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angel-maybe-alive · 1 year

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I love character design, any good story starts with a good character

So I was looking trough lightlark characters Design and by god they made me angry so let's go talk shit about this book again

This is by the way no criticisms of artstyle or the artist but the authors inputs that made those characters such piles of shit

Starting with these crimes against design

This is the same woman,like a different filter in the same woman without context they look either as the same person or close twins and I know the reason why they are so similar but I will talk about it later, the dress the hair the bitchy stand it's the same.

Now the boys

I really like goldie design because it fits the rulers aesthetic but he also looks like Jeoffrey Baratheon put him in red and I would want to punch his face, Now Grease, I mean goth I mean Grim holy edgylord grim design it's borderline stupid, and I blame Sarah j Maas for this it's long haired rhysand the thing I hate the most it's the shattered crown is that like a single piece of metal with shattered parts poking up from his hair or like multiple hair clips that can eventually fall o floating pieces he has to use magic to keep up?

Azul my darling poor sad gay widow you deserved so much better, I'm still trying to understand what is going on with his clothes but at least the crown looks good I would've given him like an extra earring or more gemstones or really lean on a more art nouveau aesthetic his worse crime is look better than boring pale Caucasian and boring tan Caucasian but of course not being a love interest and only exist so the author can kill two representation bird with one boring rock

And lastly

Her

She is wearing bbl fashion, fantasy bbl fashion she looks like a Kardashian the thorns thing is so ridiculously stupid why you have thorns in your clothes you late time emo bastard but the stupidest part is how the author clearly made the shiny gray twins so boring and identical to make this girl stand out as a living embodiment of not like the other girls very literally and still he has the most boring design of them all I'm surprised no one figured out earlier that she was a powerless fuck when they meet this living breathing default setting

#books #lol #anti lightlark #lightlark #alex aster #anti booktok #Isla crown #my god grim design its so stupid #but by the way i am ironically team oro #because i know the author will fuck him over next book #also this is sarah j Maas fault so #anti sjm #anti rhysand

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weaver-z · 2 years

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If I think about Lightlark for too long, I become passively homicidal. In a just world, Alex Aster would be pilloried for weeks for this nonsense

#lightlark #HATE

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chi-the-idiot · 7 months

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Im actually going to complain a bit about Lightlark's character designs, more specifically Isla's, because you cannot tell me this woman

Is meant to represent an amazonian warrior princess who has been trained since she was a literal child to fight to the death with others like her.

Who had to build up her body strength in order to actually stand a chance against people much older than her, with magical powers, while she had none.

This isnt the artist's fault btw, they probably just followed Aster's instructions and did a great job at that. This is just a nitpick of mine against YA female main characters in general. Because women cannot be both femenine AND have muscles in YA books apparently.

So have a modern AU of my Isla redesign as a gift.

ISLA CROWN COULD'VE BEEN THE HOTTEST WOMAN ON ALL OF LIGHTLARK

BUFF WOMEN FOR THE FUCKING WIN

#lightlark #isla crown #lightlark rewrite #plot twist the reason why Oro fell for Isla is because he likes people who could break his back

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explodingsilver · 5 months

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Book review: Nightbane by Alex Aster

Lightlark…2!

I’ve already made my thoughts on the first book quite clear (read that review first if you haven’t already; I don’t feel like rehashing all the context), and were I a bit more sensible, I would have stayed away from its sequel. I am, however, somewhat of a literary masochist, so of course I borrowed this from Hoopla the day it was released (November 7th, not too long ago). Very pleased that I was able to write this review much faster than the first one, though this review is shorter, at only 2,100 words long. Was the experience worth it? I don’t know, you tell me.

(There are spoilers ahead, on the off chance that you care)

The plot and style

After the events of the first book, Isla is trying to learn her several powers as well as get a hold of this “leading two different realms” thing while trying to move on from getting betrayed by four different people she used to love. At a celebration for a Wildling holiday (in which no Wildlings other than herself are in attendance), Grim magically crashes the party from afar and announces that the Nightshade army will destroy Lightlark in thirty days. The other realms start preparing for the invasion, and Isla tries to recover all her lost memories of being with Grim in hope that they will reveal what his goal is and how to stop him, especially after receiving a prophetic vision of him standing in the ruins of a village he destroyed with his powers.

