#scholar's plot

Benton is ADORABLE, precious historian bby and beautiful cinnamon roll

Dayless got rid of him because he STARTED NAMING THE RABBITS AND COULD RECOGNIZE THEM ALL god bless

i love the jeweler and how he just wants some small furry animals and colorful bedroom decorations and a few kind people to take care of him (the story about the crystal he gave to the maid at the university was kind of frightening but weirdly cute, like you know she sometimes chatted to him about the boy she was courting and he was legit trying to help her out)

KATHY KATHY KATHY MY LOVE

seriously this book had everything i was looking for re: Kathy, she was finally a major player in the story and had a lot to do and a lot to say 

i loved the parts where she talked about what happened at court and now i want a book about her hanging out with Rupert and Meg

i died when i read the part about the high liege proposing an OT3 holy shit (and honestly if things had been slightly different it could even have worked, but it doesn’t seem like Kathy and Rupert are remotely attracted to each other and Kathy doesn’t want to be queen anyway)

i love that her reaction to court was basically, “this is boring, i want to be back in the country helping run the estate”

i LOVE how she spent as little as possible on clothes while she was at court and then used her leftover dress allowance to stay with Benton and bankroll the investigation to clear his name 

i love Kathy and Benton and Michael’s interactions omg you can totally tell those three are the chill ones in the family and even though they have different interests they will always support each other because they can’t necessarily count on it from their parents

MY TINY LITTLE OTP IS CANON OMGGGGGGGGG

seriously i’ve been shipping Fisk/Kathy since the first book and i’m over the moon about it 

they’ve been writing letters to each other for three years and whenever they’re together they get along super well and i love all their interactions

they had some amazing chemistry in this book and they just kind of think on the same wavelength, they’re a lot more alike than Fisk and Michael are

they have different knowledge sets and backgrounds but they are both really clever and have this slight edge to their personalities that comes from being sensible realists (unlike Michael who still has this idealist/hero thing going on despite everything that’s happened, my darling child)

Kathy is a young, wealthy, Gifted noble girl with four older brothers and really good marriage prospects and is super precious to her family, but she doesn’t seem particularly sheltered - she’s still got some illusions about life but you get the impression she’s getting a better picture of how the world works all the time, and emotionally she’s very prepared to handle that knowledge

and the BEST part about this is that KATHY’S GOING TO KEEP BEING A MAJOR CHARACTER because lbr the main thing these books were lacking was a regular female character in the main cast

i doubt this will happen but IMAGINE if Hilari Bell added a Kathy POV in Lady’s Pursuit, i would die of happiness probably

now my dream is for Fisk to bring Kathy to visit his sisters because I need them back and it would super cute if Kathy met them

speaking of Fisk’s sisters, i have a lot of residual anger about what happened to them (Anna in particular) and there was a line that made me get upset about Anna all over again, but I’m not going to go into that now because it really should be a separate post

for the record i don’t ship Fisk/Michael in a romantic or sexual way, and i’m particularly uninterested in the idea of them having sex

Michael reads as aro-ace to me (i really hope he never has a successful love interest in canon) and I think Fisk is demisexual

though imo both boys have a slightly fucked-up relationship with compulsory heterosexuality (Fisk’s very first paragraph in The Last Knight, Michael’s whole thing with Rosamund that seemed to have no actual attraction behind it and would have felt super weird if it had ever worked out) 

Kathy also seems demisexual to me, but I still feel like there’s a lot more to know about her and MORE KATHY PLS ALL THE KATHY

I KNOW RIGHT??? I spent half of the book like "Michael you idiot"but also "Fisk you idiot"

Scholar's Plot is available for kindle now!