#really he just roped me into my childhood trauma but like its still creepy to me but like | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

carriagelamp · 4 years

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So, one of my favourite media genres is “child horror”, especially around Halloween. It’s horror adjacent, it can still be chilling or exciting in its own right, but there’s a layer of autumnal coziness and safety to it. Like trick or treating, but in a book form. You go out in the dark when it feels a little spookier, but you know everyone is in soft costumes and you’re gonna be eating a lot of candy. So I like trying to read child horror during October, to get hyped up for Halloween.

C’est à Moi: Alerte dans l’espace

This is a choose-your-own-adventure story. There’s an English version as well, Space Rescue, but I read this one with a group of kids in French. Honestly, doing a crowd-sourced choose-your-own-adventure with a bunch of kids is one of the funniest experiences, and reading this was a blast. We died horribly in a perfectly preventable way, as should be the case with all good choose-your-own-adventures — we never even got a chance to meet the space aliens! Would recommend for kids (or immature adults who enjoy choose-your-own-adventures) who enjoy scifi and action. It was short and simple, but fun.

Doll Bones

This was a novel I was actually really looking forward to reading this October and it lived up to my excitement, it was probably my favourite new-read this month. It’s a middle grade novel about a group of three kids who have been friends for ever and who have been playing a game together almost as long. It would have been challenging enough for them to confront the challenges of growing up and the judgment of others about them still playing with toys, but things come to a head when, one night, Poppy tells the other two that she’s being haunted by the creepy porcelain doll locked in her mom’s china cabinet, the one in their games that they’ve always called The Queen. Poppy insists that they need to run away, in the middle of the night, to find The Queen’s grave and bury the bone china her soul is trapped in. Meanwhile, Zach and Alice are trying to navigate their changing friendship, and the question of whether the ghost is real, or if this is Poppy trying to rope them into one final game.

Serious, this was a beautifully written story, especially as an adult reader. Reading about Poppy, Alice, and Zach at 12 trying to figure out whether or not they’re too old to keep playing games feels a lot like what I went through around that age as well, it’s very nostalgic and heart warming with just enough promise of the supernatural to keep things exciting as they go out on their quest.

Eerie Elementary: The School Is Alive!

This is one of the Scholastic Branches chapter books. These are great for beginning readers, as they have exciting stories, accessible vocabulary, and big, dramatic art that’s a pleasure to look at. This story is about a boy who is made hall monitor at his school… a position that has more weight than he would guessed. Their creepy old school is more than meets the eye and it has begun to wake… and the students need protecting. It’s the hall monitor’s job to fight back against a blood thirsty building. Lots of fun for kids around grade two.

Five Funny Frights

This was a “horror” book I loved as a kid, and it still has some amusing little stories in it. Who doesn’t still secretly enjoy the “pink jelly bean” story?

Five Nights At Freddy’s: The Fourth Closet

This is the final book in the Silver Eyes trilogy, I’m not quite done it yet by the time of writing this review but I should be by the end of the month. I started this series more as a joke with my brother, but I’ve actually been enjoying it. The Silver Eyes was definitely the most interesting book of the series, but The Twisted Ones managed to keep me going, and now that I’m on the third book I’m feeling intrigued again. It has some interesting characterization, not afraid to make characters that deal with trauma in some messy, angry, emotional ways which is an unexpected treat in a middle grade horror novel, not to mention so real messy murders, and the series did a good job at laying out foreshadowing — some of my predictions are coming to fruition and I feel very satisfied about it. Is it the best book I’ve ever read? No, not really, but if you enjoyed the concept behind Five Night’s At Freddy’s then it’s an interesting read and worth giving a go.

Scary Stories 3: More Tales To Chill Your Bones

Another classic from my childhood that I reread. Honestly, there were a couple stories in here that I enjoyed… “Harold” is a classic, of course, and some of their humorous ones at the end were fun, like “THUPPP”. But honestly, the first one is probably the strongest of the series.

Sheets

A graphic novel that I stumbled across and decided to try out. It was… alright. It was good, it was fine. I was glad to have borrowed it from the library, but I wouldn’t want to buy it. It was an interesting enough story about a girl who, in the wake of her mother’s death and father’s depression, is forced to keep their family’s laundromat afloat. It’s also about ghosts who use sheets to give themselves a physical premise and who put great stock in keeping them tidy. The girl’s life becomes significantly more complicated when a miserable old businessman tries to sabotage the laundromat in order to buy the property out from under her and one runaway ghosts gets tangled up in the mix.

Skeleton Hiccups

This was a picture book I enjoyed a little bit more than I should have, probably. It’s just about a skeleton doing his best to get rid of his hiccups, despite how completely ineffective most of those attempts are when you don’t actually have skin or organs. Goofy nonsense, I loved it.