Put simply, if the plot of the first book is split between “Isla and Celeste search for a MacGuffin” and “Isla and Oro search for a different MacGuffin”, this book is split between “Isla and Oro do basic defense building stuff” and “Isla remembers the time she and Grim searched for a third MacGuffin”. There’s also a subplot about a rebel group trying to capture Isla, but this is inconsequential and could’ve been dropped entirely.

It feels like there was an attempt to address some of the criticism of the first book, but not nearly enough of an attempt. On the one hand, metaphor usage has improved to the point where it actually feels like it was written by a human being and not a neural network (no throbbing and raw glaciers this time around), the book acknowledges that no longer having a power no one else had in the first place is less bad than having a maximum lifespan of 25, and Isla realizes that Grim let her win the duel in the first book and that she did not win against a 500+ year old army general on the strength of her own skill. On the other hand, it does not address questions like “how does Starling society even function if none of them ever live to 26?” or “if Oro always knows when someone is lying, why didn’t he call bullshit the moment Celeste said ‘Hi, my name is Celeste’?”

Speaking of that last thing: I didn’t mention it in my review of the first book because it didn’t really feel relevant to anything, but each ruler has a ‘flair’, a special power that is unique to them. Oro’s is that he can always tell when someone is lying. Grim’s is that he can teleport. This book reveals that Isla’s is that she is immune to curses. Glad to finally have an answer to one of my biggest questions of the first book (checks notes) 75% of the way through the second one, when this explanation should’ve been given the moment we learned the original stated reason does not apply.

Wildling elixir and its (lack of) consequences

Much of this book centers around the presence of the Wildling elixir from the first book, a potion that is super effective at healing wounds. As you might imagine, this kills a lot of the tension. Used in conjunction with Isla’s magical teleportation device, “teleport away, use Wildling elixir, teleport back” becomes an easy way to recover when the characters get their flesh ripped apart. And indeed, they do this all the time! The book tries to nerf this strategy by stating that the elixir is rare due to the flower used to make it being rare, but 1) this is at odds with Isla’s very liberal use of it, and 2) aren’t the Wildlings the “make flowers grow instantly” people? Why can’t they just use those powers on it like they do for every other plant?

There was a bit of potential for an interesting theme with these flowers: Isla eventually learns that while the Wildlings use them to make the healing elixir, the Nightshades use those exact same flowers to make the titular nightbane, which is basically fantasy heroin. I was intrigued by this motif (I like it when things have a dual nature like that), but unfortunately this doesn’t really go anywhere, other than some vague gesturing at “wow, just like Isla”. Speaking of Isla…

Isla

This time around, Isla is clearly traumatized by the events of the last book, trusts very few people, and is aware that she is in over her head with leading two realms full of subjects she barely knows while also being the king’s unofficial consort. Not a bad start for a character arc, but in effect, she has gone from naive and impulsive to naive, impulsive, and guilty about those things while making little effort to amend them. It feels like her attitude towards leadership is basically “I’m allowed to call myself a bad leader but nobody is allowed to agree with me on that.”

Much of Isla’s internal conflict in this book is based around her Nightshade heritage on her father's side. She is convinced that there is an inherently evil part of her because her father was from the Inherently Evil Realm. This may not come as a surprise, but I do not like when stories have such a thing as an Inherently Evil Realm. Not only does Nightshade fill this role, but the book never even gestures at pushing back against Isla’s conviction that her heritage taints her, and in fact ends up affirming it.

This book really told me to my face that Isla is the first person in millennia to have both Wildling and Nightshade powers. I do not buy that even for a moment. Maybe my disbelief is because the series discarded the “only one realm’s power set per person, even if their parents are from different realms” thing in the same book it was introduced, and I would expect there to be Wildling/Nightshade couples way more often than once per few millennia. But no, that highly plausible thing can’t happen because then Isla won’t be the most special person currently alive!

The other characters

Sadly, the rest of the cast did not improve, and in some instances, got worse.

Oro going from "world weary, distant king" to "official love interest" has unfortunately sanded down all his interesting aspects, and everything I liked about his character in the first book now takes a backseat to being overly protective of Isla and making stock Love Interests threats to kill anyone who hurts her. I swear, he turned so generic that some of his lines were indistinguishable from something Grim would say. But hey, if nothing else, he at least didn’t get character assassinated like I was sure he would!

While Grim actually does stuff in this book, he still has no personality traits other than what's included in the Sexy Villain Starter Pack. Like, it actually upsets me that he's such an absolute nothing of a character. Everything about him begins and ends with “what if the villain…was sexy?”, and there are about a morbillion stories out there that provide more interesting answers to this question. You’d think focusing on him this much would be the perfect opportunity to give him any unique traits at all, but Aster certainly did not take that opportunity, nor did she ever answer the question of why he likes Isla, despite the sheer number of pages dedicated to their relationship.

As for everyone else? Azul, our beloved token gay black man who runs his realm like a democracy, still receives woefully little page time. Cleo, the bitchy ruler who hates Isla for no reason, receives even less, but at least we get to hear about her dead son, I guess. Ella, Isla's Starling assistant, is mentioned so rarely I wonder if Aster forgot she exists. There are also several new average citizen characters introduced, but none of them are remotely interesting. They're all defined solely by whether or not they're on Isla's side. It says something when the best new character is Isla's new animal companion (a panther named Lynx, who rules because he does not give a shit about Isla).

The chili pepper emoji, as the TikTokers call it

Because I must do as the book did and address the topic of sex before I get to the final important bits.

This book is much hornier than the first one, but in a way that makes large parts of it feel like one of those dreams where you're trying to have sex with someone but your attempts keep getting interrupted. I regret that I did not count the number of times Isla was about to fuck someone and then got denied for some reason or another.

There are three times she actually succeeds, and luckily these scenes do not read like they were written by Sarah J. Maas, despite her obvious influence on everything else. This doesn't seem like much of a compliment, but this series needs all the W’s it can get. That's not to say everything is fine, though. There's one scene that's obviously using all the "first time" stuff for characterization, and I can't help but feel this would be more effective had they not already slept together a few short chapters beforehand? Like c’mon, all you had to do was switch the order of those two scenes.

The ending

Shortly before the Nightshade army is set to storm the island and destroy it, Isla learns Grim’s (and Cleo’s) real motivation for doing so: there’s a portal on the island leading to another world, one in which the original founders of Lightlark came from before making Lightlark in the image of the world they left. Grim and Cleo want to open that portal and reach the other world, which will just so happen to destroy the island. They’re not actually trying to kill everyone for the evulz. Isla, in her naivety, accidentally opens it for them before they even arrive.

During the final battle, while trying to steal Grim's powers so she can kill him and save Lightlark, Isla finally remembers the last two important memories: 1) she and Grim actually got married right before he memory-wiped her, and 2) what she thought was a prophetic vision of him killing an entire village was actually a memory of her doing so. Convinced that she'll accidentally kill Oro if she stays with him, she agrees to go with Grim, whom she just realized she is still in love with, in exchange for a promise that he'll withdraw the attack.

I cannot remember the last time I had this strong of an "are you fucking kidding me" reaction to the end of a book. But after some thinking, I decided that it actually makes for some great tragedy material. “Traumatized woman with a supportive partner becomes convinced that she’s too horrible to be with him and goes back to her terrible husband” would make for a good story if this was a more grounded book written by anyone else. Alas, this concept just had to be tackled here.

I also naively thought that because the deal was for two books, that means this would be a duology. But it feels like there will be a third book, and I'm hoping there is, not out of any desire for more (unsure how much more I can take), but because it would be straight-up authorial malpractice to end the series on that note.

Conclusion

This honestly wasn’t quite as bad as the first book, but the problems that persisted outweighed the ones that got fixed, and the severe case of Middle Book Syndrome certainly did not help its case. It’s a very small improvement stylistically, but when the nicest things I can say about it are “there were some concepts that could’ve made for an interesting story in the hands of a better author” and “the sex scenes aren’t atrocious” and “the cat is kinda cool”, then I feel justified in calling it terrible overall. It’s a good thing that Lightlark…3! is presumably a long ways away, because I will need all that time to recover from having read this.

