Alian's EVOlution

character designs for this poor starved fandom 

Order:

Wolfe, Santi

Jess, Morgan

Glain, Thomas

I love stormcrow

Right? They're so gay for one another and I love them with all my heart

Wolfe is such an arrogant conceited idiot [affectionate] and he just met Santi but he's already decided it's his responsibility to protect him. Like...that is MY High Garda. mine. he is MINE and I will Protect him and Take Care of him and Cherish him forever.

Based on a conversation with @thegreatlibraryfangirl

The most evil teacher is just fucking exhausted because he can’t find a tenure-track position, has no time for the research he really wants to do because he’s stuck teaching 100-level classes, and doesn’t have adequate mental health insurance coverage to get his PTSD properly treated.

No one ever says it’s homophobia or racism, but somehow Wolfe always gets the shit classes, has the worst office location, and never gets research funding, while the straight white guys keep getting promotions and tenure and research funding. Wolfe was his department’s diversity hire, and his department chair will not forgive him for failing to be properly grateful for having a job at such a prestigious university at all. He was supposed to be the token gay brown professor, not to stand up for himself or angrily demand changes in curriculum meetings.

Santi, Wolfe’s more traditionally masculine cop partner, gets paid more than him, gets better benefits than him, gets more respect than him, but keeps getting asked to do things that are just a little unethical and feeling pressured to do them because he knows they’ll be homeless without his job (and they’ll lose his health insurance, which might not cover Wolfe’s PTSD adequately, but it’s a lot better than nothing).

Go break up that student protest, whatever it takes? Santi is hoping the students will disperse quietly because he really can’t say no to the boss.

“Nic, can you tell that boyfriend of yours to stop showing up at those protests? If he doesn’t settle down, we’re going to have to arrest him. And it’s making you look bad.” Santi is bristling at boyfriend and knows how unhappy Wolfe will be, but what can he do? They need his job to survive.

Then Wolfe is sitting there in his tiny basement office with an angry Jess, trying to say, “I really want to help get Morgan out of trouble, but if they catch me involving myself in this, they’re probably arresting me and firing my partner and then my PTSD is going to spiral out of control and kill me” without actually saying that.

What is Morgan in trouble for? Protesting the college’s handling of sexual harassment and assault cases on campus. Gregory, Dean of Something or Other, adored by upper administration because his filthy rich family gives very large donations to the university, tried to coerce her into sleeping with him. She reported it, only to have the case swept under the rug because “think of his career. He’s such an important member of the community. It must have been a misunderstanding.” She found out she’s not the only one. She will not be quiet about it.

Frustrated at being told there was no proof Gregory did anything wrong, Morgan hacked his emails and posted a file full of incriminating evidence to the campus Facebook group. She did it with a throwaway account, but the university suspects her and very much wants her caught and charged with felony hacking.

The university asks Wolfe to look into this, of course. Remembering how Gregory used to harass him back when he was a student, Wolfe quietly slips more of Gregory’s passwords to Morgan, while insisting to his bosses that he can’t find any evidence at all.

Santi’s boss wants him on the case, too. Santi doesn’t know how long he can stall before he’s forced to arrest Morgan. “Just grab her at one of those protests,” his boss says. “Bring her in for rioting, we’ll get her to confess to the rest.” He doubts they’re going to do that with legal tactics. He knows what happens to cops who report things like that, and keeps his mouth shut.

Thomas was the star student in the engineering department, until he turned in an assignment that got him flagged as “dangerous.” It didn’t occur to him that the robot he designed had military applications, but it was a very convenient excuse for his department chair to put him on a watch list. When he gets arrested at one of Morgan’s protests, the chair of the engineering department is happy to bail him out, if he’ll just do some work on a special project or two… or twenty…. Thomas practically lives in the engineering department offices now. He has no free time. But if he doesn’t do this, he’s looking at terrorism charges, with that robot he designed as evidence against him.

Khalila is an astrophysics major, easily the top student in the school. She’s going to graduate with honors, she already has offers for fully funded graduate positions at 3 universities, this one included, and job offers from NASA, SpaceX, and Blue Origin. She’s doing a research project on recent space shuttle designs when suddenly, suspiciously, every faculty member starts encouraging her to shift her project in a different direction. Why can’t anyone seem to find a copy of that paper on that shuttle design that NASA suddenly, mysteriously, scrapped? She just wanted to see what was wrong with it and apply that to newer designs.

She finds herself in Wolfe’s tiny basement office, asking him about a strange database error. “This is a waste of time,” Wolfe says. “Those other professors are right. You’re going to ruin your career digging into these kinds of failed projects,” he says, while wondering whether and how to slip her the evidence he’s just uncovered that Elon Musk bribed government officials to bury that perfectly good shuttle design in favor of a SpaceX one.

Glain is a criminal justice major, planning a police career. She understands why people keep telling her that she needs to stay away from Morgan’s protests, but she hates it. Protests are legal. The cops should be going after Gregory. She’s sick of hearing from the campus cops that she needs to be careful who she’s seen hanging out with.

