Sandbox / Eye Bonito WIP

• After Anita's Destination Defenestration, her body lands on the roof of the next door deli, but her spirit splashes into the ocean, thus returning to Yemayá. She ends up in Cuba's Varadero Beach, and her ghostly adventures begin.
• Nick gifts Raquel with an expensive Vivienne Tam dress for her to wear to dinner with his parents. After he drops the dress off, telling her she'll look great, she looks through the bag and finds a pack of pantyhose he also bought. She doesn't get why since the dress will cover her ankles until she notices they are extra-firm control top pantyhose.
• The Unfavorite: Astrid, Nick's sister. Their mother, a trustee, pulls strings to get her a curatorial internship at MoMA. Astrid doesn’t even show up to the interview. Never mind that Astrid manages to get a prized fellowship at RISD strictly in her own merits.
• Successful Sibling Syndrome:

The moonlit Vine

The Moonlit Vine 2023 by Elizabeth Santiago

"We love proudly and freely. This is our power"

Fourteen-year-old Taína, known to her friends and family as Ty, One night, her grandmother Isaura passes her a box, a carved stone and amulet.

• Anacaona, Higüamota , Jaragua, 1496 in Ayiti
• H to Guanina (mother to Casiguaya), Amoná (modern day Mona Island)

A passes a zemi to her daughter H a zemi and a gold amulet. “Zemis, like the one Anacaona held, were carved representations of gods and were sacred objects for their people. This particular zemi was triangular and sculpted to look like a frog, the symbol of fertility. The frog’s legs had been chiseled along the sides until they intertwined at one of the points on the triangle. On the opposite side was a face, not a frog’s face, but a human face with a large, gaping mouth. The gold amulet sat at the end of a string of small, perfectly round stone beads. On the front of the amulet, the figure of Atabey, the goddess of life, was engraved.”

1530, Amoná (Mona) H passes it along to her daughter Guanina

• 1550, Borikén: Guanina passes it to Casiguaya while escaping from Amona, to Boriken

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• Arc Words: Isaura shares these with her granddaughter Ty, who copies them in her journal:
  "We are the light that makes the night sky bright. We are the music that warms the heart and blesses the soul. We love proudly and freely. This is our power."
• Most Writers Are Adults: Ty is only 14, but she is able to and outline commonalities between her neighborhood 's gentrification and colonization in the Caribbean islands.
• The Woobie: Luis, Ty's little brother, does not understand why his beloved older brother had to move in with their father or his grandmother's death. And when he acts out in school, a school resource officer is called in and he is put in handcuffs. He is seven.

Earthsea

A Wizard of Earthsea is the first novel in the classic series of high fantasy books by Ursula K. Le Guin. Published in 1968, it was followed by The Tombs of Atuan in 1971 and The Farthest Shore in 1972

In Earthsea, magic is a part of everyday life, dragons are an occasional threat, and the afterlife is a very real place. Ged is boy who rises from a modest life as a goatherd in a sleepy village to become an apprentice to a wizard, and later enter the school of magic who rules in place of Earthsea's. He soon makes a grave mistake with dire consequences.

In many ways the Earthsea Cycle represented a radical departure from the then dominant view of fantasy in featuring a wizard as the main character rather than as a supporting character, featuring a cast of mostly brown-skinned and red-skinned characters, featuring women in prominent roles, exploring an islander society instead of the standard medieval European setting, and advancing the story by having the characters make increasingly complex moral and personal decisions rather than simply winning in sword fights or obtaining treasure.

The BBC adapted the works as radio dramas twice: in 1996, as a two hour adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea, and in April and May 2015, as a full adaptation of the original trilogy (A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, The Farthest Shore) in six episodes, each half an hour long.

