#i'm reading monster baru cormorant today as i go about my errands and I kinda don't think it's what i want because i want it to be the kind | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

bitegore · 2 months ago

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baru cormorant seems to me to be a series that suffers miserably for me having read machineries of empire first. unfortunately everything BC is doing strikes me as something MoE did better and more believably and with much a greater and more grounded eye for how systems, complex system interaction, and oppression like. work

#red rambles #also i don't like the writing very much so I'm not having as much fun with it as i did with MoE #but YHL straight up writes with the exact approach and methodology *i* write - the narrative frame is extremely close. the lines are punchy #the description is sparse the info we are delivered is typically in short wacky one-off chunks that tell us not only something about the #world but something about the narrator who is also the main character whose head we're in #the timing. so on and so forth #someone told me that seth dickinson is transfem but i cant find her (?) pronouns anywhere so if anyone knows where to see them i'd #appreciate a link if only to complain that i don't like her (?) writing that much in comparison because it is a lot less.... rewardingly #entertaining i suppose. when compared to the way yoon ha lee structures his. there are much fewer twists #and of course the major huge twist of Baru Cormorant was hidden from the reader which i just think is *bad form* when it comes to intrigue!#when yhl will lay all the moving pieces of the plot before you openly and say 'hey. isn't that a funny side tangent. anyway look to your #left; something is exploding' and then as it keeps unfolding he goes 'and here in small scale is how it is being used! isn't that #interesting to see how these pieces move? now look to your right; something is exploding' and then at the very end it all comes perfectly #together #the way i felt around the middle/end of Raven Strategem when i understood the spy network the first time is something that BC cannot do #you aren't trusted with the pieces and you don't get to play the game of understanding that you weren't *told* literally everything #i'm reading monster baru cormorant today as i go about my errands and I kinda don't think it's what i want because i want it to be the kind #of working awful poisoned bloodstained empire as the hexarchate and i want it to be a complex contradictory overlapping system like the #hexarchate's army and i want the banal cruelty of perfectly decent people condemning strangers to awful awful bloody deaths because they're #'not like us' instead of the petrified horror *everyone* has of the Social Contagion Agents because i just do not BUY the construction of #dickinson's Social Hygiene Offices and their place in the world #but i cant just read the MoE books any more. i'll get bored. i'm already kind of bored of reading them over and over

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