porciacatonis:

Oh my gosh, anon, this makes me so, so, so excited to hear! The books mean a lot to me at this point, and also I love talking about them so much.  Always glad to grow this tiny little group of people into the books on Tumblr.

Okay, I am sure I’ll miss some things, since I’m not the most organized thinker, and I’m not gonna try and spoil things, and it’ll be in no particular order.  I hope that’s not too confusing.

• The nerd references.  They’re varied, they’re nuanced–some are outright quoted or referenced, some are cleverly paralleled, some are obviously influences, some are just hinted at.  But if you’re a kind of nerd, there’ll be something for you in there.  Narnia, Harry Potter, D&D, Star Wars, T.H. White, Shakespeare, Star Trek–all sorts of nerd references.  It makes you feel like this book gets you, it speaks your language.
• The character types.  Some of them are so, so comforting to read, and it needs subbullets
• Quentin is the kind of character I desperately needed to read about.  He’s the kid who hoped everything would mysteriously clear up, and his life would start.  He constantly expects magic in everything. He loves fantasy and the idea of a better world with all his heart. He would be a hopeless romantic–and is, when his depression isn’t fucking him over–but can’t always.  He’s lonely but bad at reaching out.  He stumbles and grows through just about every lesson I still need to learn, but he’s not talked down about.  Reading him just feels like this affirmation that yeah–you, who are Just Like This Guy, you there.  You can grow past this, you can become someone cool. You’re making more progress than you know, and this unglamorous shit you hate has to happen. Or if it doesn’t, it doesn’t mean other, better things won’t exist too to make it ok.
• Eliot Waugh.  Eliot is so, so, so important. He’s a great take on the self-made, Wart-to-Arthur with some Francis Abernathy in between archetypes.  And as someone who wants very much to control who I am and leave my family one day and have friends and be loved, Eliot is kind of lowkey my hero.
• Julia Wicker. Just in general, she is the reason you should never assume someone’s pedigree or lack thereof says a damned thing about their worth.
• Alice Quinn is honestly the light of my life.  I’ll let you see for yourself.
• Janet Pluchinsky is the lovechild of Tinkerbell and Julius Caesar, and she grows up to have all the coolness of both, with none of the tragic death.  She’s great.
• Magic in this world.  It’s like language, or music.  It needs to be practiced, it needs to be learned.  It’s not a guaranteed fix-all, but it can surprise you with how much you can do with it.  sometimes it’s a huge game changer, sometimes it does nothing at all, sometimes, you wish you’d never tried it.
• The books are just so fucking human.  It’s a nice change, because grandiosity and interpretation still play a huge part, but it takes a lot of time to appreciate the fucked-up, confusing, unpretty side of humans, and it thinks that’s magical, too.  Or at least, not excluded from magic.
• It allows its characters to fuck up. Constantly. But guess what? They’re more than that. They’re still heroes, or kings, or deities or what have you.  Because no one is defined only by their fuck ups, or only by their greatness. It’s a lot about how yeah, you’re probably both, and your traits aren’t cancelled out by other traits.  You’re a whole, not a sum of parts.
• The humor, man.  For something so heavy, it’s honestly FUCKING HILARIOUS.  And like, that doesn’t get quoted a lot.  But honestly, I lost it laughing or snickering too many fucking times reading. 
• Life doesn’t end after school does.  As a college student, that’s comforting to read about.  Because, you know, by most coming of age narratives, my life mysteriously tapers off in a few years.  It’s nice to read a coming of age narrative where he’s not even done coming of age until long after his school years.
• Mental illness is a huge part of the story. And coping through fiction, and navigating life and fulfillment while that colors your lens.  And it does such a good, lifelike job of it, probably since the author has mentioned he dealt with it himself. 
• The Aesthetic. A little bit TSH. A little bit Narnia.  A little bit Hogwarts. A little bit Gossip Girl.  A little bit Baz Lurhmann  All amazing.

Finally, unrelated, but the fandom is great.  They’re some of the coolest folks I’ve met on tumblr!