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Repost from my tumblr
It’s like… super, super weird how quiet we’ve all already gotten about the fifth book (Beginning/End) coming out. And it came out in like, November, right? Right before the 6th anniversary of the movie?
I didn’t even get a copy. I have no need for a copy.
This book got pushed back three times, as far as I can remember— I actually had it pre-ordered all the way back in 2014, before there was even a title to it, and all it promised was that the Guardians would go to the Moon. I was given the novels and Sandy’s picture book as my Hanukkah gift from my grandparents, the preorder for B5 + Jack’s picture book included, but we waited so long for the 5th book that it literally timed out the preorder.
In those four years (though in fandom terms I’ve been writing Nightlight for roughly 3 ½, since I started with North and Jack first on a different site) I’ve re-read the books and dissected the material and made myself squarely miserable about many plot details, especially once Jack’s picture book came out… out of spite, mostly, I built an entire Golden Age that suited my own wants and needs, I’ve created species and timelines and family histories, I’ve designed languages and I’ve made six different versions of Nightlight’s armor (only two of which were satisfactory) and two coats for North. I’ve been through five different costumes for Jack, even.
It took four years— from my perspective— for the conclusion of a story that I no longer wanted or connected with because my heart was so fiercely entangled with Nightlight’s that I cannot bear to lose him.
In reality, for people who were following the books from the beginning, it took five years, because B4 (Sandman War of Dreams) was published in 2013.
In terms of media movements, it was SIX YEARS since we got Rise of the Guardians. Six years.
Modern fandoms complain about gigapause this and megapause that and the great BBC Sherlock hiatus etc etc, but. Six years!
Six years is a death sentence for a niche series, especially one originally tailored for children, who if their parents had been reading them these books at toddlerhood are now eight or nine or ten, older siblings brushing teenager status, far beyond the times when they would want to bother with the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus. “Little kid’s stuff,” is the protest, they’re growing up.
So who was this final book for?
It was mostly an attempt to reach out to the adults who read the stories at bedtimes, and definitely a grab at us, the ones who will eventually be those “Tall Ones,” but just judging by how there’s been barely a peep about it since the few days after it came out and B5 happened less than four weeks ago????
I was fully expecting at least a little bit of a resurgence, mostly in terms of art and fandom things and meta, but the only post I’ve seen other than many of us basically saying “this book does not apply to my muse” is a personal blog I don’t even follow saying they got their copy, because tumblr likes to suggest posts from tags a person follows and of course I follow North’s tags.
Just. Whoosh. There it goes, like a butterfly out on a test flight that got scooped by a ratty seagull.
What a weird, depressing way to see this all go down.
To Nightlight, the concept of a book is rather abstract: this flat object made of square leaves and leather means something, certainly, for his very favorite people seem to collect and treasure them— his Katherine in particular meticulously curating a hoard of them for herself and Ombric, making new ones to replace those too worn out to be repaired, or just because she thinks there ought to be more, or gifting books of nothing to North so that their Nikolaus may fill them— but Nightlight comes from a people and time where available information is primarily found on screens, holograms, in moving diagrams and audible through speakers.
Books existed in the Golden Age, sure, and the Clipper has her private library, but the books are old and precious things, preserved in airtight shelves and sealed away like treasures, not to be touched or breathed on.
You cannot make a book scroll, and you cannot zoom in or rotate the images to see every angle; books do not read themselves out loud to you at two in the morning when a fussy Small One needs a feeding and a change but you need both hands to care for them. Books cannot be stored by the thousands in tiny chips of meteor and filaments of thread, so transporting any great number of them means stretches of labour and only having access to the ones you’ve carried with you, whereas a single standard-issue Army caliber datapad can download, upload, and share any desired information in the span of a few heartbeats from any civilized planet with uplink capabilities, whether the information be for education or pleasure or work or any number of things.
A book is an object.
The things books hide inside of them are more important, and yet dreadfully inaccessible.