Warren the 13th and the 13-Year-Curse

Another trilogy-ender I read this month. I really enjoyed The All-Seeing Eye and The Whisper Woods, the first two books that I read last year, and The 13-Year Curse was an enjoyable wrap up to it… though honestly I would be very interested in more stories about Warren and his fantastic hotel. The series, simply, is about young Warren, the thirteen in a line of proud hotel owners, though as of book one the hotel has fallen into considerable disrepair that Warren is struggling to fix. The series follows Warren, along with his friends (two witch hunters, one tentacled monster, and an assortment of hotel staff and guests) as they discover the secrets of The Warren Hotel, confront terrifying witches, and fight against terrible curses. Though the real selling point for this series is the absolutely beautiful graphic design that went into the page layout — I would honestly buy these books just because they are so damn pretty to look at and have so many fascinating details. I highly recommend these to both kids who like interactive stories and mysteries, and to adults who want something whimsical and weird.

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aeondeug · 5 years

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So @thedrunkenminstrel did this so I might as well too. Let’s get an Aon’s Top Ten Ships list running! I will say right now that this list is honestly a very shaky thing. A lot of is something that is subject to heavy shifting around, and some of the things that are on it currently probably wouldn’t be if you asked me another day. The top three I can more genuinely state are like Actual Factual Top Three Material and wouldn’t shift much at all. But the rest are up to heavy degrees of change.

