Read Kevin As Kaz And Just Went Long With It Until I Saw Exy

there's something sooo special to me about writing that gives narrative weight and time to characters who are just brief flashes across the page, especially the ones that die. like how The Spear Cuts Through Water breaks its main narrative to give the people Keema and Jun cross paths with a voice, from the vendor to the messenger they kill to everyone else, just brief flashes of other lives that matter just as much. And how the Aeneid takes the time with the deaths in the final battles to say that this man was a hero, that this one loved his aged father, and so on. it's just the way that these books acknowledge that every single person has their own history and present, compared to so many books today that treat lives so carelessly

Neil Josten lets Andrew's his cigarettes burn to the filter without taking a drag. He hates vegetables. He knows all the places you can shoot a man without killing him. He doodles fox paws on his homework. He's not scared of knives or violence or the yakuza. He is scared of cellphones and therapists and his own reflection. His favourite colour is gray. He got told he couldn't play exy with a bloody nose so he sniffed back the blood until they let him. He doesn't like movies or loud music. He hitchhiked halfway across South Carolina by pretending to be a sociology student. He gets sad when Kevin watches exy without him. He wishes he had his mother's patience instead of his father's temper. He's brilliant at manipulation. He's stupid on purpose. He was every inch a lie but his friends made him into someone real. He doesn't wear a jacket to the roof when it's cold because he knows Andrew's body heat will keep him warm. He thinks the hardest thing he's ever had to do was opening a tub of ice cream after kissing his boyfriend and not like, all the torture he's been through. Nobody is doing it like him

from andrew, to renee (re: neil)

Just imagine Nicky forcing Andrew and Aaron to do one of those twin telepathy tests that are all over tiktok. They match on every single one. Nicky is screaming. The twins are annoyed. They flip him off in perfect sync. Neil and Katelyn are laughing.

Idk why but Gansey seems like the kinda guy to go fishing

Can bunny hurry up and get killed I can't listen to him anymore

finally reading The Spear Cuts Through Water and it's sorta fuckign amazing wow. The only way i know how to show I really really liked a book is to make shitty memes about it but there’s something so ethereal about TSCTW that it’s lowk sorta hard…

Anyway, it's a bit funny that even though it's being told through like 4 perspectives and it reads so much like an old oral fairy tale, it still has the ragtag group of misfits traveling through the land.

i love that the zombie apocalypse conversation appears so often in fics like the foundation of andrew and neil’s relationship is based on them knowing each others survival plan

which is funny because in the book neil actually doesn’t actually contribute to the conversation it’s a convo between renee and andrew that neil gets fixated on (and then quotes back to andrew later in the book)

and do u know what. i love it, because that conversation is like a perfect demonstration of their characters - renee, concentrating on creating shelter for survivors, andrew concentrating on keeping his group protected, and neil, thinking that he’d probably cut and run and lamenting that fact UNTIL he realises he would want to go back for andrew. that conversation that neil isn’t even eally part of sets up perfect proof of neil’s character development even in the final book - i mean, the fact that neil says ‘chances were it would be instinctive to abandon all of them’ which he acknowledges as an ‘ugly truth’ already displays a change in his character since the first book - because in that one, he has no qualms about leaving, is prepared to do so as soon as necessary. but then the conversation comes back and neil says he ‘doesn’t want to be that person anymore’ he ‘wants to go back’ for andrew. and just. isn’t that beautiful.

so yes, every time the zombie apocalypse comes up in the most random places in fics i eat it up so hard. cause like, what a perfect hypothetical for them to talk about for 1 - because both of them spend most of their life having to learn to survive in different ways, and so their different approaches to the situation is a great way to demonstrate their different characterisations and show how their traumatic experiences shape the way they react to new dangerous situations - and 2 - because we can starkly see the change in neil when he realises he wouldn’t be able to just leave.

I’m dying at the implication that after Jun and Keema get their godlike powers and have the ability to launch themselves high enough into the air to clear anti siege walls, they still can’t stick the landing. People are watching them achieve these feats of godhood and they just keep landing like 

Jimenez, S (2022). The Spear Cuts Through Water, Del Ray, 445

Andrew either has nobody saved in his phone ("hold up 0273837263 is calling") or the most ridiculous ones and nobody knows

Andrew's phone contacts:

Exystential crisis (original)

Exystential crisis (deluxe)

Spare parts

Joan of Exy

Captain

Neil's bf

Parental unit

Barbie

🐝

Stickball addiction enabler