keishajay

[keishajay]

And then, there are the sighthounds. 50/50 shot you find one ambitious enough to go investigate the thing it saw move across the yard... when their eyes are open long enough to spot it that is.

I think it's so funny how we bred JOBS into dogs. I have two shih tzus and they were bred to be lap dogs. All they care about is looking cute and cuddling with people. Meanwhile my grandma has a border collie and that dog needs to feel so useful all the time, he acts like he will pass away if he doesn't have a job to do constantly

[keishajay]

The new Hellraiser is actually pretty good

I actually had a very real fear rear its ugly head after watching Hocus Pocus 2. What if I’m too jaded an adult to appreciate modern entertainment? I just recently stopped thinking McDonald’s tasted good too, the true marking of a grown-up. I haven’t really enjoyed a single new movie I’ve seen all year. Thor 4 and Hocus Pocus 2 were just disappointing. Dr. Strange 2 and Jurassic World: Dominion both actively pissed me off watching them, entirely for bad writing and weird pandering.

And then, I watched Hellraiser (2022) with expectations as low as humanly possible. This had all the hallmarks of being godawful - another in a LONG line of remakes, gender-swapping established characters for no real reason, modern filmmaking and CGI - but I actually really enjoyed my time with this one. I even plan on going back to watch it again, unlike the rest of the movies I listed here. I only saw the first two Hellraisers a few years back and liked them fine, and what I enjoyed about the old ones is present in this one, minus the OG Pinhead. I can definitely understand some folks not liking it. To each their own and all that. But this movie was well-acted, well-written, and pretty well-shot too. If you’ve got a strong stomach for body horror and need something new this Halloween, I highly recommend it.

This was clearly made by people who loved the originals, complete with real prosthetics and additions to the lore that actually make sense. The actress playing Pinhead did a great job, and she looks awesome, as do all the new cenobytes. They even turned Pinhead into more of a job title as “The Priest,” which works beautifully in this setting. The story’s pretty standard about a drug addict trying to save her brother, but standard isn’t bad at all. Riley isn’t exactly likable all the time, but she is relatable, and I really felt bad for all the shit she goes through in this movie. She even has some actual growth and learns a lesson by the end. GASP!!! 

The writers even managed to put in what I felt was a great example of gay characters. There’s no extra focus on their sexuality beyond what would’ve been viewed as completely normal in a heterosexual relationship. They are both people beyond just the label of being gay men. They aren’t a novelty. They’re just normal guys who love each other, and it was honestly refreshing to see them treated with respect... body horror and murder aside.

[keishajay]

Hocus Pocus 2 is... a giant missed opportunity

I really hope this isn’t just me being too old and jaded to enjoy new things anymore, but I HATED this movie. It was just boring and unfunny with no direction and the same pandering message that all movies seem to have nowadays. The writing choices honestly led me to believe the writers had never even seen the original, and the whole time, I couldn’t identify who this movie was made for. At first, I assumed it was just nostalgia baiting for people like me who love the original, and then, they nerfed the threat of the witches. Then, I figured it was for teenagers as their first exposure to Hocus Pocus, but then, they overloaded the whole thing with references from the first movie that nobody who hadn’t seen it already would get. Is it supposed to empower teenage girls? I honestly can’t tell. If you’ve never seen the original, the witches are kind of painted like victims in this one with the protagonists winning by killing them. I don’t even think it’s colorful and exciting enough to be for younger kids. Nothing really happens for a good chunk of its runtime.

There is but one good thing about this movie, and that is the original Sanderson sisters. They’re back and having just as much fun as before. They’re fun to watch when they’re on screen, but their chemistry and goofiness wasn’t enough to save this garbage fire of a script.

#1: Historical accuracy is a suggestion in this movie. Those girls would NOT have been allowed to live alone and act the way they did in the 1600s. Blah, blah, blah, witches and magic exist, but this takes place in the real world with real world history and rules. Winnie would not have been given a choice to marry that kid. His family probably would’ve taken her and her sisters in after their parents died, just waiting until they could be married. That’s two more hands to help in what looks like a farming hamlet. If they wanted Winnie to have that protective, older sister vibe, why not make her hate her forced husband? Why not make the sisters’ new guardians awful to them? You get the same outcome with a more sensible, relatable setup.

#2: The main characters have no personality. I didn’t even know one of the girls’ names until the end credits. All three of them are cardboard cutout teenage girls with the edges removed. And their “conflict” wasn’t even a conflict. I assumed Becca and Cassie were acting weird because one of them confessed to same-sex attraction (that’s exactly what that weirdness would’ve been if they were opposite genders). And then, it just turns out Cassie wanted her old friends to hang out with her new friends. Granted, that’s a very teenager fight to have, but it’s resolved and explained in all of ten seconds, and then, everyone’s just suddenly over it. That is not how teenagers act. These girls would’ve been so much more interesting if they’d just lifted them straight from The Craft.

