Ben and Cassie are the REAL Power Couple of 'The Fifth Wave' Trilogy

"The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that (s)he is most alive when alone," -Martin Amis

Recently, I have been in love - and I mean IN LOVE -  with The Fifth Wave series. BUT THE THIRD BOOK IS OUT AND I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THINGS BEFORE I REVIEW IT. Because damn right, I'm going to talk about it. I might even do a YouTube video about it. 

The most popular couple in The Fifth Wave is Evan and Cassie, and a good percentage of readers agree. However, I don't ship Cassie with really anyone, maybe with Ben (Zombie).

So, here are four reasons why Ben and Cassie are the REAL powercouple in this trilogy. I will also be comparing and contrasting Evan in the explanation sections. 

1. They share a common love: Sam/Nugget. 

Throughout the first book, the main focus of nearly everything Ben and Cassie do is for Sammy Sullivan. Continually, they risk their own lives to save him. Sam is the silver cord (ha, you see what I did there?) that binds them together. They continually work towards a common goal, and that goal is protecting Sam. It is beautiful and unites them in ways that Evan cannot understand. This deep level of understanding and connection is what holds them together like glue, and, invariably makes them better for each other. 

2. They work well together. 

Ben and Cassie spend much more time together in The Infinite Sea, but even in the climax of The Fifth Wave, their cooperation shines.  Despite their bickering, they seem to know how the other works. Their banter is raw and they know how to get sh*t done. Ben and Cassie, standing alone and together, are much more down-to-earth and realistic than Evan and Cassie ever are. Evan is idealistic, while Ben is realistic. This even could get into a debate about Ben and Evan being foil characters, but, truthfully, Ben and Cassie can talk about things rationally without emotion, which is an important aspect in good relationships with people. 

3. They are strong, stand-alone characters. 

When I first started reading The Fifth Wave, I was a bit hesitant of the dual POV, split between Cassie and Ben. I was worried that I'd get bored with Ben's POV. However, I found that I was enthralled with both sides of the story. Both Ben and Cassie are well-developed, fleshed out characters. If one of them was the only character in the story, they could carry it on their shoulders. They'd make a fabulous couple because they are two strong characters coming together like puzzle pieces.  

Evan, however, always remains a mystery. He has very little time and leverage to be developed in both books. His brooding and quiet nature doesn't make for an interesting read, or an interesting character.  Evan and Cassie are quite unbalanced, and quite frankly, Evan degrades Cassie's character, especially when she gets all mushy with those 'chocolate eyes and soft hands'. Oh my God, no. 

4. They are incredibly, viciously, human. 

Moments before Cassie kills the Crucifix Soldier, the tension is tactile. When Ben is hit with the blow that they are the Fifth Wave, the shock is felt through every reader like a punch to the gut. Each rollercoaster emotion is gut-wrenchingly real, and, ultimately, makes the readers connect with them more. There's a reason I had a hard time connecting with Ringer in the first book, but The Infinite Sea gave me a left hook to the face with the last half in Ringer's POV. Each character, especially Cassie, Ben, and Ringer, are beautiful human characters - even when Ringer becomes enhanced, we still have a connection to her because of the other books and her beautiful last act. 

This might have something to do with the fact that Evan is not incredibly, viciously, human. While teenage girls get weak in the knees with his perfectly romantic prose and brooding good looks, he is disconnected and cold.  

If you can't tell, Evan Walker is really the only problem I have with The Fifth Wave Series. 

So, yeah. I'm right and you're wrong. Next week's blog post will probably be a review of The Last Star. Viciously excited and scared to read it. I truly don't want to finish, because I want everything to stay all perfect and alive and okay in my head. 

~The WordShaker

The Importance of Studying 'Your' Genre

"The thing about creativity is, people are going to laugh at it," -Twyla Tharp

In my bookshelf, I have an entire section dedicated to what I call 'my genre', which is along the blurry lines of survival/disaster/personal growth and change/romance. Seriously.  It's full of media, from my favorite movies (127 Hours, Titanic)  favorite TV shows (LOST),  favorite books (The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, The Book Thief), testimonials and true stories, along with reference journals and informational books all concerning my genre.

What makes it 'my genre' is that I enjoy the media in it so much and most of my novel writing falls in this genre. For a friend that I have, she loves the fantasy genre, and she pursues and consumes all the media she can about the sub-genres of fantasy.

