#i hope you enjoyed me being a hater. if u didn't. that's ok i mostly wrote this for me

[the-most-pathetic-edge-marquis]

the dude string trail

(aka jasper cowboy headcanons UwU)

i had a conversation with the one and only @su-angelvicioso that inspired me so strongly i wrote this even though i was Not Writing Twilight at the time, and you know what fuck it, i think it's funny. cori, as always, thank you for being my favorite person to talk about twilight with.

this is completely authentic and not sarcastic at all. why would you think that

one fall, jasper decides that he misses embracing his texan heritage. he wants to get back into being a cowboy!

(this is definitely only about him missing horses and his human life & has nothing at all to do with being sick of living with the cullens & kind of in trouble because he ate someone again & tired of having to defend himself to alice about wearing boot-cut jeans for no apparent reason. because none of those things are happening. obviously.)

“back into being a cowboy?” emmett says. “wait, when were you a cowboy?”

jasper ignores emmett, who is obviously just jealous of jasper because he has superpowers and is better at fighting, and definitely doesn’t know anything about cowboys or cowboy culture because what would someone from rural tennessee know about cattle ranching.

he also definitely doesn’t have a cooler more authentic southern accent than jasper. what

because the cullens are richer than god and alice will do literally anything to get rid of jasper right now because he called her maría by accident again i mean what that never happens he gets himself a nice two-week vacation all alone on a ranch up in wyoming.

(texas is too sunny. that’s definitely the only reason he doesn’t go south.)

he arrives. he realizes that he has gotten way too used to living in houses that esme made because he explicitly chose a ranch with some of the fanciest cabins, and he’s a vampire who doesn’t feel discomfort or really need to sleep—but he still sees the cabin where he’ll be staying and winces.

it’s…it’s fine, he supposes. a little log cabin, with lots of windows and glass doors and a view of the mountains. it’s just…

well. first of all, is the emphasis on the little.

also it’s just…very brown. surely the log walls would be enough, right, they don’t need to have brown rugs too? and brown curtains? and weird little yellowish shades on the lamps?

at least the blankets are colorful. great southwest style.

(he squashes the part of himself that sounds an awful lot like maría laughing about how cheap and mass-produced the thing clearly is; not even a good imitation, she’d probably sniff,and then go and find herself a new rebozo just out of spite—)

(this is why jasper isn’t in texas.)

whatever.

he waves off the worker who led him to the building—she’s in the middle of some spiel about what to do if he has questions, but why would that be relevant?

she radiates annoyance for some reason, as she heaves jasper’s suitcases into the building and hurries off. he has to admit, she does a very good job of covering it with a bright smile. if not for the empathy, he probably wouldn’t have noticed.

did he do something wrong, he wonders for a moment, but ultimately he decides the girl must just be in a bad mood today.

weird. he can’t imagine working here is that bad.

anyway. jasper isn’t here to worry about the interior design of the cabins, he’s here to be a cowboy!

(his thoughts sound like maría laughing at him again, at that idea, but he’s not going to think about why, thanks.)

jasper, because he is a vampire war lieutenant and a strategist and not an idiot (thank you very much, emmett), is well aware that the horses might not react...let's say ideally...to him being a vampire.

he also has a plan.

it's a great plan. simple. he'll sneak down to the pastures in the dead of night and wander around getting the horses used to his smell.

the plan did not account for the possibility that a number of the employees would be sitting on a porch at midnight smoking weed together. (didn't they care about their jobs? what if something went wrong with the horses? geez.)

admittedly he sneaks past them easily enough, but it's still annoying.

the more difficult thing his plan apparently failed to account for...

were horses always this mean?

jasper, over the course of his midnight jaunt, gets kicked, bitten, knocked over into piles of horse shit, (apparently even a vampire can be thrown off-balance by an entire herd of furious ungulates), and somehow covered in hay.

he refuses to consider the possibility that alice is watching this.

(when he gets back to the cabin later that evening, he of course finds a sticky note in his suitcase informing him to just throw the entire outfit away.)

he does, eventually, figure out that he can use his powers to calm a few of the horses down long enough to let him get within approaching distance.

this is inevitably followed by him letting his guard down, and said horses booking it away from him at top speed, shrieking like demons, but he decides to call it good enough regardless.

he spends basically the rest of the night in the shower, which he was not expecting to have to use. the water pressure is shit.

he definitely isn't sulking about this.

(he still smells like horse manure in the morning.)

the actual riding goes better though! totally! it's fine!

"so, do you have any horse experience?" the employee (he's pretty sure it's a different one than earlier) asks him as she leads him down to the corral.

