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moonlightreal · 19 hours
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Some magical toys
They’re fun to look at.
This thing
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Isn’t this thing marvelous? The beaker in the little twig stand! The jewel on the cauldron! The spellbook! The wand holder! This thing is so hecking cute! Ok, it wouldn't be in person. In person it would be too small, and all the parts all joined together so you can’t move the spellbook or the candle, it makes bingldey electronic noises and its plastic nature would be all too obvious. But maybe if I saved some sticks and boards I could make a real one!
Magic Mixies
Are neat. They are definitely neat. Mixing potion ingredients and waving a wand to summon your own plush familiar is top tier magical toy.
The price kept me from getting my own, but then they introduced the dolls and they are such wonderful dolls. The faces are amazing, they’re just so cute.
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The only problem is that if there are several you can’t resist, you accumulate several potion bottles that you don’t actually need. The website does have a section that suggests you make each pixling’s potion by filling the bottles with glitter and things which… ok, points for trying but it’s not reeeeeally a reuse option that actually works. I also thought that the bottles might look cool with battery operated candles inside. The bottles are neat items, it’s just that you end up with more than you have a use for so it becomes waste.
I emailed the company suggesting a “minimal packaging option for collectors” might be a good idea-- and I got a quite nice reply! I don’t know if they’ll listen, but you could message too if you wanted. The company really loves the magical reveal gimmick, and it is super cool, but the dolls are nice enough to stand on their own as a toy.
...I also told the company about treasure rocks, because if anybody’s going to bring them back it’ll be the company that’s big into the “magic reveal.” And I got no reply at all so I don’t think that’ll happen!
Wishcraft Toys
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I thought I saw these mentioned on the livejournal post about How To make Magic, but looking back I don’t see it there. Either way, this three-toy set includes a paper foldy fortune teller, a deck of tarot cards, and a pendulum with pendulum board.
The tarot cards aren’t great, they’re black and white with pink and blue accents, the art is just not much. The cards are marked on the back so if you look closely you can do the psychic thing of looking at the back of the card and knowing which one it is. They come with a printed felt reading cloth with a spread printed on it, and there’s a booklet with extremely basic descriptions o what the cards mean.
The pendulum is two plastic ends on a satin cord, with one of the ends containing a magnet. The cardboard pendulum board has a piece of metal inside it that will make the end of the pendulum skip around and appear to point at one of the fortunes printed on it. It’s a subtle effect, not flashy, but it is kind of neat. Or you can use the magnet-free end for a natural fortune.
And the foldy thing is a foldy thing. I’m an absolute sucker for packaged magic, but this package is not really worth it. You can make your own pendulum and you should drop twenty bucks for a deck of tarot cards that really call to you.
Safari Ltd also has a line called "Wishcraft" that are, as you might guess, mystical crafty kits.
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moonlightreal · 8 days
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“The story is both timely and timeless, and really has an opportunity to be told in a fresh way,” said [producer Iain] Canning, speaking to Variety from the offices of “The Neverending Story” literary agent AVA in Munich, Germany. “And part of the specialness of the book is that you can go back to it at different ages in your life and find different levels of meaning. So how wonderful that we have this opportunity to do a fresh perspective that will have new layers and meanings. We just believe that every generation deserves their own journey into Fantastica.”
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moonlightreal · 19 days
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Ok, this is a very odd tagline.
“Hunger is the best sauce” is a quote from Don Quixote, or so google tells me. It means that if you’re hungry enough plain food will be as enjoyable as fancy food would be if you were less hungry. Wiktionary puts it “Hunger makes one less concerned about the taste of one’s food.”
In the context of an author who hasn’t published anything in a quarter century it’s hard to read the message as anything but, “My next book may not be the greatest but I hope the long wait made you hungry enough to overlook that.”
And… my brain doesn’t think that’s what Ms. Smith means, I don’t know why any author would hint their next work might be subpar, even in a case like this one where it’s to be expected that Ms. Smith’s writing ability would be effected by everything she went through, any writer’s ability would be. But would she say that?
But I can’t un-see that meaning
But maybe I’m reading too much into this and Ms. Smith was thinking about vampires when she chose it, or maybe she has a website manager who googled quotes about hunger because vampires and didn’t think too deeply about the context!
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(Image reads 'hunger is the best sauce', found on L.J. Smith's website.)
Questionable, but okay.
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moonlightreal · 22 days
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Reconstructing Strange Fate, again
But longer, with more deductions and guesses.
Sarah’s story
Sarah is a normal girl with two boys…
Strange Fate seems to start with Sarah having a dream, whether it’s of Ash or Brionwy. She either wakes up and it’s time to go to school, or gets a migraine and starts having a vision while in class. She goes to the school bathroom to wash her face and fight the vision and her boys find her there. I think that leads to the sneak peek from the omnibus: The boys take Sarah home after she falls into a vision at school. They decide it’s time to kidnap her and take her to Circle Daybreak. While Mal gets the car, Kierlan takes advantage of Sarah being stuck in a nightmare to reinforce their soulmate status in her subconscious… which is a new bit of soulmate lore. The sneak peek ends as we start a flashback to how Sarah and Kierlan met. Presumably after that they would all go to the town of Harmony and that’s where they are when the apocalypse happens.
But before the apocalypse, the first dragons to wake up hunt down the youngest generation of Harmans and Redferns, particularly those who have soulmates. The mysterious figure who controls the dragons knows these people—our characters!--are dangerous to the dragons. Indeed Keller and friends, and Poppy and friends, are able to kill dragons. So the dragons are attacking everyone and Ash ends up being there to rescue them and help them travel to Harmony, with his last rescue being Mary-Lynette on the day the apocalypse begins. I think.
But if Sarah is seeing Ash’s rescues in her visions as they happen that’s four-ish rescues so four-ish dreams so four-ish chapters of Sarah’s awake life between the dreams before the apocalypse happens. What happens in those chapters? How do the dreams line up with Sarah getting kidnapped and taken to Harmony?
The apocalypse
So dragons destroy the cities with the most Circle Daybreak presence (how do they know?) then use their mind control power to call all the survivors to where they are. Probably some survivors get eaten and the rest are put into farms like we see in Brionwy’s story.
A nice simple end of the world!
When the dragons attack, our cast is in the Circle Daybreak town of Harmony, a hidden enclave where Thierry and Hannah are basically king and queen and night and day people live together in peace. Keller, Galen, Rashel, Quinn, and Thierry of the A-list characters are there
There are also “time bubbles” where our characters live, aging more slowly than the rest of the world. In Harmony there seems to be a large underground area where people live and where time is slowed down. This is a device to make the apocalypse happen years after the millennium but have all the characters still under 20 years old, and it is a completely bonkers idea. Thierry discovered time manipulation? Cryogenics is also mentioned, so the dude’s like Tony Stark he’s not just rich he randomly invents impossible stuff?! Anyway Harmony has a time bubble and so does San Francisco and other unnamed cities where lots of Circle Daybreak members live.
Ok, I can see Ms. Smith not wanting to make her characters 30 years old, but this “time bubbles” stuff is extremely silly. Just set the story “at the dawn of the new millennium,” make the exact year super vague, make the characters 18 or 19, and say Thierry got them “cutting edge tech” that does whatever they need real-world 2000s tech for.
The mission
Seven characters go on a mission to save the world and only two return. We know the four wild powers plus Hannah go on the mission. I assume the last two are Sarah and Mal since they’re the main characters of the book and Sarah should stay with both her soulmates, but we don’t know completely for sure.
They’re going out to face dozens, hundreds, even more than that, of dragons according to Keller who is upset that she couldn’t go along to protect Iliana.
What is the mission? We don’t know, but I have a guess. Since young Maya and Hellewise, and their mother, appear in Strange Fate I think we’re traveling back in time to find out how they sent the dragons to sleep long ago. So we get to meet young Maya and Hellewise. Which will be interesting for Hannah!
I do not like the time travel. Maybe if they cast a spell to look back in time that would work, but going full “Thierry is Tony Stark and invented time manipulation” is just too far outside of what a Night World story is! But since there are time bubbles, I think Ms. Smith does go full on “hop in the tardis!” time travel.
So they learn the secret from the first witches and… what? With the wild powers needing blood to call the blue fire I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a ritual where they have to spill all their blood and sacrifice themselves to save the world. Or, since we’re back in time, maybe the visitors from the future add their powers to the original binding spell so the dragons will never wake up, and the apocalypse un-happens in the future.
And we have to find out who the big bad is and defeat him or her.
The blurb says “seven set out on a mission and only two return” and that suggests it’s one mission. Maybe the entire time travel, threat of hundreds of dragons, and dealing with the big bad all happen within a short time period. Nobody takes the new lore home to Harmony so everyone can gather in the war room (which Harmony has) and make a plan to use whatever secrets have been learned, is what I mean. One mission no rest stops. This means the big bad has to be someone who’s along on the trip or someone they meet on the way, one more point in favor of Mal being the big bad.
Only two return, and I think the most likely are Jez and Delos, who have soulmates to come back to, or Sarah and her surviving soulmate since she’s the hero of this book. This doesn’t mean the others necessarily die. They could choose to stay in the past, go off on a quest to travel the world and help rebuild, transform into another type of being, or any other not-actually-death option that doesn’t bring them back to Harmony.
