“Part 1” of The Rose Field was chapters 1-8. “Part 2” is twice as long (chapters 9-22), and I haven’t gotten any less chatty. So you’re getting a Post 2A and a Post 2B. Look forward to a 3A and a 3B to finish off the set.

As of this roundup, I’ve finished the whole book. Post will have light spoilers, in the notes I put in while editing. Comments are a free-for-all.

Still adding relevant BBC HDM screencaps to break up the text.

Sidenote: At some point in the middle of the original liveblog, I managed to injure my hand. Nowhere near as bad as Lyra’s — I kept an ice pack on it for the first several hours, and within two days, it only hurt if I touched/bent the injured part wrong. (The next week saw a steady decrease in which kinds of motion counted as “doing it wrong.”)

But every time I did, I remembered how Lyra’s spent this whole book with full-on broken fingers, and have an extra wince of sympathy. The only treatment she’s had is some (rose-scented) salve. She hasn’t even splinted them! Has to be a miserable, constant pain.

Library hold for The Rose Field came in. The TOC divides it into 3 parts, so this is the liveblog for Part One.

Previous HDM-related posts here. To start from the earliest Book of Dust reactions, see The Reaction Posts of Dust on AO3.

I’m going in mostly-cold. Got spoiled for a few individual details, but the rest, including basically all the actual plot, is a mystery.

When doing the original reactions, I usually don’t stop and rewind the audiobook to make sure all the quotes are exact. For this roundup, I have an ebook version I can text-search, so I’ll try to correct them. Carefully, because I’ve only read chapters 1-17 in total, and don’t want to spoil myself by seeing search results from chapters 18-36.

For visual interest, I’ll throw in some screencaps of relevant people/places/items from the HDM TV series.

Chapters 1-8 ahead:

At long last, after a year’s worth of internal discussion and a few more months of preparing for the rollout, AMTs are back on the menu.

Two of my requests have already been approved! His Dark Materials & Related Fandoms and 魔法少女まどか☆マギカ | Puella Magi Madoka Magica & Related Fandoms are the metatags on a couple of shiny new tag trees!

Official AO3 announcement post is here. The number of “I’m so happy to see this, it’ll make my fandom browsing so much easier” comments are a joy to see. (The comments about “well, geez, took you long enough” are…valid, honestly.)

A lot of specific tag trees are still works-in-progress, especially if it’s a big complicated franchise. So don’t worry too much if a fandom you love doesn’t have one yet — the wranglers might still be working on it. Honestly, I’m still working on investigating all the Madoka Magica fandom syns, which is why most of the spinoffs still don’t have their own separate fandom tags. We’ll get there, I promise.

Fun little twist that’s only a problem for me: this means “more fandoms” listed on my wrangling page. The amount of work is objectively exactly the same! It’s the same amount of fic, just spread across slightly more fandom tags! But the recently-added limit is on the number of fandoms, not the amount of fanworks those fandoms get.

Current number of fandoms on my list: 1142.

Current number that have any tag-wrangling to do: 28. (Not the same 28 as the last time I posted. There’s some overlap — a fandom like Sailor Moon has new tags every week — but the others rotate, especially the “just got new tags from its first fic posted in 2 years” type of fandoms.)