σκύλα

Naturally I went wow okay, and there was more

Just how much involved was Hyacinthus in Apollo’s life

Anyway, yes. There are mentions of a stone called Hyacinth(us)

(Greek anthology)

and of sapphire being sacred to Apollo

(Nonnus, Dionysiaca)

It’s Pliny the elder who named the stone hyacinthus, because the stone resembled the blooms of hyacinth flowers. However, the thing is, the sapphire described in ancient texts is most probably not the stone we call sapphire today. Until 18th century, it seems, sapphire was a term used to refer to lapis lazuli. Pliny the elder describes sapphire as “refulgent with spots like gold. It is also of an azure color…In no case, however, is this stone transparent.” Another scientist Theophratus describes it as “the sapphirus which is speckled with gold”. These all describe lapis lazuli rather than sapphire. Even Nonnus’ description of “patterned sapphire” makes sense when you consider this.

So, when ancients said that sapphire was sacred to Apollo and named after hyacinths, they were 99% referring to this

and not this

And despite the shit we give him

Hayden Christenson

is the biggest

most clumsy

cinnamon roll

in the Star Wars franchise.

Tom Hiddleston, Loki: Villain You Love to Love

Well thank you!

It’s a major bummer that we have to wait a few more months for the last book and I wish we had a bigger fan base following for this series, but considering the market of YA fiction out there, getting fans in the community is difficult right now. Though, I personally think this is one of the better done love triangles.

I mean, on the one hand I really hate love triangles because it turns into which boy is needlessly obsessed and/or which girl is needlessly obsessed with someone who doesn’t love them back.

On the other hand, I would say that a book like Endless Knight gives one pause about True Love and Destiny.

Usually in a romance series the First Boy a Heroine meets is the one she’s going to wind up rubbing bits with later, but in Arcana, that’s really not the case. Evie starts out with a boyfriend, meets someone else and has to learn about him. With Arik’s introduction, we also get to ask the fictional questions of “What is Destiny”. If Death and the Empress are meant to be together what happens when you just don’t like the way your soulmate was incarnated, you know?

Personally, and I hope I’ve made this clear, I’m a Jack/Evie shipper. However, I have a lot of sympathy for the plight of Arik and I think that Cole gave us a really good comparison of the two. I cannot, and this isn’t a statement on others, this is simply a statement on my preferences and feelings, rectify a pairing with Arik simply because he’s just too pushy. He’s too centered on what he wants and not the needs of his partner. While he does care of Evie in the material and survival sense, everything he wants is for his own satisfaction. Jacks always put Evie over himself.

Jack and Arik were always going to be rivals for Evie’s affections and I feel like the reason that this triangle actually WORKS is that Evie is a very fleshed out and balanced character with her own motivations and intrigue. Jack’s advantages in the Evie/Jack pairing are that he gets to Haven first, he protect Evie while she’s coming into her own and wants to HELP her succeed instead of winning all her battles for her. He tries to make her stronger, even though he does want to shield her from the worst of it. There are moments where that need to help her be a stronger person and to fight all her battles for her war within him. And that’s wonderful.

Arik on the other hand was, when he first met the Empress hundreds of years ago, younger than her. He desired her. He was influenced by her beauty and I can’t for one moment thing that Previous Empress wouldn’t have played on that for survival. Perhaps she wasn’t kind and she did betray him, but again, hidden agendas and motivations. Past Empress had been raised to play the Game and as they say in A Song of Ice and Fire, you win or you die. Yet with each game that Arik has won, he’s become less of a human. Evie on the other hand is still very connected to humanity and the mores of her time.

The part of the interview with Cole that I liked the best was the answer she gave when asked specifically about the Love Triangle. 

Plus, Evie deserves to have options in at least one area of her life. She’s had so many choices taken away from her (by the Flash, her destiny, etc.), but she still has a choice about who to give her heart to.

Cole is not intending on letting this be easy, but at least Evie has some good options here. She has on the one hand a man who has worked hard his entire life and is changing as a man to be a good partner to her. On the other hand she has an obsessive lover who has been trying to keep her for centuries.

Finally: Evie’s actions. Everything I have seen her do since the first book have had one goal in mind: Survival. She had to be cold to Jack pre-flash because she was afraid of him. She went to his house pre-flash because he took her sketchbook and she knew she couldn’t handle returning to the mental hospital. That interaction was based on her need to survive. When he comes to Haven, she goes with him to survive. Yes, she starts to fall in love with him, but he also keeps the voices of insanity at bay, and that too is a survival technique. Do I believe she loves him? Absolutely, but she also needs to continue breathing. When she chooses to go with Death in the cave, it’s again, all about survival. She is surviving this game and she’s damn sure going to make it so he can survive too. When she begins her flirtations with Arik, that’s also about survival. She is trying to find a way back to Jack at that point.

And when she finds out that Jack assisted in her mother’s suicide, her cutting herself away from Jack and clinging to someone else is also about survival. She cannot mentally handle knowing that the person she loved might have only come to her for revenge and she isn’t yet ready to face that he sped her mother along to her final ending.