I think Hannah will die though, since we know she’ll come back. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if at the end of the book whichever character is pregnant has her baby and it’s Hannah reborn.
The end for the world
If our heroes win and avoid Brionwy’s dark future, what future do they get? There are a lot of ways it could go. Maybe humans and Night people know about each other and live in peace. Maybe humans start sprouting powers so everyone is equally supernatural—or some great power makes all Night People into humans. Or maybe things reset. Most of humanity forgets about the dragons and believes the apocalypse was a natural disaster. The surviving Night People decide to stay separate from humankind, and there are still some evil night people. So things stay as they were. I think this is the most likely outcome, since one of Ms. Smith’s posts suggests that she was thinking of possibly writing more books afterwards!
That’s my reconstruction of the main plot and it has more questions than answers. Whole sections of the story are still unknown.
So let’s try to fill in some gaps by looking at the details and characters.
“One from the twilight to be one with the dark”
Officially, in every canon that says anything, it says Kierlan is the fourth wild power. But how is a shapeshifter “from the twilight”? He’s solidly Night World. I’d think Mal the vampire-witch would be a better fit, since vampires are a lot more night-ish than witches. I also think it might turn out that Sarah is secretly the fourth wild power. If she is not a witch but something new, a human with powers that no Night Person has, that could count as “the twilight” since she’s not a Night Person or a daylight human.
I suspect the “one from” prophecy was written before Ms. Smith knew who the wild powers would be.
“A witch who is not a witch”
Who is the big bad? Who released the dragons? I can think of a few possibilities.
-Mal Harman is a witch who’s also a vampire, so he’s a witch and not a witch. If I had to bet, it would be on Mal.
-Maya, an ancient witch who became the first vampire is a witch who became not a witch. But she is very dead after centuries of murderizing Hannah lots of times. Did she cast a spell to release the dragons before she died? Is she still around as a spirit? Vampires don’t reincarnate but nobody ever said they can’t be ghosts. The Maya in Strange Fate is young Maya of the stone age. So maybe she was part of the spell to imprison the dragons and she worked in something to release them later so they’d be grateful to her.
-Sarah Strange. She has some kind of mystical power, she dreams of the future and can astral project herself at least. But she seems to be officially a human so maybe she’s some kind of new creature, someone who isn’t descended from Hellewise but has magical powers. Like a witch but not a witch. Maybe the dragons reached out to her sensitive spirit and used her to awaken without her being aware of it.
The dragon also said it was, “Someone you’ll never know” and “we made our own alliance.” which suggests not Sarah since we’ve seen her point of view and she didn’t mention dragon buddies.
The Night World wiki suggests that Sylvia, who got pissed off at the other witches and declared herself no longer one of them, might technically count, but by that logic Thea is also possible. She is a witch who everyone thinks is not a witch, and she has a special gift with animals. Maybe the dragons are animalish enough that they could use her the same way I imagined them using Sarah.
Sarah Strange
We have quite a lot about who Sarah is but nothing about what she is. Other than a Mary Sue, which she very is. Everybody in Circle Daybreak is captivated by her. She has prophetic dreams, can astrally project herself to be seen by Ash, and has a special connection to plants- though it’s not clear whether that’s an actual power or just part of her personality.
And Mal and Kierlan think Sarah can do something to “help establish harmony between humans and creatures of the Night World to stave off the apocalypse.” In fact it sort of seems like Mal and Kierlan have been assigned to Sarah to be her guardians because she’s special. But Kierlan met Sarah when they were little kids and Sarah’s visions hadn’t started then so maybe there were other clues. In fact Sarah’s visions started when her mother died, so is there something special about her mother? Could Sarah be a half breed like Jez, and have unusual powers because of that, somehow? Is Sarah part of a prophecy? We already had one unforeshadowed prophecy girl with Iliana so a second one seems like too much but Sarah is a similar character to Iliana, they’re both soulful and more than they seem, with deep kindness and mysterious powers.
And she has two soulmates, somehow. In her posts LJ Smith just says “she has two soulmates,” Ms. Smith has given zero hint that there’s anything else going on, but there are also hints of, “Who is her real soulmate?” So there might be something else going on.
Could one of Sarah’s silver cords have been created? Mal is one of Sarah’s soulmates, he’s a witch and a lamia and my pick for undercover baddie. Lamia are telepathic and witches can cast spells that manipulate emotions, so he is the guy most likely to be able to create a soulmate connection where one was not naturally there. And Kierlan couldn’t sense the silver cord Sarah shares with Mal.
And we have a preview where one of Sarah’s soulmates is terrified that she will break the connection and leave him, which was not something any Night World character could do before or Rashel or Mary-Lynette would definitely have tried! Open and shut case, Mal created a connection so it’s more fragile than a true silver cord, Mal’s the baddie… except that the boy in terror of losing his connection to Sarah was Kierlan, not Mal. So much for that theory!
It’s also possible that having two soulmates is something special about Sarah. Maybe she can create silver cords to connect to the people she loves. This would go against the established lore that being soulmates is something that just happens-- the mystical connection happens because two people are perfect for each other, it’s an effect not a cause. But maybe Sarah is a different sort of person so things work differently for her.
Ms. Smith said the silver cords “have an additional function” in Strange Fate. It could be that this additional function is protection from dragon telepathy, since Mary-Lynette doesn’t hear the dragon’s call that takes everyone else away after her college is destroyed. That would also be why the soulmated pairs are the biggest threat to the dragons.
Unless. If having a silver cord protects you from dragon magnetism, maybe the dragon magnetism is in some way related. Maybe the dragons create bonds to people to control them. If this is right, that puts Kierlan in the running for fake soulmate, maybe when he fell in love with Sarah when they were both children his Drache powers instinctively created a bond to her, he doesn’t even know he has this power but he instinctively knows that Sarah could break the bond.
Maybe?
I feel like I’m on to something with my Holmesian deductive skills but really this is all just a guess.
Figuring out her two soulmates has to be a big part of Sarah’s story. And I feel like she has to end up with only one. A threesome ending just feels too wild for LJ Smith, so I think something has to take one of the boys out of the picture. Either Kierlan sacrifices himself as the wild power, or Mal is revealed to be the baddie, or one of the silver cords turns out to be artificially created. Something.
Kierlan Drache
Galen’s cousin, a big cat shifter-- a tiger, according to a piece of fanart on LJ Smith’s page. I’m not sure if the artist knew for sure but orange hair so we’re going to assume tiger. He has dark red hair and tawny eyes, and he’s a practical joker.
We see a bit from Kierlan’s point of view so we know a bit about his inner life. He has been in love with Sarah since they met as children, and he has always known they’re soulmates. But he is desperate for her to love only him and not Mal too. It seems like Kierlan can see his silver cord with Sarah, but not Sarah’s cord with Mal, so he may not know Sarah is also soulmates with Mal, which would make him very confused as to how Sarah can love her Soulmate and also someone else. Also Kierlan never thinks about how he’s the fourth wild power. We know he is, but does he know he is?
Kierlan calls Mal his “soul’s brother.” Does this just mean that they’re close friends or do they have a mystical connection as well? Kierlan doesn’t say he sees a silver cord between himself and Mal, but it’s not impossible that there are platonic silver cords as well. (also the two of them vibe kinda Daemon and Lucivar. Has Ms. Smith read the Black Jewels trilogy? I think she’d like it.)
Kierlan is also afraid that Sarah will cut the silver cord between them. Is this even possible? Does this mean that Kierlan and Sarah’s silver cord is artificially created and cuttable where natural ones aren’t? I wonder how much new lore Ms. Smith is going to add, here at the end of the series.
Mal Harman
Is the son of a Redfern Lamia and a Harman witch so he has both bloodlines, but he seems to use the Harman last name. This puts him at the number one spot for the “witch who isn’t a witch” who woke the dragons. Having a witch’s power to cast love spells and a vampire’s telepathy this makes him also likely to be able to create a silver cord where one wasn’t naturally there. And his name means “bad.”
Mal has sleek dark hair and very pale gray eyes. He’s “master of the cold stare,” a cool and aloof personality. In a lot of YA the cold, dark-haired boy is the one the heroine ends up with, including in the Dark Visions series.
The two boys had a gentleman’s agreement that Kierlan, who knew Sarah first, was the one who would get her even though Mal also loved her and Sarah loves both of them. Mal agreed never to interfere with Sarah and Kierlan’s relationship. But he broke his promise—or at least Kierlan thinks he did. Kierlan had to use his mental powers to “show Mal the truth”—but I’m not sure what that truth is. Maybe just that Mal loves Sarah, but I don’t think having feelings counts as breaking a promise to not interfere. Eh, it’s unclear.
The rest of the gang
Everybody got a badass upgrade, like when Doctor Who’s old companions show up and somehow they all ended up working for Unit and shooting things.
Rashel and Quinn are married.
Hanna and Thierry are married.
And one couple is having a baby, if we subtract the wild power couples and the couples with made vampires, that leaves Thea or Gillian as the mom to be.
Circle Daybreak has taken down the worst Night World enclaves and freed the human slaves… without the rest of the world knowing? Maybe the human slaves just stayed put as free people and didn’t try to integrate into modern society. Now Circle Daybreak has presence in some cities and there are “time bubbles where people age more slowly… without the rest of the world knowing?
