#seriously if you read this im so sorry. i kind of went wild infodumping in there

[natdrinkstea]

tagged by @chiropteracupola and @dxppercxdxver :3 time for you all to judge my taste in books!

rules: list ten books that have stayed with you in some way, don’t take but a few minutes, and don’t think too hard - they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you.

putting this under a cut because I hate making long posts. the rules up there say "don't take but a few minutes and don't think too hard" but I don't know how to do Either of those things. this post is Long. you've been warned.

1. is, of course, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland In A Ship Of Her Own Making by Cat Valente. It's a wonderful, clever story that absolutely ruined the way I view fantasy, devotion, and girlhood at a young age. It's beautiful and magical and devastating AND I LOVE IT!!!!

2. The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater. I post about this series all the time but I never really express how much it means to me? It's about a friendship that's so strong it defies all odds, it's about finding magic in the mundane, it's about being a weird little guy with anxiety who's trying to be braver.

3. The House in the Cerulean Sea and Under The Whispering Door by TJ Klune (they are tied). SORRY FOR THE BOOKTOK MOMENT LOL but these novels are about finding love at an older age in an unexpected place!!! about relishing little moments with people you care about in a world that's beautiful! and the way klune writes introspection really feels like how I Think. it's like a magnifying glass into my brain

4. House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. another one I post a lot about that seems very out of left field considering the rest of the list! but it was recommended to me at a hard time by one of my closest friends, and the incredibly intelligent and thoughtful way it uses Words and Language to express both Horror and Humanity has had SO MUCH influence on how I want to write

5. Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White. This novel captures queer rage in a way that feels deeply personal and wildly cathartic, and the desperation and passion with which Benji views the world and the people he cares about feels the same. Also it helped me get over my fear of meat 👍hooray, meat!

6. Now this is getting hard. um. Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir <3 sorry to put a popular book again but listen. it's about humanity and how ugly and brutal and full of love we are. it's about being so painfully Normal and Alive in a world that's trying to keep what you love from you. It's about eating breakfast and petting a dog and swimming in the sea and it's UNAPOLOGETIC IN IT'S HONESTY. IT'S SO HEALING TO THE INNER CHILD TO SEE NONA LOVE SO FIERCELY

7. Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli. listen. it's not a great book. it's stereotype-y and gross and kind of boring but. when you're in fifth grade and very neurodivergent but trying very, very hard not to let yourself show it, reading about a girl who is proudly Weird and Impulsive and Kind and Creative is like finally getting to see what you could be if you were a little less afraid. she was a manic pixie dream girl but she was mine, y'know?

8. (at this point I'm getting up to look at my bookshelf)

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Again, hugely different from the rest of this list, but probably the book I read in high school that I felt was most worth my time. Stunning, earnest writing and a deeply human story. I could go on for probably an hour about how clever Ellison's imagery is, and how powerful a choice as small as leaving your protagonist nameless can be. If anything on this terrible list is required reading, it's this

9. similarly, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. I read this book for school, but by choice, and I kind of hated it! Not gonna lie! But something about how batshit insane it is left a huge impression on me. While it's wildly unrealistic and often frustrating, there are little bits of earnest grief and uncomfortably close-to-home interactions that make it feel like it Could happen. The way it describes parent-child relationships makes me want to escape my mortal flesh due to feeling Too Seen.

IF YOU READ ALL OF THAT WHAT'S WRONG WITH YOU!!!!!! anyway @haijinks @neonphoenix @human-sweater-vest @lasaraleen @samwisegamwise I'd love to see your ten books but there is No Pressure :3 love u !

10. FINALLY THE END! FUCK YOU! PERCY JACKSON!!! it's so funny and clever and diverse and ACCURATE! twelve year olds are little shits who want desperately to run away from their parents and make friends and have adventures! it made my sense of humor what it is, it introduced me to a blonde female protagonist who was INTELLIGENT AND BRAVE (things I always thought I was but was afraid to be)!!!!! and, most importantly, my first thought upon receiving my adhd diagnosis a week ago (it's been about five years since I last read pjo), was "wow. I'm one step closer to being a half-blood".

