#but​ that's a different case. other times I misread then misremembered a paragraph and a character has gone from Latino to Asian and idk

[wearetheunholyfamily]

I need to start writing down character descriptions in books bc I will just imagine a completely different looking person for an entire series otherwise

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Character bingo for Vil and Idia

***Standard disclaimer: These are just my personal opinions of the character(s); regardless of what I may think of them, sharing my thoughts is NOT meant to offend or to shame anyone that thinks differently.***

Truth be told, I don’t care for a majority of the dorm leaders, and Vil is no exception to this. I don’t necessarily think he’s poorly written or anything, though! On the contrary, I really enjoyed his story arc across episodes 5 and 6, and I think that both the lessons Vil imparts onto his students and the lessons he learns for himself are very valuable. Being content with yourself and being unconcerned with constantly comparing yourself to others is extremely relevant, especially in this day and age where social media is so prevalent and a lot of people look to it for validation.

I think that Vil has a lot of good things going for him, most notably his confidence and determination. He knows just how skilled he is, but he also knows that he must work hard to not only maintain that skill, but to excel in it. I really admire that about Vil--he’s always willing to put forth his own effort to improve, rather than rely on magic or other shortcuts. Vil has TONS of super inspiring lines, and I love them all. A particular favorite of mine is, “I’m not interested in magic that only lasts until midnight.” (this is a very rough translation that I recall from the original Japanese, so apologies if I misremembered it) It really showcases his resolve!! I also like how Vil challenges traditional gender roles; he’s not afraid to show an interest in fashion, beauty, and taking care of himself despite being a man, even when society generally looks down on such things. He’s also not just all bark and no bite, Vil is strong in his own right and shows that you can be powerful and pretty at the same time. He’s very confident in being himself, and that’s super admirable!

Actually, I kind of feel bad for Vil 😅 Around the time of episode 5′s release in TWST JP, he was getting some salt directed his way because people completely misread why he Overblotted. I believe part of the misunderstanding could be chalked up to the language barrier between JP and the rest of the world; a lot of the Japanese language’s nuances did not translate over well into English (through no fault of the fan translators, but just due to the nature of the differences in languages). A lot of people were taking Vil’s OB to be the result of pure vanity and jealousy, but that’s NOT the case. When he was screaming for others not to look at him because he was “so ugly”, Vil did NOT mean it in a literal sense of being physically repulsive, he meant that he had an “ugly heart”. Recall that Vil was very intent on winning through his own talents and merits, but that he had resorted to attempting to poisoning his competition to gain an unfair advantage when the performance drew near. He resorted to foul play when he had previously said he wanted to win fair and square, and as Vil is Overblotting, he’s realizing how hypocritical he had been, and thus, how “ugly” he is really is ON THE INSIDE. This hurts him particularly deeply because Vil was constantly told by his peers in childhood that because he played the parts of villains, he must also be a bad person off-set, and Vil trying to poison his rival in present day is basically AFFIRMING all those beliefs that Vil was working so desperately to prove were false. I really wish people would see past the surface and realize that Vil’s problems don’t just amount to him being concerned with his appearance or with his popularity, but with his own struggles to accept, and be happy with, himself. There’s definitely a lot more than meets the eye when it comes to Vil!

... Now, I know you must be very confused. I opened up my remarks on Vil by stating that I don’t like him, but then I proceed to defend his positive traits for 3 consecutive paragraphs 🤣 That’s because even the characters I don’t personally enjoy have good points, and I want to acknowledge those rather than just mindlessly bashing on a character. It’s time to get down to business to defeat the Huns--

The main reason I don’t like Vil is because of how... intense he can be? Like, there’s nothing wrong with him being ambitious, but he comes on too strongly both in appearance and in personality although not gonna lie, I find his Kool-aid tipped hair hella ugly. His eye makeup is very striking (particularly in his dorm uniform), and he exudes this energy of “you cannot hope to touch me” that just scares me off. If I saw him wandering around in real life, I’d cross the sidewalk just to put distance between me and that oppressive aura. Vil’s sternness isn’t doing him any favors in my eyes either. I totally get that he’s in an industry that demands a lot from him, but I think Vil takes it too far when he imposes those high expectations on everyone else around him. You can say that he has good intentions (which I’m sure he does), but I still think that Vil goes too far with his methods and needs to be more mindful of others’ limitations and how to work around them rather than keep pushing them. To me, Vil kind of reads like an unrelenting and uncompromising tiger parent, which is very off-putting.