Uh… what? Ok I get that LJ Smith wants the characters to still be 17 years old but she wants to set the story later than 1999 because it’s going to be published after 1999, but this is a very weird way to go about it.
Thierry is also basically a king, and while I am down with him being an inspiring leader to whom people pledge their allegiance, he also has a herald come into the room and go, “All rise!” and everybody has to stand up. And Thierry immediately says it’s fine and acts like a normal person but he still has this herald…
Ms. Smith went some weird places, is what I’m saying.
The Circle Daybreak town seems to be very advanced technologically even if it’s gone backward politically. Thierry has trained guards and professionals, a whole town, a sort of inverted tower where people live underground in the slowed time before returning to normal time on the surface. (maybe the time bubbles are a natural phenomenon they discovered rather than created?) and some helicopters. A LOT has been done to build this enclave. Thierry has unlimited money but how did he get the people? How did he hide it from both the humans and the evil night worlders?
Does humanity know about the Night World by the time of Strange Fate The pieces we’ve seen say no, Human society is still chugging along with Sarah in a house and high school all normal, but it strains my suspension of disbelief that all this could be built without all of humanity noticing.
The Story Thus Far
So that’s what I make of all the factoids and mentions and preview chapters we’ve seen so far. I would love to hear what you made of them. Do you think it’s time travel? It’s such a stretch! Do you think the evidence points to Mal as the big bad? It seems so likely but also so unlikely! Do you think there’s a surprise fourth wild power who isn’t Kierlan? What do you think is up with Sarah? What do you think the world will be like at the end of the story?
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moonlightreal · 23 days
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Ah, the probably seventies. The books of the time are a hoot.
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moonlightreal · 24 days
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The Lyrical Nanoha post
Today on “what to watch while waiting for season nine,” here’s my post on Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, one of my favorite magical girl series.
So what’s marvelous in Lyrical Nanoha? The worldbuilding. There’s so much stuff in this show! Magical girls, magical girls in sports, magical girls in organized strike teams, magical girls in the government. Magic jewels, magic staffs, magic guns, magic plushies, magic rollerblades, upgrade devices (that look like tiny cute anime girls) magic circles, shapeshifters, cyborgs (that also look like cute anime girls) ancient weapons (that look like cute anime girls too) reincarnation, cloning, dimension ships, different worlds, ancient empires, and dragons.
I love that the devices talk and change shape. The visuals are wonderful. The transformation sequences are great and the attacks are cool. The stories are heartfelt and all the characters are fun, even if there are sometimes too many to keep straight. And Nanoha is one of the few magical girl series that has a whole magical world that the girls visit and eventually move to permanently.
Some parts of all-things-lyrical are available streaming on Prime but other parts are unlicensed so you can sail the seven seas guilt-free. There’s a site called “nyaa” where I have in the past gotten my hands on unlicensed anime. You can read the manga here, but the manga has 1)fanservice, including of underage characters, which the anime does not have and 2)a lot of characters who kind of all look the same which makes it less fun to read than some.
The series is also special because it shifts genre as the franchise goes on, starting as a traditional magical girl story, turning into a kind of technomagical war story, then unexpectedly morphing into a sports anime.
And, ooh look, I can link all the openings.
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Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha
Your standard magical girl plot. Young Nanoha meets a magical ferret who gives her a transformation device because he needs her help to collect “jewel seeds” that can turn things into monsters. The ferret is actually a boy, an archaeologist who was transporting the magical items when an accident stranded him on earth. But a mysterious blonde girl with magic of her own is trying to get the jewel seeds too! Nanoha sees sadness in her rival’s eyes and resolves to save her, even as authorities from the magic dimension come to help get the situation under control.
And here begins the strange theme of the series: our heroines make friends by defeating them, in combat! It’s really very odd.
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Nanoha A’s
Nanoha and Fate make a new friend, a wheelchair user named Hayate. Little do they know their new friend has magic of her own. Hayate’s health is deteriorating and her three magical guardians are desperate to save her at any cost. Nanoha and Fate can only help them by… defeating them in combat!
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Nanoha Strikers
The third series is 26 episodes and jumps ahead to when the girls are in their twenties. They’ve moved to the magic dimension of Midchilda where they work for the government as professional magical girls responding to disasters. They’ve also become teachers. Nanoha’s two proteges Subaru and Tiana and Fate’s two proteges Erio and Caro learn to use their magical items and soon the whole gang is faced with an emergency! A villain has created a bunch of minions, who need to be befriended by defeating them in combat. He’s also created a clone of an ancient queen in the form of a little girl and, more than just befriending her, Nanoha adopts her.
StrikerS is a good series, it has loads of worldbuilding, new characters, epic battles, all kinds of good stuff. But having your magical girls be adult professionals who have military ranks is a big change from schoolgirls on Earth so it may weird your magical girl vibe.
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Nanoha Vivid
Changes the vibe again. Now it’s a sports anime! With no enemies attacking, Nanoha and Fate’s daughter Vivio only needs to use her magic to compete in transformed martial arts. Vivio is the clone of an ancient queen, and she meets a cool emotionless girl who is the reincarnation of a friend of that queen and is driven by her ancestral memories to become the strongest fighter. She needs befriending through defeat! I do quite like that aspect: Einhart turns up driven by her past life memories to become the strongest and gets told quite matter-of-factly to join a gym and channel her mystical urges productively!
Vivid is a sports anime with transformation sequences. (in which the little girls become adults and body parts inflate like balloons.) The world of Midchilda seems less magical than it did in StrikerS; Vivio and her friends train at a gym that’s pretty much like a gym in our world and Vivio’s magic item doesn’t talk or change shape. The anime of Vivid also comes after some audio dramas and animates a small part of a manga, so the anime has a bunch of characters that are just there with no explanation of who they are, and it doesn’t end at the end. The manga is very long and is more about putting the characters in a series of cute costumes than actually having a story. I mean there is a story but boy do they spend a lot of time in swimsuits and Chinese dresses and maid outfits and more swimsuits...
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Vivid Strike
Nanoha has moved on from her own series. The new heroine is a girl named Fuuka who has become estranged from her friend Rinne after Rinne experienced bullying and became a cold and closed-off person. How can Fuuka break through her friend’s shell and restore their relationship? Maybe her new friend Vivio can help!
Vivid Strike is a spinoff story that stars Fuuka with Vivio and her friends as side characters. The anime is a complete story arc and it’s a good show. But Midchilda has become even less magical; it now has normal non-flying cars and Fuuka gets in a fight with some gangstas. I’m pretty sure the government we saw in StrikerS wouldn’t let there be gangstas in the city!
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moonlightreal · 27 days
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Night World unfinished business
Strange Fate’s B-plot is Ash helping the protagonists of the previous books as the apocalypse approaches. It looks like the “help” is just hat he shows up with a helicopter and rescues them from the dragons, who are threatened by the younger Harmans and Redferns and their soulmates. But before we learned that I thought about other situations Ash could find the characters in. So, what unfinished business do the characters have?
Secret Vampire
Poppy and James are setting out to find Poppy’s father, a lost witch. He’s apparently been… being a hippie… all over the country, led by his psychic powers. So what interesting things has he gotten up to over the years? How does he react when he learns about the Night World and that his daughter is now a vampire? Poppy’s brother Phil has chosen a human life, but we know that’s not going to work out for him. How does the Night World pull him back in? Could he have a soulmate? And how do they break the hews to poppy’s mother after she has mourned her child?
Daughters of Darkness
Ash may be off being a knight but his sisters are still in a small town. They’ve defeated the local werewolf, but he might have family coming to inherit the homestead. We also have three vampires who have never lived modern human lives, starting at modern human high school with Mary-Lynette and Mark to help them fit in. Could fierce Kestrel or responsible Rowan have human soulmates?
Spellbinder
Thea has given up being a witch to be with her soulmate. Everybody thinks she’s forgotten all about the Night World, and if she lets on that she remembers she’s toast. But she’ll still be in high school with her friend Dani and two Circle Midnight witches who will probably bully her. How will she manage every day without reaching out to Dani and spilling the beans?
Blaise has been exiled to the Convent under the steely eyes of Great Aunt Ursula. She’s sure to find some way to wreak havoc. Blaise has a lot of sequel because she’s such an awful person that it could be fun to get into her head, see what motivates her to be so terrible and what it would take to get her a redemption arc.
Dark Angel
Gillian is a lost witch, and will probably study witch lore with the only witch she knows, Melusine who works at a witchy shop. Gillian’s next goal will be to help her mother, a lost witch who had psychic powers that she couldn’t control and turned to alcohol to calm her nerves. Gillian will have to help her mother recover from her addiction and learn to use her powers.
Gillian also has a special gift: she can see spirits, thanks to coming back from the dead. What other spirits might she encounter? Will she become a kind of medium, helping lost souls fix their unfinished business and find peace? Gillian has a lot of sequel potential.
The Chosen
We left Rashel and Quinn heading to join up with Circle Daybreak with a traumatized human girl turned vampire hunter named Nyala and Timmy, Rashel’s childhood friend Timmy who is a made vampire stuck at four years old. So their first problems will be getting their friends some help,. What kind of mental health resources does Circle Daybreak have? Is there a way Timmy can be turned human again, or a spell that can make him age so his brain will develop and he can have a life as a person? Rashel also wants to reach out to the vampire hunters she knows and help them see that vampires are not all totally evil. I’m sure that will go completely fine and they definitely won’t want to murderize her for betraying the cause and fraternizing with the enemy! Yeah Ash could definitely rescue her from pissed off fellow vampire hunters.