#3: None of the characters have any agency in this story. In the original, the goals are clear and laid out from the start. The sisters need to brew their potion to kill children and make themselves young again before sunrise. Max, Dani, and Allison need to outsmart the witches to stop them, effectively cleaning up their own mess. Simple, clean, and easy to follow. What was the goal in the sequel? Becca and Izzy are following the same mess-cleaning plot as the first, but it wasn’t their mess in the first place. It was Gilbert’s fault, not theirs. They didn’t wake the witches by being stupid teenagers. They woke them because they were tricked. What was the witches’ goal? They didn’t have one until they saw the Mayor. Then, they wanted to kill him for like a second, and then, for some reason, they decided doing the all-powerful witch spell was what they wanted. Again, for reasons. Were they only awakened for that one night? Who knows. The movie and the witches themselves act like they have all the time in the world.

#4: The rules from the first are broken or ignored. Mary explicitly smells Dani and tells the others exactly how old she is in the first. Yet, they’re fooled somehow by two teenagers lying about their ages in the sequel. How, if Mary can tell a child’s age through smell? Binx states that nothing good can come from the spell book and repeatedly warns Max and Allison not to even open it. Now, in the sequel, the book bound by human skin suddenly can be used for good. It even has a personality now, and it didn’t want Winnie to use that power spell. Why? Because the book cared about her and her sisters? Again, why? It’s just handed over in the prologue and doesn’t seem bothered in the least about losing that master. It had just abandoned Winnie for Becca in the previous scene as well. Are the writers trying to imply that good people can make bad people change? The book has a personality now, after all.

#5: There are no stakes. Yes, this is a family movie. I get it, but you can still have stakes and threatening villains without crippling your script. The sisters have ample opportunity to kill Becca and Co. but choose not to until the plot armor kicks in to prevent them from being able to do so. They even threaten to kill them multiple times and don’t do it when there’s literally no reason why they wouldn’t. Morality certainly didn’t stop them from trying in the first one. As stated in point 3, the witches have no concrete goal for the heroes to stop. There’s no statement made about how to defeat the witches or even a ticking clock for urgency. The girls trap them once, which again led me to question why the writers kept ignoring Mary’s sense of smell, and then, all three witches just end up dead by the end through a combination of hubris and framing murder in a very questionable light. They literally assisted in Winnie’s suicide by lying to her about the spell being able to bring her sisters back. And this is framed as the kind thing to do. Excuse me. What? 

#6: The all-powerful witch spell is an awful plot device. The story warns us that this spell is very dangerous and should never be used. The book doesn’t even like it, and it hasn’t removed the spell itself, for some reason. (It can open itself, fly around, and select pages on its own. Why couldn’t it remove a page?) Why is it so dangerous the book gifted by Satan and bound with human skin doesn’t want it used? Who knows. The only indication of its danger is the very clearly stated cost of the spell. Fine. But if Winnie was now all-powerful, why couldn’t she just magic her sisters back to life somehow? She should be able to do anything she wants. She could just rewind time if she felt like it. There’s no inherent limit to omnipotence, and the story never provides one either. It also begs the question of why they never used it before. Why suck the lives out of children to stay young forever when you could just be all-powerful? Why didn’t the woods witch use it? Or did she and she was warning them as a cautionary tale? Who knows. The writers couldn’t seem to come up with an answer beyond Winnie promised she wouldn’t.

#7: Becca’s magic was essentially pointless to the plot. Everything she did with it could’ve just as easily been achieved with salt, which they used multiple times in the movie. She can’t even stand up to Winnie with it. So, what was its purpose exactly? The movie would’ve worked just as well without it. Hell, it might’ve even been better off that way. Then, we could’ve seen some ingenuity from our “heroes” as they stand up to people much more powerful than them.

90% of this movie just left me asking why over and over again. They had the makings of something that could’ve been fun. Maybe not great but at least fun. Bring the witches back by accident and focus on the omnipotence spell. They learned their lesson from last time and are just gonna skip all the child-murder nonsense. Turn Gilbert into an actual villain like Ben Ravencroft from Scooby-Doo instead of half-assing it and having him forgiven by the end for no reason at all. He didn’t redeem himself. He did nothing except trick people the entire story, and he’s a good guy at the end? Turn Becca, Izzy, and Cassie into Sarah, Bonnie, and Rochelle from the Craft. (Nancy’s a little intense for a family movie.) That setup pokes that nostalgia itch for both of these movies. Hell, go the extra mile and turn Gilbert into Nancy. Even that would’ve been cooler than what we got. How much better would it have been to have the girls go up against their power-hungry friend at the end of the movie? For those that want to argue that it’s fine the way it is, sure, that’s an opinion. But why would you want fine when things could be better? You lose nothing by having a solid story and a real magic system, so why not have them and make your movie better?

So, yeah, Hocus Pocus 2 is just missed opportunity 101 the movie. Not as bad as I was expecting but still not anywhere near what I would call good.

[keishajay]

I have some thoughts about Deep Blue Sea (1999)

Specifically about Susan.  This is super out-of-date, but I was just perusing my movie collection and decided to rewatch this delightful shark movie again.  I loved it when I first saw it, and I love it now.  It’s great, B-movie fun.  For those not in the know, it’s about a research facility getting systematically destroyed by a trio of genetically-modified mako sharks who are smarter than they should be.  It’s riddled with plot holes and impossibilities, but it’s awesome in the way ‘90s movies always seemed to be.