I also dislike Vil partly because of what he is: a celebrity. I admit that it comes across as a very shallow reason for disliking Vil, but it’s just a very personal thing for me. I have never ever been taken by celebrities (real ones or fictional ones) or celebrity worship culture (especially the parasocial relationship aspects of it); there’s such a large gap between them and their followers that people try to traverse to get closer to their idols or to be like them, and that makes me feel very uncomfortable. I also just don’t like how “in the spotlight” celebrities are; I much prefer characters that operate “in the shadows” and go under the radar.

Speaking of being “in the spotlight”, I felt like Vil was hogging it in episode 5. I get it, it’s technically his chapter so the focus will be on him. However, I feel like he got so much more screen time than previous episodes’ dorm leaders (except maybe Kalim?), and this was very apparent since there were a lot more characters in episode 5 for Vil to compete with for lines and presence. I felt like Ace and Rook especially faded away into the background while Vil dominated, and that wasn’t something that I personally enjoyed. Episode 6 did a better job of balancing out Vil’s screen time with the other boys, but episode 5 was just Not It for me 😔

In conclusion, while I think that Vil goes through a fascinating character arc, has admirable traits, and is a lot more complex than people take him to be, who and what Vil is fundamentally does not appeal to me.

***CONTENT WARNING: My thoughts under the Character Opinion Bingo for Idia mention death and suicide!***

Idia is an... interesting case. He’s one of those characters that I started off not liking very much because I thought that his personality was way too “gimmicky” (especially the way he talks; all that gamer slang and internet lingo got grating for me to read really fast and it took me out of the immersion). WHEN I READ HIS LINES, I CRINGE SO HARD THAT MY SOUL LEAVES MY BODY, REINCARNATES, AND THEN IS REBORN ONLY TO CRINGE SO HARD AGAIN THAT THE CYCLE REPEATS ITSELF. Idia got particularly irritating whenever he assumed his arrogant persona and talked down to his peers. Like, my dude... you should NOT be shit talking the people who are trying to rescue your ass from an undead marriage, they’re RIGHT THERE and they will turn on you so fast. He is, quite literally, THE quintessential elitist gamer, and his only vaguely redeeming quality was that he was sometimes cute when he engaged with Ortho. Needless to say, my initial impression of Idia was Not Good.

What I noticed immediately about Idia (once I looked past all the annoying things he does) is that he legitimately seems to be socially anxious and sometimes straight up fearful of others. I’m not going to go into detail and speculate about potential conditions Idia may or may not have, but I could tell something was seriously eating away at him. His reactions are way too extreme for it just to be a “cute character quirk”; there HAD to have been a good reason for why he’s... like this. (Luckily, we do get to see what that is in episode 6, which I’ll discuss in a bit!) I developed a hesitant interest in Idia because of this observation (yes, in spite of my initial dislike), holding hope that there would be something deeper to his anxious personality. Now, what I didn’t like was when pockets of the fandom interpreted that anxiety as just Idia being “shy”. Granted, we didn’t know at the time what specifically was worrying him so much, but I don’t think it would be wise to conflate very real problems that actively impede his life and his relationships with “shyness”. From the rarity of Idia actually leaving his room to his hesitance to speaking to people face-to-face, it all reads to me as someone who is struggling rather than those just being something slapped in for comedic effect.

Episode 6 completely changed my opinion of Idia. Here, we get to pull back the curtain and see just how much Idia was still grieving the loss of his little brother, on top of dealing with the pressure of carrying on the Shroud family’s VERY important duties. He’s been chained not only by his bloodline, but by his own guilt and involvement in Ortho’s early passing. I’m not someone that cries easily when I’m consuming fictional media, but Idia’s backstory was the ONLY one of the OB boys that actually made me tear up. We see just how deep his hurt goes, and how it emotionally, mentally, and socially cripples him to this day.

