"You weren't my Thaniel yet."
The watchmaker of filigree Street by Natasha Pulley
don't forget the umbrella, thaniel. there will be a rainstorm in the afternoon.
Whenever I read fics with a young Mori learning to pronounce Thaniel's name I imagine him doing so with the same energy as a middle school girl doodling her crush's name in her notebook.
Anthony: hey I know Hermie is kind of a difficult character to build chemistry with, you don’t have to attach yourself to him if you don’t want to-
William “do it for the bit” Campos: my character is gonna marry this motherfucker whether you like it or not
The implications of that scene in tlfop where Thaniel has the fucking shotgun are insane to me because there’s only two ways it could have gone:
1.) he shot into the crowd and was completely inaccurate because of how disoriented he was, and very likely killed someone
2.) he shot into the crowd and was insanely accurate despite how disoriented he was, canonically making him the best shot in the entire pulleyverse (aka the ONLY character to use a gun that doesn’t have military experience)
And he’s such an unreliable narrator, ESPECIALLY BECAUSE HE’S SO DISORIENTED, so we have no idea which it is
Just to give you an idea about how fucking out of it he was, let’s recap what he’s working with in terms of physicality:
- went fully unconscious minutes before shooting directly into a crowd
- very likely still healing from a concussion
- was locked in a room by himself for days and is likely malnourished (I know they like gave him food but like probably not enough considering he’s a pretty big guy)
- HAS A MASSIVE GUNSHOT WOUND IN HIS SHOULDER
- Climbed and descended an entire fucking mountain with like half his normal lung capacity maybe a week prior and never had time to properly recover
- Sustained a full sprint (again at half his normal lung capacity) all the way up a flight of stairs, through the legation, out the door, and down to where Takiko was when she got fuckin murked
All this on top of a whole assortment of mental health concerns, and they thought it’d be a good idea to stick a shotgun in this man’s hands and tell him to have at it. AND HE DID. It’s fucking wild.
Am I imagining it, or didn't he say he was in the military at some point before the events of Watchmaker? It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if between growing up a gamekeeper's son and being a soldier he's amassed the tenacity needed to power through things that would incapacitate anyone else.
As far as I’m aware it was his brother in law who died in military service, but he went from working in a factory to working at the Home Office, but I could also be misremembering??? I’ll try to find it at some point but I wouldn’t doubt it tbh
The implications of that scene in tlfop where Thaniel has the fucking shotgun are insane to me because there’s only two ways it could have gone:
1.) he shot into the crowd and was completely inaccurate because of how disoriented he was, and very likely killed someone
2.) he shot into the crowd and was insanely accurate despite how disoriented he was, canonically making him the best shot in the entire pulleyverse (aka the ONLY character to use a gun that doesn’t have military experience)
And he’s such an unreliable narrator, ESPECIALLY BECAUSE HE’S SO DISORIENTED, so we have no idea which it is
Just to give you an idea about how fucking out of it he was, let’s recap what he’s working with in terms of physicality:
- went fully unconscious minutes before shooting directly into a crowd
- very likely still healing from a concussion
- was locked in a room by himself for days and is likely malnourished (I know they like gave him food but like probably not enough considering he’s a pretty big guy)
- HAS A MASSIVE GUNSHOT WOUND IN HIS SHOULDER
- Climbed and descended an entire fucking mountain with like half his normal lung capacity maybe a week prior and never had time to properly recover
- Sustained a full sprint (again at half his normal lung capacity) all the way up a flight of stairs, through the legation, out the door, and down to where Takiko was when she got fuckin murked
All this on top of a whole assortment of mental health concerns, and they thought it’d be a good idea to stick a shotgun in this man’s hands and tell him to have at it. AND HE DID. It’s fucking wild.
#and considering how fucking inaccurate shotguns were back then??? if he actually did land shots where he wanted them to he’d canonically be-#-the best sniper in the fucking world#honestly he had years of like hunting experience so it’s not out of the realm of possibility but also kind of insane???#low-key he’s the biggest Mary Sue of the entire pulleyverse but I love and adore him so much#the watchmaker of filigree street#twofs#the lost future of pepperharrow#tlfop#natasha pulley
So I have a severed nerve in my middle finger from a work-related injury, and I can't really feel anything I touch with it, but obviously that doesn't mean I'm not able to touch something with it, and that got me thinking about something; if you use a spell in d&d with a touch component (Lay On Hands, Spider Climb, etc.) but the characters' nerves are severed and they can't feel the touch, would they still be able to cast that spell? Because when you're blinded you can't cast spells with visual components even though you still can look in the direction you want to cast the spell in and even picture it in your mind, so does that logic apply to things you can't feel? Does that mean that it's your senses making the connection between the magic user and the magic they're casting, and would a severed nerve affect that? I don't know that much about d&d so if they've already addressed this in canon sources lmk but I'm genuinely curious
Ms. Pulley really popped off with the dynamic between Thaniel and Takiko. In theory they should hate each other, but he spends half the fucking book talking about how cool she is, and she mentions him maybe twice in her own pov and both times she talks about him with the same sympathy people would give a stray puppy.
#on a serious note…the PARALLELS between these two make me insane#the way they each speak Japanese and English being reflective of their respective arcs as characters…the very similar backstories…#and the way Takiko goes out of her way to protect Thaniel wherever she can…they should have been given the time to be besties Im so upset#the watchmaker of filigree street#the lost future of pepperharrow#twofs#tlfop#natasha pulley
‘I’ve never known you do a bad thing,’ Thaniel said honestly. ‘You haven’t known me long,’ Mori pointed out.
I wanted to redraw this old Pepperharrow piece.
making up characters is so fun because you can be like “this is johnson he came from my mind” and all your friends will go “yippe!!! horray!!! we love johnson!!!”
very unfortunate but hilarious side effect of calling the example oc johnson in this post is now people are saying this in the tags
#us when we completely accidentally come up with Johnson’s named Davey#also found out today that one of my other Johnson’s is named after A REAL PIRATE which is devastating but I don’t really care bc the most-#-significant thing the real one did was get kidnapped by other pirates and detail the brutality of it
me when the brain strings together "I can't breathe when you're not here everything I've done since losing you has been about getting back to you you're not even one tenth mine and you never will be" and I think nothing of it. I exhibit completely normal thinking patterns and behavior
Shut up m'dudes, it's a national holiday
I would love to write some Watchmaker of Filigree Street/Lost Future of Pepperharrow fic but the idea of trying to capture even a little of the magic of Natasha Pulley's prose is...daunting. To say the least.
do we have any headcanons on what petnames the pulleyverse characters would use with their partners (i dont mean nicknames like "Kei" i mean pet names like honey or darling)
girls when "You’ve stolen my favourite toy and now you’ve invited me down here to play with a new toy whose mind is a reasoning engine running on rails. But I don’t like train sets, they’re dull, and there is a certain urge to arrange a wreck for the sake of variation."
I LOVE AND ADORE THIS SCENE SO FUCKING MUCH I COULD TALK ABOUT IT FOR HOURS
#some of y’all are COWARDS#an omnipotent clairvoyant who could have literally anyone on earth would not settle for a bad kisser for the rest of his life#he was ready to fucking DIE just to get a chance to kiss him#also not for nothing but Thaniel had quite a few people convinced that he was a sugar baby#INCLUDING MORI#do you honestly think that money and miscommunication were the only things that lead him to that conclusion??? I think not#I for one strongly agree with the poll results
love when jesper asked wylan "shouldn't you be in university" my brother in christ shouldn't YOU be in university