Okay but the fact that AFTG, a selfpublished bookseries, therefore without any official advertising whatsoever, has been trending almost constantly for the last, like, five days!? And frequently at first place!? A feat several well advertised tv-series can't pull off!? Incredible. These books are so genuinely loved that it has spread from person to person without any help from a publisher. That is truly remarkable. Well done Nora!
Things Kaz canonically does in the two years between Crooked Kingdom and Rule of Wolves:
And that's just the stuff we see from Nikolai's and Zoya's incredibly limited perspectives during their Ketterdam sidequest
I 100% agree with Zoya when she thinks that "maybe Kaz was like Nikolai, a boy with an unquiet mind, a man in perpetual need of challenge" because ROW makes it so obvious that Kaz is bored and incredibly restless in his success. Someone get our boy a new life's purpose and a subscription to a long-running unsolved mystery podcast stat
in universe aftg memes are so funny it gets me every single fucking time just imagine liking a sport but it turns out the mafia is involved and riko moriyama is literally a psycho and his brother killed him and seth gordon fucking died and aaron minyard killed someone and neil josten's dad is the butcher and kevin day has never been skiing and jean moreau was kidnapped from the ravens and then there's jeremy knox
Nora shared a thread on Twitter of in-universe memes and I had to join in
Character, book, and author names under the cut
someone better have a love wins banner ready for if we pull this off
I’ll make one for you guys if it happens no worries
13K FOLLOWERS CELEBRATION ✩ favorite characters SHADOW AND BONE (for @yenvengerberg + @witcherz) ↳ Kaz Brekker
I fully believe Neil sent this to the foxes post Baltimore
deleting my dating apps because I want to meet someone the old fashioned way (I'm running and you hit me in the gut with a racket, narratively setting yourself up as the person who helps me stop running from my past)
Most coveted, most protected. He’ll sacrifice every piece he has to protect his throne. Whatever. Me? I’m going to be the deadliest piece on the board.
No stop bc why did it take me so much time of not getting why people talk about Andrew’s reading glasses when he hates the library for me to neilcore realise that Andrew hates the things he likes and he is indeed a huge fucking bookworm but will never admit it, only spouting poetry and quoting shakespeare as if that’s a totally normal thing for someone who ‘hates reading’
1 TSC will be out in April unless someone else dies or gets hospitalized. The chances of yall getting an actual date are slim to none, you'll probably just get a meme when I finally lose my patience and hit PUBLISH on it. I'd say sorry but
2 I will hopefully vanish when it's out, for better or worse. While I am anxious to know how it's received, I know very little of what yall have in mind for Jean & Jeremy and I want to keep it that way. I've made one or two half-assed compromises (bleaching Jeremy's hair) but the goal is to tell my own story free of influence. If my self-control holds, I'll be gone til TEB.
3 inspired by the resurgence of drunk!kevin memes I went back through aftg and counted every time kevin drinks that isn't social (ie Eden's or with the upperclassmen). five times across three books, my boy is doing better than expected. life goals, or something
4 the temptation to make the cover for 1 a frowny face and 2 a smiley face is almost all-consuming. I think I am going a little mad in this weird in-between space
Aftg is fun cause all the characters are living in different genres like neil is in a mafia thriller while andrew is in some a24 drama film. Kevin is the horse girl in a horse girl movie and dan is in an underdogs sports story. Poor aaron is trying to have a normal slice of life forbidden romance type beat but then he has to go and kill a guy.
(voice of a man slowly losing his mind) does it ever strike you that the plot of aftg is moved by little acts of kindness kevin offered to people who never had any semblance of it before. loving riko when no one would, befriending jean in the nest and keeping him alive through debilitating amounts of trauma, telling andrew he was worth it in a dingy high school locker room, teaching neil every night even if he knew he was about to die
I think one reason why I like aftg so much is because of how early Nora sets out that it's gonna be incredibly unrealistic. Because in what world would any university choose any athlete who is 5 foot. And now that I know they're five foot I'm not gonna question when one of them carries around knives in his arm bands and believes that he can take down the Mafia because in reality that's so much more reasonable than him being that short. Like it's so much easier to imagine him beating the shit out of Riko then it is to imagine him standing next to Kevin simply because the height difference would be so incredibly unrealistic. So basically I've come to the conclusion Nora is a literary master and planned this all out from the start.
we simply do not talk about how iconic kevin day is as a fandom. the man literally had his dominant hand shattered to bits and he was so dedicated to the ball life that he learned to play his sport with his other hand. and despite that, he was still one of the best in the game. what a man. what an icon.
would love an essay on the mother figure in all for the game, as they are the only ones able to be flawed, saints, martys, pieces of shit, angels, fighters, pillars, activitists, annoying school nuses, ect.