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This novel contains examples of:

• Abusive Parents: Ged's father beats him.
• Aggressive Categorism: As far as Earthsea is concerned, all female magic users are both weak and wicked. All those good and powerful ones are just because they're too weak to pose a threat or they stole it from other male magicians.
• All Deaths Final: Mortality is a necessary and fundamental part of the world in Earthsea. Ged attempts to prove his prowess as a mage by summoning the dead spirit of a legendary woman. Instead, he releases the Gebbeth, killing Nemerle, scarring Ged and setting the stage for the hunt over the rest of the book.
• Animorphism: Wizards are capable of transforming into animals, though the process is dangerous, due to the animal form's instincts slowly dominating and overriding their human thought processes. In one particularly memorable example, Ged turns into a hawk in order to escape an enemy—and, forced to spend weeks in his new form, almost ends up getting stuck that way. Also, a tragic warning story told at the Wizarding School is of a wizard who loved turning himself into a bear, until he actually became one in mind as well as body, killed his own child, and was hunted down and killed like any other dangerous wild animal.
• The Apprentice: Ged to Ogion in A Wizard of Earthsea.
• Badass Boast: In a world where the magic of true names is a serious thing, and someone who has your true name and sufficient willpower can control you with it, Orm Embar proudly uses his true name as his only name. Of course, he is a very powerful dragon, but it's still an impressive boast.
• Ban on Magic: While wizards are not strictly forbidden from using forms of magic other than illusion, there is a powerful taboo against it, for very good reason.
• The Blacksmith: Ged's father is a bronzesmith.
• Child Mage: Ged is this early on in A Wizard of Earthsea before he goes on to become Archmage. His aunt, a witch, notes that he has unusual magical power, and when he was eight or nine, he saved his entire village from the Kargs using a spell he essentially made up on the spot. Some time after, he goes to Roke, which, as it's a wizarding school, is also full of child mages.
• Conlang: Hardic, which we see a little of. And Kargish, Osskili and Old Speech, in which wizards cast spells.
• Covers Always Lie: Early Earthsea covers had a marked tendency to show Ged as white, and the setting along the lines of Medieval European Fantasy. Le Guin resented the publishers' art departments for insisting that this was what would sell, and was ashamed of the misrepresentation.
• Deserted Island: Ged is sea-wrecked on a very small one during the first book.
• Dragon Rider: Ged earns the title of Dragon Lord simply because he's one of the few humans the dragons will deign to speak with. So when the most ancient dragon gives him a lift home, it's a significant mark of honor.
• Eldritch Abomination: The gebbeth that Ged unleashed.
• Eldritch Location: The Immanent Grove of Roke, a place where the trees themselves seem to be teaching advanced magic. It is stated that for the people outside, the Grove seems to be moving all over the island of Roke. In reality, it is anchored in the very fabric of reality; the Grove cannot move, Earthsea does.
• Endless Daytime: One of the backstory's greatest heroes, Erreth-Akbe, is said to have gained eternal fame by defeating a being (a mage or possibly a dragon) called the Firelord who sought to stop the sun at noon so that there would be light unending.
• Enemy Without: The shadow in A Wizard of Earthsea.
• Epigraph: A Wizard of Earthsea begins with in-universe epigraph, "The Creation of Ea".
• Evil Counterpart: The shadow to Ged.
• Famed In-Story: A Wizard of Earthsea is explicitly described as being about Ged when he was young and not famed in story; in it, a friend declares he will make a song so his deeds will be remembered, but either he didn't or the song was lost (only distorted pieces survive).
  • Despite the lines in A Wizard of Earthsea saying that stories of the events of that novel were lost, it is clear that they are common knowledge by the time of The Other Wind, as shown by Alder.
• Familiar: Ged's Otak—a small, rodentlike creature similar in size and disposition to a weasel. He tames it in the wild using the Old Speech, and it follows him around everywhere after that, usually riding on his shoulder or resting in his hood.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Word of God claims there's no specific analogue but draws heavily from many non-European cultures, an aspect that perhaps is one of the setting's strongest points. Broadly speaking, the world seems to be based on a Polynesia with metallurgy, some cultures even vaguely matching Hawaii, Rapa Nui and the Maori, but elements from Babylon, Mesoamerica and West African are also abundant.