As I’ve mentioned in this analysis, Idia appears to have received very little emotional support after experiencing such intense trauma, and a lot of his dialogue and behavior also gives me very deliberate “unaliving himself” intent. It’s a very touching and very real tale about losing a loved one and the consequences death has on the people who cannot properly move on--and that’s a delicate subject that few stories can tackle in a respectful and tactful manner. Episode 6 really made me appreciate Idia’s character more, and it explains most of the hang-ups I had with his personality prior to episode 6. However, I will say that I could not take OB Idia’s dialogue seriously because he was still throwing around all that gamer slang 🤣 Clearly, I don’t vibe with how he talks asdhbasdasodpqbdqoyr8qvbdqso

I think a lot of us in the TWST fandom can relate to Idia in terms of hobbies and interests (I mean, why else would we be playing this game full of pretty anime boys 😅) but I actually relate to Idia in other ways. When Idia’s Groom-for-a-Day SSR came out, a friend was translating a lot of his homescreen lines and they straight up told me, “Idia sounds a lot like you”. When I looked at the lines for myself, I found myself agreeing with them. Idia appears to have a very cynical view of love, gagging at the idea of happily ever afters and begging others to focus on being a student rather than passionately pursuing a romance. That’s very much in line with my own stances on romantic love. No one ever outright tells you “ROMANTIC LOVE IS THE BEST, YOU NEED IT, EVERYTHING ELSE IS TRIVIAL”, but it’s all implied (for example, parents pressuring their children to marry and provide them with grandchildren). It’s an unspoken expectation of society, and I don’t like seeing the media or the people around me constantly pushing romantic love as the “end all, be all” of life. It felt very validating to hear similar thoughts reflected back at me in Idia.

In episode 6, Idia had some lines that really resonated with me: “The story of a hero rescuing his girlfriend from the Underworld is considered beautiful. Why is it that when it’s a younger brother being rescued, it becomes a taboo?” I know that he’s talking about the story of Hercules vs him bringing Ortho back as a humanoid robot, but outside of the context of Idia’s flashback, I interpreted it to mean “platonic/familial love is just as important as romantic love”. That’s likely just me projecting my own views onto a fictional character, but I don’t think there are enough words to describe the immense relief I experienced when I read those lines.

On the surface, Idia comes off as an anxious person with stereotypically nerdy hobbies, but episode 6 provided ample explanation for his character being the way it is, as well as a very compelling narrative about death and learning to cope with it. I’ve also noticed over time just how similar my thoughts on romantic love are with Idia’s, and as a result I find myself projecting my own views onto his.

[the-apocryphal-one]

Novel Review: Uprooted by Naomi Novik

“Our Dragon doesn’t eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley. We hear them sometimes, from travelers passing through. They talk as though we were doing human sacrifice, and he were a real dragon. Of course that’s not true: he may be a wizard and immortal, but he’s still a man, and our fathers would band together and kill him if he wanted to eat one of us every ten years. He protects us against the Wood, and we’re grateful, but not that grateful.”

I’m sorry, but when you open up your book with that paragraph, intentionally invoking and subverting typical fairy tale tropes with a fun tongue-in-cheek narration...you’ve got me hooked. And if you get me hooked like that, you’d better follow through. And this book did. Hot damn it was good. I binged it in a day.

Apparently the author used to write fanfiction; it shows, because she took away all the good lessons you learn from it and left behind the bad parts. Uprooted is a stand-alone medieval fantasy with a refreshingly original tale and lovely use of fairy tale tropes and you should definitely check it out.

Summary: Once a decade, the Dragon comes and Chooses a single girl from the valley he protects as payment. Agnieszka (Nieshka for short) doesn’t worry about being taken; she worries about her beautiful, talented, perfect best friend Kasia, who everyone knows will be Chosen. But for a reason Nieshka can’t fathom, the Dragon picks her instead, and she gets sucked into a world that is dark and horrifying...but not in the ways you’d expect it to be.