However, what makes studying your genre so important is that you can know what works and what doesn't.  You can learn from the masters - or, at least, the people who are out there and producing publishable work. If you seek the media in your genre with a learning heart and a critical eye, you can then apply this to your work and see the flaws and strengths.

Enjoy watching movies and reading books, my writers!

~The WordShaker

The Ascent Of Everest - The Fourth Score by Adam Young - Review

"The only way you can become worse as a writer is by not writing," - Me. 

Usually, I'm a bit wary of this new territory that Adam is venturing into, but this month, I felt every bit as confident that this month's score would be just as fan-freaking-tastic as the previous month's. 

I'm sad to say that I wasn't entirely right this month. 

However, a little disclaimer. If Adam Young decided to move to Idaho and farm potatoes until he died, I'd support it. If he decided to do anything, I'd most likely back it up. So that means I am sticking with this project, and will still 100% listen to it, but that doesn't mean I don't have some problems with it.

Following my problems and formal review will still be a track-by-track description/review. 

Now something that's different about this score - and I think is one of it's problems - is that it doesn't feel like a cohesive piece. The tracks don't make a story arc the way that the Apollo, RMS, or Spirit do. I mean, heck, they're beautiful and amazing to listen to, but, for me, they do not evoke the same feelings that the others do. They seem to lack something that ties them together. The way that the songs are structured, they seem to have their own story in them, have a rising action, climax and denouement, while they are not building toward anything. The difference here, is that in the three previous scores, each track build the tension or conflict more and more, until you were burning for the climax of the event being portrayed. This, however, didn't feel as cohesive and building toward an ultimate goal here. 

While the songs perfectly display the setting of the score - the Himalayan mountains - with "frozen, wind burned, sun-bleached instrumentals that become more and more tattered and torn as you listen to them", they do not convey the mental and physical strife or the struggles and the life-threatening danger that would have come with the territory, and then coming in hard with a climax of heart-soaring glory. I feel that Adam stayed on the safe side, here, where he could have gone to dark and daring places with this. The story took a backseat in this score, and I'm not very impressed. 

I think this is because I couldn't picture any of it in my head. With all three of the previous ones, the songs pulled you in and crafted you into a lonely astronaut, a doomed aristocrat, a brave pilot. You could see this being a background music to a movie, a story. However, I could never feel the emotions or picture the scenery around me as the brave men climbed to the top of the world, which, I find, is an utter disappointment. 

Enough with that. If you couldn't tell, this month's score is about The Ascent of Everest, when in May 1953 two men were the first to reach the 29,029 foot summit.

You can listen to The Ascent of Everest for yourself here. 

1. Base Camp 

Eerily cold, this track is a beautiful start with humbling and intimidating horns and synths.  

2. Khumbu Icefall

Gritty and stellar, Khumbu Icefall is a track with crunching synths that reflects the sojourn across the ice. 

3. Western Cwm

Captivating strings and pounding guitars build to a stunning conclusion about the lonely, cold valley. 

4. Lhotse Face

This track is layered deeply with electronic sounds and guitar, which build up to be an awe-inspiring, glorious track of impending triumph. 

5. South Col

Persevering with heavy electric guitars, this track makes it real to the listeners that we're almost there.

6. The Hillary Step

Epic and enthralling with intense strings and deep bass lines, this track builds with intensity to marvel the beauty of the snow-capped mountains. 

7. The Summit

Herculean and viciously triumphant, the closing track bursts with epic guitar for a stunning and joyful conclusion.

Do I hate this score? No. Is it my favorite?  No. Do I think it has some problems? Yes. Is it still beautiful music?  Yes. 

And that is all, friends. 

~The WordShaker

Bucky Barnes and Peeta Mellark: The Tragic Similarities

"I think that most of us writers would rather have an audience than countless riches. If we wanted to be rich, we'd be doing something else," -John Green

In honor of Civil War being out for one week:

So, I finally saw Civil War on Saturday, and while this won't be a review, I'm going to discuss it for little. 

While it wasn't perfect, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was well executed with fabulous characters and motivations, which is what made this movie hit home the way that it did. The characters and the way that they changed and new facets of them were revealed was beautiful. As a sucker for good characters, this pulled me in. And this alone can carry nearly any movie. 

Some of its pitfalls were that they should have focused much more on the conflict between the Avengers, and less on the Zemo aspect. The clashing superheros - not just the action sequences, but the dialogue, etc. - is what made the movie so freaking awesome. 

Overall: not as good as Captain America 2: TWS, but still freaking awesome as these movies go. 

