you’re starting to look really weird.

In many ways The Monster and the storyline with The Monster is kind of the culmination of all of Eliot’s Problems. For a period of time he is stuck inside himself, with only his thoughts and his concepts of the most important people to him to keep him company, unable to stop himself (his body) from hurting those same people. He is even for an extended period not aware this is happening and is living in a comforting illusion of stasis, of his season 1 or pre-season 1 Brakebills self, throwing the best party over and over again. To briefly regain control he has to do extraordinary emotional bravery at the possible cost of his life and maybe the lives of others if he fails, and he has to do it alone, with no bullshit to fall back on (Charlton notwithstanding). It’s just such a neat fantasy-TV-plot encapsulation of everything going on with him, including the recurrent element of violence that keeps encroaching on him from his childhood abuse/bullying through to his manifestation of magic, him having to kill Mike, etc. Like u must unfortunately admit the show Did That.

speaking of quentin's hobbies, an underrated bit of characterization-via-the-necessities-of-tv-production is that quentin knows there is a student in his year at brakebills who is a huge enough nerd that she's so into star trek that she can be bribed by the promise of leonard nimoy on vinyl, which quentin can offer as a bribe presumably because he is also really fucking into star trek because he is a huge nerd, and yet as far as we know he, famously a huge nerd, literally never attempts to befriend this huge nerd he obviously has at least some core interests in common with

Do y’all remember when The Monster held out his ice cream cone and Quentin (Brian!) took a resentful exhausted traumatized lick right after The Monster just magically slit the ice cream truck teen’s throat. Hello. Is this thing on

do they think... that prologues and epilogues... which take place within the story and are very much inside of the same book as the rest of the pages... don't count as part of the book....???.....