Spoiler-free cliffnotes review:

- After a while, YA female protagonists start to get cookie-cutter. Nieshka is not at all cookie-cutter; she’s unique, sweet, and genuinely flawed. I never found myself irritated with her, and I kept getting prouder and prouder of her as she grew into her own.

- Likewise, YA romances tend to be cookie-cutter and feel shallow or lust-based. And don’t get me started on the love triangles. But thankfully, there are no love triangles here, and the romance is background, slow-burn emotional goodness. Bonus points for neither lead being hot; they’re actually kind of plain. Poor Nieshka especially gets called horse-faced and nothing special to look at.

- The other characters are all developed well; Kasia, the wizards at court, the royals, the antagonists, they all have their own distinct personalities and motivations. And boooooooy I love Nieshka’s friendship with Kasia, it is Good and Strong and we need more platonic relationships like that in literature.

- Worldbuilding was enticing, I was genuinely interested in the different legends and histories and songs. Downside is the world itself felt a little confusing in terms of layout; nothing that created a plot hole, but I could have used a map.

- Novik’s prose is beautiful, and especially shines when she’s creating atmosphere, but can be a bit too long at times. It definitely slowed me down while I was reading.

- She’s great at pacing and tension. The stakes start small but important, and then they grow a little larger, and then they just spiral up and up and more and more is at risk and I kept holding my breath waiting to see how the heroes would get through it this time.

...And have the spoiler version below the cut:

The Gushing:

- honestly I love Nieshka because she is just so unlike your typical YA protagonist. A lot of them are cold, brave, loner-types who don’t need help. Nieshka’s a self-admitted coward, genuinely clumsy (she’s always dirty from spilling stuff on herself and tripping), and anxious...but also a big sweetheart, idealistic, and kinda spacey. Like the Dragon took her to teach her magic, and she keeps thinking about how restrictive it is. Then she starts thinking about it in terms of wandering through the woods not knowing what she’s looking for, but she’ll know when she finds it, and she’s picking berries in her head, and suddenly: boom, magic. And the Dragon is furious because that’s too unorganized, what do you mean woods there aren’t any woods here, how are you doing it????

- it is essentially Wizard vs Sorcerer, to put it in DnD terms, only she is the only Sorceress in a world of Wizards and they can’t. get. it. it’s hilarious. (but she also can’t do their stuff, she has all the power without the precise control. They’re all stronger working together, so it’s not “super specialness”, it’s a fair trade)

- Delicious slow-burn, enemies-to-friends-to-lovers romance, yum. It’s written subtly and beautifully; I love the detail when she stops thinking of the Dragon by his title and starts thinking of him by his name. You just see the relationship changing without being told it is. 

- speaking of, I love the Dragon. He’s laid out as nuanced and “not a bad lord” from the start--protective of his vassals, enough to personally step in to help them, but also extremely distant. He thinks of the needs of the many vs the few, he’s grumpy, he never socializes, and he demands a sacrifice of a girl every decade--just to clean his tower, but everyone thinks the worst because he doesn’t do anything to make them think otherwise. So no one likes him except in that local proud “he’s our lord” way. And he keeps getting taken off-guard by Nieshka (again: “HOW ARE YOU CASTING LIKE THAT?!”) in a way that’s kind of adorable.

- Nieshka's profession at the end is becoming a druid-type healer. I LOVE THAT. there’s like some stigma against women doing feminine things in YA literature, and Nieshka just goes for it. She has the power to be a war-witch, and she’s used her magic that way, but she hated seeing battle and death. She goes “nope, I’m gonna peace out and heal the damage caused by this war.”

- I love how Nieshka knows the Dragon is gonna run from their relationship and decides she’s not gonna beg him to stay bc he needs to figure that out for himself. If he doesn’t come back, she’ll be sad, but she’ll move on. Her life doesn’t revolve around him, that’s refreshing, and it makes the moment he does come back (bc of course he does) that much better.