Now onto the title of this blog post. As you probably know, I am a die-hard Hunger Games fan. I was on the bandwagon relatively early, and still, it remains my favorite book series. However, I could totally go into an entire blog post about this, but, nevertheless, we've got to talk about the similarities between two tragic characters: Bucky Barnes and Peeta Mellark. 

Not all of these ideas are my own, as well as the critiques of Civil War. They are mostly a accumulation of my own thoughts, and others from the great, wide interwebs. 

1. They are both wholesome deep down inside. 

It is obvious that Peeta Mellark has always had good intentions. In the first book, the only thing he desires is to stay true to himself, and later in Catching Fire becomes self-sacrificial and entirely devoted to Katniss, even up until his capture in the Capitol. He was fighting for her the whole time. 

http://49.media.tumblr.com/b6e91ffcf56ce038a466b4b763acc02f/tumblr_nmq62j5wAN1qj2cswo2_500.gif

Bucky, a sergeant in the army, is shown to be loyal and brave in The First Avenger. He fights alongside Steve with a vengeance, and supports him in all that he does. Bucky even goes so far as to risk his life for Steve, and falling to his assumed death. He was truly with Steve to the end of the line. 

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/shipping/images/0/01/Marvel_-_Captain_America_-_Bucky_Barnes_Userbox_(Captain_America_The_First_Avenger).png/revision/latest?cb=20131202075157

Truly, Bucky and Peeta are whole at heart, are self-sacrificial and loyal with strong souls. 

2. The government screwed with their brains to use them as a weapon. 

Now, the more obvious portion is that bad people scrambled their brains in order to use them for their agenda. 

Peeta was hijacked, not totally brainwashed, where they enabled a sort of fear conditioning. They would refresh a memory in is mind, and pump him full of fear-inducting drugs, more specifically tracker jacker venom, in order to change his view on the world. This transformed him into not only a tactic for the Capitol but a weapon sent in to kill Katniss. 

This not only ties in with Civil War, but with Katniss being used as a 'piece in someone else's games'. Both of them incited many deaths and war, much less than if they had been acting on their own liberties. 

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/p-wjV-iW5-g/hqdefault.jpg

(I honestly could write a whole nother article about the similarities between Captain America and Katniss Everdeen/their trilogies. But for now we must focus on the task at hand: Peeta and Bucky.)

Bucky, however, was given a metal arm (as Peeta was given a metal leg) and was brainwashed multiple times. He then was programmed and pumped with super-serum and sent on assassin missions that he is later blamed for. 

Cap uses this as a compelling argument that the avengers would become exactly what Bucky (and Katniss and Peeta) were.  

https://secure.static.tumblr.com/711209dd6dd6debd0d100f49a7ce5a2f/upxigir/nawnna4c4/tumblr_static
_g0yqnp3u4tw8co00ks0oo4ck_640_v2.png

3. They have triggers. 

It is revealed in both of the third movies that some things can set our wonderful little characters off. While it's not clear of what exactly sets off Peeta, but he has flashbacks that are most likely triggered by violence, certain sounds and words, just anything that reminds him of his torture in the Capitol. These either send him into a PTSD-like flashback or back into the same thinking patters of the hijacking. 

https://www.tumblr.com/search/everlark

Longing. Rusted. Seventeen. Daybreak. Furnace. Nine. Benign. Homecoming. One. Freight car. These words send the recovering Bucky Barnes back into muscle memory of sorts, and flip his mind back into The Winter Soldier. 

https://www.tumblr.com/search/bucky+barnes

4. They are blamed for actions they did while 'under the influence'. 

The masses of District 13 hate Peeta for going against the rebels. However, he was tortured and forced into saying these things. Not only was he not himself when he strangled Katniss, and killed Mitchell, but he feels insurmountable guilt and many blame him for these things, as they do Bucky. 

http://cdn.playbuzz.com/cdn/7d2d093f-b7ab-43c6-9cfc-9369455de4c2/840d47b0-d842-4928-a0eb-f0dedf3516db.png

*MAJOR SPOILERS FOR CIVIL WAR* It is revealed that Bucky, as the Winter Soldier, killed Tony Stark's parents.  And Tony FLIPS SH*T - rightfully so - over this realization. However, Bucky was not aware of this and did not consciously do so. It was the Winter Soldier who killed them, but many people, like Peeta's case, aren't able to see past that. 

https://www.tumblr.com/search/bucky+barnes

5. Their 'lovers' believe in them, and are actually quite selfish in doing so. 

Katniss and Cap are selfish in different ways, but both hold unwavering devotion to their counterparts. 

