matthias and nina my beloved, they are so <3

“Nina had blown into his life with the wind and rain and set his world spinning. He’s been off balance ever since” I’M GONNA FUCKING COLLAPSE-

I AM ON THE THE FUCKING FLOOR I’M GONNA HAVE A BREAK DOWN IN 9 IN THE MORNING

oh my god i love jesper and inejs relationship

“I will have you without armor. Kaz Brekker. Or I will not have you at all” I AM GOING TO COLLAPSE-

Just read “The Maidens” by Alex Michaelides in two sittings. Saw the twist coming from the first few pages lol. It was a quick, fun read, though!

I. Sam Porter Bridges

Spoilers below readmore!

Summary:

Sam wakes up from a nightmare in a cave where he was taking shelter from the timefall. Fragile shows up and introduces herself. She invites him to work for her and explains that most of the former Fragile porters were traitors. She then explains that she doesn’t have much time left because she was soaked neck to toe in timefall.

The story switches to Igor’s perspective after Sam leaves the cave and heads out for a delivery at Central Knot. Igor is given an urgent message from Deadman that a body was discovered in the residential area and urgently needs to be disposed of. Deadman apologizes and promises that this will be Igor’s last job for the Corpse Disposal team before he starts on Bridges II. Igor is advised to bring equipment which the reader later finds out is a BB.

Igor meets Sam out near the distrocenter outside of Central Knot. Igor explains that there was a suicide and that the body needs to be delivered to the incinerator immediately. On the way, the car loses power, and Igor’s BB activates. It seems to be malfunctioning since it can’t give him a definitive direction as to where the BTs are. When the car powers back on, Igor realizes the BTs are directly in front of their path just before the truck overturns as the BTs begin converging on the vehicle.

The driver is pinned under the truck and ultimately is unable to stay quiet enough to not attract BTs. Igor pulls out his gun and shoots the driver in order to prevent a voidout. A strange masked man appears on the overturned truck and points out a massive entity looming over them. Igor disconnects the BB and throws it to Sam and instructs him to run. Igor fails to shoot himself as he’s dragged into the air and instead tries to stab himself to death with his knife. Though he manages to strike his heart, the life doesn’t leave him fast enough to prevent a voidout and everything- Central Knot, Sam, the BB- are swallowed in the ensuing implosion.

Thoughts & Notes:

Right off the bat there’s some changes with the book compared to the game: Sam wakes up in the cave after having a nightmare instead of traveling there as he does in the game. Sam doesn’t crash his bike almost running into her and she doesn’t help him with the BT. They don’t talk about his DOOMs level. These are minor, and I can see that in general dialogue is truncated or adjusted as well. Most of the dialogue is pulled directly from the game, though.

Perspective switches to Igor for the rest of the chapter. He receives an order from Deadman (our first introduction to him) for an emergency transport of a body to the incinerator. Central Knot is described as “The underground Knot City”. Personally, I had a headcanon that the cities were largely underground and am happy to see that confirmed here. I don’t think I remember seeing any detail about the cities in the game. Another thing I noticed was that, from Igor’s perspective, he continually refers to the BB as just “equipment”, though there’s a sense of unease to it.

I’m impressed with all the ways the book is describing how Sam scrunches his face. Sorta wondering if they’ll run out and have to start repeating stuff.

As Igor connects to the other side, the book describes the connection through his senses as perceiving a literal beach. He smells the salt of the sea and hears the crashing of waves. When the BT’s are near he can smell the ocean water mixed with blood and likens it to rotting fish. I was curious how they were going to handle that, and I like the route they took.

And of course, Igor is not long for the world and it still makes me sad. I wanted to highlight the section where Igor’s is, well, stabbing himself because I just find it particularly sad to read:

Prologue

Spoilers below readmore!

This chapter is very short. Without saying names, it describes, in third person, someone experiencing strange dream-like visions. Through context, it’s easy to tell this is about Sam experiencing one of his nightmares.

It describes him going through the seam and being on the beach (and all the strange visual metaphors we see in the dreams in-game). There’s a portion where Sam is vored by a large person who’s mouth splits open horrifically and engulfs him. The prologue also uses the word “anus”, I will let you guess how it was used.

Generally, I like the way it describes the timelessness of the beach. How past, present and future are all the same thing there. It focuses on themes of rebirth, life cycling between life and death like an ouroboros. It felt like they were going for a “less is more” thing for this.

I assume the book is going to be in Sam’s perspective (3rd person limited), so I’m interested in getting to read Sam’s thoughts in some way and how much of an unreliable narrator he would be. And also generally hearing his thoughts on things he was completely silent for in-game.

Death Stranding Novel Review Master Post

I wanted to record my thoughts and impressions about the book somewhere (as well anything that I think is noteworthy or interesting). I’ll use this post to chain together and separate by chapter. Posts like these I’ll tag as “// Novelization” so it’s easily blockable if anyone doesn’t want to see them (though I will be putting them under a read more.

Fair warning, I tend to be a bit wordy.

First, some general notes:
- The book was written in Japanese first, then translated to English. I’m keeping this in mind while I read since that could mean anything from awkward sentence structure to strange references (translation isn’t exactly a 1 to 1 correlation and all that).

- I noticed that the print is pretty large and spaced out. I admit that I usually read pretty hearty books, though, so this might be more normal for others. I would be surprised if there were even 400 words on a page. The book is 341 pages for reference, not including the index and all that.

- Interestingly, there is a list of characters and some vocab in the front. It includes non-spoilery descriptions of Die-Hardman, Amelie, Bridget, etc. as well as similarly non-spoiler descriptions of BB’s, The Death Stranding, and Bridges. These things are still talked about at length in the book, so I’m wondering why they were included in the beginning.

-It should go without saying that my review will include game & book spoilers. It’ll also probably be rife with my own opinions and interpretations, obviously.

Chapter Index:
Prologue
I. Sam Porter Bridges
II. Bridget (Coming soon..)
III. Amelie (Coming soon..)
IV. Fragile (Coming soon..)
V. Unger (Coming soon..)
VI. Mama (Coming soon..)
VII. Deadman (Coming soon..)

jemmo:

you know how kinn says porsche could just go, and he’d tell everyone he died so he can be free? do you think he thought about that for himself too? do you think he thought about running off, not even necessarily with porsche as some kind of runaway lovers thing, but also to escape the family? to live his own life? and do you think as quick as that idea came into his head, he also thought that wouldn’t be possible either? bc his family is too powerful, would be able to seek him out even if he tried to run? that they’d find him eventually and hate him, make him come back? or do you think he entertained that thought for a second, before realizing he couldn’t abandon his family like that? that despite all the hurt that world has caused him, he still loves his brothers, still cares for the people that work for him, still couldn’t bare to disappoint them, to leave them? bc he thinks porsche has no ties, nothing keeping him there, but he, he cares too much, is too important to that family, fulfills his role too well to abandon it all. if porsche leaves, they’ll survive, if he leaves, they’ll crumble. does he stay out of fear or obligation? what’s keeping him trapped, the family or himself?