- Nieshka and Kasia’s friendship is the Good Shit, they’re just completely devoted to each other and it’s not at all framed in a romantic way. ACTUALLY their platonic love is the central relationship of the story instead of the romance, and I LOVE THAT, because romance shouldn’t be The Only And The Biggest bond in our life. But they also have their secret envies and hurts, but their friendship just grows stronger for it??? it’s just so good???

- Okay, for some non-Nieshka things (but seriously I love her), how about the side characters? They’re never reduced to “stop mattering when the hero leaves the screen”, they get motivations explained and other facets of their character explored. Alosha the witch-blacksmith, the Dragon’s rival the Falcon, KASIA, Prince Marek. Marek is like the perfect shadow archetype of Nieshka, they both really want to save someone they love from the Wood, they both refuse to quit, and it’s just plain bad luck that his quest was doomed from the start. So even though she hates what he does, she understands why he’s doing it, and admits she might well have done the same in his shoes.

- The Wood is terrifying. Novik uses a lot of pretty descriptive words in her narration that borders on flowery at points, but when it comes to the Wood, it underlines how horrific that place is. At one point, the Wood corrupts Kasia, and she describes sap seeping out of her eyes and mouth and I gagged reading it. Or here, take this paragraph:

“I could see light shining through my own skin, making a blazing lantern of my body, and when I held up my hands, I saw to my horror faint shadows moving there beneath the surface. Forgetting the feverish pain, I caught at my dress and dragged it off over my head. He knelt down on the floor with me. I was shining like a sun, the thin shadows moving through me like fish swimming beneath the ice in winter.”

- yes thank you I really needed the imagery of living evil fish swimming under someone’s skin in my life (translation: beautiful prose but ahhhh!)

- plus the Wood is alive and incredibly smart. It spends the whole book playing speed chess and keeping you double-guessing every apparent victory the heroes have. Combined with the supernatural/horror aspects, it really feels like an eldritch and dreadful force of nature. 

- there are like three books’ worth of plot in this one, but they all get developed and paced well. there’s just so much content, and it’s varied and exciting and gripping--training with the Dragon, rescues in the Wood, courtly intrigue, a siege on a tower, kickass magic battles, and The Big Final Mission which ends in a way I don’t want to spoil, even in the spoiler section.

Critiques:

- I really wish Novik included a map of the land, because I just kept getting confused where everything was. At first I was under the impression the Dragon’s tower was to the west, closest to the Wood; then it and the Wood turned out to be in the east? And the capital is...north, northwest of that? But then why are Nieskha and Kasia crossing mountains to get to the Dragon’s tower in the south, the mountains are in the east too, dividing them from Rosya, right??? where even is everything??????? it’s possible I was a dumbell and just misread/misremembered stuff, but that’s why a map would have been helpful.

- Novik’s writing style is beautiful, it’s fairy tale-esque and fits the setting...but once in a while it’s too much, you know? She really, really wants you immersed in the physical sensations of the world she created, and in cases like the Woods, it works well to convey the sheer monstrosity of the place. In other cases, it feels kinda like a slog; there’s one point where she writes at length about the pattern of a carpet. How interesting.

- Usually in YA fiction, the heroine doesn’t care about her parents or vice versa. Thankfully that’s averted here, but Nieshka mentions she has three brothers...who she doesn’t really think or care about. There’s a nice scene when she first arrives at the tower and starts crying about how she’s lost her parents, but her brothers? Nada. They don’t even get names or show up, with no explanation; at the very least a line about how they’re so much older than her that they’re not close would have satisfied me, but there’s nothing like that. It’s not huge, but it’s jarring.

- while I love the Dragon and Nieshka’s emotional relationship, I do admit the physical aspects felt sudden. Novik basically has it so that magically working together creates a charged intimacy between them, and the first time it happened I loved it because it seemed like it was gonna be ‘the gateway’ to more. Instead, it kind of ends up a crutch for their physical relationship. It’s like “slow burn, slow burn, magic, KISSAGE, slow burn, slow burn, magic, SEX”.