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: Ged's father, a blacksmith, is always telling him his fantasies will do him no good, and that learning to make a living as a blacksmith is the only realistic way for Ged to get by in the world. He's proven wrong when Ged becomes a wizard.
• Fantasy World Map: One of the more famous examples.
• Farm Boy: Ged starts out as a goatherd, son of a blacksmith, on a very rural island out on the edge of civilization.
• Fat Best Friend: Vetch, although he is more intelligent and complex than most examples of this trope.
• Females Are More Innocent: Inverted. Part of Earthsea culture is the assumption that female magic users are wicked.
• Fictional Constellations: A Wizard Of Earthsea discusses the constellations of the land of the dead, which do not match those of the living world. Their names include the Sheaf, the Tree, the Door and the One Who Turns.
• Forced Transformation: A spell to change another person involuntarily into an animal is possible, but difficult.
• Functional Magic: The magic taught in Roke seems to cover the gamut pretty widely, though with an unusual caveat of geography: the further one gets away from Roke, the less reliable the magic that Roke teaches becomes. Vetch, grown up in the East Reach, says that certain spells he learned at home are useless at Roke, while some spells taught to him in Roke lose their potency in the East Reach.
  • Additionally, the way magic works in Earthsea is that it's impossible for anything said in the true speech, the dragons' tongue, to be a lie. Anything you say in the true speech is true, even if physical reality has to change to make it so. The only exception seems to be dragons, who speak nothing but the true speech, and can still lie all they want.
• Gender-Restricted Ability: As in the rest of the original trilogy, features mostly male wizards. In fact, there was a proverb "As weak as a woman's magic."
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Ged, after unleashing a never-exactly-specified evil into the world, is scratched up rather terribly by the thing on one side of his face, and scarred for life. However, in that same book someone says approvingly that the scars indicate him as a true hero—and more importantly they are a sign of his kinship with the Nameless Ones. Ged himself is actually not aware that anyone thinks his scars are heroic. The guy who thinks this is very young, and very awed by Ged, and he thinks the scars are the tracks of a dragon's claws, since Ged is known for having vanquished an important dragon early in his career.
• Head Pet: Ged has an otak, a small, very shy wild creature that rides around in his hood and will tolerate almost no one else. When he's attacked at one point, it tries to protect him, screaming (this is notable because otaks have no voices). Ged is heartbroken when it dies.
• Humans Are White: Averted. White humans (Kargish) are rare in Earthsea, and are more or less Vikings. Most people we encounter are Ambiguously Brown, with Le Guin having said that they look vaguely Native American, or black. Ged has red-brown skin and Vetch is described as having black-brown skin. The implications of this are intentional.
• I Know Your True Name: The name is the thing, and the true name is the true thing. Know the true name, and you can control the thing. This power is limited in that there are literally countless numbers of names in the world, and no human, at least, can ever learn them all. You can't control the sea, for example, because you would have to know the name of every shore it touches, something impossible for a man to do in one lifetime.
• Job Title: The protagonist of A Wizard of Earthsea is a wizard of Earthsea.
• Language of Magic: It even has regional dialects!
• Language of Truth: The Old Speech. Except for the dragons. Well, dragons can't lie, but they can certainly omit, obfuscate and otherwise mislead.^* Or, you know, set you on fire and eat you.
• Living Legend: "His life is told of in the Deed of Ged and in many songs, but this is a tale of the time before his fame, before the songs were made."
• Living Shadow: What Ged summons up and then must deal with in the first book.
• Mage Tower: The Master Namer of Roke, Kurremkarmerruk, lives in a tower some way from the School.
• Magic Staff: Wizards trained on Roke are distinguished from mere sorcerers by carrying staves. Ged is awarded a staff made of yew bound with copper in A Wizard of Earthsea. When it is lost in Osskil, Ogion makes him a replacement from a length of wood formerly intended for a longbow.