EDIT: there are bonus books in the replies that my dumb brain forgot ab until rn if u wanna see :]

#long post #tag thing #seriously if you read this im so sorry. i kind of went wild infodumping in there #nat chats

[bittercoldbrew]

PLEASE tell me about the alien plant girls im so gay for anthropomorphic fem plants

omg thank you SO MUCH for asking and i apologize in advance for the infodump because i have been thinking about these alien plant people for literal years now, i love them so much. I first started thinking about these guys a little after TFA, because of an oc i was working on for a lil star wars fic that i have mostly abandoned by now--so sorry to the like 3 people who were reading my sidon ithano fic but tlj/tros really killed whatever passion i had for the franchise for a good long time :/ but Mando is great so i've been thinking about them'st again...

anyway i am sticking this under a cut because a) im very attached to these characters and if someone steals my shit i will kermit and b) sweet jesus this got so long, i am so sorry

in the SW universe at least, these plant people (that i still for the life of me cannot settle on an actual name for) were the primary inhabitants of a dwarf planet way out in wild space; they had a pretty symbiotic relationship with a race of sentient insectoid people (basically human-sized bees) who could travel between the planet and their home on one of its three moons (affectionately called the Honey Moon). what the plants didn’t know was that the bees were also able to travel to different planets, and had been doing so for a couple centuries before everything went to shit--but we’ll get to that in a bit.

the plant people weren’t particularly interested in the galaxy around them--they had a decent understanding of astronomy and cosmology, but little cultural interest in journeying to the stars. since the planet was pretty small and distant from the galactic core, it was pretty rare that a visiting ship would even pass them by, and scanners didn’t register them as genuine life-forms separate from the natural flora, so even if someone happened to end up out there it’s not the sort of place anyone would really choose to land. on rare occasions, a pirate or smuggler would try to hide out on what they thought to be an unoccupied planet, and would return to the Outer Rim with tales of mobile, sentient trees and bizarre, organic cities found on some uncharted world; likewise, occasionally a plant person would turn up at the local bar with tales of crashed space-ships and strange aliens that seemed almost like people. neither would ever be taken seriously.

the plants aren’t a particularly verbal people. they understand spoken language (a somewhat-modified Basic, at least, which is what the bees speak hmm i wonder where they picked that up from) and many can talk, but most don’t really bother learning to do so. mostly they rely on an ESP-like combo of pheromones and body language, highly attuned to the point that it’s essentially a kind of telepathy. i think i mentioned in the tags on that post that my character Antheia is sorta kinda a jedi? for these people, force sensitivity tends to manifest as an extra-extra-sensory-perception that causes you to be hyperaware of every living thing in your environment, not just the other sentient ones.

this made her uhhh extremely off-putting as a youth, easily distractable and often disinterested in the other people in the small community she grew up in, where she was already pretty disliked to begin with. there’s quite a lot of diversity among the plant people (a wide variety of skin tones/textures and body types, though few if any secondary sex characteristics; four limbs are most common, though occasionally some have two or more sets of arms; different types of leaves/vines/blossoms/etc in lieu of hair), and though they have a barter-based economy there’s still a lot of classism that’s mostly based around lineage (and thus evinced by one’s appearance and the traits one manifests). to protect (or attempt to bolster) those lineages, prospective parents can apply for a spot in a nursery, where their offspring are propagated and tended--mostly just through infancy before going to live with parents, though sometimes longer, and the very high class have private nurseries that will do all the rearing so they don’t have to.