10. Naruto/Hinata from Naruto We’ve got to start this list off right and to do that let’s put one of my weirdly enduring baby ships in the ten spot. This was honestly kind of tied with three other ships that I’ll mention later as honorable mentions, but Naruhina gets to win out its spot for its bizarre personal significance to me. Namely the ship is weirdly instrumental in my realizing I was trans, by way of an AU I worked on where Hinata was a transman. And the entire thing was very heavily focused on that woe and also romance with Naruto who tried to teach Hinata the ropes of being a dude. Which sounds like a beautifully terrible trainwreck now, honestly, given that it’d probably involve him showing Hinata the local pornshop and being like YES. THE HEIGHT OF MANHOOD. titty mags. Stepping away from that weird personal significance that no one else save me holds for it though...Naruhina is one of those early ships I clung to really, really hard because I heavily related to one half of the ship and saw, in the other person, traits I found admirable. Like, yes, Naruto’s an irritating jackass who fails all his classes but he’s loud and out there and keeps trying even though he basically always fails up until the point when the plot deems him Ninja Jesus. All traits a nervous kid desperately wished he had and ones that I found endearing or attractive. Even if so much of the rest of him is so grating. Also this sets up the major theme of this list, namely that if you’re earning my undying shipper love chances are I relate to one half and have a crush on the other half. 9. Saria/Malon from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time This is really low on the list, but it’s here for one very important reason. And that reason is is that it is the crackship that will not die. Years have past since a little kid went ‘but what if the cute farm girl and the fairy girl were a couple!’ and the ship’s stuck. It’s also evolved over the years. Evolved into something that by its very nature is doomed to tragedy. Because really if you think about it there’s no real way it could be anything but. Saria dies in the end and is also a weird eternal child type deal. Malon’s going to grow up and move on from her first dumb little kid crush. It’s not really a ship I like am actively, emotionally obsessed with but it is one that I repeatedly go back to and just toy with the idea of every so often. Like it’s just an idea I find compelling to toy with. Early childhood love that by its very nature must die between a human and what amounts to a fairy. 8. Satoko/Rika from Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Alright now we’re back to something I am like deeply and emotionally invested in. As someone with an abusive family seeing Satoko’s story in Higurashi was a harrowing experience as a kid. Especially as a kid who has outright lied to CPS before to avoid further abuse. It was also a comforting one in a fashion. Since even before saving Satoko, Rika and her friends are always there to at least try and save her. Satoko’s a horrible brat and a horrible brat that I relate to. Rika’s...weird meanwhile. She’s someone who’s technically a child but due to magical fuckery is actually mentally matured past that. She’s also been pretty scarred by the trauma of what she’s gone through and it’s left her not entirely ‘human’. So much so she needs to eventually go through an arc just to realize that, no, it’s time to give up being a witch and to just...try and find what’s normal. Even though everything about that sounds wrong or even impossible. And that in itself is also relatable. But even then she’s still Satoko’s best friend and Satoko is her best friend. They stick by each other and I’d imagine they would later on in life. But even later on in life there’d still likely be mental disconnect there for a good chunk of time. And one also has to keep in mind that while Rika’s mentally lived for at least one hundred years she’s still not an adult. She’s just a child that was forced to grow up too fast and that’s eventually going to bite her I think, when she realizes that in itself isn’t adulthood. That’s an interesting thing to think of an toy with, I think. 7. Porrim/Aranea from Homestuck An entirely unsurprising pick from me if you know anything about me from my Homestuck days. Which are like my normal days, honestly, but the fervor’s kind of died down. Give it a bit though and we’ll get right back to Hamsteaking. Porrim is just...a very one-note little joke. In all honesty. But she’s one that provides like a vast sea of unexplored potential. Porrim is, like so much of Homestuck, a perfect Barbie doll to play makebelieve with. She is also a vampire. This nets her like 50,000 bonus points immediately. Then there’s Aranea. Aranea is a bad person. Let’s make no bones about that. She is a bad person. But she’s cute in a way, when she’s not being awful. She’s also someone that reminds me somewhat of the person my current boyfriend used to be, while also having troubles that I myself find relatable. And the most important part of the ship is that they canonically broke up. Which sounds like a weird ass reason to ship a thing I suppose, but the breaking up is what makes the ship interesting to me. It’s basically a tragedy in action. It can’t work out in the main timelines, though it might in alternates. And I like exploring what led up to it not working out. 6. Chise/Elias from The Ancient Magus Bride This is sadly not in the top ten yet as I don’t quite feel comfortable putting it there when I’m not caught up. But given where I currently am in the manga I have to say that this is one of the most disgustingly me romances I’ve seen in a bit. We’ve got a spooky monster man, an awkward abused girl...He calls her puppy and gives her head pats and they nuzzle each other like dogs. He kind of wants to eat her and he’s kind of a creepy weirdo to her at times, but she’s also not seeming like someone that is just going to bow down and eternally accept that and... And they’re both learning how to people. They both are. Neither of them really knows how to do this whole human thing that well. They’re both emotionally fucked and dysfunctional in their own ways. And they’re learning from each other. In such a fashion that I legitimately cried while reading my comics. Which is a bit hard to manage. Given proper time and catching up they may well travel up this list. 5. Malus/Carrie from Castlevania 64/Legacy of Darkness Alright. Back to childhood ships. Also more monsters. Also these were kind of awful ass games and neither Carrie nor Malus really have much personality at all. Carrie’s personality is mostly relegated to material in the manual, which paints her as an incredibly angry and distrusting child that hates adults and also God for failing her repeatedly. But that’s all just stuff in like a summary. And Malus’ personality is NYEHEHEHE I WAS EVIL THIS WHOLE TIME. So what, pray tell, is the appeal of this besides my obvious vampire fetish. The answer is that like...the bad end of the game has Carrie promising to marry Malus. Malus asking her to marry him presumably so he can like make use of the Belnades bloodline’s magic. Also Malus is Dracula. Dracula and human women do not have a good track record. Both in terms of him being able to resist the rare strong willed woman willing to put him in his place and in terms of keeping those women not murdered for witchcraft. Malus and Carrie is a ship of potential. Potential that plays into one of the central themes of Castlevania’s storyline which is that Drac really just wishes people would stop killing his girlfriends. I may or may not have also had an OC who was their kid who is also kind of basically another character on this list. 4. Glinda/Elphaba from Wicked Listen to What is this Feeling. Now listen to it again. Listen to Popular. Now listen to it again. NOW LISTEN TO DEFYING GRAVITY. NOW LISTEN TO IT AGAIN. We’ve got a green woman who is kind of hideous and who thinks she’s ugly! She’s also angry at the world and wants to change shit! She’s also tragically fucked! In the book at least. How is that not a me character? And Glinda. Gods. Glinda. She’s not stupid. She seems it in the book a lot of the time and Elphaba assumes she is right away but...Glinda’s not stupid. She’s actually very smart and putting on a front. Also she basically annoys Elphaba’s tsundere ass into being her bff. And if there is anything I love in my ships it is one half having to be annoyed into friendship by another happier character who is weirdly trusting and accepting of this horrible monster. Why? Who cares! But they are! Now listen to What is this Feeling. Please. 