• Magical Incantation: Magic works by the user speaking the language of dragons; since it is impossible to lie in said language, the universe will change to make what is said true.
• Man in the Iron Mask: The brother and sister on the deserted island. They're a Kargish prince and princess who were abandoned to get them out of the way without outright killing them.
• Meaningful Rename:
  • Every human gets a new secret name when they come of age, and adopt a publicly-used nickname. In A Wizard of Earthsea, the boy called Duny becomes the man called Sparrowhawk, whose secret true name is Ged.
• Medieval European Fantasy: Totally averted. Most of the characters are dark-skinned/non-white (with great care taken to distinguish between the various shades of brown), and if any era of actual history matches Earthsea, it's ancient times, not the Middle Ages (for instance, the tech level is late Bronze Age, augmented by widespread use of magic for things like animal husbandry and weather control).
  • If you're having a hard time figuring this out, just envision the settlements as looking Middle Eastern or Indian or perhaps Polynesian (and yes, African), and you'll probably end up freeing yourself from the chains of this trope forever.
  • The first edition cover◊ appears to be Mayan-inspired.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: The reason why it's dangerous for a wizard to stay shifted into an animal shape. The longer you stay in a given form, the more your mind gets taken over by that form's instincts.
• Namedar: High-level wizards are implied to have Namedar for people's True Names, which is used in coming-of-age ceremonies, among other things.
• Naming Ceremony: Children are given their True Name by a wizard in a special ceremony. Sparrowhawk receives his in A Wizard of Earthsea.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Herod: A king received a prophecy his empire will fall because of a person from the former royal house. By then, there were only two children left; a boy and a girl. He was afraid to kill them (Royal Blood), so he banished them to a desolate island. They survive until old age. Then, one day, Ged is washed ashore. The girl gives him an old family keepsake...
• The Nothing After Death: The land of the dead is presented as a dry sunless place where the dead keep their names, but not their spirits. This is later revealed to not be the real afterlife but a barrier to reaching the real one, established because the first human wizards wanted access to the true names and thus power. Nice job breaking it, wizards.
• Ocean Punk: One of the classic and most refined examples.
• Ominous Fog: The boy who will grow up to be Sparrowhawk uses a fog control/illusion spell to confuse invaders and save his village.
• One-Winged Angel: Subverted in "The Rule of Names". Two sorcerers get into a duel involving shapeshifting; it ends with one back in his human form, and the other a dragon. The human says something like, "I'm tired of this; it ends now; show me your true shape, by the power of your True Name." He speaks the Name. The dragon is unaffected, and replies, "That is my true name; this is my true shape." CHOMP!
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Most people in Earthsea are like this—they receive a true name when they come of age, but keep it a secret to all but those whom they trust completely. Ged for instance, is known to the vast majority of Earthsea's population as "Sparrowhawk".
• Our Dragons Are Different: The intelligent and deadly Tolkien variety, at least in the Dragon Run corner of the far West Reach. When one approaches the East Reach, the farthest islets of Earthsea, there are still dragons... but they're about the size of housecats, and completely harmless and unintelligible. The dragons depicted in the earliest stories and novels resemble Smaug (intelligent, capricious Western Dragons), but gradually become more varied. They are highly magical, and indeed seem to be affected by the geographical limits to magic — magic in the West Reach, where dragons are huge, cunning, and rich, and rule both the skies and islands, is different from magic in the East Reach, where dragons are very small, unintelligent, and often domesticated as housepets. Although they're highly intelligent, often wise creatures, they're inclined to simply kill most people who get near them. A rare, powerful mage may become a Dragonlord, which Ged (who is one himself), describes as simply someone with whom a dragon will reliably speak rather than eat. Dragons and humans are strongly implied to be descended from the same original species. Also, dragons naturally speak the world's original language, the True Speech, which is significant because in Earthsea, magic is in words and names. Humans have to learn it, and cannot lie in it, while dragons can.