But, on very rare occasions, certain wild plants will spontaneously develop sentience, and even more rarely will survive on their own long enough to find their way to a community. Hundreds of years ago (or “before the bees could speak”, which is their version of “once upon a time”), these spontaneous growths were revered and cherished, and whoever was first to encounter one would see it as a great honor to be responsible for their care and upbringing. now, with a much more striated society, these “weeds” (derogatory) are considered inferior, feral, dangerous. fortunately for Antheia, the man who found her, tangled in marsh reeds under the light of the Honey Moon, didn’t buy into any of that bullshit. he was a really sweet dad, very attentive and doting on his increasingly-strange adopted daughter; they were very close. but the older she got, the more her unusual ability developed, and the more he realized he was well out of his depth to help her understand that part of herself. eventually, she’s sent away to a kind of temple/convent for other people like her, where she’s trained to hone and control her extra senses, rather than be overwhelmed by them.

many years later, the sudden appearance of several large starships in their atmosphere turns their society on its head. it turns out, the bee-people have been traveling to other planets, forging alliances, brokering deals; they claim they just want to facilitate inter-planetary trade. Antheia is among the first to mistrust these invading aliens and their fleet of well-armed droids who seem hell-bent on mining their planet (which is, apparently, rich with cortosis, which--thank you wookiepedia--is apparently capable of repelling lightsabers and blasterfire alike). She flees her convent, joins up with an underground network of resistance fighters, discovers that her hyperawareness makes her a truly formidable force on the battlefield, and helps lead her people in defending the sovereignty of their home. And then things take a turn for the worse...but we don’t need to get into that right now.

ANYWAY.

my other oc, Shoal, is from the same planet but not even remotely star-warsy; either from a different time period well before the droid incursion, or just like an AU of my own stuff, idk. but she’s great, i love her deeply even though i dont really know what i even want to do with her yet. i mostly just was thinking about what a normal, average person in this world would be like, but then i got too attached. she’s also one of the spontaneous “weeds”, a semi-aquatic plant girl that washed up on a sandbar that occasionally connects a small island with the mainland when the tide is out. she was sort of “found” by multiple people at the same time, since they were making their way across to go trade goods at the mainland market, so to avoid the confusion of who should be responsible for her, she’s just sort of raised by the village as a whole. they name her Shoal, since that’s where they found her (it started as a joke, but then no one could agree on anything else to call her so it just sort of...stuck).

she grows up without realizing that it’s a pretty unusual upbringing. as a teen, she gains the reputation for the island’s best fisher (it helps that she can breathe as well underwater as above, and she’s always been a good swimmer). one thing that’s pretty consistent among all the plant people are their teeth--they all have long, sharp incisors and canines because sexy and also as more of a defense mechanism than a dietary one. they don’t eat much, typically absorbing nutrients from the sun/water/air/soil (mud baths are such a beloved experience, like for the most part they are very dignified people but find them some good mud and they will wallow for days) but when they do it’s pretty meat-heavy. they don’t really enjoy the process of eating very much, especially because they don’t have much gut bacteria so they typically have to swallow some stones to break up their food and nobody wants to do all that. but, at least in the coastal towns near where Shoal grew up, fresh-caught fish is considered a delicacy, and they can trade for quite a lot in return.

as she gets older, though, she starts getting restless. she loves her village, but it’s all she’s ever really known. also, it is so hard to even consider dating when literally everyone your age is practically your sibling, i mean, yeesh. so one day she just packs her bags and says her goodbyes and waits for low tide, then sets off to find her own way in the great wide world. she stops wherever she can, sees everything she can, but eventually settles down working at a tavern in a medium-sized town that’s mostly acclaimed for being a crossroads between bigger and better places. she likes it there, likes getting to know lots of new people and hearing about someone else’s travels more than she actually liked traveling herself. after a few years, the tavern-keeper retires and decides to leave the place to her, and she finds she’s become a permanent fixture in this new community. that’s really all i have for her so far, and i have no idea whether i’ll ever actually do anything with this character lol, but still she is very precious to me so i hope i find a story she’d be a good match for sometime soon.

#my ocs #oh my god this is...way too much i am so sorry #the sad thing is this is me trying to restrain myself there was more i wanted to talk about for both #and still i somehow wrote like 1500 words of backstory orz #but yeah i am hoping to have a bit about antheia and mando written up soonish if anyone is interested?? 👀👀 #and wow i really wanna write something with shoal i just. dont know what that something is yet #ugh #thedragonagelesbian #thank you so much for indulging me anthropomorphic plant girls are SUCH an underutilized monster girl its so sad #but i am doing my part to rectify that injustice