***Spoilers Ahead (for a 23-year-old movie)***

But I also watched the director’s commentary, where he relates the original ending of the movie where Susan survives to kill the final shark.  Evidently, test audiences hated that, hated her really, and they changed the ending to have her sacrifice herself... kind of.  It’s weird, thanks to the limited reshoots and awkward cutting they had to do to make it work.  The ending is fine as is, but I found myself wondering why people disliked her so much.  She’s cold and unfeeling and never really takes responsibility for the entire situation.  It is kind of her fault, if you want to lay the blame at someone’s feet, for messing with genetic engineering without considering the consequences.  And she absolutely would be off the prison if she’d survived.  Maybe I just identified with this super-smart, objective character enough to ignore her hubris.  The sharks were the villains, not the woman they were actively trying to kill.  But I really liked Susan, and I would love to see the original ending someday.  (Doubt it will happen, but it would be cool.)

In her first scene, she tells a condensed version of her backstory.  She was the caretaker for her father for some period of time, and he likely had early onset Alzheimer’s.  Saffron Burrows, who plays Susan, was 27 at the time.  Her father could’ve been an older man, but she also mentions her mother being dead.  It makes more sense for him to be in his fifties when he would’ve theoretically died.  Alzheimer’s is terrifying, and close relatives having had it increases your risk.  If her father had early onset Alzheimer’s, she would’ve been 23 at most when he died (she mentions the project had been going 4 years in a deleted scene).  Fear of losing your mind like that can be a very powerful motivator, and I think his diagnosis and subsequent death hit her hard.

She regularly talks about all the people that would be saved with her research, and she doesn’t appear to care what she had to do to make it work.   A common criticism is that she never takes responsibility for what she’s done, even at the end, but I honestly don’t think she equated the two together.  Her messing with the sharks was necessary to her work, but everything that happened after wasn’t her fault.  It was the sharks’.  Her continual insistence on saving other people, even when her friends are dying, feels very disconnected with the situation for good reason.  She was saving millions of people from degenerative brain disease, including herself.  Even at the end, I doubt she felt responsible for anything that happened.  Killing the last shark became more important to prevent her from reproducing and making more super-smart sharks.  I think that’s why her sacrifice feels so empty.  She doesn’t do it to repent for what she’s done.  She does it to save people, the same thing she thought she’d been doing the entire time.  Those other lives became more important than her own shaky future of suffering her father’s fate.

Watching it now, I think she’s, at the very least, asexual.  She regularly seems oblivious to Carter, the shark wrangler, flirting with her, and she never displays any overt interest in him or anyone else.  It could still link back to her fear of Alzheimer’s and potentially not wanting to condemn anyone else to her fate, but I prefer the asexual interpretation.  I don’t think she’s necessarily aromantic though.  She kind of seems touch-starved at several points throughout the movie, looking for some form of comfort but not quite knowing what to do.  She gets very close to touching people and then pulls back multiple times.  She does it at least three times, almost putting her hand on Carter’s back, almost holding Jan’s hand, almost touching Carter on the ladder.  It’s probably nothing, but it’s interesting once you notice how often she does it, particularly when she’s afraid or upset.

Now, I could be reading too much into this, probably am in fact, but I like humanizing characters, especially ones I have a soft spot for.  And who knows.  Maybe she was just selfish and mean, just manipulating people to get what she wanted.  But that doesn’t mean she was the villain or even the antagonist.  She had the most growth to do out of everyone in the cast.  She deserved the chance to put other people before herself for once, to give up the one thing she cared about for the greater good.  Her being awful doesn’t mean she can’t be redeemed by the end of the story.  I think she could’ve been, if the writing was just a little better.  And now I’m sad for a fictional character who would most likely be in prison for multiple counts of manslaughter.

[keishajay]

Dolls love baby squids

A mirror breaks

[keishajay]

Watching the 1999 Mummy movie in black and white feels like a whole new experience that I definitely haven’t already had a million times.

[keishajay]

hey, tag this with a food people get really upset about you not liking

[keishajay]

A little thought on Black Widow

I just watched this movie (liked it way more than I thought I would), and that first scene when they’re fleeing Ohio really stuck in my head. It strikes me as an interesting writing choice to have Melina incapacitated when they reach Cuba. She was the one who said she didn’t want to leave; she was the one looking conflicted through the whole run from the house; she was the one comforting the girls while she was bleeding out on the pavement. And later on, when she says she was cycled through the Red Room four times, it really got me thinking. 

This woman is a highly trained operative who got compromised enough by this family to say, out loud, that she didn’t want to complete her mission. Why would she have said that to Alexei if she didn’t want to talk him out of it? She knows Dreykov better than he does. She knows weakness equals death for someone like her. She is disposable at the end of the day, and it probably would’ve taken one word from Alexei about that statement to seal her fate. I think, for a moment at least, she thought about running, about taking her girls and escaping the Red Room and Dreykov for good. If she hadn’t been shot in the escape, she might’ve even tried it. But a stray bullet took away her chance to try. It really hammers home just how little choice she’s ever really had her whole life, ever the mouse forced into its cage.

