#bartimaeus

i DON'T need them to kiss i need them to come to the sobering realisation that their souls are merged and no part of them is extricable from the other anymore

the thing about the throwaway lines in ptolemy's gate about bartimaeus taking a lioness's form because manes block peripheral vision and then the brief reveal a few hundred pages later that he was a lion when ptolemy was attacked and killed is that it's obviously devastating but for me it's more about what it reveals about so much of bartimaeus' narration. he doesn't linger on this connection explicitly. the implication is that so so many of the quick comments he makes have extremely similar stories behind them he's not even revealing in the footnotes, not necessarily bc he doesn't remember but because he finds them painful, or embarrassing, or unimportant. fucked up about a character so very old who is mostly willing to explicitly reference his history only for a quick joke or brag, nothing too real

Love how all of Jonathan Stroud’s series end with the oppressive, unjust government literally getting blown up by people who recognize that it’s wrong :)

"a shapeshiting character who shapeshifts so often they start forgetting what their true face looks like" is wonderful but "the shapeshiting character who never had a true face and their image is fully formed from collection of faces they loved" is worth ten poetic books. This post is about Bartimaeus of Uruk.