uhhhhhh

Ok so I saw some people whining about how the new novella is going to be about Taryn, but let me tell you something:

Taryn is not a bad person

At least, relative to Jude she isn’t. Taryn is no more bad a person than Jude is, you guys just like Jude more because she’s the main character. If the whole book revolved around Taryn instead of Jude, this whole thing would be flipped IMHO.

These reasons are pure inference, it’s just how things looked to me as I read TCP

Reasons:

1) Taryn is not marrying Lock because she loves him (maybe that’s a teensy part of it) she’s marrying him to get a place in faerie, similar to how Jude wanted to earn her place as a knight.

2) Taryn is more faerie than human. She may be a mortal girl, but her morals are all wack due to growing up in the hell known as Faerie. She’s every bit as traumatized as Jude, and probably just wants her suffering to end. Locke is a way to make that end.

3) Taryn may have betrayed Jude, but let’s remember that Jude isn’t the easiest sister to stick by. If it were Taryn’s way, she would lay low and not provoke the wild beasts we know as Cardan’s crew. Now I love Jude more than anything, but half of Taryn’s suffering is due to the fact that Jude Just. Won’t. Quit. It was probably the hardest decision Taryn had to make accepting Cardans deal and leaving her sister in the water like that, but Taryn did the best thing for Taryn, something Jude never really thought about.

4) Taryn chose Locke because Locke wanted a girl who was easy to manipulate. He wanted someone weaker than him so he could mold them into what he wanted. He was probably the only boy willing to marry a girl who wasn’t a faerie, and Taryn took her chance to get a place in court. 

5) Taryn knows just how shitty Locke is. She doesn’t care. As I’ve said before, Locke was a means to an end. Yes, she betrayed her sister, she chose a place in court over Jude, something Jude probably would have never done. Jude is noble, Taryn just wants to make a place for herself, despite where her loyalties should lie. Jude wasn’t getting her anywhere, but Locke definitely would.

This may not have skewed your opinions in Taryn’s favor, but it wasn’t really supposed to. I feel like we all just need to keep an open mind as to what Taryn herself was thinking, and understand her side of the story. Taryn was a shitty sister, but she did what she had to do to keep herself safe in a land full of monsters. 

the first book i read by her was tithe, which was published in 2002 and still has a gay boy as one of the protagonists. this was g r o u n d b r e a k i n g at the time, an unattractive white boy who lived in a trailer with his supportive family, and was into dark yaoi at that. corny wasn’t cool or even that funny. he was just an awkward kid who worked at a gas station trying to be an edgelord.

literally. this was freaking 2002. i read the tithe when i was eleven or so (nearly ten years after it was published), and i fell in love with kaye (honestly, this should have been the first indication that i was bi, but i refused to acknowledge it at the time). back then, kaye was a little blonde asian high school dropout who wore pants too big for her and shoplifted from walmart. and there was her love interest, tall dark mcbroody (roiben), confirmed bisexual reluctant murderer, later bisexual reluctant king of murderers. 

then the second book centered around another girl, val. val fell in love with a troll who helped her get over her drug addiction. literally. that was the book. 

the third book was back to kaye, roiben and corny again, they’re older now, and kaye wants to get married to roiben. i won’t delve into details but i guess you guys already know what happens. corny gets a boyfriend (who is latinx, again, this was 2007 at this point).

i can’t express how much these books mean to me. kaye was my first female crush where i actually realized yes, i am crushing on a girl, all of holly’s female characters are so strong and resilient, she never went through that girl hate bullshit of the early 2000′s all of her female friendships were so pure and good. for instance: kaye and janet, val and ruth, heck, even val and lolly even though that friendship went down the drain.

and you know what the most devastating part of all of this is: even after the cruel prince blew up, y’all just sit on these books!!! the fandom is almost nonexistent, everyone just assumed kaye and roiben were quirky side characters to tcp, even the characters from the darkest part of the forest weren’t recognized (that book was much popular than the whole tithe series, bc people started to catch up to how awesome hb is).

(don’t even get me started on the darkest part of the forest, one of the best lgbt+ books of this decade, hazel and jack end up together, a white girl and a black boy, and ben’s love story gets the spotlight as he falls in love with severin.)

Jude: Oh my god it’s finally happening.

Cardan: *Falls over*

 10) You

 9) Can’t

8) Rank

7) Them

6) At

5) All

4) They’re

3) All

2) Terrible