[keishajay]

So, my sister and I just started making pokeball terrariums. They’re surprisingly fun and easy to make. I wanted to do a little more advertising for the etsy shop we started for them. All the figures are hand-sculpted in polymer clay, and each ball comes capped with a button and a stand to display it on. 

Some of these balls are still available, and we just put up a custom order listing last night. Check out our shop at Hoople Handmade, or just message me here, if you’re interested in a one-of-a-kind pokeball of your favorite pokemon.

[keishajay]

I’ve been stuck on Kingdom Hearts junk for a while now, trying to get the platinum for 3 and all that.  And the more I dick around in that game, the more I thought about its plot structure and pacing.  I think we can all agree that that it’s bad.  Sora does nothing but filler content through 80% of the game, and then, all the story happens in the last chunk.  It bothers me that the Disney worlds are largely irrelevant to the plot of the game and that there’s no proper hub world this time around.  They give you zero incentive to ever go back to Twilight Town, and a good lot of story cutscenes happen in the gummi ship over the phone, where once we had to go somewhere to trigger those things.  And when they said there would be more than one playable character, I foolishly assumed there would be actual story involved with the others.  A few boss fights don’t really count as “playable” to me.  I wanted to use them more than I was allowed.

*Spoilers below the break*

So, I came up with some easy solutions that would’ve made the game so much more enjoyable and better paced.  First, let Riku and Mickey save Aqua early on in the game.  He’s already leveled for endgame, so just let him have the Aqua boss fight instead of Sora.  Sora doesn’t have to Mary Sue and deus ex machina his way through everything, Nomura.  Anyway, Aqua hangs out in the hub world (Radiant Garden or Twilight Town, doesn’t really matter which), and after Sora completes each Disney world, she might have a side mission to do.  She couldn’t wake Ven and she’s still on the hunt for Terra, so she’ll get a lead now and then about one or the other of them in the various worlds you visit.  And to give Riku and Mickey something to do, send them along with her.  Or better yet, let her take Axel and Kairi for training missions.  Bottom line, she’s playable for more than one easy boss fight, and her content could be entirely optional to the endgame story.  

Second, Riku and Mickey were already sort of working with Ienzo at the lab.  Do a similar thing with them that was done with Aqua.  Every now and then, give them a side quest where they’re investigating replicas or trying to track down Ansem the Wise.  Let them pal around with Ienzo or Haynor, Pence, and Olette until Ansem SoD shows up at the mansion with Ansem the Wise.  Sprinkle some references to Xion in their side quests so it doesn’t feel so much like she showed up out of nowhere at the end.  Like with Aqua, this could all be optional and wouldn’t effect the ending one way or the other.

Adding this stuff might seem like filler on the surface, but it gives other characters some agency without relying on Sora to do everything for them.  It provides better pacing for this crazy, convoluted story and could potentially fill in some plot holes that inevitably show up in a Kingdom Hearts game.  Sora’s lolly-gagging can continue as it stands now.  He still has to learn the power of waking to rescue Ventus, and when he finally does, that scene will have more weight because he’s (and the player) spent more time bonding with Aqua throughout the game.  The ending wouldn’t even have to change to accommodate Riku and Aqua’s extra screen time.  We’d just have more context about what’s happening in that ending.  I think this method would’ve been easier on players new to the franchise too.  I can only imagine how confused new people were about some of the info dumps that came during the last part of the game.  Putting Riku and Aqua in separate Kingdom Hearts exclusive worlds would also help anchor new fans and old.  Yeah, they’d have to address the lack of Final Fantasy characters in Radiant Garden, but they side-stepped that issue pretty easily in the game as it is now.  And, the more I consider it, the more I like the idea of Aqua taking over Kairi and Axel’s field training like this.  I don’t care for either one of them as characters, never have, but I might like them more and care more when they try and fail if I’d been able to spend more time with them in actual gameplay.

That ended up way longer than intended, but I’m glad I wrote it all down like this.  All in all, I think we could’ve done with fewer mini-games and more actual content like this to make a more cohesive story.  That, and the more of these games I play, the less I like Sora as a character.  Riku and Aqua are so much more interesting and layered than he has ever been, and I want to see them succeed now and then.  Plus, how cool would it be to see other characters in Monster, Toy, and Pirate forms?

[keishajay]

So, I finished Kingdom Hearts 3 yesterday, and I have a serious question for the developers.  They give you so many options throughout this whole game for combat and party customization (you can order Donald to only heal you, if you want to), but they choose to restrict you something fierce in the last fights of the game.  Why?  I get that thematically, this is what should happen with Sora and gang, but isn’t the whole point of Sora’s character that he can make friends with literally everyone he meets?  Yeah, he’s been through the most with Donald and Goofy throughout the series, but KH2 didn’t care and gave you Riku for the final Xemnas fight.  Why can’t I choose who to take with me to the final fight with Xehanort?  Donald and Goofy are basically Z-team tier at this point in the game.  Let me take my favorite characters instead of forcing me to stick with these same two boring sidekicks.  Basically everyone is back for the final boss rush, and they barely get to do shit anyway.  Why, SquareEnix?  If you’re not going to let me have fun with all these characters you refused to let die, then why not just let them stay dead?

