You brought this upon yourself.

#quoth the great bernadette banner: ‘you have entered a world of SLEEVES’

Davey in 92sies because he’s constantly Done. He deserves it.

However, he would only say it in Yiddish.

Oh boy I can’t wait until someone tells them about kataang and sukka

Yes it ABSOLUTELY is a thing he would’ve either had or been around relatives who had. Passover requires four cups of wine; until I was about 18 I drank grape juice, but we still had wine in the dishes we cooked for it. And at Kiddush (blessing over the wine before a meal) for Shabbos every week it was the same thing, although we usually only had wine if we were at shul or had guests.

IT should be noted that some alcohols need to be certified as kosher by a rabbi if you’re on the more observant side. I’m not sure if beer is one of them off the top of my head, but I know wine is.

either “sounds like a religious hymn but it’s worshipping a lover who may or may not be gay” or “parody that makes the opposite point of the original song”

if the victim is a pretentious bush then is it a snobbery shrobbery strobbery robbery?

Sorry did Damian just say that he bought the living turkey at the supermarket?

Especially if you’re not stopping every two chapters to rant about how everyone in his life is a disaster sink of toxic mental health effects and modelling. 

welp, now I have to reread it out of morbid curiosity, because teenage me didn’t know enough to notice

Especially enjoy all the parts where Vanyel has endured real, legit, massive trauma, and in our world would be in a psych ward without access to his own shoelaces, and the narrative assures us that his angst is VERY self-indulgent and he needs to just suck it up and think about how inconsiderate he's being to his caregivers!

Like, you get ONE of these things:

1. Deep, serious trauma caused by things like child abuse, the murder of your loved ones, being repudiated by your soulbond, watching your lover commit suicide, being hated by the people around you, the murder of your important adult mentor figures, being raped, and seeing no future for yourself.

2. Sad people who can stop being sad by being given a talking-to about how selfish they're being and how they need to consider other people's feelings too.

YOU DO NOT GET BOTH, MERCEDES LACKEY.

The adults' reactions to Vanyel are understandable (though neither helpful or therapeutic) if he were a teenager whose loving parents just didn't understaaaaand him, he broke up with his first boyfriend ever, and then became a workaholic university student who lived on energy drinks.

Their reactions are GROSSLY INAPPROPRIATE for someone who's deeply depressed, traumatized, and suicidal.

Oh my god. I feel so validated to read other people saying this. Pretty much every time I ever picked up one of Lackey’s books I had to white knuckle through the beginning because it was so damn triggering and then... a story would happen, as if the character would never think about their trauma again.

I thought I was a wuss. I feel so relieved to hear people confirming how unrealistic that is... 😁👍🏼🖤

If you want more validation, I've done a really specific read on a scene from Arrows of the Queen on how, just 30 years later, Lackey's pop psychology falls to absolute pieces in the face of current psychological knowledge of trauma and psychology.

And we don't have telepaths and empaths. VALDEMAR HAS GODDAMN MINDHEALERS. They have no excuse for being so bad at handling trauma, other than "they were written by someone from the 1990s without deep amounts of wisdom about trauma and living with tragedy."

I want to like Lackey’s books. They have some interesting worlds and adventures. But god, the fact that in every single book featuring a main character with a Traumatic Backstory (which is TOO MANY of them, by the way) I can basically just……skip past the backstory and have the character still make sense both bugs me and makes them easier to read. How is this possible???