Then there’s Rashel and Keller’s twin retcon. I’m not sure if I like it because it gives Keller more possible family plots and Rashel some learning-to-shapeshift plots, or dislike it because it’s so obviously a retcon. But it would provide interesting situations for Rashel to be in. What if she got stuck since she’s new to shifting?
Soulmate
Hannah’s sequel story is how she and Thierry set up Circle Daybreak as a thing with its own enclaves and towns and communications network. How did they find the decent Night People? Did they make any mistakes and invite in anyone who later turned out to be a real jerk? Does Hannah want to try to find other people from her past lives? She could also be a source for prophecies, maybe she was there in some ancient temple when a seer received the prophecy in the first place, Hannah could remember the exact words and describe what it was like to be there.
Soulmate is also the book that introduced a friendly werewolf. I feel like the werewolves went underused in the series, the whole “nobility of the pack” thing never turned up or got any screentime. Maybe Ms. Smith just didn’t want to do the whole alpha/beta/omega thing that everybody else does, but everybody else does it because it’s kinda fun plot stuff! Or a writer could do anything else they wanted with the werewolves, there’s not much canon culture for them, so it’s a blank canvas.
Huntress
Jez has plenty of background but one thing we don’t know is how Circle Daybreak learned the apocalypse is coming at all, and what the signs are?
Black Dawn
There is prequel potential here. We’ve never seen much of life in a Night world enclave. How did the masters here learn Delos is the wild power? What was his life like before Maggie descended upon it?
Witchlight
Again prequel potential. How did the witches figure out Iliana is the Wild Power? What is the Witch Child prophecy? Is it ancient or did Aradia just have a vision recently? An ancient prophecy that witches have been debating about for ages works better since people can have different views about what the Witch Child is all about. We don’t even know what the prophecy is but if it were something like “a lost witch with a pure spirit who will lead all witches down a new path” that could mean that her spirit is purely witchy and evil.
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moonlightreal · 1 month
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Some thoughts on AI art for magical beings
I have many opinions about AI art, some of which contradict other opinions that I also have, but this is a magical things tumblr, so here are two opinions of interest to magical beings.
1) AI art gives magical beings who come from other realms a chance to have images of places, people and creatures that don’t exist here on Earth. With enough fiddling, you can make a picture of a place you’ve seen that you could never take a camera to. A place you have seen, but can’t see with your eyes in this world, you can make a picture and see it with your eyes. And that means something, to someone’s heart.
2) I like cryptids. I don’t believe in cryptids exactly, but if anyone got good evidence for one I would be there for it. And good clear video would be evidence. But soon anybody will be able to make a good video of a cryptid, and that means if anybody ever does get a real, actual good video of a cryptid nobody will see that as evidence and investigate further. That way of noticing something new in the world will be gone.
I don't have much of a conclusion from those two thoughts, maybe "Ai art has good and bad effects" which is only the most obvious conclusion ever.
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moonlightreal · 1 month
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Iginio Straffi teasing a potential new Winx Club member on Instagram stories. 07.19.2023
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moonlightreal · 1 month
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The big Strange Fate factoids roundup
Presented here is every bit of information about the plot of Strange Fate I could find, with links to sources. Canon is in bold, my commentary is in normal text, links are all here so if they don’t link you should be able to copy-paste. If you find anything I’m missing, please send it to me! I found sources for all the orphaned factoids that had been floating around in my brain, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t more out there.
Have fun! (it’s nine pages long...)
What about Strange Fate—really https://www.facebook.com/notes/684528395496843/?locale=hi_IN&paipv=0&eav=AfYTUg-qPuddohcLG_4yYui3c9CIr3W9GNa_yAwvyD7JeBCZ13KAEuoBWZhHUpOcR1A
I used new stories about what happens after a year to all the soulmate couples in the Night World series. They all had exciting stories to tell: Ash Redford is doing good deeds to make amends so that Mary-Lynnette will accept him as her soulmate. Poppy has developed her telepathy into a weapon against evil. Rashel and Quinn are married, as are Thierry and Hannah. And one lucky couple is expecting a baby.
From… I thought it was the author’s note from amazon for the hardcover editions, but it has a picture signature so may have been from LJ Smith’s website.
Although Thierry is an old vampire, he isn’t the oldest vampire. There is one older, the one who Changed him. She provides another thread that binds the series: the pitiless Maya. Maya is the first vampire, the witch who finds the secret of eternal life—and chooses to use it for evil. But there will be plenty more about her, including a look at the young Maya, her sister Hellewise, and their mother, Hecate Witch-Queen, in the upcoming Strange Fate.
From LJ Smith’s blog
18 August 2010, Ms. Smith answering a question about how she developed the idea of silver cords
https://web.archive.org/web/20131226172041/http://webmail.ljanesmith.net/blog/2010/238-more-news-a-the-silver-cord-a-dont-despair-delena
Imagine how Sarah Strange of Strange Fate, the last, LONG overdue Night World series when she sees two silver cords connecting her to the two guys she loves best in the world. Can I say confused? Maybe flummoxed is better.
And the silver cords have an additional function that won't be explained until Strange Fate finally comes out--I hope and pray in 2011. Something that may make it all make sense at last.
19 December 2011 https://web.archive.org/web/20120512010007/http://www.ljanesmith.net/www/blog/2011
An image of Hecate Witch-Queen’s family tree of all the Redferns and Harmans with notes about what books the characters appear in. Here’s the list for Strange Fate:
Hecate herself, Hellewise, Iliana, and Aradia,
Thea and Blaise and Aunt Ursula
Phil and Poppy and their mother Phillipa, and James
Gillian
Maya Dragonslayer, the first vampire
Thierry and Hannah
Delos and Jez
Rowan, Kestrel and Jade and Ash
and
Mal Redfern Harman, vampire and witch
Ms. Smith also says,
I hope to do the same thing for the shapeshifters, although information about them is much more sparse. STRANGE FATE will clear up much of that confusion, and at last there will be enough about werewolves and other ’shifters to put onto paper. Right now, most people know that Galen Drache of the First Family of the Shapeshifters, whose chosen shape is a leopard to match his soulmate Keller’s black panther, has a cousin named Kierlan Drache who also chose a shape in the large cat family. And if you look at the very bottom of Hecate’s family tree you’ll find the vampire who is also a witch, although he hasn’t cultivated his powers, Mal Redfern Harman. (Witches are matrilineal—they pass the name through the female line). They’re the two soulmates of the human girl Sarah Strange.
So Mal is a hybrid and Kierlan the wild power is some kind of big cat. So much for my idea that he could be a good dragon! Also Hecate and Hellewise appear, and Maya may not be as dead as previously assumed.
24 June 2012 answering a fan question about recommending her own books, Ms. Smith posts the blurb for Last Lullaby https://web.archive.org/web/20130508094847/http://www.ljanesmith.net/blog/2012/560-some-interesting-questions-from-ziggy
or those who actually can fly: my latest book, THE LAST LULLABY, over 700 pages, and once part of STRANGE FATE. It is the tale of Brionwy and her guttersnipe friend, Crispy, who . . . oh, here’s the blurb:
THE LAST LULLABY is the story of Brionwy, daughter of Branwen, a courtesan in the harem of the Lord Overseer, Rajan Adani, who is the head of a Great House under the rule of the Masters. In this post-Apocalypse story, magic exists, but is rarely seen. Brionwy befriends Crispy, a little girl, or fawn, who has escaped from the pens in which all humans but the serving slaves of the Overseer, the guards, and the “humble and pathetic” Beauties in the harem are kept like animals.
Crispy has named herself for the burns that cover half of her body and have withered one of her arms. She considers herself slightly abled because of her baby arm; it looks useless but is almost as strong as the other. Tough, cynical, and quick to laugh at herself or others, Crispy’s life changes the day that she peeps through a hole in the harem wall and listens to Brionwy playing her lute and singing a heart-rending lullaby. Together, the two girls who come from the most different backgrounds imaginable, and with the help of Crispy’s gang of dwarfed, misshapen, deaf, and otherwise abled misfits, solve the mystery of a strange prophecy that leads to the secret of the nearby caverns and of how to fight the Masters. Despite the fearsome Guntra, Head Dwenna of Brionwy’s Concubine Pavilion; despite the Overseer himself, Brionwy and Crispy find themselves leading a revolution that will change the lives of all who belong to the Overseer’s Great House forever.
When THE LAST LULLABY comes out will be up to the publisher who buys it. Unlike all my other books since THE NIGHT OF THE SOLSTICE, I wrote it before trying to sell it.
1 Feb 2013 Sarah Strange description https://web.archive.org/web/20130703170137/http://www.ljanesmith.net/blog/2013/592-sarah-strange-of-strange-fate
I'm not really sure if this is the right place to post this, but I did do an avatar for Sarah Strange. As I work toward what I hope is the end of this book, really how extraordinarily fond I am of her, although she does not have outstanding brains and beauty. Sarah's qualities are more internal, and though she may have an ordinary face and ordinary brown hair, she has a deep, fierce love for all creatures flawed or fallen, or helpless, or striving. She loves forests and sees trees as dryads. She loves animals. She may be a little flat-chested, a little clumsy, a little naive, and a lot shy, but she never stops trying, or loving, or doing her best to understand.