Side note, this series would probably be a thousand times more coherent and easier to follow if someone would tell Nomura to thin out his character roster.  There’s absolutely no reason to have so many of the exact same character.  Kill them and let them stay dead.  Not everybody gets a happy ending.

Also, fuck Axel and his fourth-wall-breaking ass.  Unpopular opinion, but I hate him, and I have hated him since KH2.  Stop letting the popularity contest determine your storylines.

[keishajay]

So, I’ve been known to do some writing from time to time, and I like listening to orchestral music while I write.  I also love From Software games (Bloodborne is my favorite), and the music in those games is fantastic.  Listening to it, I discovered (or re-discovered, who knows) my love for string instrumentation and melancholy rhythms.  FromSoft’s boss themes, especially in Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3, have a ton of both, and I absolutely love it.

All of this to say my sister walked in on me last week listening to one of my favorite tracks from Bloodborne, Lady Maria’s, and she stopped talking mid-sentence to ask me what the hell I was listening to.  When I told her, she just laughed and said it sounded like depressing church music.  And then she had to ask why it didn’t make me want to slit my wrists (we have an odd relationship).  So now, I play that shit as loud as I can whenever I’m on my laptop, and we both laugh.

[keishajay]

I meant for this whole review to go in one post, but damn, I had a lot of complaints, way more than I thought once I started writing them down.  Some are nitpicky; most are related to characters and writing choices.  For the fans of this series, I did enjoy this series for what it is, but I’ll never defend it as great literature.  It’s Sharknado levels of fun, and I live for stupid shit like that.  For the haters, enjoy.  Oh, and spoilers ahead.

Now, on to the cons, and hoo boy, are there a lot of them.  First, I was shocked to see this was labeled book 7 and not 6.  I had no interest in reading Tower of Dawn, as it was marketed as a side story novella.  Kingdom of Ash expects you to have read it and spends little to no time explaining who all these new characters are.  It’s not confusing, just annoying for those of us not invested in Chaol’s story enough to read the novella.  If you like Chaol, more power to you.  I just didn’t care enough about what was a sure outcome to waste my time reading a novella about him and only him.  Nesryn goes with him as well, but she was barely a character in the fifth (fourth? I don’t know anymore) book, more a cool background piece than a real person.  That’s not nearly enough for me to pick up an entire book.

Maas brings in four new “personalities” from Tower of Dawn that really just take up space and fawn over Aelin, just like everyone else.  Hasar is just a crabbier version of Aelin; Sartaq loves Nesryn and that’s it; Yrene is Chaol’s wife who’s a healer and that’s it; and Borte likes arguing with her fiance.  They might be more interesting in ToD, but here, they just read like cardboard cutouts.  They’re unnecessary and boring.

And speaking of unnecessary, there are WAY too many POV characters in these books.  What started with a handful of mostly essential characters has now become a library’s worth of them.  Even Lysandra’s ward, Evangeline, gets a couple POV bits to herself. Why?  They added nothing to the story aside from remind us that she was there and still alive.  More POVs should only ever be added to further the story or themes.  I kid you not, Elide and Lorchan are together for 90% of the last two books, and for some reason, they both have POV chapters.  Elide was already established and should’ve been the only one necessary, but you know, Lorchan’s hot so we should hear him angst too.  And that is all he does, by the way, angsts over Elide.  Hell, by the end, I was a little surprised Abraxos didn’t have his own POV chapter.

Maas also adds nonsensical things in to ramp up the drama.  The worst offender is the character Darrow.  He and TWO other old men boss Aedion around throughout this entire book, because... reasons, I guess.  They don’t recognize Aelin as queen, fine.  But they’re three old dudes against Aedion, who literally commands their entire army and the fire-bringer all the people in their whole country rally to.  If anyone can give me a logical reason why Aedion didn’t just ignore every order they attempted to give him, I’m all ears.  Instead, he tiptoes around them constantly and outright steals his own army from under their noses to do what he wants anyway.  Why?  They all know damn well Aelin is the rightful queen and they wouldn’t even have an army without her and Aedion.  She could crush them under her thumb, and they all know that too.  Hell, Aedion’s treason would even be forgiven in moments when she took her throne back from... no one.  Darrow isn’t even trying to be king of Terrasen.  He just doesn’t like the idea of this bratty teenager being his queen, and who can blame him?  Yeah, I know she wants her country to be different, but she can’t change anything from the sidelines when the old rules are the only things keeping those men in power over her.  There is no good reason for Aedion to obey any of their orders.  They can do nothing to stop him, and they all know it.  They are literally only there so Aedion has someone besides Lysandra to be pissed off at.

Speaking of Aedion being pissed off at Lysandra.  For the haters out there, yes, he has every right to be mad at her.  She may not have been the one to come up with this insanity, sure, but she knew Aelin suspected it might be necessary.  Telling the one person who foams at the mouth anytime someone gets within spitting distance of his cousin that maybe something terrible could happen to her, making this plan necessary, should be at the top of your to-do list.  She knew damn well what she was doing and how he would react the entire time Aelin was teaching her to play pretend.  He should be angry with her for not telling him what was going through Aelin’s head, not for following the orders of their queen.  Yes, him throwing he naked out in the snow was a major dick move, and I’m glad that she didn’t let him forget it.  What I don’t condone is his reaction to seeing Aelin again.  He just hugs her like nothing ever happened.  He’s an asshole to Lysandra for months, but he just forgives Aelin for everything as soon as he sees her.  I’m sorry but no.  I would’ve forgiven the entire conflict between him and Lysandra being tedious if he had just punched her in the face before he hugged her.  God knows she deserves it for all the shit she’s pulled over the course of six books.

So, I hate Aelin Galathynius.  Like straight up hate her.  She went from being a brat in the first few books to being the worst case of Mary Sueitis I have ever seen outside of self-insert fanfiction.  First, she’s a secret princess, a “twist” anyone with a brain could see coming.  She’s also somehow the best at everything she does, even though she shows no evidence of any of it.  How does the country’s best assassin get caught?  On top of that, how does anyone even know who the country’s best assassin is?  Shouldn’t hiding your identity be rule number one in the assassin handbook?  This shit-licker could’ve been any happy-ass teenager with a knife pretending to be this famous assassin when they caught her.  How would they know?  Answer, they shouldn’t have any idea (that would’ve also made for a much more interesting story).  So, not only is she the best at everything she tries for reasons, she’s also the only one in the whole damn world with fire magic, the only thing that can hurt the demons for a majority of the series.  And she doesn’t just have regular old everyday fire magic.  No, she has fire to rival fifteen suns going supernova at the same time.  She’s also the prettiest and smartest and nicest and snarkiest and funniest girl in the world.  She outsmarts someone thousands of years old who could’ve snapped her neck or dropped her in to a literal Hell with a flick of her wrist.  But no, Princess Mary Sue wants her new boytoy free, so the villainess has to get tricked into letting him go.  Now, let’s not forget she’s also the Chosen One who deus ex machinas her way out of sacrificing herself because no one can do anything without her there to save the day.  Seriously, no one ever wins anything unless she’s there.  It happens more than once in this book.  Her boytoy and company show up to rescue her from aforementioned villainess just as she’s breaking herself out, and they can’t get her chains off until she somehow shows them how to unlock them.  She then proceeds to get them out of the country through her magic of summoning deus ex machinas whenever she needs one, and they arrive just in time to rescue Chaol and Nesryn from certain doom.  She stops a cascading river with fire because science, and when all hope is lost back home, she shows up on a magical white deer with the Rohir- oops, I mean her army.  She also somehow holds off two of the most powerful creatures in the world with her assassin skills and barely any magic, because... villains have to lose, I guess.  You know what Aelin loses by the end of the book?  Her humanity, which she suddenly cares about ten pages before it’s gone.  Aedion lost his father and at least half an army at his command.  Manon lost the only people she really cared about in the whole world, and she could do nothing but watch them sacrifice themselves.  And Aelin lost her humanity when she’s already been living as a fae since book 3.  Oh God, how will she ever survive such a loss?  She is actually the worst.

These books, this one in particular, are clearly written with a younger audience in mind (much younger than me at least, and I’m 30), and I strongly believe the target audience is girls.  There is so much description of how beautiful the men in this series are that it almost borders on obscene.  I do appreciate having a clear picture of what characters look like, but I do not need to know about all the rippling muscles and long fingers that all the men in this series seem to have.  Even bookworm Dorian is described as being oh-so-sexy even though he doesn’t appear to have ever handled a weapon in his life.  There is a lot of pandering to the female audience, especially with the sex scenes.  In a YA novel, these are pretty inappropriate.  She started with sex scenes being a fade-to-black kind of event, and now, almost every single one is described in disgusting detail.  I like romance as much as the next girl, but if I wanted soft-core porn, I’d read romance novels.  To top that shift off, she still insists on using “rutting” as a substitute for “fucking,” and I think that’s what bothers me the most about the whole change here.  They are completely interchangeable in every context, to the point where I just read “rutting” as “fucking” every single time.  This isn’t Brandon Sanderson’s silly but story-appropriate swearing.  It’s just lazy writing.  And detailed descriptions of sex are okay, but swearing?  Someone call Takamata.  We need to start the Inquisition. (History of the World reference for anyone confused.)

