Behold. Baby Gideon.
So when Harrow has a very bad time while traveling trough the River for the first time in Harrow the Ninth and sees the dead children of the Ninth House, including a baby Gideon with face-paint, the intensity of the moment was kind of dampened by the mental image that popped in my head.
Just the idea of Gideon with face-paint makes me think of her on the cover with the sunglasses. Ergo, baby Gideon with sunglasses.
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cw: Bakugou dies but comes back to life, “comes back wrong” trope, implied fighting, angst
When Bakugou died, you’re not sure how you went on living. Grief had taken over your life, sat you in the passenger side while it cruised off the highway into icy waters. And even then, you couldn’t find the energy to drown.
It’s why there’s a sudden uptick of energy when you’re promised to have him back. Some top scientists contact you months after his death, tell you to hurry down to the headquarters labs, come and rejoice for what you’re about to witness. And you’re horrified, to say the least.
“This isn’t my husband.” Are your first words when you walk in, watch the figure on the other side of the glass examine its own hands. It looks like your husband but—but his hair isn’t the right shade of blond all over. His nose bridge had a slight bump after a scuffle with a villain. He had a scar on his hand but—but it never looked like it was to sew a pinky beside the other fingers.
“Is that really my husband?” You ask next in disbelief, slowly entering the room. Bakugou’s head snaps up, his eyes a little brighter than you remember but—they hold so much emotion. So much memory, so much panic, so much guilt.
“I left you.” He mutters, his voice raspy and ragged, and you wonder if it’ll always be like this now. It makes you cry a little harder than it should, but you only embrace each other. He’s cold and his shoulders don’t hold the same mass and his back doesn’t carry the same scars. There’s one, jagged and rough, running down his back, and you think, you think that’s where they slipped a new spine in.
“Welcome back home.” You tell him, weeks after meeting him again, new and not totally—Katsuki. He’s stiff and he doesn’t immediately take off his boots when he enters, and it worries you. Makes you think if you’ve just let a stranger into your home, one that has stolen your dead husbands face. Makes you wonder if he’ll be as loving as Katsuki once was, or if he’ll become your monster looming over you with the guilt of not being able to rest anymore.
“I’ve missed you so much.” You whisper against his mouth one night, a little while after he’s moved back. You don’t know why you lay under him, why you let him nestle himself inside of you, why you let him hold you against his chest. Katsuki always ran his hands over your cheeks and neck whenever he held you like this, but this…man, only holds himself up with his hands resting beside your head. It’s alien, how he looks at you, how his hips are methodically measured with every thrust, how he kisses you every 8 seconds. You wonder if he’s more robot than Frankenstein monster.
“Why did you come back to me like this?” You ask him one night, barricaded in the bathroom away from him. You can hear his sobs on the other side, his pleading to be let in. He tells you he never wanted to come back if he had to be like this, that he’s sorry, please let him in, he misses the warmth of your skin, he’s never been so cold before, he’s never liked the cold.
“Is this considered cheating?” You ask yourself aloud one night, when Bakugou is forced back to the lab when he becomes too…un-Bakugou. To sleep with a man that is your husband in every way but? Your husband has been dead for a year now, and yet you stroke the chin of the man that tries so hard to be him everyday, but fails so miserably at it every time.
“I’ll come back to you right this time.” Bakugou promises to you when he’s strapped down to leave for the lab and before he’s sedated. But you don’t believe him—you never did. Your husband is dead, and this animated corpse has been nothing but a cheap mockery of everything you’ve lost and something you will never truly get back.
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Whoever made Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo (Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji’s actors) sing the main ost of The Untamed, which is 無羁 (wú jī)— had made the best decision in the entire decision making world.
Whoever decided to name it 無羁 (wú jī) and make it the WangXian version (from the books/donghua) of the live adaptation, and also the one that Lan Wangji canonically composed as a theme song for him and Wei Wuxian — had made the second best decision in the entire decision making world.
Whoever decided to make the official English title of 陳情令 (chén qíng lìng) as “The Untamed” which also means “unrestrained” or “無羁 (wú jī)”— had made the third best decision in the entire decision making world.
Like it was so genius? Knowing that whenever you listen to 無羁 (wú jī), it’s Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji themselves singing the song? Their theme song? And that even though they censored it, they still managed to make the song name a combination of their names (Wuxian + Wangji)? And that the literal English translation of 無羁 (wú jī) is “unrestrained” which can also mean “Untamed”?
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can't sleep and somehow ended up thinking about The Infernal Devices series despite not having gone there for years but like...god that was one wild ass messy love triangle and i think it might have geniunely been one of the most fun takes on the whole ya love triangle trend ever like yeah just marry both of them just 100+ years apart because of magic immortality reasons. and they were legally besties
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as a huge unreliable narrator enjoyer i love the fact that the raven tower is narrated by someone who cannot lie. so the narration is not unreliable, and any kind of uncertainty is always couched in "here is a story i have heard" or "i imagine", but it scratches the same itch as unreliable narration because the evidentiality of the narration is still so central, just in the opposite way. stories that don't care about where the narrator is getting their information or what biases are present in the way that information is shared with us are on one end of a spectrum, and stories that do care about those things are on the other end, and the raven tower is firmly situated alongside the unreliably narrated stories even though the whole point is that the narrator is as motivated as it is possible to be to never say something that is untrue. and it's fascinating to see how ann leckie manages to build suspense and subvert expectations without really at any point deliberately misleading the reader. every time i reread one of her books, the bouncing of the dvd screensaver in my brain gets a little more frenetic. how does she do what she does. ann leckie what is your secret.
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