Armand pulling Louis along vs Lestat having Louis take the lead.

Armand controlling and looking down on Louis's emotional outbursts vs Lestat doing some crazy shit because even hate is better than apathy, silence and indifference.

Louis with a book in his hand and or surrounding by books in easy reach and Lestat buying him books as gifts and peace offerings vs Armand's bookshelves out of reach but in view and Louis having to ask permission to read.

Lestat settling in New Orleans, a place by a river that runs into a lake that runs into an ocean (don't know why but i really feel like Louis is a water baby given that he could swim the Mississippi and I really think he spend his childhood and young adulthood barefoot with his toes in river mud and exploring the bayou given the stop he drove Jonah to) and only wanting to leave if Louis did because Louis is his home vs Armand locking Louis away in a tower in the middle of a dry, barren desert.

Louis and Lestat sitting outside even at Louis's most depressive and sucidial vs Armand dismissing Louis longing for the natural world as silly sentimentality and that gross anemic facsimile.

Loustat's lived in, cluttered and warm townhouse with echoes and presence of a family vs Armand's cold, minimalistic, sterile, clinical penthouse that feels like a showroom display.

Lestat Louis:passionate, fiery, stubborn, opinionated, angry, spiteful, warm and loving, vibrant and moving; alive vs Armand Louis:cold, composed, eerily still, clinical and clipped, unnaturally repressed; hollowed out and all but dead

bloodsport | loustat

And I tried to get you back through sheer force of hope, sheer force of want.

"Because I completely fucking hate you," said Harrowhark. "No offense."

Wanted to see if I could animate a lip sync, so of course I chose a line from the GtN audiobook.

Alright, so this has probably been talked about a lot already, but I’m throwing my two cents in just because.

I think Corona will kill Ianthe in AT9, and I have reasons!

1. Their original names

I’ve read a lot of speculation on what makes Corona the “bad twin” according to Tamsyn’s extra notes at the end of GT9. Corona was supposed to be called Cainabeth and Ianthe was supposed to be Abella originally, but of course they got changed. In the biblical story, Cain kills Abel, and since Tamsyn went out of her way to point out how she aligned the sisters, my spidey sense went off about Corona possibly killing Ianthe.

2. Sacrifice and rejection

In the biblical Cain and Abel, Cain kills Abel because God preferred Abel’s sacrifice over Cain’s. In a more watered down version of this, Ianthe chose to kill Naberius instead of Corona to become a Lyctor and Corona canonically is upset about this. She sees Ianthe ‘rejecting’ her in a sense and choosing Naberius as an (albeit unwilling) sacrifice. By Corona’s wailing at the end of GT9, and the fact that she was not a necromancer, I think we’re supposed to get the idea that Corona was Ianthe’s true cavalier, and Naberius was kind of a smoke show, which makes Ianthe taking Naberius even worse.

3. Moral Comparison

Essentially, Corona has to do something worse than Ianthe’s actions to fulfill the title of bad twin, and while murder is pretty bad, Ianthe clearly has done a lot of other messed up stuff. But what Ianthe has done all makes sense in context. She worships John as her God like almost everyone else, so of course she’d do whatever it took to be a Lyctor, and of course she’d save his life at the end of HT9. The big reveal about perfect Lyctorhood doesn’t apply to her since she didn’t even like Naberius; why would she be upset that there was a chance he could have lived?

Further, Ianthe’s dialogue makes it very clear she would never hurt Corona. She leaves the p.s on Harrow’s letter that Harrow can’t hurt Corona when she silences her, and she uses the trident knife on Harrow when she implies Corona might have died. Ianthe killed Naberius because harming her sister is unfathomable to her. So if Corona intends to kill her sister, an act not even Ianthe would consider doing, that makes her the “bad twin” in moral comparison.

A sequel to my “adult fantasy books by authors that aren’t straight white men,” this time for sci-fi!

These are probably skewed more towards modern authors and books, but that’s because I tend to read newer stuff, not because only men or only white people wrote sci-fi in the past. 

Authors and books below the cut, including links to Goodreads. I’m not providing trigger warnings (if I make the post too long Tumblr starts freaking out about it), but you can use the search function on Goodreads reviews to find more specifics.

6/26/20: I no longer recommend Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear.