Now THIS is the type of ask I love to get! (contains spoilers)
After he wakes up, Viola teaches Todd to read properly. At first he’s kind of reluctant. He doesn’t have time to read anyway, right? They have an entire planet full of settlers to rebuild. But Viola isn’t going to give up so fast. She digs up some ebooks for him that she read when she was little, and they read them together, little by little. Ben likes to sit in the room next to them and listen to Todd’s Noise reading. It makes him proud. And little by little Todd advances until he’s able to read pretty much by himself. Until one day Viola comes home and hears some very frustrated Noise. She runs in and finds Todd sitting on the floor, clutching the E-reader with wide eyes. “What’s wrong?” “It just stops. How can it just stop? There’s gotta be more -” Viola sighs and helps him download Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
They’re both really sick of living in a city so they decide to go back to Todd’s old plan and start a new settlement in Old Prentisstown. But it takes a lot of time because they have to hang around in New Haven where the majority of the population is gathered. They spend their days working and helping wherever they can.
Viola especially tries to keep the new settlers from bugging Todd too much. They are nice people, and they’re very interested in him, but they freak him out a little. They’re just so different. And they keep stealing Viola’s attention with all this tech talk that only they understand. Eventually, with Viola’s help, he starts spending more time with them. Todd is trying to learn as much as he can from the settlers about agriculture and machinery.
But then there’s this one girl, Steff Taylor. Todd doesn’t understand why Viola keeps ushering him away whenever she’s around. She won’t say more than, “I don’t like her very much.” Then one evening, Steff shows up on their doorstep uninvited. The most awkward dinner in New World’s history ensues.
Ben is a really crappy cook. Cillian was the household chef. But Bradley and Mrs. Lawson come over for dinner a lot, and the three of them bond over teaching Ben to cook. Todd asks Ben (very sheepishly) if he could help him bake a cake for Viola’s birthday. They end up making a huge mess. But at least it’s a delicious mess. Even if Todd misspelled “happy birthday” in frosting.
excited for chaos walking gifs because I always want to make a “YOU MUST WARN THEM” joke/reference but no one would ever understand what I’m talking about
Look Todd, it’s not lying when you’re the mayor— it’s politics.
Me, internally: Tom Holland said that he had to spend weeks learning to ride a horse for the Chaos Walking movie but his character, Todd Hewitt, never rides a horse until the 2nd book, which is significant because characters with a horse are seen as a lot more powerful and the fact that Todd, and also Viola, don’t have a horse means that they are at a significant disadvantage both in stamina and pacing, and also physically. They have to outrun men on horses and they have to potentially fight off men on horses and that’s part of the tension, that they have that disadvantage if the army ever got close enough. and when Todd finally is asked to ride one in The Ask And The Answer, he is more than a little nervous. Throughout the entire series, horses are seen associated with men fighting, specifically Mayor Prentiss’s army, and war, which again adds weight to when Todd first gets his horse in the sequel, given to him by the Mayor for Todd’s job. Plus, how is Todd going to ride a horse if he has to bring Manchee with him? Manchee is a dog small enough to carry for long periods of time and would not be able to easily keep up with a horse. Is Todd riding the horse while holding Manchee while Viola sits on the back? If the horse is going at the pace of Manchee then there’s no point of even having a horse because they need to do lots of hiding and are generally moving stealthily anyway and horses make that extremely difficult. Unless they get the horse when they don’t have Manchee with them, but at that point they are actively running fugitives and also have Ben with them and they sure as heck can’t fit all 3 of them on a horse, dog or not. Maybe they each have a horse but again that makes no sense for about a billion reasons. If Todd and Viola have horses themselves then how do they meet Wilf? If the horse riding is only for a little scene or something then why did Tom Holland have to spend weeks learning to ride when he has some (not a lot but some) riding experience in the past and he’s allergic to horses? If it’s a small scene then surely he wouldn’t have had to spend weeks learning? Half of the bloody book singes on the fact that Mayor Prentiss’s army have horses and Todd and Viola don’t and the significance of that disadvantage so when the FUCK does Todd ride a horse in the Chaos Walking movie and WHY?! Also it’s rumoured that he rides a motorcycle and they don’t even exist on New World in the books and why do you need a horse AND a motorcycle? If automobiles exist in the movie then why are the army on horses? If they aren’t on horses then WHY DID TOM HOLLAND HAVE TO LEARN HOW TO RIDE A HORSE?!
bullshit central 