"it's been a while," jasper says, "but i used to be pretty good."

for some reason, this makes the girl's eye twitch.

despite her obvious annoyance, she keeps trying to make conversation. jasper, despite wanting to tell her to fuck off, but is extremely polite and subtle and good at secret-keeping, (obviously), so he tolerates the conversation.

for some reason, it still doesn't go smoothly.

"where are you from?" "texas." "oh, nice! one of the other guides, jeremy, he's from austin." (a baffling pause, as though she's expecting him to say something to that inane statement.) "so was that where you learned how to ride?" "yes." "what'd you do?" "i was in the cavalry."

for some reason, that gets her to stop trying to talk to him, and jasper enjoys thirty seconds of blissful silence as she leads him into the pen of already-saddled horses.

this is what he's here for. who cares about the people, he's going to ride.

(he tries to ignore the fact that the horse she deposits him is extraordinarily fat, and so clearly done with life that he hardly has to try to calm it. it's fine. it is not a statement about what she thinks of his riding skill.)

(fine, it probably is. but she's clearly an idiot.)

anyways! he rides! it goes great! it's fine!

(anyone who says differently doesn't know what they're talking about and they weren't there anyway.)

"wow," the guide says as they start walking out toward the trail, "this is the most amped i've seen arrow like, ever." jasper, who is kicking the horse probably harder than a human would even be able to and getting absolutely 0 increase in speed, is not impressed.

"okay, we're coming up on a stream," she says at another point on the first insufferably long trail ride, as her mare splashes calmly through it. "your horse might not want to cross, so you need to just--"

jasper knows. he kicks harder.

the demon horse responds to this by deciding to jump across a stream that is literally the length of one of its steps.

jasper does not fall off. he just...gets down. very quickly. over the side of the horse's neck. onto his face.

his cowboy hat floats off downstream, but it was ugly anyway.

("okay no, my guy's definitely got the worst fashion boots," he overhears the guide saying to one of her coworkers during lunch, when they probably think they're out of human earshot, "did you see the fucking snakeskin patches--")

on another ridiculous ride through a bland, endless meadow, the nightmare horse stops dead in a patch of grass and ignores everything else, (including jasper's attempt to manipulate it into having any energy).

"he's trying to eat again," the guide says, sickly-sweet patient even though he can feel her amusement. "you just need to pull up to one side and kick forward!"

jasper comes the closest he ever has to revealing the vampire secret, (not counting the times he ate people), just so he can tell her that he knows, he has a perfect memory, the goddamn horse just won't do it.

in the second week he buys his way into--er, gets invited into--a more advanced session, with actual cows. of course, they leave him on the same asshole of a horse, who clearly doesn't know how to respond to basic commands like turning, even when he's putting all his weight into dragging the reins to the side.

("i'm pretty sure this dude has somehow never seen a cow," the guide complains during another lunch. "did you see the face he made when darren brought the herd in?" there's a beat, then they start giggling--if jasper had to guess, he'd say she's imitating said expression. which is just rude. he's seen cows before. obviously. he just wasn't expecting them to be literally covered in each other's shit. they smell so bad. who wouldn't make a face at that?)

anyways. the cattleworking is fine.

and he could totally have landed on his feet after the horse stopped out of nowhere if he wanted to.

he just needed to keep his cover. same for stopping the cow that tried to make a break for it and almost trampled him while he was down. he had it under control. he did not need the guide to electric-prod it in the face.

(alice and maría's voices are both laughing at him in his head now.)

one of the older men gently suggests that he might enjoy himself more going back to trail riding. that is also fine.

on day ten, he gets back to his cabin late (the girl asked if he wanted to help her brush down his horse today, and everyone else seemed excited about the option so he said yes, and now he smells like horse sweat), and goes to pull his twelfth new outfit out of the suitcase. (there is a washer/dryer in the cabin, but what does he look like?)

there's a note folded up in the button-down.

i'm picking you up in 15 at the front office, alice's chicken-scratch says, or you're going to snap and eat a bunch of horses and we're going to have to buy the ranch instead of getting me that paris studio that's going up for auction next year.

for a second, jasper considers ignoring it. he's not surrendering. this is his vacation goddamnit, he's fine--he rubs a hand over his mouth in thought, and an ungodly combination of horse hair, dirt, and hay smears onto his face.

20 minutes later, he's in the passenger seat, alice speeding around mountain passes and playing a pitying bluegrass CD for him.

"i had a good time," he tells her.

"sure, sweetheart."

"it was nice to cowboy again."

"mm-hmm, sweetheart."

