#i wish i was more into soc since its clearly better written but idk

[serpenteve]

LMAO court of porn and roses, i haven't read sjm but this sent me xD

i think the anon has a point tho! CW has done well with YA shows before. tvd, the 100, PLL, idk so so many ya shows that also typically followed the love triangles and various interesting cast of side characters. S and B hasn't even come close. (The 100 is a bit different maybe in the sense that it also got a fair share of adult viewers ig and it was generally less trashed on at least in the earlier seasons.)

I get that sab is a fantasy setting so might have more lore etc, but it's not a very COMPLICATED world to understand. in fact a lot of it is like this group has fire powers, this group has healing powers etc. (And they've got colour coded uniforms too!), the royal family and many citizens have no powers so they're the muggle equivalent, and the muggles are largely more dominating in this world. that's really the biggest chunk of what needs to be understood at a superficial level for the first book/season to make sense.

Additional info like the larger world can come in eventually, but things like tvd also would randomly come up with lore and audiences would just roll with it. Like ohkay now in s2 we have werewolves and also the blood of this x thing can cure vampirism and there is also some bloodline connection and hunter theory and whatnot??

Maybe it's the dumping of all the episodes in one go, but maybe it's also that sab just didn't capture non book folks as much that they'd want to make theories etc as to what's gonna happen. It just didn't create the fandom that it was supposed to. Book fans know the first one was the best one lol, and then it's the crows books that are more fun because of the heist. And non book fans didn't care all that much. And maybe this is my darklina bias but for most ya stuff you need a good romance subplot and sorry but ma*linas meadow scenes were a snoozefest for me. I couldn't care less and didn't want to sit through 10 meadow scenes. (The darklina scenes were good but those are probably done now)

You could generate enough debate or hype around character decisions and actions but the gregverse throws away all nuance in favour of making the darkling evil and where's the fun in that? So maybe have the main character face difficult choices? But it's basically alina has to do x y z to stop the evil darkling but now that she has done x y z she's gonna get punished? Was she given a choice between choosing more power vs taking more difficult paths to defeat the darkling? No she wasn't. So is there a fun love triangle where we can have folks pick a team? Nope, she has multiple love interests but one is an evil guy, the other is her childhood crush who in the show is perfect. The result is a decent ish show but not strong enough to keep pulling viewers back in.

I'm curious to see how the show fares after Season 2 because I think it will give us an idea of how many people are still invested. Are non-book fans going to tune in to another season? Will they go back and binge the first season to refresh? How will show darklina shippers deal with the darklina arc being derailed and demonized? Most of them already seem disappointed with the direction of the source material and have shied away from picking up the books as a result. Will the Mal and Alina dynamic be interesting enough to keep people rooting for them? And more deliciously, will there be a similar audience backlash if Alina loses her powers? 😈

I just don't think the source material for the original trilogy is really strong enough for non-book fans to actually enjoy. Even regular old book fans are salty about a myriad of things, let alone have much hope for how they could be adapted for the screen.

As for the love triangle, I think general audiences are getting annoyed with the overuse of the trope. Even Leigh clearly understood she played with fire by adding that Alina-Darkling-Mal-Nikolai love quadrangle because it left so much of the fandom against her canon ship that she conveniently had all the main characters of the Six of Crows franchise in safe one-to-one ships to avoid potential backlash.