"Do you understand? When I am done telling you these stories, when you're done listening to these stories, I am no longer I, and you are no longer you. In this afternoon we briefly merged into one. After this, you will always carry a bit of me, and I will always carry a bit of you, even if we both forget this conversation."
– Hao Jingfang, "Invisible Planets," in Invisible Planets: Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction in Translation, tr. & ed. Ken Liu
It's way funnier to me to imagine that Geralt is the one who desperately wants Dandelion to winter at Kaer Morhen with him but Dandelion keeps saying no on the simple grounds that it's too fucking cold and do you want me to die Geralt? Do you want me to get hypothermia and fucking die?
And Geralt's like "please I am begging on my knees I will cuddle you every night to keep you warm I just need to prove you actually exist"
Look, look, some of the deepest, most intricately detailed, real and profound media I’ve ever seen is also the stupidest, most ridiculous and strangest media I’ve ever seen, promise me you’ll get real weird with it
People talking about Grover vibing with Ares over war and the violence of nature (or whatever happened in that scene) and how it was unexpected but still cool are forgetting that in the book he played a hunting game at the casino where the deer hunted people and very loudly demanded humans die over pollution and then shot at Percy with the plastic gun when they tried to get him to leave, like Grover's been wild since day one.
"The truth is love exists so much more than a romantic partner. Love is everything around you, and I hope you learn how to open your eyes to that. I hope you find love in every aspect of your life. I hope you find it tucked into early morning sunrises and the smell of your favorite places. I hope you find it strung between the laughter you share with friends. I hope it bounces off of you when you hug the people you care for. I hope it swells within your rib cage whenever you hear your favorite song or discover something that moves you. I hope you fall in love with growth and change and the messiness and the beauty of making mistakes and becoming exactly who you want to be. I hope you find love in places that were once devoid of it. In places within yourself that you could have been softer to kinder to in the past. Because if there is one thing I have learned, it is that love is so much more than a human being who holds your heart. Love is everything around you. It is everything."
gortash sets up a lending library at his estate after seeing durge’s in the bhaal temple. they both know they’re the only people who use them so it turns into a sort of game. durge loves music, so after enver’s last visit a book about viola has appeared in the temple library. enver fancy’s himself a jeweler so it’s only natural a scroll about gem welding would end up in his library. books relating to their schemes, hobbies, pasts, futures, inside jokes and aspirations get passed back in forth. the only extended pause is when a novel about star crossed lovers gets dropped in the bhaal library. it’s weeks before the favor is returned and enver receives a scroll about bhaalist marriage ceremonies. he doesn’t know whether to take it as an advance or a threat, so he accepts it as both.