I’ve always wondered how it would have gone down if Jack never came to Haven and if Evie had seen the army herself. Would she have reigned death and mayhem down? We know what happens when Evie gives herself up to her bad side. If you don’t remember, you should go ask Arthur.

To me, the worst and saddest moment of Evie’s time with Arik is actually when she stops them in the middle of sex. I know that a woman always has a right to say no and I’m proud of her for SAYING no, but I feel like it was cruel of her to let things get as far as they did for Arik. Do I want them to be together? No. But do I think that she is often unintentionally cruel? Yes.

Though, on the other side of things, if you want to compare both men to each other, she did EXACTLY the same thing to Jack in book 1 at the pool house. Mind you, she hadn’t gotten off or anything like she did in book 2, but she does stop Jack from penetrating and taking things beyond where they should be going.

I love this series as a whole and I just need to rant first off though, one of my favorite Characters, Tess.

Because I love her as a character, and generally speaking, I love her alliance more than I love Evie’s most of the time. She’s in cannon, a thick girl, something that I, as a big girl, love to bits because seeing just thin women in basically all media makes it a little hard to accept myself and often times knocks down my motivation to get into better shape. One thing Kresley Cole does amazingly is character building. Evie isn’t perfect. No one in the stories are perfect, something I love. Tess isn’t the Earth shaking goddess of the cosmos she could have been if Kresley Cole had written her as having complete control over her powers.

She’s just a kid. She’s just a girl with powers she can’t control, powers that could kill her and everyone around her if she lost control. She has a nervous habit, chewing her nails that even goes so far as to cause her cuticles to bleed, a nervous habit I share, as I also do this when I’m stressed. Despite not knowing how to use her powers, she still tries to contribute. She still wants to be helpful.

Also, can we talk about her relationship with Joules and Gabriel for a moment. Because, god, I love the friendship those three have. From what I see, Gabriel is like a protective older brother to her. He almost flipped his shit when Evie forced Tess to go back in time so far back her hair was falling out(Something me and my best friend both screamed at Evie about when we got to that part of the audio book). When Evie says she’s sorry about Tess’ death in Death’s car, even Joules, whose all but foaming at the mouth to get a crack at Death, quiets down for a minute at the mention of Tess. They genuinely cared about her. They miss her. It’s nice to see relationships like this, something that is often romanticized in most media. Another good Example is is Evie with Matthew, even if Matto is being a weird bean right now and I’m screaming at Kresley Cole not to do what I think she’s leading up to.

Also, another fucking thing, NO ONE IS PERFECT. I can’t say how much I love this, because believe me, I know how easy it is to accidentally make a Mary Sue, and Kresley Cole is sooooo good at not doing that. Evie doesn’t fucking know about her powers, she questions her own sanity even after the Flash happens. She has to slowly learn about her powers, and even then, they aren’t perfect, they’re wild and emotion based, not easy to control. She slowly gets better. She’s not the instant pro and sourcing or surviving like Jack was, it’s a learned skill, something she needed to work out. Every character has their own flaws, things that are fairly consistent and aren’t glossed over. Things that make them relatable. Evie has been sheltered her whole life, she doesn’t know how to shoot a gun or drive. Jackson isn’t good with emotions, sometimes he comes on too strong, he recognizes this and works on it. Matthew’s powers screwed up his mind, Selena doesn’t trust, she’s TOO hardened by her training, Finn is that one guy who’s a total fuckboy but trusts too easily and doesn’t mean any harm. Death was hardened by his long life, he doesn’t trust. Tess is a nervous wreck, Joules is angry and clearly struggling with suicidal thoughts and depression, Gabriel can’t fucking socialize to save his life because he was raised in a fucking CULT. I could go on, but I’ll move along.

Another thing Kresley Cole does beautifully, is balancing pacing and Character development. Because by the end of the 6th chapter, I was willing to die for Evie. My poor baby thought she was going insane and she couldn’t even confide in her best friend! But, by that chapter, we already were getting a pretty fucking good idea of the wonderful misery we were in for. We were in a world where girls could control plants, guys could see the future, and there were clearly things going on that neither we, as readers, or the main character herself  knew about, things that meant life or death. We knew exactly the type of shit storm we were walking into, and we were already too invested to care. THAT, boys and girls, is EXACTLY, how you capture an audience, how you have a captive audience that doesn’t want to be freed. Because I sure as hell didn’t want to be. By the end of the 1st book I was almost crying because the rest of the books hadn’t been released yet.

Also, Sol the sun card, one of the power house’s of the Arcana is Bi and Poly, something I absolutely love because  FUCK YES, YOU SEE THAT BABY, THAT’S MY BABY. He was in a relationship with a guy and a girl, and it’s portrayed as a healthy loving relationship. He’s clearly torn to bits over what happened to them, and it’s not treated as weird or wrong. It’s so fucking GOOD to see this kind of relationship normalized. It’s something I hope catches on