne falls rapidly in love with Rand in book 4, and then proceeds to have a bunch of arcs that have little to nothing to do with Rand - hunting the Black Ajah in Tanchico, solving fantasy global warming with the Bowl of Winds, and taking the throne of Andor. Even though Rand tried to “give” the throne to Elayne (which pisses her off), she still has to struggle for it and overcome significant hurdles. Nynaeve’s whole plot of learning to break her block while maintaining her passion and rejecting Aes Sedai serenity has nothing to do with Lan. Same with Egwene, Aviendha, Moiraine, Tuon, and even Suian (and personally the Suian/Garreth Byrne relationships is one of my least favorite relationships in the series).
It’s so refreshing! I devoured book after book as a kid in the 90s and early 00s and the romances were usually SO central especially for the female characters. Even when reading the books, I remember being 14 and going “shouldn’t Elayne be with Rand somehow? Shouldn’t he be helping her take the throne?” Simply because that’s what I was used to. Think of how much weaker the story and the characters would have been!
The crowning example is in aMoL (which I know was written by Sanderson, but I feel like RJ laid enough groundwork and precedent that he still gets a bit of credit) when Rand proposes the Dragon’s Peace and both Aviendha and Elayne have BIG criticisms of what Rand tried to do. They love him! They worry about how it will affect their relationships with him! But their devotion and responsibility to their own people trumps their romantic ties and the narrative *doesn’t punish them for it.* It’s a great scene and one of my favorite Sanderson chapters in the books.
Anyway, I was just thinking how interesting it was that the thing I like least and the thing I like most about RJ’s romances both come from his focus on individual character motivations over his focus on romance.
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Watch the American Climate Leadership Awards 2024 now: https://youtu.be/bWiW4Rp8vF0?feature=shared
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an old coworker was saying how lonely it was to work from home & that she missed us & I was like. well. I have a light day next week. I could break into your house
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