#Alice Chen

#Alice chen

also please tag the person you're thinking about while voting this? it's not useful to the poll i just wanna know.

#he's so classic

Some Selwyn Headcanons, from a violinist

1.) The merlin school he went to didn't have an orchestra, so Mr Davis would have to drive him to rehearsals outside of school and those were some uncomfortably silent car rides

2.) Lots of his all-black wardrobe is just concert attire

3.) Nick isn't very musically inclined (aka talented) but he did learn a bit of acoustic guitar in school and cannot wrap his head around a violin. He uses guitar terms for the violin and Sel feels like he's speaking a different language

4.) He doesn't really play for Bree, but sometimes she'll sit in his room while he's practicing. It makes him feel like he's performing and sometimes sends his anxiety off the charts, but he also understands that it's a sort of safe place for her. Sel is comfortable enough to be doing something that could be deemed pointless for a highly trained killer to know, and when she's sitting there she knows that she's safe too

5.) His favorite songs to play are/used to be cringy video game soundtracks that he picked up when he was 14

Fr the love triangle in legendborn is fun and full of drama but its secondary plot. Literally the entirety of Bree stands for rebellion, ancestry, powerfulness and acceptance

(and more! But descriptive words are running from me!)

She also stands for finding your place, being worthy even though you're the only one or the 'first' one (literally what Tracy Deonn said)

(love u queen Tracy)

Bree stands for power.

I mean, if yall were too absorbed by the romantic plot in the first two books i guess yall gonna get a reality check in the third where she's literally ISOLATED from them for a pretty long time loooool

blue: pjo mention red: legendborn cycle mention black: jst in general i honestly don't care much about the shipping portion of books. like, pjo; there are a lot of other interesting plot points than ships and pjo's never been just about romance yk? it's about so many other things. sometimes, shipping ruins shit for a fandom, especially when people are out here harassing people for harmless ships. when i say harmless ships, i mean ships that don't have pedophilia, zoophilia, incest, and more. scarily enough, there are plenty of ships like that I'm gonna choose not to tag or comment because lowkey interacting with people who scream at you for not liking their ship is something way too common in the fandom. also, legendborn. this book series has a lot going for it (if it can get better after bloodmarked..) but i see a lot of people only focusing on the shipping portion which is very strange to me. this book is about representation and ancestry and finding your roots, not about which boy bree should kiss. i mean, is the romance cute? sure. but let's stop shoving aside the actual plot for it also, mind you, the amount of people i've seen getting attacked for not being a big fan of canon ships is insane. some people think canon is some kind of holy grail, and that changing it is akin to sacrilege and I just do not get it. why does canon matter if some guy says “I’d prefer it to be like this”, and it's still an innocent ship? it’s just an excuse for people who clearly need to go outside to say “uhm actually you’re having fun wrong 🤓, leave this fandom now, you don't deserve to be here”. but also, mind you, if someone makes an anti post of your favorite ship or character /or/ a pro post of your least favorite, stop going after them. damn. scroll past. even block them if you want. it's not difficult. people are entitled to their own opinions and they can choose for themselves what characters they like and dont like. would you like to be attacked for liking/disliking a character? of course not. literally no one wants to wake up to that. TL;DR: sometimes, shipping can ruin a fandom, especially when people harass people over it, and canon doesn't have to be followed, and sometimes anti/pro really isn't that deep when it comes to book characters

Huh… really interesting to read that you think Sel is more trope than character when it seems like that’s how everyone feels about Nick. I have always felt weird about not really being into Sel. We have seen the brooding, dark haired love interest a million times.

Exactly my thoughts. I never really liked that type of character to begin with. I think people don’t see Sel as a trope because 1. they eat that trope up and 2. they think being morally gray means a character has depth. They do not, in fact, have depth. They are all copy and pastes of each other.

I actually rolled my eyes when Sel was first introduced because these characters are so predictable. They all start off hated by the FMC (yet she always ogles him). They all hurt people, including her. But they all also do some nice things which makes them immediately forgivable in the FMC’s and audience’s eyes. For years I’ve been wondering why these characters are so popular in books made for girls in their formative years. Why are we trying to teach them to love men that hurt them?

About Nick, I think he seems like a trope because Deonn wrote him off in order to give Sel a romance arc. He could have had so much more depth than Sel with the identity crisis thing going on, but then the romance Deonn wanted wouldn’t have worked.

I try to write MMCs more like Nick. I will admit it is challenging to create a character who is both nice and compelling, but there are ways to make it work. And we need to make it work. We need more diverse storytelling than falling back on what everyone else is doing, and we need to move past the internalized misongyny that keeps making its way into books made for girls.

I hope the girlies aren’t too mad about this take.

Stanley. Cup.