"i do know how to ride horses."

"i know, sweetheart."

they drive the rest of the way back in silence.

(it never occurs to jasper that he should've left a tip.)

#is this original content? #jasper whitlock #ft. near-lethal amounts of sarcasm #& sponsored by the TOO MUCH TIME i spent working at a guest ranch in my late teens #look at me. JASPER IS NOT A COWBOY #(yes that remains my favorite hill to die on) #jasper is however the kind of shitty rich white man who THINKS he's a cowboy #trust me. i met so many of them doing that job #also for the record mass-market 'southwest' style blankets are predominantly copying navajo blanket patterns (w/out regard for the meanings #and rebozos are an Indigenous Mesoamerican (particularly Mexican) traditional woman's garment! not the same thing #but that was too much to get into in the story. ANYWAY #i hope you enjoyed me being a hater. if u didn't. that's ok i mostly wrote this for me #(also i DID listen to 'dude string trail' on repeat while writing this. for the vibes)

[livlepretre]

ok wait i have some thoughts about acotar that you may or may not agree with... but basically i loved acotar/acomaf but hated acowar and i didn't even try to read acofas. there was a lot i hated about acowar but basically it sums up to 1) hated how sjm tried to retcon rhys into being this perfect amazing flawless person kind of destroying everything that was interesting about him in the first couple books. 2) THE EXTREMELY GRATUITOUS AND NUMEROUS SEX SCENES IN THE MIDDLE OF A WAR. LIKE ??? oh god especially that one scene where feyre wakes rhys up by... yeah. 3) king of hybern fell so flat as a villain i was expecting to get more backstory or smthg on him but no he was just... there. and evil. for no real reason. and then they killed him. like... ok. 4) TAMLIN WAS SO OOC. AND I HATE HOW SHE VILLAINIZED HIM. i also find the whole fandoms take on tamlin to be very bland and ridiculous. like yeah he obviously was not the right person for feyre and he made some serious mistakes for which he should be held accountable, but he was traumatized too! he was a very flawed character but he's not a villain!!! that scene where he's like making rude sexual comments about feyre in front of everyone felt so ooc for him. hated it. 4) mor's coming out storyline was... very bizarrely handled, and frankly i just found it hard to believe that mor's sexuality was something sjm had planned from the start of the series. as a bi woman that whole plot just rubbed me the wrong way. anyway. ya those are my thoughts but i'm curious to know what u think about this series lolol

Oof complicated question. 

I think in general I come down positively on ACOTAR based mostly on the strength of the first 2 novels? I read ACOTAR and ACOMAF back to back right after ACOMAF came out, and let me tell you: I was obsessed. I was devastated. I was enthralled. It filled some very particular requirements for what I really wanted-- it was gorgeous and atmospheric and really frightening and romantic. I thought the characters were well developed, and I just thoroughly enjoyed the world-building with vicious alien faeries and the real sense of danger, as well as the magic and the breathtaking imagery. As a painter myself, I LOVED reading about painting in a way that felt so true to the actual experience of what it’s like-- so much rarer and harder to actually find than one would think-- ACOTAR and An Enchantment of Ravens are the only two novels I can think of that even grasp the experience. I loved Feyre as a human, loved loved loved the trials, and I loved how even after she became High Fae, there was an element to it that was incredibly disturbing-- the idea of having a human soul in a fae body, which meant that things that sort of roll off of the fae around her-- like violence and killing-- profoundly disturb her and wreck her soul. I loved that. (at least, that was how I interpreted the “be glad for your human heart” thing, and also why I assumed she didn’t recognize the mating bond... that maybe, as a human soul in a fae body, it would be lost in translation for her until it was actually consummated). 

One of the things I also really loved about ACOMAF was that it took everything in ACOTAR and subtly turned it on its side. At that point, I was used to 1st love = true love, so actually reading a narrative where a heroine could change partners was really refreshing, and I liked all the ways that, looking back, we could realize that Tamlin wasn’t it-- that he didn’t try to free her from Under the Mountain (wow that should have been obvious) or how he never offered to teach her to read in the 1st book. I also really liked Feyre’s observation that she needed to feel protected in the 1st book because of where she was coming from then, but that by the 2nd book, because of the trauma of her imprisonment, she felt smothered and trapped. I thought the 2nd book did a good job of showing how Tamlin and Feyre could be really trying to make their pieces fit together the way they once did, but they had both been too changed by their experiences to work and had in fact become poison for each other. They both had PTSD, and I felt that was clear in the narrative. And I was happy for Feyre to leave, I loved the exploration of her depression and her slow recovery, and I was okay with how Tamlin was presented in that way because there is a way in which he really was as helpless as her-- yes, his actions were abusive, but I didn’t think that came from having an abuser’s personality. The tragedy was in the fact that he was also suffering and screwed up, and that meant that Feyre had to leave for her own sake, and that Rhysand ended up being what she needed. 

