tbqh i didn't need kevin r free to go quite that hard on the 'something in me broke' line but here we are

i love murderbot so much its unreal

i think it is extremely funny the twist villain of The Atlas Six is literally just like. a pokemon villain

anyway i am trying to remind myself that i do not have to finish books that im not into, and i spent the entire book thinking "idk if im into this enough to finish, ill give it one more chapter" and just did that all the way through. still dont know if i liked it

good reads is full of the most annoying people imaginable. Sometimes I will read reviews for books I hated looking for hate sympathy, but even people who also hated the book manage to hate it for the dumbest reasons imaginable and I end up sitting there being forced to defend a book that I hated (in my head, not literally, I would never interact with another user on the internet) because no one is hating it for the right reasons

if you have ever used the term “mary sue” unironically in a review or critique, just know I will automatically have a very very hard time respecting your opinion on anything

I knew for certain that term was devoid of anything meaningful when I read several reviews of Elantris who’s only critique was that Sarene was a mary sue over and over

imagine accusing anyone of being a mary sue when they exist in the same book as fucking King Raoden

sometimes responding to media you like is articulate and sometimes it is microwave noises and static fizz

i dont mean to only complain i swear i also like books its just easier to complain

mistborn's magic is cool but im starting to wonder if i can no longer enjoy stories about political revolutionary groups that are very very clearly written by em....people who are probably not very revolutionary irl. to make a long grouchy ramble short.

ive liked plenty of books by non radical authors, but the fact this one is *about* a needed revolution makes those moments particularly distracting. sometimes it makes the characters feel disingenuous.

anyway i absolutely loathe elend venture as a person and a character and a concept just. so so much. every time he talks i want to strangle him

abolish your house and relinquish your wealth or shut the fuck up forever challenge

i loved the raven cycle (and TDT by extension) and also i am so infuritated with the raven cycle and a lot of it has to do with the conflict-to-resolution ratio being so very unbalanced

like i think i peaked Fixation Mode between Dream Thieves and Blue Lily, like i was so indescribably hooked on the build up of all this emotional conflict, but what gets me hyped on that stuff is the awaiting of some kind of cathartic resolution to all the interpersonal mess and I was just!! not given it!! the love for each other despite everything and the desire to fix things was clearly there but never properly acted on. because ~they didn't need words~

you know I think maybe you do actually need at least an attempt at words sometimes. i think maybe when your relationships are built on eggshells and the same arguments keep happening over and over, a couple (unrelated to the root of the conflict) grand gestures and knowing looks are actually not a resolution. that's just sweeping the problems under a rug until they inevitably come up again another day when you trip over all that baggage building up underneath

the characters fighting so so much only works if a good amount of time is given later to actually resolving them, otherwise it leaves the whole relationship(s) feeling doomed to fail. which is so frustrating because that's clearly not what its supposed to be about. i'm in agonies

on one hand i do understand that graduating and ~coming of age~ creates massive changes, and growing up into a new person with new goals may take you away from places and people you knew, and that drifting apart from people you were close to as a teenager is a very very common experience. I fully understand and sympathize with the desire to explore that in writing, to cope with the melancholy feeling and still find some value in relationships that were meant to fade away, and create comfort for yourself in affirming that that’s an inevitable part of life sometimes etc etc

that being said, i can't help be a little annoyed that moving on and away from childhood friends is so often regarded as an inevitable must, and I would just like to point out that most highschool friend groups Do Not go through terrifying life-or-death magical life-changing adventures that no one other then the people they were on that adventure with would be able to understand and like. idk man i feel like that unique and intense experience would make things different

and i get that like. magical terrifying adventures are a common metaphor for tumultuous teenage years. but that metaphor only goes so far because in world this has been a much more significant experience then simply the people you had classes with in high school

so there is unsurprisingly quite a bit of confusion and dissonance when the epilogues/follow ups of such stories casually go the route of "they kind of don't talk that much, you know how it is when you grow up, you just grow apart, it’s a bit sad but it happens to everyone"

like yeah i know how it is when you grow up with katy from home room who you talked about your first relationship heartbreak with over smores at 3am. but not quite as much the person/people you were spirited away from your normal life with and nearly died in each others arms multiple times while you discovered some buckwild magic no one back home would ever believe or whatever???

idk man is this the right stage for setting up a theme of “and then you drift apart but maybe text once a month” because i actually do find it kind of hard to believe such an experience could ever be reduced to casual. it’s weird. this doesn't actually have to be the only option

the actual reason I consume mediocre media is because I have bad taste. the deeper secret pretentious reason is because I think there’s something very revealing about bad media that you don’t get with good media. when you watch a poorly executed plot point unfold, you see the machinery behind it. you see the gap between what’s actually on screen and the true goal the author is striving for. if it’s particularly awful, you can even measure just how poorly mismatched the author’s skills are with the story they’re trying to tell you. watching a poorly executed narrative play out feels like you’re discovering something, because you see all the wiring and guts underneath that better authors hide from you, in the same way that movies hide boom mics and books make you forget you’re turning the pages. if a story is good and executed well you just see the story. but I want to see the guts and wires!

I COMPLETELY FORGOT THIS WAS COMING AND ITS A DAY EARLY NOBODY TOUCH ME NOBODY SPEAK 2 ME

wait is it actually canon that the characters in the book *literally* have the existence of noah wiped from their memory??? cause i did not get that at all, i thought the author just didn't have time/didn't feel it was necessary to bring him up again.

i thought everyone was just cynically joking that they "forgot" him because of that, i didn't know people meant it literally

was this confirmed out of text by the author or something or is just a popular theory based on the fact he isn't mentioned again after he passes on...???

and if it is canon...w. why??? would that happen?? how was i supposed to gather that, i don't remember any insinuation about things being wiped from peoples minds when they leave the layline??

an unfortunate side effect of the dreamer trilogy committing so hard to being a ~stand alone~ series that “new reader can start here!” on is it makes it end up feeling like. an AU?? I do not know how else to describe how it felt reading it, coming directly off the heels of reading the raven cycle like i did

like, there’s such a big disconnect for Ronan, who cannot think in specifics about any of the wild shit that happened in trc, even though any normal person would be thinking about those things and how they were impacted by them more. I remember at one point he off-handedly talked about the past as like “the wild events of his high school years” which could apply to any slice-of life highschool experience. Cause like, that’s not the plot right now, and if you’re treating it as being for new readers, you can’t off handedly mention demons and a whole bunch of welsh mythology and that time your best friend died and got resurrected, or ghosts (which as a result means he can’t mention Noah at all) because it all would require too much confusing explanation for a backstory that would alienate new readers as none of it is relevant to this plot.

But like. This was such a massively important part of Ronan’s life that I don’t know how you can just cut it off and not talk about these life-changing specifics of his weird life so far and have it feel like a genuine continuation of this character. For a moment I legit wondered if he had gotten amnesia somehow after they resurrected Gansey. This Ronan feels like he came out of an AU where nothing beyond the run of the mill weirdness from his dreams happened to him, Glendower wasn’t a big thing, no demon, no ghost friend, Gansey didn’t die, they just met Blue and hung out with her under normal circumstances and had a relatively normal not-unusually magical high school experience. Thats how it feels from how he talks about it

 I do like a lot about the dreamer trilogy!! its just when you spend four books having your central theme revolve around how inseparable these four kids are, there is no way for it not to be weird to not just put them in separate locations (which is fine! i dont think authors should feel obligated to shove in unnecessary cameos when the characters dont have a role to play in this particular plotline) ....but to also have to make it so you can’t think about their relationship in the way it was defined for us (ESPECIALLY for Ronan, probably the most codependent of them all) at all anymore because it would alienate new readers who wouldn’t understand why such a private person like Ronan has friends at all. its weird to the point of being distracting sometimes idk

i'm new here does anyone know what the context of this is???

today i made the awful mistake of listening to the end of mister impossible at work, because i was too impatient to wait till i got home and can i just say I HAVE NEVER SO ACCUTLEY FELT LIKE I WAS GOING TO THROW UP

I HAVE TO JUST GO ON LIKE THIS??? BEING NORMAL?? FUNCTIONING??? WHAT THE F U C K

do i fully understand why henry cheng as a character exists?? no. did it feel a bit late in the game to try and introduce and forge a new bond with a new character? maybe. Is it true he didn’t really do much aside from offer a small plot convenience here and there that likely could have been accomplished another way with some element/character who had already been established??? probably

but like, how am i not supposed to want to know the mind of the weird little freak who, after going through some normal methods of attempting to bond over school politics and parties, decides the next natural step is to throw out subtlety and speed run his way into the squad using the fool proof logic of “lure him into a dark hole, trauma dump my horrifying past on him and then maybe traumatize him a little too as a fun surprise. this is a good plan god i’m so good at making friends :)” 

here is the entirety of my little live reaction notes i kept as i went

and it fucking works. what the fuck. they are on a cross country road trip now. whats wrogn with him. i cant get the mental image of him getting kidnapped at gun point in his underwear and a madonna t-shirt out of my head

narrative purpose be damned, henry cheng can do whatever the hell he wants.

if i may take a pause to be an asshole, it was astounding the whiplash i got from liking the raven cycle (despite my complaints) so so much and then starting her werewolf book series because well i like wolves i guess and have nothing else to do right now.

 its so bad. its so bad. its so unbearably boring and nothing about the plot is interesting or original, then i saw it was one of the books that came out on the coat tails of twilight and like oh yeah. that explains everything. it was one of those. 

girl nothing that forces me to be reminded of the ~imprinting situation~ is a good start to a book how did this woman write both of these books it is SO FUNNY