This story ends exactly as you should expect it to, with a happily ever after.  None of the main characters die, and those with names go out as sacrifices, which is honestly consistent with the rest of the deaths in this series.  The deaths we do get are mostly to make the main characters feel bad for no real reason.  Aedion even flat-out states that Gavriel could’ve stayed inside the walls, and there is no argument, author or characters, as to why he had to go outside.  At least the Thirteen’s sacrifice makes more sense.  It was still pretty dumb to have them go out at all, but I don’t know if I could come up with a better way to destroy those witch towers.  What they did was noble and understandable in context, though there were probably any number of ways it could’ve been avoided.  I’ve seen Desolation of Smaug.  Just drop a dragon/whale/elephant-Lysandra on top of the tower before they even get it fixed up to move again.

One last complaint that I have regarding the ending is largely the villains.  There are three of them, and all three kind of go out like bitches.  Erawan, the dickhead pulling the strings since book 1, gets tricked and healed to death.  There are a lot of millennia-old creatures getting tricked into doing stupid things in these books.  Manon’s grandmother (who never gets a name by the way) gets blown up by Asterin.  Honestly, hers was probably the most satisfying end of the three because Asterin got the vengeance she deserved for her hunter and child.  Maeve somehow became the biggest threat halfway through the series, and she meets her end in the most extravagant fashion, impaled by Fenrys and then decapitated by Aelin and burned to ash.  What irritates me most about Maeve is she could’ve been great.  If anyone has read the manga, Magi, you know what I’m talking about.  Maeve is discount Gyokuen with half the threat and less than a quarter the sense.  Where Gyokuen is highly capable, both as a fighter and a politician, Maeve is kind of a pushover who gets tricked by our “heroes” numerous times.  She’s shown preparing for all sorts of unlikely eventualities, but she somehow can’t handle the plucky teenagers.  Give me a break.  From the moment you meet her, you know Gyokuen is going to be one of those bad guys that will require some clever thinking to defeat.  I felt like Maeve could just be snuck up on and murdered by anyone who knew her schedule.  Her last ditch effort against Aelin was clever, but other than that, she barely puts up a fight despite all the fear and hype she gets from almost every character in the book.

Now, like I said above, I did enjoy these books.  I don’t feel like my time was wasted or that I was manipulated by them at all.  I had fun with them the same way that I have fun with SyFy channel original movies.  The characters and story had so much more potential than what this amounted to, but I don’t hate this series at all.  Yes, the subplot with the gods was idiotic and unnecessary, but the valg were interesting as an enemy type.  Yes, the romance shoved down my throat could be awful at times, but some of the relationships were genuinely sweet.  Chaol and Dorian are the best bros, and I love Lysandra taking it upon herself to protect this little girl when she could’ve looked the other way.  Manon’s relationship with Asterin was great as well.  Do I wish it was better?  Absolutely.  Should it be boycotted by everyone?  Of course not.  Despite their problems, these books are fun, fluffy, popcorn movie fun, and sometimes, that’s just fine.

[keishajay]

Honest Review: Kingdom of Ash Part 1 (Throne of Glass Book 7)

First off, I see a lot of people either outright bashing this series or believing it has no flaws.  There don’t seem to be that many readers in the middle about it all.  I’m one of those readers, and I figure anyone debating picking this series up would benefit from a more middling approach to the series as a whole, now that it’s done.  The books aren’t terrible, but neither are they the great accomplishments their rabid fanbase would have you believe.  If you go in knowing this story was written for young adults by a young adult, a lot of what’s complained about by the haters will get a pass.  

I’ll start with the pros.  Maas is not a bad writer at all.  She’s not on the descriptive levels of, say, Stephen King or Anne Rice, who could make a radiator seem interesting, but she has some skill with painting a picture of her world.  I don’t doubt this is something that will continue to get better as she continues to write.  I will say that, while she is pretty good at visuals, I had no idea where we were half the time.  I’ve looked at the map, and I still have no clue where anything is in this world.

She also has an excellent sense of pacing.  I don’t remember any point throughout this book or the series as a whole where I felt like the story was dragging.  There’s always something happening, and she knows when to cut scenes off to leave her readers wondering what will happen next.  It’s really one of the few reasons I stuck with this series to the end.  I genuinely wanted to know how it all would end, even if the ending was pretty cliche and predictable.  I think this is probably the only comparison she should ever receive to GRRM.  She has an engaging writing style that would probably translated well to television as ASOIAF has.  They both have a similar skill at drawing readers in to wondering what happened after the scene break.  

Some of her characters are entertaining as well, though I think she found herself at a loss for how to handle some of them as the story went on.  For example, Dorian’s story didn’t really go anywhere after he was rescued at the end of book 3 (I think; I can’t really remember what happened when).  In contrast, I feel Manon was easily the best developed character over the course of the series.  She has a very simple but effective arc that lasted a feasible amount of time, and I often found myself skimming other characters’ POV chapters to get back to her story.  

For fans of young adult fantasy, this could easily be something you enjoy as we all enjoy a good popcorn movie.  You know the plot is cheesy as hell, the characters are often dumb for no reason, and the romance makes you want to roll your eyes more often than not, but it’s still fun to experience.  If you can stomach a lot of bad choices (both character and author) and fanservice, I’d say give the series a try.�� It’s not nearly as bad as the haters would have you believe.  However, I will say that if you don’t like the first book, it really doesn’t get any better as you go.  More things just get added to make everything seem bigger and cooler than it needs to be.