Here she is, with brown hair that is always a bit disheveled and falling in her face, and with the Avatar version of her best feature:  aquamarine eyes that always look as if they are full of unshed tears.
4 Feb 2013 Strange Fate chapter 1 outline https://web.archive.org/web/20130628210912/http://www.ljanesmith.net/blog/2013/594-strange-fate-chapter-1-outline-with-ch-1-download
Ash and redhead: Ash: I’m trying to make amends for the harm that I did to you. Madelyn: At two o’clock in the morning in a cemetery?  Are you crazy?  First you stalk me and hide out in my closet so you can come out once I’m asleep in bed—” “I didn’t stalk you.  I don’t need to stalk you.  I just used a little magic to come in your bedroom window—” “And now you’re telling me all kinds of impossible lies—“ “They’re not lies.  I don’t lie anymore—well, not much anymore, and if you’d just give me a chance—“ “If you think this is the way to win a girl’s heart, then I have a hot news flash for you—” “But it is the way to win a girl’s heart.  Um . . . not your heart, is sort of the point.  Someone else’s . . .” “You brought me out here to talk about some other girl?” Madelyn hits him. Ash explains:
Who he is
What he is
What the Night World is
What he’s trying to do for his soulmate
Who Mary-Lynnette is 
Ash is divided into boredom of going through rote explanations (Madelyn is Lightly Bitten Girl #97) and an uncanny sense that something is around.  That something is stalking him.
Eventually he turns around, sees nothing, looks higher …  and higher … and higher … and sees evil red eyes staring down at him.    His mind reels.  He sees a flash of purple, shouts, “Look out” to Madelyn and dives for her.  She dodges, spraying him with pepper spray.  He staggers back; there is a black (violet-edged) flame like a burst from a flame-thrower and then there is only Ash, and a white silhouette of a woman on a charcoal-black wall.  Dreamily, Ash goes and scrapes a little of the charcoaled blackness off the wall outside the shadow when he once again feels something behind him.  He whirls and finds himself staring at Sarah: description (aquamarine eyes, ordinary face, mouse-brown hair). Sarah wakes up, tosses mouse-brown hair off her face, and realizes she is late for school.
You can also read the whole chapter. Mary-Lynette is in college. Sarah is fifteen or sixteen, so younger than the other characters. She dreams of Ash and appears to him as a ghost. So, astral projection. She has an instinctive loathing for vampires.
Ask LJ question about Strange Fate’s release—undated but accessible without the wayback machine. https://ljanesmith.net/ask-l-j/
“I don’t know.  As you’ve probably heard, I wanted to publish this epic in two volumes, but Simon & Schuster did not.  I had what I felt was a complete volume already finished—the first half of Strange Fate, called The Mystic—before I began to write any of my recent Vampire Diaries books Nightfall, etc).  At this point, I don’t even have a signed contract for Strange Fate, but I keep working on it, these days using the ‘cameo appearance’ of old soulmates and friends in place of seeing a post-apocalypitic fututre with Brionwy and her young friend Crispy.”
And, yes, it is true that Brionwy’s Lullabye was originally part of Strange Fate, but the post apocalyptic future that Sarah Strange dreamed about Brionwy and her friends sort of took over the whole book.  So I had to extract them, and instead had Sarah dream about the soulmated couples you’ve already seen in Night World.  This turned out to be much better for Strange Fate anyway, as you get to see Poppy and James, and Phillip and every other pair of soulmates in the series, even if its just a cameo role.  I plan to write Brionwy’s Lullabye as a book of its own.  I do love the characters.”
Question about strong female characters
Some of my characters don’t start out as strong girls. They start out as shy, introverted or gentle girls, like Cassie Blake of The Secret Circle, or Jenny Thornton of The Forbidden Game. Then the story is about how they become stronger, through their terrifying experiences and their concern for other people. Strange Fate has this kind of a heroine, Sarah Strange.”
The stories https://web.archive.org/web/20191019132319/http://www.ljanesmith.net/stories/stories
These stories take place during the apocalypse, while the Wild Powers are off on their mission. You should go read the whole thing, but here are the factoids I got from each of them.
Thicker than Water
The characters live in the Circle Daybreak town of Harmony, with Thierry and Hannah basically ruling as king and queen. The town has cryogenics and a scientific/magical effect that makes time pass slower in the “underground tower that is the heart of the town.” The town has a park on the surface where shapeshifters and vampires can hunt animals. Dragons try to infiltrate the town. San Francisco has been destrpyed.
The wild powers are fighting against hundreds of dragons. Iliana has acquired the title Mistress of Air.
Hannah has gone with the wild powers on the mission. Thierry has not. Keller and Galen and Rashel and Quinn are still in Harmony.
Everyone was very impressed by Sarah, she’s “almost a dryad” and has prophetic dreams. So everybody met her at some point.
Keller and Rashel are twins, born to one human and one shapeshifter. Timmy has been retconned to Rashel’s friend not her brother.
Those who Favor Fire
The Circle Daybreak members have started wearing white flower pendants as identification and also as to who you gave your allegiance to. The jewelry serves as a key to get into Harmony. Thierry is basically king, but at least Iliana has her followers. Circle Daybreak has many trained professionals who have taken out the nastier Night World enclaves and imprisoned the nastiest vampires and shapeshifters.
There was also a “time bubble” in San Francisco.
Cambridge Massachusetts has been destroyed as the beginning of the apocalypse. The dragons suddenly start destroying cities with Circle Daybreak enclaves in them. Fire, weirdly colored sky. The dragons put a telepathic call on all humans and most of them walked off to meet the dragons. Some stayed behind to capture people who didn’t hear the call. Mary-Lynette didn’t, so probably having a soulmate protects you.
Sarah and her boys are in Harmony when things go down. Thierry gifted her a helicopter, which she gives Ash so he can look for Mary-Lynette.
Mary-Lynette rescues a girl names Devi who has very important pictures faxed from her mother in antarctica… The mother is studying meteorites and has found something that Devi thinks might save the world. We don’t know what the pictures are, and how a human would find the answer to the problem of “dragons” isn’t clear.
This is the last Ash rescue story and it happens as the apocalypse kicks off. So if Sarah has been dreaming the other stories as they happen, then a good bit of Strange Fate happens before the apocalypse. What is Sarah doing while she’s awake all that time?
Strange Fate Previews and chapters https://web.archive.org/web/20191020013828/http://mail.ljanesmith.net/stories/sneak-peeks
Poppy, Phil and James
Poppy has become a badass warrior with her vampire strength, and can use her telepathy to control human minds. She can also use it as an anti-dragon weapon, with help from James and Phil! Also Phil has joined Team Circle Daybreak and is riding the helicopter with Ash.
Aradia had a vision that whoever is controlling the dragons knows that the youngest generation of Harmans and Redferns, especially the ones with soulmates, are able to fight the dragons.
Brionwy’s Lullaby
In this dark future beautiful human girls are courtesans, raised in basically harems to be food and mates for vampire overlords. They are guarded by eunuchs and kept in line by “dwennas” women who raise, teach and discipline them. The girls are drugged but it’s not clear why. When one girl has a baby, it is taken away and the mother is told it has died, but clearly it’s still alive and taken for some dark purpose-- whatever could be darker than the purposes we already know about!
Brionwy has been taught that she has human dignity, she’s been taught to fight, and she can read pre-apocalypse books. She understands the idea of post-partum depression, and read the words which I guess makes sense in a place where people have lots of babies. She learned to not drink the everyday drugs.
There is a special drink that makes the girls sleep when a dragon visits so they won’t all go to it and get eaten. Maybe the dragons can’t control their calling ability.
Anyone not beautiful enough lives in pens to breed more slaves and be food for dragons.
So Brionwy’s story will be about finding out what’s happened to the vanished babies, escaping the harem and probably meeting the girl Crispy who lives out in the ruins. And then, who can say? Their future will be erased when the wild powers stop the apocalypse
Blurbs
Google books blurb https://books.google.com/books/about/Strange_Fate.html?id=jZFmkgEACAAJ
Simon Pulse, 1998 - Juvenile Fiction - 224 pages
Sarah Strange and her lover, the gentle vampire Blade, watch their peaceful life in New England come to an end when Sarah's family is asked to hide an arrogant male witch whose supernatural powers draw Sarah into his clutches.
Google books blurb 2
Hodder & Stoughton, 1998 - Witches - 224 pages
Sarah is a human girl who is happy to be with Blade, a strong yet gentle vampire she regards as her soulmate. However, when an arrogant witch called Kierlan comes to town, Sarah is strongly attracted to him. But who is her true soulmate? In the NIGHT WORLD series
google books blurb 3 https://books.google.com/books/about/Strange_Fate.html?id=k0BEPwAACAAJ
Simon Pulse, Dec 31, 2030 - Juvenile Fiction - 528 pages
Vampires, werewolves, witches, shapeshifters -- they live among us without our knowledge. Night World is their secret society, a secret society with very strict rules. And falling in love breaks all the laws of the Night World.
Sarah Strange's life was what you might call ordinary. Then her mother died.
Now Sarah has visions -- visions of a place where dragons darken the sky and a young girl is fighting to survive.
