Annabeth And Grover Frantically Submerging Percy In Water The Way You’d Put An Iphone In A Bowl Of

wait what

here its basically the barter system. you tie rakhi, give gifts, and the older cousin/brother has to give you a gift

i hate diwali <3

Percy: my dad's such a dick such a deadbeat I hate him

Poseidon: can you tell my kid I love him and I'm very sorry and also save his life

Poseidon: but don't tell him he can breathe underwater except very cryptically

Poseidon: yell at him to breathe a few times

Poseidon: that ought to work

i needs the sleeps.

trying to carry too many objects at once and dropping one and leaning down to pick it up and then dropping another thing when you do and having to leave it on the floor and come back for it is so humiliating like ohhh shit i might have overshot this one. now i have to leave a breadcrumb trail of shame in my wake as i try to reach my destination without dropping anything else. i wish i was dead.

Reminder that aru shah is an underrated series that is just as good if not better than pjo with genuine rep and meaningful relationships and fantastic writing and a fabulous plot and such wonderful world building and roshani chokshi deserves more credit for what she has created

eye of the tiger plays as i enthusiastically jump out of bed and hit my head on an overhead lamp and remain unconscious for the rest of the day

more authors should spend page time dunking on european languages

patron saint of one way trips

@lakefucine | patti white | the reverent marigold | eleanor hsieh | gus greshem | oleg gazenko | alan shapiro | boston manor | @caputvulpinum | pigeon watch | brennig davies | sleeping at last | @fateology | sarah doyle.

aru being a pathological liar is the literal reason why the pandava series even exists

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.