I’ll put my problems with the series under the cut. 

My problems started in ACOWAR, and it was primarily a characterization problem with Feyre that bothered me. To be honest, SJ Maas has this thing where she makes her main characters (male and female) just the most extraordinary over the top horrendous bitches out of the blue and it’s just like what the fuck. I think she does it for drama, and while I love a cold bitch (NESTA IS MY QUEEN)... that’s not Feyre. Her actions in the Spring Court were so much crueler than I would have anticipated. And it bothered me the way that those actions hurt everyone there, which was wild to me, as it was her home once, and that’s not Feyre. She’s the girl so empathetic that she gave those water faeries her bracelet to use as tribute. That she mourned so hard it nearly broke her for those faeries she killed in her third task. The whole point of the 1st novel was that she started with hate in her heart, but that she’s naturally so empathetic when given a chance to think about anything other than bare survival that love comes rushing in. So, I really disliked Feyre being a bitch for the sake of being a bitch. She felt unrecognizable to me. I realized recently that part of this is that Feyre actually completes her character arc in the 2nd book-- at that point, she’s figured out who she is, gained peace, happiness, and empowerment through it, and found a home. She’s answered all of the conflict within herself, so there’s just not really anywhere for her character to go in the 3rd book, which is part of why she feels so weird as a pov character. 

There were other things of course. Rhys had lost that edge I loved in him so much. (what was the point of that prologue, btw?) This is a little thing but giving Lucien a last name really wrecked a lot of the wonderful strangeness of the world building and I resent it. Especially since no one else has a last name. Sarah was on the right track when she gave Rowan the last name “Whitethorn.” THAT is a faerie last name. I don’t know what this Vanserra stuff is. What else. Hybern was supes whatever. Feyre making bargains was pretty much what we’d seen before. I didn’t mind the sex scenes because that’s just what you can expect from an SJM novel, and I don’t really have any comments on Mor’s coming out story. I also suspect that she was originally written as straight in ACOMAF, but then SJM changed her mind while working on ACOWAR. I’m not going to fault her for attempting to write more inclusively and more diversely (which, as we know, is already not something she excels at). I did find the hook up with Lucien’s dad real awkward though for everyone involved though. YIKES. TOGAS. YIKES. SJM also does this thing in her finales where too much of the books tend to be about the battles and the actual war, and that’s not nearly as interesting as the character moments that might occur because of the war. 

So, that leaves my primary complaint, which is Tamlin. I kind of think that it’s not even a matter of him being OOC, so much as Feyre being completely hateful toward him. Like, I remember thinking he was wildly OOC when he was siding with Hybern, a human hater, as he had specifically said in the 1st book that he would always fight against that. I remember being THRILLED when it turned out that he was playing Hybern, and how disappointed he was in Feyre for ever thinking him capable of actually siding with Hybern and bringing up that conversation they had in ACOTAR. I also loved it when he helped her escape the POW camp, and when he told her to be happy at the end. But honestly, after Feyre fucked him over SO! HARD! in the beginning of the novel, not at all surprised that he showed up at that meeting ready to talk smack. I was on his side during that whole thing, because by that point, I was like, get wreckt Feyre. (Which KILLS ME because I LOVED Feyre in the first 2 books, I think SJM really does mistake just horrendous bitchiness with confidence or something? It just horrified and embarrassed me the whole novel). I really do hope that Tamlin gets some sort of arc going forward. I was so depressed by our visit in him in ACOFAS-- sitting alone in that crumbling manor. I think he actually does deserve a “redemption” arc, although I don’t think he actually has to be redeemed. 

On the subject of bitchy Feyre: I do NOT like the way she treats Nesta in ACOFAS. I guess we see that Feyre has an empathy problem in ACOTAR in that she totally misreads her sisters in the first few chapters and thinks of them in the most uncharitable light possible, and of course, once she decides she’s done with Tamlin, she always assumes the worst of him, but wow. The way she handles things with Nesta just horrifies me. I just can’t imagine treating my siblings like that, or extending them so little empathy. 

And ACOFAS made me think about building snowmen and other horrible fluffy things and it was not my favorite. 

But all this being said I know myself and I am definitely going to read A Court of Silver Flames. I think it might be really good, actually. 

#acotar