[ SECRET POST #2458 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2458 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.
[Aneurin Barnard playing Richard III in The White Queen]


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03.
[Leverage]


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04.
[Pokemon]


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05.
[Discworld]


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06.
[legend of korra]


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07.
[The Young Protectors]


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08.
[Animal Crossing]


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09.
[Men in Black]


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10.
[The Rivers of London]


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11.
[Teen Wolf]


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12.
[Welcome to Night Vale]


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 026 secrets from Secret Submission Post #351.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

10. http://i41.tinypic.com/k48f1e.png
[The Rivers of London]

[kaijinscendre]

I thought that said "Night Vale" and was so confused as I read it.

[(Anonymous)]

Me too.

[(Anonymous)]

Third!

[ladyhalbourne]

I'm glad I stay away from fandom as far as possible because luckily all my friends are persuaded to read the books. Because this sounds as much wank as I don't need.

[(Anonymous)]

You lucky, LUCKY person, you!

[bringreligiontothewamwams]

I don't want to ship Nightingale/Peter. Mainly because it gets in the way of me shipping Peter/Tyburn. I love that they both want the exact same thing, but absolutely loathe each other. Or at least Tyburn says she loathes him, but she was just a little too eager to have him in eternal servitude to her. She wants him.

Oh and I also ship Nightingale/Molly but that is boringly canon.

I am glad that the character who died in the most recent book was the ASBO and not the Jag though (if RIvers and Trees can have spirits, so can the cars okay).

[(Anonymous)]

I've never heard of this show (?), but this secret made me curious. Anyone care to tell me what it's about/if it's worth watching?

[bringreligiontothewamwams]

It's a book series. For now anyway, it is up for adaptation to a show sometime in the next two years. It is worth reading though.

[(Anonymous)]

Reading. It's a series of books by Ben Aaronovitch, staring a young mixed-raced London copper called Peter Grant who finds out he's a wizard when he sees a ghost on the job, and subsequently gets drafted into the wizard branch of the Met. Which has exactly one member, Thomas Nightingale, two counting Peter, and is mostly charged with keeping the balance of power between forces that usually outclass them in terms of power. Throw in some magical mayhem and murders, political machinations, the legacy of WWII, and a secretive cabal of enemies, and you have a series of four books that are a hell of a lot of fun to read. I think it's been described as 'Harry Potter meets The Sweeney', if that tells you anything.

[(Anonymous)]

I have a lot of complicated feelings regarding Peter/Thomas. On the one hand, I sort of ship them, because watching Nightingale perpetually trying to figure out how to react to Peter is one of my favourite parts of the books, and also because they have this mutual protective thing going on which is lovely (Peter when Thomas was shot, Thomas at the Nightclub of Dr Moreau).

On the other hand, the master/apprentice thing is usually a VERY big no-no for me, and while neither Thomas nor Peter are the kind of people to let the bad variations on it fly, there's still a lot of very complicated things happening between them stemming from the fact that Thomas is very old and very much a product of a different time, and Peter is constantly forcing him to confront his worldviews (and vice-versa, but it's more of a personal rather than an existential minefield on Thomas' end - not so much threatening his life as re-arranging his self-concept).

Also, the racial angle on it does get a little dodgy considering that Nightingale is Peter's more magically and politically powerful white superior officer, and also literally from the colonial period, if only the tail-end of it. Again, not that either of them would ever consciously let that fly, but between the chip on Peter's shoulder at times and the fact that Thomas doesn't always realise when he's being old-school about certain things, added to the way other people would view the relationship, there's a lot of potential for people to get hurt.

That said, one of the things I do love about Nightingale is that Peter does force him to consider his worldview, both in terms of magic what with Peter's love of scientific experimentation, and in terms of the way the modern world is no longer socially or technologically structured the way he still tends to think it is. The way the two of them are constantly re-evaluating everything they know because of each other is fantastic.

And, ah, the badass and slightly-to-majorly traumatised old veteran will never not push buttons for me. The memorial wall at the school did a number on me, yes. Put him in combo with the curious and street-smart young gun with a scientific bent, and yes, I will probably enjoy it.

TLDR; I broadly agree with this secret, mostly because a) if I said I didn't thoroughly enjoy the character I'd be lying, and b) about 60% of my enjoyment of Thomas Nightingale as a character comes from watching him trying to interact with the nerdy, mixed-race protagonist in question. On his own, he'd be significantly less interesting to me. And c) because considering them in a relationship is racially complicated no matter which side you come down on, especially when you add in the canon power imbalance.

[(Anonymous)]

so, let me get this right, if we have -as with this book canon - a good-looking young black guy, a young white woman with facial injuries and an old white possibly immortal guy as the main characters, the Law of Tumblr Justice means you MUST NOT like the old white guy best? Because this will right centuries of wrongs or some such bullshit internet logic.

Tumblr can fuck right off. I find Nightingale a bit under-written myself, but I'm sad to see this tiny fandom fall prey to tedious SJW fan-policing. Why the fuck should someone have to get their guilt on over their choice of favourite fictional character?

[dreemyweird]

Tbh, I don't think Nightingale is likely to get killed. He isn't this sort of mentor character.

And thank God I'm not on tumblr. The AO3 part of the fandom is the warmest and friendliest place ever.

[bringreligiontothewamwams]

I think he'll die somewhere in the final book of the series. Peter has more than once wondered if London as a whole can have an Anthropomorphic Personification like the various spirits he's encountered and has consistently failed to connect that with Nightingale's age issues. Nightingale was in his prime during the colonial era when London Pride was at its height, then he was broken at the end of WW2 just as London was broken by the Blitz, then Nightingale went downhill as the post war malaise struck Britain and London then sometime at the end of the 60s Nightingale started getting younger again. Just like swinging Britain and the whole new London scene.

Its fairly obvious that London is Nightingale and Nightingale is London. I reckon he'll become fully mortal, retire, or die in the final book handing off the spirit of London to mixed-race Peter who represents the multicultural London of the 21stC.

[dreemyweird]

This theory makes sense, and it sure is interesting, but I doubt that's what Aaronovitch will go for. For one thing, there's Varvara Sidorovna (it would be cool if she'd turn out to be Zelenograd or Moscow or some other Russian city, though); and then Peter has been able to recognize all the genii locorum he's encountered - why would Nightingale be an exception? It is possible - very likely, even - that gods/goddesses are able to hide their true nature, but why would Nightingale do this?
And wouldn't the Covent Garden affair piss the hell out of him, if he's indeed London? Genii locorum have been shown to be very sensitive to what's going on in their locations.
Though of course it might be that all of the above applies to rivers but not to cities.

[bringreligiontothewamwams]

I can come up with handwaves! For Varvara, she's Mother Russia! For the Covent Garden riot Nightingale was kinda busy being nearly dead from being shot (and we know from Ash Thames that Anthro...APs, can be hurt and even die which was one of the things Tyburn was kinda pissed about) by the time he was back on his feet it was all over bar the clear up.

Finally, Peter does know there is something odd about Nightingale but is busy marking all Nightingale's weirdness up to him being (a) old, and (b) a master wizard. At times, despite his sterling talents, we've seen that Peter can be a bit slow to put 2+2 together and let the penny drop especially when it is something he has already formed an opinion on. Its probably why he was set for a grade A career as a police filing clerk (one of the things I like about Peter is that he isn't the standard policeman in fiction who always seem to be a mere hair's breadth away from being Sherlock Holmes/Hercule Poirot reincarnated, he can be a bit thick).