[keishajay]

Headcanon time!

I’ve seen Thor: Ragnarok twice now, and I just need to get this out of my head.  I always seem to gravitate towards either the unique female characters or the overpowered characters in fiction, and Hela was no different.  I loved her from the first time I saw her in the trailers, and the movie did not disappoint on that front.  She is a delight to watch, maybe not the deepest villain on the surface, but still immensely entertaining.

However, I think Hela’s story is deeper than what the movie presented to us, and because I’m a sucker for damaged characters, this is what I think Hela’s backstory could really be.

First off, I don’t believe for a moment that she’s Frigga’s daughter.  Frigga freaked out on Odin too many times over his treatment of Thor and Loki in the first two films for her to just let him banish her daughter, the only child she had at the time.  Canonically, in mythology at least, Hela is the daughter of Angrboda, a giantess.  I think Angrboda is still her mother in the MCU, making her the bastard child Odin didn’t really want in the first place.  I’ve got a few thoughts on how she came to Asgard, and none of them are very pleasant.  Mostly, I figure she accidentally killed her mother with her “touch of death” power, and Odin’s father, Bor, found out about her and threw a fit.  I think he brought Hela to Odin as a little girl and told him to deal with her.  She’s a disgrace to the family name, yadda, yadda, yadda.  Odin can’t bring himself to kill her because of reasons, and she’s raised in the palace, but out of sight, out of mind.

This poor kid just killed her own mother, can’t control her power, and is being completely ignored by the only family she has left.  Based on what she said about her relationship with Odin in the movie, I think she definitely loved him, and she probably idolized him when she was younger.  I think she probably killed someone defending him one day, or something along those lines, and Odin thought, “hey, this kid has potential,” so he starts training her.  And she gladly does everything he asks, because she’s still that hurt little girl who just wants her father’s affection.

Odin molds her into this weapon, and when he appoints her his executioner, she agrees without hesitation.  She’s finally got the recognition that she’s always wanted and a place in the world by her father’s side.  And the two of them gleefully conquer the nine realms together.  She turns from being her grandfather’s disgrace to the hero of Asgard.  Who would turn away from that?

I forget where I saw it, but I really liked the post on here about Frigga being the turning point for Odin.  She’s all about love and compassion, and he would want to change his ways for her.  I imagine Hela saw it, thought it was cute, and ignored it.  Her father would never change for real, after all.  And when he finally does decide to turn over this new leaf and become a benevolent ruler for his new love, Hela is rightfully confused.  I like to think this daddy’s girl tried to become who he wanted her to be, but it just didn’t work out.  She’s been groomed to be a warrior, a conqueror her entire life, and she was good at it.  

Maybe she saw the other realms laughing at them behind their backs.  Maybe she just hated the person Odin was trying to turn her into now.  But for one reason or another, she finally confronts him about all of it.  I like to think the petulent child in her demanded that he choose between her and Frigga, thinking he’d never turn his back on his only child.  Odin chose Frigga and peace, and Hela rebelled in a rather spectacular fashion.  He sent the Valkyries after her to try and take her down, and she slaughtered them.  (I like to think they were her friends at one point.  Goddess of Death, guides to Valhalla, makes sense they’d be friendly.)  

Odin’s clearly not afraid to lie to his own children, or anyone else for that matter, so I believe he tricked Hela somehow to get her to come in quietly.  He probably meant to kill her but couldn’t bring himself to do it, yet again, and banished her to Hel instead.  Then, he tells Frigga Hela’s gone.  He’s suitably broken up about it, so she doesn’t ask for details.  They have Thor, adopt Loki, and Hela is forgotten.

Betrayed by the one person who meant everything to her once, she’d understandably decide she no longer needs anyone.  She tells herself she hates him and that he was a fool.  Every time she sees the results of her banishment or comments on Odin’s shameful history after she’s freed, she sees him being ashamed of her, putting her in the position of being an unwanted disgrace once again.  And she’s going to prove herself just like she did as a child.   She’ll restore Asgard to its former glory and remind the universe whose name was once feared above all others.

I love meta-analysis of characters like this (psychologist in training and all that), and I think Hela’s MCU backstory could be truly fascinating.  This is just my admittedly lengthy headcanon of her origin story, but I think it fits fairly well with the character we got in the movie.

[keishajay]

you have been visited by the seven magic dragon balls your biggest wish will be granted but only if you reblog

[keishajay]

I actually remember liking Fahrenheit 451, but my favorite, by far, was Frankenstein.  We had the choice between that and Dracula, and I’m so glad we read Frankenstein.  Dracula would’ve been rough in a school setting.  I HATED The Count of Monte Cristo.  Me and one other girl in the whole school of 400 were the only two who couldn’t stand that book.

we were all forced to read “classics” in school so reblog and put the one you actually ended up liking a lot and the one you can’t fucking stand in the tags

my fave is Lord of the Flies and I ironically enough want to burn every copy of Fahrenheit 451. trash