#absolute midnight

i am also happy that Disney no longer has the rights to Abarat, and they are back in Clive's hands, because they would have ruined it for sure

also, please, please, PLEASE tell me if you are a part of this fandom. i have felt alone for most of my life.

ok hello fellow uh... 5? fans? of abarat? on tumblr, I got the interlibrary loan of Absolute Midnight WITH ILLUSTRATIONS and I finished it and here’s some thoughts These will sound like whining or like I hated it, but I actually did enjoy it, I just also have Some Problems and I wanna rant.

1) who the fuck is Gazza? Gazz? Whatever his name is? I hate him. What the fuck is the point of this character? He feels randomly shoehorned in just to give Candy ANOTHER goddamn love interest and I’m like MALINGO IS RIGHT THERE? WHY ARE YOU DOING THE YA LOVE TRIANGLE THING? And unlike Malingo (or arguably Letheo who I felt was going that way in book 2, or Chris Carrion or Finnegan Hob who I felt Barker was going with until he remembered that they’re each a minimum of 16 years older than Candy and then went WHOOPS), I literally have NO IDEA what Gazza looks like, I don’t think he gets a single illustration. He comes out of nowhere, he oscillates wildly between “huge asshole” and “infatuated with Candy,” the ONLY thing I can remember about him is that he was  fisherman, I guess. He has no development, and Candy just... instantly falls in love with him despite having one (1) conversation with him which began with him trying to stab her. And I confess -- I’m an asexual grey-romantic 34 year old, so yeah, romance is always confusing to me, but this one realllly strains credibility. And I’m kind of feeling justified because I haven’t seen a single fanart of this guy, ever, and I’ve seen fanart of *all kinds* of minor characters.

And like I’m not normally a shipper. But holy jeez. Malingo: a truly wonderful person who clearly loves candy and is also very attractive, who had instant chemistry with Candy when they met and a very well developed backstory who has been around for 3 books, who smells like pumpkin spice and looks like a friendly joyful jack-o-lantern... and then HELLO SUDDENLY A RANDOM ASSHOLE who we don’t even know what he looks like.

I’m just. I’m upset about this! What the hell, Barker, why did you feel the need to shoehorn in a Typical YA Love Interest? (Possibly, I missed something? Some part where he got character development or a backstory beyond “random fisherman”? Is he secretly the Commexo Kid or something? the small child that gets killed to show how evil Mater Motley is had more character development than this dude). I kept kind of hoping that she’d have her love at first sight crush and he’d then get killed just to prove Carrion’s point about loving and losing because he was *so* annoying but no, he’s just still there at the end, whining about everything, negging Candy, and generally just being arbitrary.

2) As usual for Abarat Barker suffers from Too Much Stuff Happening Gotta Get It All Out ASAP so nobody gets to rest and we just careen as fast as possible from Thing to Thing AAAAAAAAAAAAAAa but that’s okay because it’s mostly pretty cool & interesting

3) Boa Is Evil. I’ve seen some people complain that this wasn’t foreshadowed well and it came out of left field, but... having just re-read the other two... I do think Barker didn’t foreshadow it very well and he could have done a lot more, annnd I think he hadn’t quite started down that line of thinking until Days of Magic: Nights of War, B U T, I will say that there were weird mysteries about Boa we didn’t know of from the first time we learned of her, and I’d always gotten the feeling that a) Christopher wasn’t just a spurned entitled man, that something else was going on there and b) there had to be more to Boa than just Pretty Sparkle Perfectly Good Princess Embodiment of All Goodness (TM). I do think she gets wayyy too far into Cartoonishly Evil though, like, she went from Perfect Princess to Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain, and I can’t tell if this is just Clive kinda writing badly, or if there was a “real” Boa who was somewhere between and that removing her more just removed the “bad” parts and everything else was absorbed into Candy. Or something. You know it’s bad when Mater Motley is the more nuanced villain here... Also, the Fantamoya have some SPLAININ to do as to why they saved this bitch in the first place, with the power they have they HAD to have known she was Like That, but also had to have had some other reason for doing so. I feel like they did more to Candy than just put Boa there...

4) The illustrations in this one are a lot more foreboding and a lot more abstract. And I get it, this is the darkest of the three books, but at the same time it’s at the expense of things like... well, what the hell does Gazza even look like (is that even his name, I can’t remember, I had to return the book to the library). At this point, I wish Clive would do a Dramatis Personae thing, sort of like the Almanac he did in Book 1, because there’s A LOT of characters now and I’m starting to lose track.

5) If you’re gonna give Chris Carrion a redemption arc -- and I am HERE for it -- he’s gotta start doing good acts. Starting with going up against his grandma and against Boa. But I *am* here for the possibility -- I actually thought he was a nuanced character in Book 1 even, and I normally hate dudes who go “she broke up with me so I’m now gonna be eeeevil” but hey! turns out it was way more complicated than that and he was actually justified in trying to assassinate her.

6) Did Letheo die in book 2? I actually can’t remember o_O

7) That’s a HELL of a cliffhanger to end on, wow! I wonder, also, if the Abarat is a kind of inverted torus of a sort, like... a multi-dimensional shape, so at the edges the water still appears to fall down, but there’s really two sides to the “plate” (the other side being wherever Candy, Malingo, and That Guy just ended up), with the Twenty-Fifth being a column in the middle that connects both; possibly where the Izabella “comes back” from falling off the edge.

8) That Glyph at the end was super dope

9) How many world-ending cosmic horror factions can one universe hold anyway!? Jeeeeez

10) I’m really glad I got spoilered for Malingo surviving because I might have just given up there what with What’s His Name coming on the scene and then Malingo apparently getting fridged. Also, his head flapping around is really funny. I wonder how long it’ll take him to grow a new body? Also I am amused by Geshrat giving birth to flappy severed heads, apparently, but also like “that’s probably less trouble than giving birth to a whole baby actually if the head is baby sized”

Ya @teal-deer the sequence where Boa and Candy are removed from one another is my honest to god favorite part of book 3. Candy was already a well-written character, but after this moment you can see she is beginning to excel at being herself! At finding who she is!

One thing I liked the most about this turning point is that once they are separated, Candy becomes more decisive than ever. Before she was a little wishy washy, which makes sense! I dunno - seeing her character evolve in book 3 was (and is) one of my favorite parts!

I made an amino for the Abarat series as I am currently rereading DoMNoW on a whim and upon searching for a community on the app did not find one. If y’all are interested in joining here is the code. ✨😊