When Sarah confides in her best friends, Mal and Kierlan, about the devastation in her dreams, she discovers that her friends are not what they seem. They are part of the Night World -- and they believe Sarah has a special role in their world. And if Sarah's visions are any indication of the impending danger and destruction, there is no time to lose.…
Goodreads blurb, dated 7 2012
Also on amazon dated 11 2006
Sarah Strange is a normal teenager with annoying siblings and a crush on two boys, Mal and Kierlan, who happen to be her best friends. But Sarah also has visions of a place where dragons darken the sky and feast on humans. When Sarah confides in Mal and Kierlan about her visions, she discovers her friends are not who they seem. They are part of the Night World. And they believe Sarah must help establish peace and harmony between humans and creatures of the Night World to stave off the apocalypse. And if Sarah’s visions are any indication of the danger, destruction, and devastation that the apocalypse will bring, there is no time to lose…
Risingshadow blurb https://www.risingshadow.net/book/22703-strange-fate
Sarah Strange is a fragile human girl – happy in Circle Daybreak with her soulmate, Blade, a gentle Vampire. Then Kierlan comes to town. He is an arrogant witch and a Wild Power, and Sarah is strongly attracted to him. But who is her real soulmate? And is the answer waiting in the Night World?
Blurb from Kinokuniya Malaysia
A long-awaited conclusion to the best-selling series finds Sarah journeying with Mal and Kierlan to the Night World to prevent an apocalypse in the dragon-oppressed world of her visions. Original.
I wouldn’t put too much credence on a blurb that might be translated from another language but it’s possible evidence that the three main characters go on the quest.
Speaking of which:
Sixteen-year-old Sarah Strange finds life a mass of contradictions. She’s an ordinary-looking girl, and yet two of the most popular guys at school form her circle of friends. Kierlan Drache and Mal Harman, who are as unalike as any two people can be. That ought to make her happy, but recently she’s been having romantic feelings about each of them—and has seen two silver cords: one reaching from her to Kierlan, and one from her to Mal. What’s going on? In addition, every night she dreams of a future where dragons and vampires rule the world, and of a brave child called Crispy. For a girl who hasn’t even heard of the Night World yet, Sarah has a lot to handle! Even worse, the Apocalypse has finally come—and even the Wild Powers see only one way to stop it. This is an epic volume, which stars all the most beloved Night Worlders from the other books. Be prepared, though, because seven go on a mission to save the world . . . and only two come back.
I found this blurb on a sales site as a review, on a site in Russian, and where I posted it. I didn’t make it up, I found it somewhere, but I can’t track it back to a source! And this is the only source for killing off five characters!
Or maybe Jez and Delos come home to their soulmates and Sarah and Mal go off on a different quest so are still alive just not coming back to Harmony, or maybe some characters become guardian spirits or time travel to the past or take up new lives in another realm… there are lots of not-actually-death options, but you know what I mean.
The first two chapters from the Fan Guide. As of 2009. Linking myself, though I’m not the only person to have posted them.
Sarah has a plant theme. She’s only good at art and math in school.
Sarah is in honors math, Mal is in regular math and Kierlan takes math at “the junior college.” There’s their academic-ness ranked. Kierlan flipped a girl’s skirt and Mal is “master of the cold stare.” Mal is described as having dark hair and very pale gray eyes. Not the Harman coloring! Kierlan has dark red hair and “tawny eyes.” Ms. Smith does love her golden-eyed characters!
Sarah gets migraines and in the middle of them passes out and has visions of the dark future. She smells roses before an attack.
Preview from the back of the third omnibus edition https://www.tumblr.com/moonlightreal/742175609526075392/another-strange-fate-preview?source=share
Kierlan considers himself and Mal “soul brothers.” They had a gentleman’s agreement that Kierlan would be the one to be with Sarah, though they both love her.
Kierlan can see his silver cord with Sarah, but not Sarah’s silver cord with Mal. Kierlan is desperate for Sarah to be in love with him and not with Mal. They met as children and he has been in love with her ever since. Kierlan believes Sarah could cut the silver cord between them.
This sneak peak describes being soulmates sort of differently than all the Night World books so far, describing the cord as being “woven” in a way that almost suggests a cord could be artificially created. It doesn’t come out and say it but… read the passage and see how it strikes you.
It’s possible that this scene happens right after the chapter in the fan guide. Sarah collapses at school, the guys take her home, this scene occurs, we get a flashback to Kierlan and Sarah meeting, then the boys kidnap her and take her to Circle Daybreak which is why she’s in Harmony for the apocalypse.
Art from LJ Smith’s website https://ljanesmith.net/gallery/
Kierlan’s animal form is a tiger.
...ok, so what’d I miss?
Next I have to turn this soup of factoids into a coherent topic-by-topic list of what we know and see how much of Strange Fate I can REALLY reconstruct! *cracks knuckles*
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moonlightreal · 1 month
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Another Strange Fate preview
Strange Fate sneak preview in the third omnibus edition, April 2009
The girl was Kierlan’s soulmate. There was no doubt of that now, just as there’d been no doubt since they were children.
Kierlan should have, by everything her knew of the Night World’s laws, been comforted by this. He should have felt unassailable.
Instead, he felt very assailable indeed.
But why? They’d woven the eternal, unbreakable thread between them. He’d kissed, her, and it was a kiss that he was still dizzy from. Sarah had melted in his arms. And he’s seen the silver cord.
They were soulmates. Even if they were parted, the cord would connect them. Nothing could sever that cord…
...except Sarah herself.
Kierlan had a chill of premonition. Maybe it was best to impress upon Sarah, and especially upon her subconscious, that once the cord was woven, she had sealed her fate. Sarah’s kiss and what it had called forth had determined her destiny.
But first he needed to get Mal, his soul’s brother, out of the way.
He glanced out Sarah’s window, the one that looked down on the front lawn. Mal was gazing down at Sarah, who lay on her still unmade bed, as if the sight of her had turned him to stone. Maybe it had. Who knew what Mal had done to keep himself from coveting Sarah?
Kierlan was probably the only person in the world who knew that Mal loved her. And Mal was no poacher. From the beginning Mal had acknowledged that Kierlan had a prior claim, and had given his solemn word not to infringe on that. He’d given his word that Sarah would be Kierlan’s and that he would never interfere.
Until recently only one person had known that Mal had broken his word. Had lied.
And that person wasn’t Mal. It was Kierlan.
Kierlan had used his powers, ruthlessly and without concern for Mal’s mental well-being, to cut through Mal’s elaborate defenses and show him the truth.
Not that Kierlan didn’t see the reasons for Mal’s treachery. After all, if there were no reasons to love Sarah, then Kierlan wouldn’t have loved her since he had met her; although, at six, he hadn’t really known it was love. He’d simply known that the fragile fairy-child with the windblown hair was his, sworn his and sealed with their kiss shared under the oleander bush. Kierlan hadn’t understood his powers then, but he had known that Sarah, with her heart-shaped face and aquamarine eyes, was part of him.
Bringing himself to the present with a jolt, Kierlan glanced out the window again. “You’d better get your car,” He said. “We’re going to have to get her and all her stuff out of here fast.”
“You mean kidnap her? Where?”
“Circle Daybreak, of course. Hurry up.”
But Mal, who usually too orders immediately, stared at him with those cloud-gray eyes. The chiseled features under his shock of dark hair expressed no emotion. “What about her stepfamily?”
Kierlan swore. “I’ll send them a freaking telegram!”
“No, I mean what if somebody sees us taking her and—”
“You worry too much. And that wasn’t a suggestion!” Kierlan didn’t like using the whiplash voice on Mal. But he had to get him away from Sarah before she woke.
Mal stood absolutely still for just a moment, then saluted Kierlan and departed silently.
Alone with Sarah at last, Kierlan sat by her on the bed and gently called her name. Her lashes were fluttering; she was deep in a nightmare-dream.
How did Mal do it? Mal always said he just spoke to her softly. But Kierlan didn’t have either the dispassionate voice or the time; he’d used a lot of Power already , and he knew how he wasnted to use the rest of it.
There was no choice but to control her mind directly.
He slipped in unnoticed, leaving her the privacy of her dreams, and told her to wake up. Wake up, Sarah. Now.
Kierlan? Sarah blinked and opened her eyes.
“It’s all right,” he said immediately, “you’re safe.” but Sarah was looking around the room in bewilderment.
“I’ve never dreamed this before.” she said, “I mean, me being in my room again while I was still in the middle of the other dream.”
“You’re not dreaming.”
The problem was that she was. He could tell that Sarah’s mind was still in REM sleep, her breathing rapid and irregular, her eyelashes quivering every few moments as if she were trying to focus on something in the distance and couldn’t.
One of the secrets of Kierlan’s success was his ability to adapt. “All right, you are dreaming.” he said, cupping a hand around Sarah’s chin to turn her to face him. “You’re dreaming about me.”
Sarah’s blush, which came up from her collarbones and never failed to arouse Kierlan’s wonder, was just as adorable when she was asleep as awake.
“Again?” she faltered. “I used to dream about you all the time, until… until the new dreams came.”
Kierlan’s heart melted. He could feel, amazingly, his own cheeks heat with blood. He hadn’t thought there was anything that could make him blush, not anymore.
“You dreamed about me?”
“Oh, all the time.”
It occurred to Kierlan that what he was doing was probably not quite fair. In fact, it was completely and distinctly unfair. In this dreamlike state Sarah was at his mercy; she would tell him the absolute truth about anything.