#nightbane #lightlark #alex aster #ya fantasy #book review #book discussion #original content do not steal

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crow-caller · 6 months

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finished lightlark 2! this isn't a spoiler, it's bad

it's pretty much the exact same as the first book but more aimless and scattered. there's a lot of very obvious addressing the critique going on. a series of side quests around a plot which vaguely exists (not really) and an endless amount of grim fanservice. grim flashbacks are half the book and almost entirely a series of fanfiction tropes. it is extremely obviously cribbing off ACOTAR at every turn. it is not a duology and sets up another. the worldbuilding is really really trying to convince you it exists now but is infuriatingly bad. the author thinks you think there's any mystery if isla will date oro (no time or space) or grim (half the book and half a dozen sex or near sex scenes). isla has a magic giant warrior cat now. it's a panther. she names it lynx.

the book says her panther has pointy ears.

#lightlark #nightbane

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crimsoneons · 8 months

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What's... What's up with all of the guys with shadow powers in ya books?

Shadow & Bone

Fourth Wing

ACOTAR

Lightlark

Like, what's up with that? Why shadows? Am I missing something here?

It's been while since I've read physical books (got sucked into ao3 ages ago) but I feel like there are alot of shadow dudes now???

#ya books #shadow dudes #shadow and bone #acotar #fourth wing #lightlark #no but seriously #why????#is it just like #tall dark and handsome but with matching magic????#broody boy must be ultimate darkness???

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copperiisulfate · 5 months

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fourth wing and lightlark are to YA fantasy as divergent is to YA dystopian

#and i mean that as an INSULT #bookblr #booklr #fourth wing #lightlark #nightbane #divergent #ya fantasy #ya dystopia

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the-uncanny-dag · 1 year

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Lightlark & Nightbane sound like fucking Warrior Cat names

#been listening to some booktube & i'm frankly appalled #lightlark #ya fantasy #literature

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moonys-library · 5 months

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that feeling when you’re reading a book and you get so into the story, it feels like you’re no longer reading words

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angel-maybe-alive · 1 year

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Today I went to the towns library (had to go to the dentist and the library was close so I decided to go because this is the first time in two years I had a excuse to go out)

And I really think it's funny how booktok people act like there's anything groundbreaking about the female gaze (misused term) spicy (I fucking hate this term) books

Because I am sorry but my towns library has mostly old books and there's a whole shelf of violently 80s erotica and it's hilarious how nothing changed from horny white women in 1985 and horny white women today

(to not say nothing really changed there's less mainstream erotica about native(they do not use the term native) fetishism and orientalist power fantasies about vaguely arab kingdoms who came direct from Disney's Alladin also they have less faes and the men are bigger and more manly(also the hair because it's the 80s and all women love a guy with neck length curls)

But it's all there the criminal porn (they seemed to be more into pirates and cowboys) the royal porn(king's knights and a Lancelot/Guinevere fanfic that I almost wanted to read) the monster fucking but not really (it seems like it's being almost 50 years of women wanting to bang wherewolves ) the rapey themes the bland self inserts all of it

It was always there and you know I respect those books (minus the racist ones because holy shit I'm not joking about the fetishism part) because they were truth about what they are it's mommy porn for lonely middle-aged women

But like booktok books seem so afraid of being just erotica like they have to have something else going on Sarah j Maas didn't wrote a bad fae porn it's a epic fantasy lightlark isn't a bad courtly porn it's a hunger games with royals (it isn't)

And I actually believe that why the authors do this (not sell their clear erotica as erotica but bullshit some feminist mcguffin quest thingy in the background to justify the porn) because they are afraid of being called what they are mommy porn authors

(literally one of the authors looked just like a older sjm )

And this is my problem there's nothing wrong with writing mindless pornography I do have a problem with trying to pass mindless pornography as something else

Anyway I'm still a little numb of the anesthesia so this is just a rambling

But I also want to say the men they put on those old covers are fucking hot maybe it's the slutty half open frilly shirts and long hair maybe it's that look of a guy who smoked a pack of cigarettes before breakfast but god they look so fine

#anti booktok #anti acotar #anti sjm #writing #books #lightlark #libraries

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