Oof, hello again all, it’s been. A Weird Couple of Years, huh? I hope you’re all doing well – or as well as can be these days. Thank you for everyone who’s still keeping up with blog occasionally - I do get little spikes of activity here and there, and it delights me that new people are still finding this blog every so often. 

Believe it or not, sometime in October last year, this blog actually turned 4 years old! Which I can’t believe, time has just flown by. I started this blog while I was in the middle of uni and making my way through the series as something to do instead of all the assignments I should have been doing. We’ve definitely come a long way since then. 

So, in honour of four years of Great Library Incorrect Quotes, I decided to put together a little Top 10 Posts Compilation! Mostly for my own amusement, but hopefully you guys can find a little joy in it as well. After all, most of these quotes came from you guys! And every one of them is excellent. <3 

I’ll pop the actual Top 10 under a read-more to save cluttering anyone’s dash - this is gonna get long lmao.

I know I have a book blog but I had to post this on main - I just finished reading ‘Sword and Pen’, book 5 of The Great Library Series by Rachel Caine and I absolutely loved it with all my heart and I cried so much, more over the fact that it’s ended (as well as over other emotional stuff in the book) but this is basically me rn - 

The obvious:

- Thomas is a gold band schoolar, so is Chris, Jess is High Garda, so is Nic.  -Thomas and Chris have both been imprisoned and tortured for the fucking same thing  - Jess and Nic both searched for them while the above was happening. Nic always says, that his loyality for Chris runs deeper than that for the library. Jess showed in Paper and Fire, that his he values Thomas more than his future at the library too. Tbf coming from Jess that means much less  than coming Nic, who had been serving the library for years back than. Still.

The personalities:

- Jess and Chris were often compared to each other (by multiple characters iirc), they are both stubborn with self destructive tendecies but also brave, clever and good people. They both come from families with big names. Chris being the son of two of the most influential people in the library and Jess basically being the counterpart to that, by being the son of a big time criminal.

- Thomas and Nics similarities are a bit less obvious but still there imo. They are both geniuses in their own area of expertise. Thomas being a brilliant engineer and Nic an expert marksman and (even though he thinks differently) a good tactician. They are both more quiete characters and speak less than most of the other members of the pack. They can both be very charming. Both of them come from normal families ( Nic might come from a military family but we don’t know) as far as we know. Most importantly, they are both VERY protective. And post Paper and Fire, they both have a tendecy to snap. Like Nic is often described at being very charming and calm, when he’s pissed and most dangerous. Thomas is behaving similiar in Sword and Pen. And they both go absolutely feral, at the end of Ash and Quill, when they believe to have been betrayed (well, they kinda were).

The relationship:

-NicChris and JessThomas immediatly got along from the first moment on ( Nic even mentioned, that he fell in love with Chris when he first saw him) - Both of the pairings have a way to understand each other. Post Paper and Fire Thomas was a little odd at first and Jess seems to be the one who’s really being there for him, just like Nic was there for Chris post Rome -Chris and Nic both care about each other more than about anything else. This is a bit of a hot take, but I believe that is the case for Jess and Thomas too. Hear me out: We have this weird hint at a one sided GlainThomas (was it from Jess or Khalilas perspective I’m not sure?) but whoever it was is not a reliable narrator. We have nothing in Thomas’ perspectives to confirm that. Yes, he was scared when she was wounded in Sword and Pen but he would have been worried the same if Chris had been hurt, come on. But during his POV he thinks most about Jess and his wellbeing than about anyone else. Just how Jess thinks more about Thomas in Paper and Fire than about anyone else, even when his girlfriend is imprisoned too.  Okay, so we have these parallels and we have Jess thinking/saying twice, that he wants a love like Chris and Nic ( I love how all the characters agree, that they invented love, because they did)

Hello nonexistent fandom, I am here to draw these beautiful characters I love so much!! Had to draw the squad because I love these characters so much and this series is amazing!! Ya’ll should read it

The Great Library series by Rachel Caine 

2015 was the prime of my YA reading years so I have no idea how I’d never heard of this series before - especially because it’s very, very good. 

Jess Brightwell is son to a family of book-smugglers, in a world where the Great Library of Alexandria never burned and became the largest power in the world as a result. Knowledge is considered more important than even lives, and the Library has a stranglehold on both. In order to give his family an inside man, Jess goes to Alexandria to become a Scholar, one of their librarian-mages. 

I LOVE a story with an ensemble cast, and this delivered - once Jess arrives at Alexandria and meets his fellow students, I had so much fun learning about them and their teachers

Speaking of which, their teacher Wolfe is my favourite person I’ve read about all month. An A+ character right there.

I loved the conflict of morals between the Great Library and the Burners (rebels whose greatest weapons are burning books and themselves along with them) and the book smugglers. None of them are completely right and all of them do terrible things. Unlike most stories where the main characters will have to pick a side, it wasn’t immediately obvious what the side should be.

The second act of the book takes place in a city under siege and it was very very good, thrilling and horrifying.

I thought that Caine could have gone further with some aspects of her alternate history - if the Great Library is the greatest power in the world, why is English the lingua franca that all the characters from diverse places have to conform to? But for the most part, the steampunk vibes were there.

