#menthalightfoot

JEHAN 14:  Jehan loves music, and he plays, and his family’s rich enough for him to have had a fair amount of dance training.  He could be a pretty good dancer if he wanted to be.  However, he has no interest in following the conventions of dance in which he was trained, and he tends to let loose and follow his own lead.  Whether that makes him a bad dancer or not, I won’t judge here, but he’s certainly difficult for most people to keep up with!

I started shipping these two in the middle of my first Brick read-through, and was confused and disappointed to find that there was very little fanwork involving them.  I assumed more people would ship them based on the book alone!  I make no secret of the fact that my shipping tends toward ambiguously close friendships, and Courf/Marius is a pretty textbook example of that!  And also that when I ship something, I don't care too much what kind of relationship the characters have, exactly, so long as they are spending time together and enjoying each other's company.  The line in the text that absolutely sells me this ship is “in Courfeyrac's presence, Marius breathed freely, a decidedly new thing for him.”  Marius, smol anxious thing that he is, finds that in Courfeyrac's company he can quiet all that anxiety and relax from the demands of the world; he can breathe.  And that's huge.  Courfeyrac likewise seems to find Marius endearing, and tolerates his quirks as I suspect people (M's relatives) haven't in the past.  We see Courfeyrac in the book being quite tactile, and I suspect that Marius would be touch-starved and needful but too worried to ever initiate things like that, and that kind of casual touch is part of what helps Marius to breathe more easily.  (Translation: I need more C/M cuddles.)  Ummm anyway, I ship them because they are adorable friends and I think that would translate well into other types of relationship.  (I will also say that I ship Marius/Cosette or some flavor of poly MC2 as endgame.  Marius and Cosette are important and deserve each other in the best way possible.  ((and let's just say, if Marius/Cosette involves some Courfeyrac angst... I won't complain.))  But there's plenty of people drawing/writing about that—I have to keep my ship afloat!)

This bar was perhaps the last place she would find herself after previously getting engaged. But beside her, Cadash’s smile was the widest it had been in years. And that was more important to her than experiencing an ideal scene plucked out of her many romance novels.

I do think that it’s important to maintain really old books, however.  Physical libraries will always be important, and no digital facsimile of a manuscript or codex can give us as much information as the hard copy.  I love old books, can you tell?  Also, as a professor of mine was fond of saying, there is no means of transmitting information with as much longevity as a book.  Anything stored digitally, as we are all well aware, has the potential to be wiped out or otherwise made inaccessible at any point, and surprisingly easily.  Nothing short of physical destruction can do that to a book.  We have books surviving over a thousand years later--it seems doubtful to me that we will ever be able to say the same for electronic data.

I’m good! at work, trying to figure out if I should use the feminine or masculine forms for Aston Martin (which is hard and useless because they don’t have a French website, so it probably will be less trouble considering this article an exercice in epicene writing...)

Y - What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?The Wicked and the Divine?  And there was a strange brief flourishing of The Raven Boys.   Also, JJBA fandom, which I am not exactly *in* but always appreciate *seeing*, you know? 

tbh when it actually sinks in, I'll probably cry