Katniss can't love Gale, because she still holds onto hope that the real Peeta is in there somewhere. But she holds her distance, wanting to protect herself because she cares so much.  Many times in all three books, Katniss saves and treasures Peeta because she's afraid of being hurt by losing Peeta. 

https://www.tumblr.com/search/katniss+and+peeta

Steve's only connection to the life he loved is Bucky. And his selfish desire to get back to this life is mostly what is fueling his aggressive protection. Sure, he loves Bucky, but, like Katniss, a good part of his motivations are selfish because they don't want to lose them. 

How heartbreakingly human. 

source: instagram

Probably one of the most compelling similarities is Cap's and Katniss's heroic selfishness surrounding their loved ones. Peeta and Bucky are the only things that keep these protagonists anchored in their crazy worlds, and they cling to them, doing rash things in order to protect them, and in turn, protecting themselves. 

I realize that only one person will be damaged beyond repair if Peeta dies. Me. 

Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky. 

6. They are both smol and beautiful cinnamon rolls who need to be protected at all costs. 

Okay, maybe this was just a shameless plug for  #savebuckybarnesandpeetamellark2k16. 

But, oh well.  I bet you enjoyed this post anyways. 

~The WordShaker

BLOOM

"Those who tell stories rule the world," -Unknown

Unless you live under a rock, you probably know about Bloom, the climax of all art and writing at WCHS. 

Last night was this amazing event, and not only did I get to know better my fellow artists, writers, and musicians, I had some amazing experiences with amazing people. I will share my pieces that were accepted.

For now, look at some amazing pictures of members of the Creative Writing Club who got into Bloom!

Sloan with "Hi"

April with "The Girl and The Stream"

Matt with "Change" 

Grace with "Lights Up" 

Sarai with "For the 50th Time this Month" 

Copyright 2016, Olivia J

Dear you,

I breathe in, my face basking in the cool, spring chill.

It's been one year, but I still see you.  I see you everywhere.

Because when I close my eyes hard enough, I can still see you so clearly.  I can see right into your eyes: clear and blue and locked on me.  I remember the things we said on that night.  Evanescent words weaved in the night, of silver emotion and gold passion.

I see you in the creaking of these old, wooden doors. I feel you in the taste of sugary drinks on my lips.  I hear you in the melodic songs we danced to in the endless night. I see you in the limitless starry sky, on the tables we sat on and talked for hours.  I see you as a ghost on the stairs, trying to balance his weight on the narrow steps, smiling at me.  I see you standing in the grass, over me, as I stared up at the stars that night and dreamed.  And, if I focus hard enough, I can feel your jacket wrapped around me in that cold, spring night.

~

I remember everything, and still, I grasp onto these threads, not knowing whether they will lead to a spool.  I remember what little we had.  I remember what we could have had.  I wouldn't trade our time together for anything. Yet, it all still hangs bittersweet on my lips.

Like most things, it all ended as fast as it had begun: our love was a match - hot and raging and all consuming. And now you're gone, and all that remains is the memories, fleeting and wispy like ribbons tied to my head. As I age and the people surrounding your life decay into earth, those ribbons will detach, and float away forever.

I sit down in that special place, feeling the sag of the old, wooden bench. As deep summer melts to fall, the trees are bare, and the flush of life on earth is at it's end.

And so were you.

What I regret most is that I missed it.  I missed what it was all really about. Because all it was really about was love. Something so simple, yet so deep.  So universal, yet so fleeting.

But it was not the love that we felt, that left our souls high and our skin buzzing. But the love that we are, which is not only what we do, but what makes up the very vivacity of each cell in our bodies.

And I wish with all my still-beating heart that you could know all of these things - I wish that love would have blossomed within you.  I wish I could change the past, reach my weathered fingers back and tinker with the strings of time. I wish that you could possibly know, and know all of the potential that you had, that we had, has been tossed to the wind like chaff, carried to the far ends of the earth.  But please know, wherever you are and whatever may come of this life, that it was not all in vain.

Love,

Me.

And my art that was accepted:  

*crappy picture, I know* 

Lioness in Oil Pastel

As well as the T-shirts, designed by me: 

*A+ with those crappy pictures, Olivia*
In Bloom, originally in Pen and Ink

But truly, it's amazing events like these that remind me that this is what I'm supposed to be doing. Even through the aching feet and the long hours and the laborious work, it's all worth it. 

~The WordShaker