3. Zero/Fiethsing from Force of Will And now we are finally in the top three. We have also reached the part of the list where we have a character with alarming similarities to my weird kidfic OC from Castlevania. So Zero. She’s cranky and serious. Kind of nervous. Really nervous honestly. She’s also pretty cynical and at her worst points actively gives up on trying to save the world and attempts to destroy it or is like on the brink of giving up again. She’s also got abandonment issues, self hate problems, and uncompromising sense of justice that can be reasonably connected to the self hate problems and shit’s just not a good time for Zero. Also she’s a vampire. And then there’s Fieth. Her Most Important Partner. Lovely, stupid, irritating Fieth. Fieth who adores freedom above all else and who is seemingly full of endless optimism and hope and who is a cocky bitch and who lies and sleeps and is basically a cat become an elf. More importantly though there’s what they are. We don’t get to see Zero and Fieth becoming friends. We meet them when they’re friends already and have years of established history with one another. And shortly after we meet them they adopt a child. Or, rather, Fieth declares she’s going to raise the baby into her apprentice and Zero declares that she refuses to let Fieth raise a baby on her own. And then...they become a family. Just. A family. A pretty happy one at that. It’s eventually torn asunder by death and war but before that they’re just two mothers and their daughter. They are in a sort of quantum gay state like poor Nanofate despite their whole deal, but to me they do unquestionably read as a couple. One with problems. A laundry list of them. But a couple with a kid and, in a weird sort of way, a future. 2. Jame/Tori from The Chronicles of the Kencyrath I adore this ship. It is hard to quantify how much I adore it. But it’s quite a lot. It’s dysfunctional. It’s got issues. It’s incest and that shockingly isn’t one of the issues. And that’s why I love it. Because Hodgell has managed to take fantasy characters and mythic archetypes and humanize them with some of the most starkly real depictions of mental illness I’ve ever seen. Hands down. Tori’s a nervous wreck. He’s an asshole with problems from trauma and Jame doesn’t just take his shit. She actually does the exact opposite and tells him to fuck off. That’s important. Tori not just getting the girl despite being a human disaster is very important. The fact that his very behavior is why the girl does not want to get with him even though she really, truly wants to deep down is very, very important. Jame/Tori is the awkward and rough tale of two people having to recover from frankly atrocious abuse. Two people who are deeply drawn to one another but who also fear and kind of hate the other. Two people who can barely stand being in the same room as one another currently. It’s a bumpy road. It’s a road we’re not even sure they can make it down. But that’s why it means things to me as someone whose undiagnosed BPD almost destroyed his relationship. 1. Sakuya/Remilia from Touhou This just barely beat out Jame/Tori and the sole reason it beats out Jame/Tori is I have shipped this fucking shit for literally almost half my life. And I’m still not through with it or tired of it. It’s been years and years and it is still one of my most favoritest ships ever. So I feel pretty confident saying it is my One True Pairing. It’s also got a vampire. Wow. It’s got a human partner who is bad at humaning too! Double wow! And what it’s got in particular is exceptional flexibility. Like all the Touhous Remilia and Sakuya are kind of just left up to the mercy of the fandom. There’s canonical traits they have and we have seen them interact together and with others, but in a far more limited degree than what is seen in a lot of other works. And the fandom is what basically runs Touhou. It is a self perpetuating machine and Sakuremi is still chugging along years later and with a bunch of variety in it, even if it’s got some tropes I am really tired of seeing at this point. But why is this the Touhou ship to end all Touhou ships? Besides the obvious answer of ‘Duh, it’s a vampire and her maid. What the fuck else do you NEED?’ we have the ever important identification and wish fulfillment aspects. Which breaks into my own personal conception of the characters and their relationship with one another. So Remilia’s like...a kid. Forever. She was turned very young so even after five hundred years she still looks like she’s ten at best. She’s also kind of a brat and at times fairly naive in the way a kid might be. But we do see that she puts on airs. She’s TRYING to be this intimidating, sophisticated vampire lady and she takes pride in the fact that people ‘respect’ her. But that respect is more fear of the fact that she’s a vampire and vampires are stupidly powerful in her world. And as someone who had an extended childhood forced on him by his family and who is trying to learn what it is to be an adult and never being treated like an adult or not being able to handle it when he is...That’s just. Something very ripe for playing with. Especially when you mix it with Sakuya. Who’s an outcast among her own kind and who gave up on bothering with them for it. She’s someone who might have been a vampire hunter than failed to kill Remilia. She takes care of her and chides her like a child, but she also is most definitely subservient to her. And she’s said that she’ll always be together with her as long as she lives. Always. Sakuya’s like this weird mix of a sweet, caring goofball of a woman and a hate filled, mopey edgelord that really only could get along with monsters. So like, I like to think, that they’ve basically ended up finding what exactly the other needs. Remilia gets someone who sincerely respects her authority and takes her seriously, but who also will not entirely put up with her bullshit. Sakuya gets someone who...cares. At all. Someone to give her a name and talk to her and not chase her away for being monstrous. And perhaps more than any of these ships freedom to fuck around is there. It’s what I want to make it. Honorable Mentions We have three of these. Nanoha/Fate from the Nanoha franchise, Usagi/Ami from Sailor Moon and Shimako/Sei from Maria-sama ga Miteru. They were all just barely beaten out by Naruhina, hence their inclusion here.

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