It was something he definitely had to take advantage of.
“Who do you love?” he whispered, taking her chin in his fingers and using his most intense gaze to hold those aquamarine eyes with the trembling, starry black lashes.
Sarah’s face went even softer, as if she could see glorious things behind Kierlan’s tawny eyes, as if she could see inside him and everything she saw made her want to melt in his arms
“Who do you love, Mal or me?” he repeated.
And the answer came back instantly, infuriatingly, “Both.”
Kierlan’s breath came out in a little explosion. “Look at this. See this?” He had to tip her head down to look at the silver cord that was taut between them. “Do you know what that means? It means that we’re soulmates. It means I’m yours and you’re mine. Mal hasn’t got anything to do with it. I’m your other half. You’re sworn mine, sealed mine, bound mine.”
The effect was not what he’d anticipated. Sarah was looking helplessly down, then she seemed to forget the silver cord, and her gaze wandered out the window. Looking for what? Mal?
Frustrated, almost frantic, Kierlan took Sarah by the shoulders. “You have to love me. You have to.”
And then he did something he knew he should be ashamed of.
He kissed her.
Helpless as she was, dreaming as she was, he kissed her.
And it was warm and sweet and long, and Sarah didn’t wake. She wound her arms around his neck and cuddled to him, little shivers going through her. In Kierlan’s mind, in Kierlan’s heart, in Kierlan’s soul, there was total anarchy, but overall there was only the thought of Sarah. His Sarah, sealed and bound to him forever.
Whatever might happen, whatever he might have to do, Kierlan had to keep Sarah.
I have no conscience or morality about this, he thought, holding Sarah, cradling her so that her soft, fine, freshly washed hair was against his cheek. He was thinking terrible things. Sarah had changed in the last few years. Her face was still waifish, her body still fragile, but there were changes. New curves under her simple T-shirts. Now, with her quiescent and seemingly happy, he was tempted to go farther—just a little…
No! Sarah had given him a kiss from her heart, even if he’d had to exercise all his powers of seduction to get it. The waking Sarah would never allow… she would beat him away… she would never speak to him, if he tried something like that. And even if she never found out, Kierlan would always imagine the beating hands, the shrieking. Even though they were soulmates, Sarah wasn’t ready to give him more.
But I still have no conscience, he told himself defiantly. I’m restraining myself for Sarah’s sake, and that’s all.
The thought of beating, thrashing hands and shrieking brought another scene to his mind, however. It made him remember vividly the very first time Sarah had kissed him. And suddenly Kierlan knew how to make Sarah his forever, without the possibility of interference by Mal, however tall and handsome and perfect Mal might be.
“Sarah?”
“Yes?” She was still asleep, with her great jewel-like eyes wide open in that gamine face.
“Sarah, can you remember when we first met? Do you remember that first day?”
Sarah’s features changed. Her eyelids went heavy, half-closed in bliss. Her mouth went so soft with adoration that Kierlan had to clench his fists to keep from stealing another kiss. Her whole face—glowed.
“I want to take you back to that day.” Kierlan whispered. “I want you to dream about that.”
He knew he was being hideously cruel and unfair. Those kisses had been won at a heavy, heavy cost. But just now he needed Sarah to remember how she’d felt about him before Mal had come into the picture. Kierlan needed her to remember how they had already been sworn together, so young.
“Go back.” Kierlan was whispering now, hypnotically. “I’ll go back with you. We’ll share our thoughts, our feelings. Go back to that first day…”
Unconsciously, Kierlan was swaying, and Sarah was swaying with him. Grasped in his arms, her mind dissolving in with his mind, Sarah was going back, and he was following.
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moonlightreal · 2 months
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"Why doesn't she self publish?"
Why haven’t we gotten Strange Fate? Why hasn’t Ms. Smith just self published it? A question posed by Jen on Goodreads and hey, it got me thinking!
Short answer: we don’t know.
But I can think of a few possibilities.
1) Simon & Schuster owns rights to the series and is blocking publication in some way. Maybe they’re saving it in hopes that paranormal romance becomes the big thing in YA again. YA has its fads, there was girl meets vampire, then dystopian, and right now on my library’s suggestion page it looks like a “loads of representation, possibly too much representation” fad is fading into a “books for girls who love true crime podcasts” fad. So Strange Fate really missed its popularity window so there’s no need to rush, maybe the publisher prefers to save it and see if it fits the next fad better.
The problem is that I don’t know enough about publishing contracts to know what rights a publisher has.. I have read that the publisher of a series gets “right of refusal” on any new books in it, but if S&S had a chance at Strange Fate and said no, would Ms. Smith be free to shop it around or self publish, or would S&S be able to just sit on it? I don’t know. Anybody know a successful published author they can ask?
2) Strange Fate isn’t finished. We’ve heard that it’s finished… a bunch of times… but it has also been rewritten a bunch of times. There was the 1999 Strange Fate with Blade the vampire, the Strange Fate with Brionwy’s story in Sarah’s dreams, the Strange Fate with the Night World characters in Sarah’s dreams, and the latest update we have is that Ms. Smith is “rewriting it completely” in 2022. With all of these rewrites Strange Fate may just be starting over and over and never quite getting to all the way done and publishable before it needs to start over again.
3) Strange Fate isn’t any good. LJ Smith is a good writer. But she went through family illness stuff that was bad enough that she wasn’t able to write for 10+ years and then had a major medical emergency that left her in a coma. Meaning her brain was not doing ok, and the brain is where the writing happens. Strange Fate has also been in development hell for 20 years, with multiple changes and rewrites. Oh, and during this time teen life and YA literature went through some really big changes. If this kind of thing happened to a hundred writers with a hundred books, most of them wouldn’t be able to overcome it! We want to see Ms. Smith overcome it because she seems cool and the universe has been unkind to her and we want to see her succeed, but if she doesn’t there’s no shame in being defeated by impossible circumstances!
4) Maybe Ms. Smith doesn’t know about the self publishing options available today. She was a writer in the nineties when stuff like ebooks, patreon, kickstarter and lulu.com were not a thing yet. Does she know she has all these options? Does she have an editor to explain them all? We don’t know.
5) And if she does know about them she may not want to take advantage of them. Ms. Smith was a full on very popular published author in the 90s, and self publishing would be a step down in pride. It would also be a step down in money; self-published books don’t usually make it onto the shelves at B&N or at libraries., and a self publisher won’t handle the marketing for you like the teen branch of Simon & Schuster will. I have no idea how well off Ms. Smith is, she must be making some kind of royalties from the TV series and reprints, but she had major medical issues that must have cost a lot.
So that’s my guesses. I don’t know the truth but I bet it’s one of these, maybe more than one together. What do you think?
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moonlightreal · 2 months
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Strange Fate in memes
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But on the other hand,
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Whenever there's a hint of action on LJ Smith's website I'm always surprised, because if I were her I'd just remain 100% in hiding from the questions of the fandom. And I feel bad for her about that, having a fandom is awesome and she can't enjoy it! And I feel like Ms. Smith's issues are a lot less her fault than, say, Martin's or Rothfuss' issues.
But we have heard "Strange Fate is finished" a whole lot of times, so the situation is at least a little bit self inflicted.
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moonlightreal · 2 months
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@ljsmiths-thenightworld
UK cover? Who knows.
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moonlightreal · 2 months
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Reconstructing Strange Fate
Y’all started reblogging my Strange Fate Blurbs post and it inspired me to try constructing my own Strange Fate plot out of them. Read on for olympic grade headcanoning!
So what does the end of the world look like? In Witchlight the end hasn’t even advanced far enough that humanity has noticed, so the entire apocalypse has to happen in Strange Fate. No wonder it was going to be extra long! Also I think Ms. Smith didn’t really want to write an apocalypse. High school romance is her jam so it’s not a surprise that she wouldn’t be keen to write a disaster movie. But because of this, we’re left with:
1. Shapeshifters revolt and kill people.
2. ???
3. post-apocalyptic setting where dragons rule!
We know that seven characters go on a mission to save the world, but we don’t know what that mission will be.
I’m going to guess there would have been a dragon big-bad, who isn’t awake yet but once he rises he’ll be able to… hmm… mentally take over the minds of much of humanity and make them shoot missiles at each other to reduce the human population and disrupt society enough that the Night People are safe to come out of the shadows and take over. There’s something like this in Night of the Solstice, Ms. Smith’s first book, the kids suggest getting the army to fight the villain and Morgana tells them that the villain has power over all things nasty and warlike so the army would just make things worse.
Or instead of a big boss dragon, maybe the ancient witches who enchanted the dragons to sleep left something behind. Maybe their bones, so their spirits could be called back to explain their magic spell. But the binding of the dragons certainly happened before America was settled– maybe they foresaw that and had their bones or whatever transported to America. Wasn’t Quinn from colonial times? Maybe he knows something about an order to move some artifact. The only ancient witches we have names for are Hecate Witch-queen and Hellewise, so maybe one of them will come back and advise our heroes, or maybe they just left instructions or a magical dragon-binding macguffin.