Plot: once it got into it, it was great. The first three or four chapters of the book are markedly different from the rest of it. If you don’t like them, stick it out until you get to the meat of the story. I was not interested in reading another series about a criminal empire and the scion of it when there was a whole world outlined and waiting to be discovered. I was very excited once we got into the world. I do think the pacing dragged a tiny bit in the third act, but never enough to ruin the story for me.

Characters: I had so much fun with these dudes. Jess is an engaging protagonist who isn’t too annoying, although I had a lot more fun with the secondary characters. My favourite was Christopher Wolfe, mentioned above, although telling a lot about him is a spoiler. I also liked his classmates Khalia (badass and clever Muslim mathematician), Glain (think about the gentle giant type and then think about how much you’ve always wanted to see it applied to a girl), and Dario (a rich asshole who’s actually fun to watch and be around). Their friendships were really fun to see, and the romance wasn’t bad either, although not exactly memorable.

Setting: I feel like Caine could have gone further with the alternate history, but fun. I really enjoyed everything I learned about the Great Library - Caine puts in letters and historical documents to give you a better sense. I think, though, that if you’re making such a dramatic shift in the world so early on, that it should impact the world a lot more than it did - not ‘this is our world but there’s steampunk added in and Alexandria is a different place’, but ‘same land shapes different world.’ I’m very excited to see the different locations the rest of the series takes us to, though.

Prose: good at landing points, if not memorable. The beginning scene of the book, where someone eats the only copy of Archimedes’ On Sphere-Making, was fantastically horrifying. The scene at the end of the second act as they leave the city was also fantastically horrifying, though I won’t spoil it. It wasn’t poetry, though.

Anyway, what I like is that Santi's placing his morals over his service for the library and that is 👌👌👌 You could argue that he isn't doing that in the first book but he is already showing little acts of rebellion there (siding with Wolfe against the Archivist, keeping Jess' secret) the thing is just that his priority when it comes to loyality is:

Wolfe>>his morals and values>the library as an idea/the protection of knowledge>the library as it is

We saw that when Chris told Jess that he went feral after he was taken to Rome. I believe that he would have also acted against the library after Wolfe was returned from Rome if it hadn't endangered himself and therefore Wolfe.

Is that it is canon Wolfe and Santi enjoy playing board games. Chess, sennet, and 'the ancient games of Ur' are all mentioned.

(Now I'm just imagining them being full-blown board game nerds in a modern AU and it's beautiful.)

I’ve only had the notes for this lying around for like … twelve thousand years. Like, at least six months. Omg. 

Right, so, this is every deity mentioned in canon, I THINK. Also includes pseudo-canon Stormcrow, thanks @rosalind-of-arden. 

Firstly, the many who are only mentioned as statues/automata. 

Nut (Egyptian, displayed in inlays, once in the chest containing Morgan’s collar, once on the Artifex’s office door)

Menhit (Egyptian/Nubian, one of the very many war deities outside the High Commander’s office.)

Hera (Greek, automaton on the street where Dario tries to contact a book smuggler in P&F)

Bast (Egyptian, hostile Artifex/Archivist automaton in Smoke and Iron and Sword and Pen, statue in Sword and Pen)

Athena (Greek), Saraswati (Hindu) and Nabu (Mesopotamian) are mentioned as writing deities, found in the Library gardens.

There’s a statue of Hathor (Egyptian) at the top of the Lighthouse. 

There’s also a statue of Heron mentioned - he’s not a deity as such but multiple characters exclaim in his name throughout the series. Could easily get fully deified since his tomb has been uncovered. 

Jupiter, Juno, Pluto, Mercury, Victoria and Minerva (all Roman) are mentioned as statues while the pack are in Rome. 

Now, those deities mentioned with evidence of worship/cultural integration

Christian God and Muslim God are both mentioned extensively. 

Ra (very major Egyptian god) is mentioned in exclamations and the like during Stormcrow. Nowhere else, interestingly.

See point about Heron - he’s used to exclaim/swear by.

Thoth is described as having a “faded” temple, in “poor repair.” He is mentioned many times throughout the books. 

Hephaestus (Greek) has a temple mentioned in canon. Jess also compares Thomas to Hephaestus.

Laverna (Roman goddess of thieves, cheats and the underworld) Fittingly, this is the temple where Red Ibrahim takes Jess in Smoke and Iron. 

Anubis (Egyptian god of the underworld) Mentioned a few times, most noticeably has a temple in Sword and Pen. Priestess and religious functions mentioned. 

Bes/Beset (Egyptian) are mentioned as the ‘household gods’ in Alexandria, depicted on thresholds. It’s polite to touch/acknowledge them. 

Osiris (another very major Egyptian god) is mentioned in Stormcrow, and also when Anit is talking about the Egyptian afterlife in Sword and Pen. 

Ma’at (Egyptian deity of justice/truth) is likewise mentioned by Anit.

Isis: Used as an exclamation ”Blessed Isis!” by Anit and a random guard, as we all know Santi asks a statue of Isis to keep Wolfe safe in Sword and Pen, and is a hostile automaton.

Horus. And of course, Horus. The emblem of the Library, mentioned … everywhere. In every way possible.