• People of Hair Color: The Kargs are typically blond.
• Politeness Judo: The last task the apprentice wizard Sparrowhawk must achieve before he leaves the school as a fully-fledged wizard is to discover the name of the Master Doorkeeper. Since a wizard will always protect the secret of his name, he thinks long and hard about what form of magic he could use to wrest the information from the vastly more powerful Master Doorkeeper. Eventually he goes before the master and admits he must give up, but only after asking one question: "What is your name?" The Master Doorkeeper cheerfully gives him the answer: politely requesting his name was in fact the solution to the test.
• Portal Statue Pairs: The land entrance to the Port of Gont is flanked by two dragon statues.
• The Power of Language: A Central Theme of the series. Earthsea starts out fairly simply, as a world with a Language of Truth that doubles as a Language of Magic reliant on the memorization of things' True Names, but as the story progresses, it questions the origins of this magic and reveals that words only have so much power—language-based magic is a relatively shallow, masculine form of magic, and there are deeper forms of magic and understanding that do not rely on the imperfect medium of speech.
• Primal Polymorphs: A cautionary tale every wizard student knows tells of a wizard who liked becoming a bear so much, one day he became a bear for real and killed his own son. The people were forced to hunt him down after that.
• Privileged Rival: When Ged arrives at Roke Island, he gains a rival named Jasper, who's the son of the Lord of the Domain of Eolg on the Isle of Havnor. Ged is just the son of a smith, and is rubbed the wrong way by Jasper's extremely polite but condescending manners.
• Reality Warper: A wizard can do this, if he changes something's true name, or otherwise changes something's nature.
• Reality Warping Is Not a Toy: If you use the Old Speech to warp reality, you will face the consequences (probably). Plus, some forms of reality warping are just plain impractical: For example, one could use it to change a rock into a diamond, but due to the way True Name magic works, all of the islands of Earthsea would change into diamonds too, which obviously would make them pretty unsuitable for living on.
• Rescued from the Underworld: Attempted by Ged; he follows the soul of a dying child on the way to the land of the dead, but he doesn't manage to keep her from entering it and being lost.
• Resurrected for a Job: It is mentioned that one wizard used to summon souls of ancient kings and wizards for royal council. It ended up with him being exiled, since, apparently, the advices of the dead are of little use to the living.
• Rite of Passage: In A Wizard of Earthsea, the mage Ogion the Silent gives Duny his True Name of "Ged" in a coming of age ceremony.
• Royal Blood: Why the God-Emperor did not just kill the prince and princess but instead stranded them on an island where Ged ran into them.
• Sacred Hospitality: Sacred hospitality appears pretty deeply ingrained in Earthsea, in both the Hardic and Kargad lands. Despite Ged's private gripe in A Wizard of Earthsea, his boat was provisioned for free on the island where people thought he might be some kind of demon, and the innkeeper who told him their island already had a wizard gave him free lodging, food, and ale. Staff-carrying wizards almost never pay for such things, or for ship's passage. While hospitality to wizards is mere common sense, there are many examples in the stories of non-wizards (or wizards in disguise) getting the benefit of sacred hospitality.
• Scars Are Forever: Ged has disfiguring scars down one side of his face, inflicted by an evil Living Shadow he summoned as a boy, which remain even when he is the Archmage. He seems to regard them as a reminder of the cost of arrogance and misuse of magic.
• Shadow Archetype: In A Wizard of Earthsea, Ged accidentally raises an evil spirit representing the darkness in himself, which is actually called the Shadow in the book. It follows him everywhere until he can call it by its true name—which is Ged.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock: Wizards who spend too much time shapeshifted into animal forms can forget their humanity, especially when distracted by the animal's power of flight or ability to freely range the oceans. Ged almost loses his personality once. It is stated that one wizard spent so much time as a bear he lost his humanity and killed his son. He had to be hunted down afterwards.
• Shoulder-Sized Dragon: The harekki Yarrow keeps as a pet in A Wizard of Earthsea, possibly the very first example.