So Team Circle Daybreak has to take the four Wild Powers to the place where the big dragon is sleeping, and sneak past the evil Night Worlders who are there doing magic to wake him up. So the team must be Jez, Illiana, Delos and Kierlan as the wild powers, Sarah and Mal as the main characters of the book and… one other. You can pick any character for the last spot but I’m going to pick Keller because she’d volunteer, she’s a fighter so she could defend the wild powers, and I like her. Maggie is another possibility since she wouldn’t let Delos out of her sight, and Hannah is another one since she’s a Circle Daybreak leader and she will be reborn if she dies.
And who are we killing off? We have to kill off five! Kierlan is an obvious one for the chop, since Sarah has a backup soulmate, and Kierlan might turn into a good dragon to battle the evil one. But Sarah is giving me a little bit of Usagi vibe, so she might be the true and pure girl who sacrifices herself to save her friends. And if two of them die we might as well kill all three.
Illiana is also a pure sacrifice type and she has no soulmate, making her more likely to be killed by the plot, but she also has this “healing flames” thing so she would be great to help fix the world afterwards.
I think Keller is also likely to die, just because she’d be happy sacrificing herself. Actually, if Keller died then Illiana and Galen might find each other soulmates so that would be a good plot reason not to kill Illiana. I can also imagine Keller suddenly breaking through to a new level of shapeshifter power and becoming a giant glowing winged panther to have a physical battle with the evil dragon.
My vibe is that Jez and Delos are least likely to die because they both have soulmates to come back to. But it also seems likely for there to be a sudden revelation that the Wild Powers have to spill ALL their blood and sacrifice themselves to release their full power and fix the world. Would make for a cool scene, blue fire spilling from their injuries and consuming all the evil Night Worlders while healing the non-evil ones.
So that’s the ending, some form of those options. But we have a main and secondary story to get there. For our secondary story we have two options: the post-apocalyptic story seen through Sarah’s dreams, which is Crispy’s story, Brionwy’s story, or both. For a long time I thought these two were the same character, with one real name and one cruel nickname, but they seem to be different characters. At least they are now; one of the blurbs has Sarah dreaming about Crispy but I feel like I’ve read other places that it’s Brionwy. Maybe Ms. Smith just wanted to write both forms of the post-apocalyptic story, with Brionwy in the vampire harem and Crispy in the ruins. So we get to write a post-apocalyptic story and it can be either kind! You could even include some characters from thye books. James and Poppy, Quinn, Ash, Thierry and Hannah, all might still be alive in the future. Other characters might have gone through hard choices. If the world was becoming very bad for humans and your vampire soulmate wanted to turn you to keep you safe, would you want to be turned?
Or we can have the secondary story of Ash Redfern visiting all the characters from the other books and protecting them from “ the enemies who, for unknown reasons, are targeting the youngest generation of Harmans and Redferns.” So, not protecting them from the collapse of society due to the apocalypse.
Some of the couples from past books are married and one couple is expecting a baby! This is another great option for a secondary story since you get to imagine a future for all the couples, where they ended up. Is Poppy back in touch with her human family? How are they handling it? Has Thea admitted she remembers being a witch? Are she and Blaise friends again? Has Rashel discovered she and Keller are twins and has she learned to shapeshift? And then at the end Ash has atoned for his evil ways and reunites with Mary-Lynette for the ending. That would be a blast to write!
And now, three pages into this post I wasn’t even planning to write today, we get to the main story. Sarah Strange, a character whose face we know but whose personality we only know from a description. She sounds like an “ordinary girl who is more than she appears” sort of character. She is the first one we have seen who has two soulmates. And they think she “must help establish harmony between humans and creatures of the Night World to stave off the apocalypse.”
Why do they think she can do this? Ms. Smith gave us no hints. Is Sarah something other than a human? Is she half-and-half like Jez? Like Ciri in the Witcher, who is somehow part elf and that makes her a special magical being who can be queen of both elves and humans. (displaying my Witcher ignorance here, love it, don’t understand it! But back to Sarah!) Is she secretlyb the fourth wild power not Kierlan? Is she a lost witch? But that was Illiana’s plotline. Is she an old soul? Is she Brionwy? That would explain their dream connection. Do Sarah’s dreams mean she’s a new creature, an oracle who can see the future?  Hang on, I read somewhere– LJ Smith originally meant Strange Fate to be two books, the first one tentatively titled Mystic.
Maybe she can become soulmates with everybody, join everybody in the world together. Didn’t Ms. Smith say something about how she’d like to give everyone in the world empathy so they would all help each other? Sarah’s two silver cords could be the beginning of that power showing itself. And that would let her be very special while also just being an ordinary human. But there hasn’t been any foreshadowing of that, no prophecies about anything other than the four wild powers.
So we meet Sarah as she’s having visions of the dark future. She tells her two cute boy best friends about it. They tell her about the Night World and the looming apocalypse. We just don’t know anything about Sarah’s journey beyond that. I assume she and the boys hook up with Thierry and Circle Daybreak and go along on the final mission. But does she survive? Does she end up with both boys, one, or neither?
In 1999 there was “Sarah Strange is a fragile human girl – happy in Circle Daybreak with her soulmate, Blade, a gentle Vampire. Then Kierlan comes to town. He is an arrogant witch and a Wild Power, and Sarah is strongly attracted to him. But who is her real soulmate? And is the answer waiting in the Night World?” and we could start there if we wanted! It’s interesting because this Sarah knows about the Night World, and may be older than the other heroines, with her soulmate already figured out. Then her family is asked to hide the witch Kierlan who is already known to be the wild power.
But the more recent incarnation of Sarah is 16 and in high school, with her best friends Kierlan Drache and Mal Harman. So what can we deduce about these boys? They are from important Night World families but have not been mentioned in previous books. Galen never mentioned his cousin/brother/whatever Kierlan is, and the Crone didn’t mention Mal as a Harman they looked at to see if he might be the Witch Child. That makes some sense; they probably just knew the Witch Child was a girl, but it’s a missed chance to foreshadow the final book’s characters and make the world feel more connected. Makes me wonder how far ahead the apocalypse arc was planned. I get a vibe that “not very” is the answer, the prophecy is vague enough that… well… what does “one from the twilight” even mean?
Mal is a Harman so he’s a witch. A male witch, which is rare.. Thea, Gillian and Illiana were all blondes, so Mal probably has light hair too. He and Sarah go to high school together and have been friends for some time so Mal has a home and a settled life of some sort.
Kierlan is now a Drache, from the first family of the shapeshifters. If he’s like Galen, he hasn’t chosen an animal form yet. I think he’s gotta go for “good dragon” in the end, it’s just the only thing that makes suitable apocalyptic sense. Kierlan is the fourth wild power. How does he know? How did Circle Daybreak find out? Is he a member of Circle Daybreak or still undecided? He has also been friends with Sarah for a while so he’s lived in the same town for some time.
If Mal is blond that would make Kierlan the dark haired one because in YA books there’s always one fair haired and one dark haired boy and the dark haired one is always the bad boy and always the one the girl chooses in the end, them’s the rules! Probably the “dark hair and golden eyes” that Ms. Smith likes. Maybe Kierlan is a rebel from his family, which would explain why good-boy Galen doesn’t mention him. Maybe Kierlan isn’t sure about Circle Daybreak. The shapeshifters joined the good side thanks to Illiana, but a lot of individual shapeshifters probably still think that going back to the old days of ruling humanity sounds like a good deal. Kierlan could be undecided but Sarah shows him the pure goodness of humanity and turns him to the side of good.
Do the two boys get along? Are they fighting over Sarah? Do they know that she has silver cords with both of them? Have there ever been multi-soulmate groups like this? Is threesomeing a thing in the Night World? It’s not a thing in teen literature of 1999 which makes me think that at the end of this Sarah can have no more than one soulmate remaining.
And… and… there is so much more! There are hints in the stories on the webpage, Ms. Smith gives so many Strange Fate clues in her blog which I am looking at right now on the wayback machine! This post was just written from the details that randomly stuck in my brain!
But this is enough for one day.
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moonlightreal · 2 months
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Sarah Strange
The wayback machine can get us there! *tries link* ...Heck How do you link to a wayback machine pageload? Well, anyway. Like someone who saw Sasquatch, I can at least point and say, 'It was there, and I copy-pasted it!"
Quoth Ms. Smith:
I'm not really sure if this is the right place to post this, but I did do an avatar for Sarah Strange. As I work toward what I hope is the end of this book, really how extraordinarily fond I am of her, although she does not have outstanding brains and beauty. Sarah's qualities are more internal, and though she may have an ordinary face and ordinary brown hair, she has a deep, fierce love for all creatures flawed or fallen, or helpless, or striving. She loves forests and sees trees as dryads. She loves animals. She may be a little flat-chested, a little clumsy, a little naive, and a lot shy, but she never stops trying, or loving, or doing her best to understand.
Here she is, with brown hair that is always a bit disheveled and falling in her face, and with the Avatar version of her best feature:  aquamarine eyes that always look as if they are full of unshed tears.
Quoth me: Ok I misremembered the "crybaby" part so she isn't quite Usagi!
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moonlightreal · 2 months
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There was an Ocean Girl cartoon
But in a very Fate situation is had a title and one character name in common with the original, and it wasn't much. It isn't bad, it just isn't something really special like the real Ocean Girl. So the Ocean Girl fandom... there's like 20 of us but we're very dedicated... pretty much ignored it so the cartoon doesn't really have its own fandom.
But I do have to say
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The character design is super cute.
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She's adorable! She's so drawable!
And the opening song is really good.
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