The Sunshine Court Has Been Out For Less Than Two Days And I Already Fear I Am Returning To My Roots

the sunshine court has been out for less than two days and i already fear i am returning to my roots (all for the game blog). in my defence that book was everything i wanted. everything i needed, even. and i am not letting go

jeremy's sister blaming him for destroying their family vs. jean telling him "in no universe could you be anyone's villain"... i am unwell

i think of that moment when allison fresh after seth died went to see the banners with his picture and nicky went "i bet she's crying". like. he's putting up with a lot of shit from the twins and kevin willingly but he's still a shitstarter at heart. neil is saying that it was a bad attempt to lighten the mood but nicky ffs why?

dude. neil, someone who is callous to this kind of thing, got mad at that. how do you achieve that?

I still can’t believe so many people place Nicky as some sort of pacifist/conflict hater who is upset when arguments break out when canonically he is known to makes things awkward and uncomfortable just because he finds sheer joy and amusement out of it 😭

five curiosities for the next book, after reading the sunshine court

a non-exhaustive list, but five things i'm curious to (hopefully) find out more about in TSC2, or that i have questions about still:

what happened at the trojans' fall banquet (presumably jeremy's first year)? it's a Scandal, and jeremy cannot stand to be around bryson, and annalise has never forgiven him for sticking with exy after that, despite having attended all his games in high school. given the allusions to his stepfather, and also his step-grandfather being a congressman, i can see how jeremy's sexuality might be relevant to the situation—especially if we read into lucas' stiff apology and shame at his implication about jeremy and jean as being born from more than just common decency, but rather knowledge of this being a previous sticking point in terms of jeremy's scandals—but i also keep thinking about what cat said. jeremy has—three. two brothers, one sister. the way she says it, how it sticks out to jean as an odd switch, and the fact that we've only met two siblings – it makes me wonder what happened to the third. or if that's even the right question to ask, regarding jeremy's siblings.

elodie. i'm curious if we learn anything about what happened—by and large, i kinda hope not, if only because then jean has to too, unless it turns out stuart is lying, but that's a very different kind of fallout. (i don't actively theorise he is—at some point, these kids will run out of tolerance for ghost stories coming back to life—but i think its possibility ought to be considered, at least). i think we'll get more flashes of her from jean's thoughts, though, and i anticipate lots of heartbreak lmao

lucas. assuming stuart's contact comes through, and neil's hit goes ahead, we've got lucas in the aftermath of finding out his brother is a monster, and jean saying not to call the police, and then possibly his brother being dead. if it happens any other day—if it happens in west virginia, especially—i suspect lucas might be able to look at it like another domino in the ravens machine falling down, or even that something horrible happened to him when he returned home, but if it's still in LA, after what he did to jean, after jean said no cops-------i can see how that might twist into something more suspicious. who knows! i'm curious to see what happens there. grayson is a monster, but he is still lucas' brother. aaron and kevin still have complicated grief about tilda and riko, and they were their direct, constant abusers; cass never learned until after the fact, and lucas is in a complex space between the two parts of that spectrum. if grayson dies, i think the fallout will be unavoidable for exploration

this is a small one but man, i just want to keep seeing jean's list grow. it tears something out of me every time, and stitches me back together, and i want to go through that over and over, because i want to see a jean who not only hears that his life is his and worth living, but a jean who learns to believe it too

i'm just kinda assuming we see the foxes again, because i remember nora's character list having new details about characters who didn't show up in this one, but i'm also quietly hoping for more thea. their scene made me ache, and he'd never had good defenses against thea, and kevin knew that. jean would kill him for bringing her here made my heart do the !! double-tap. i'm extremely invested in jean, thea and kevin as a unit, and it would be so incredibly wonderful to see more

this was really quickly done so not the best quality, but I was relistening to the audiobook and just HAD to draw this scene 👁

I still can’t believe so many people place Nicky as some sort of pacifist/conflict hater who is upset when arguments break out when canonically he is known to makes things awkward and uncomfortable just because he finds sheer joy and amusement out of it 😭