• Shout-Out: The word for stone in Old Speech is tolk and that for sea is inien, making Earthsea translate as "tolkienian".
• Small, Secluded World: The exiled brother and sister Ged encounters on a small island in A Wizard of Earthsea. They were marooned on the island as small children, and having spent their whole lives there have "forgotten that there were other people in the world."
• Spoiled Brat: Jasper, a fellow student in the school. He is the one who provokes
• Stern Chase: Ged gets chased from island to island by a creature from the shadow realms.
• Summoning Ritual: Ged decides to show off by summoning the spirit of Queen Elfarran from the dead. He succeeds, but also inadvertently calls a "Shadow", which promptly tries to kill him, then stalks him for the next several years trying to finish him off.
• Telescoping Staff: Ged picks a blade of grass and speaks to it to expand it into a full-sized wooden staff. To suit this trope, the staff is able to shrink/grow it again.
• That's No Moon: Ged once goes to an island to fight off dragons. The first dragons are relatively small and easy to defeat... then the castle on the island moves and it's the main dragon.
• Training the Gift of Magic: Ged is first taken as a trainee by a witch when he shows a remarkable ability to cast simple spells after hearing them once, then recruited for (extensive) training at a Wizarding School after showing greater but still limited power. It's possible that anyone could achieve something if they knew the right true names, but most people would probably be dangerously clumsy at best.
• Turning Back Human: Ged spends too much time in the form of a hawk (and focused on nothing but survival), so he has to be turned back into human by his teacher. Even then it takes a couple of days before his mind is back to normal.
• Two-Faced: Ged has a half scarred face from an encounter with a vaguely defined creature that he accidentally summoned. (It later turns out to be, appropriately, his own dark doppelgänger.)
• Unequal Rites: A distinction is made between "true" magic (based on an ancient language, studied in a Wizarding School, practiced only by men) and several lesser forms of magic, including sorcery, illusionism and village witches. There are also other forms of religious magic in different cultures.
• Unusual Pets for Unusual People: Ged ends up with an otak as his familiar. It's explicitly noted that otaks are not easily domesticated at best, and it is shown when his otak nearly bites some of the other students at his school.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Roke Island is home to the School of Magic which results in all sorts of bizarre occurrences such as flying houses, people transforming into an animal (or vice versa), etc. The locals are used to this and barely give a second glance.
• Weather Dissonance: Wizards like controlling the weather. It's the first ability that Ged manifests. But it's not always wise. In the sixth book, the sea-captain Tosla grumbles about sailing to Roke, saying there's not an honest wind or current for miles around the island, but all wizard's brew.
• When You Snatch the Pebble: To graduate from the wizards' School on Roke, a student must find out what the Master Doorkeeper's name is. While there may be a way to find out by magic, it's perfectly acceptable simply to ask him what it is, and he will tell you.
  • Dragons are described as having their own morality, and while perilous for humans to interact with, are not actively evil. They appear to qualify more as Blue-and-Orange Morality.
• Wizard Duel: Not actually a fight, but Ged's attempt to outdo a schoolyard rival with flashy demonstrations of magic led to tragedy in A Wizard of Earthsea.
• Wizarding School: The school for magic on Roke, which only admits men, and which is portrayed pretty much as the center of the magical world. May be the Trope Maker.
• Your Magic's No Good Here:
  • When Sparrowhawk (Ged) travels to the island of Osskil in the far north, his magic fails because he isn't familiar with the differences in magic there.
  • The mage Vetch tells of the differences in magic between locations.
    Sparrowhawk: They say, Rules change in the Reaches.
    Vetch: Aye, a true saying, I can tell you. There are good spells I learned on Roke that have no power here, or go all awry; and also there are spells worked here I never learned on Roke. Every land has its own powers, and the farther one goes from the Inner Lands, the less one can guess about those powers and their governance.
• Youth Is Wasted on the Dumb: The young students are showing off their spellcraft when Ged foolishly casts a dangerous and powerful spell to show off. He nearly dies himself, the Archmage does die, and a creature is unleashed.