#if I'd gotten more than fifty pages into the Host I'd agree

[lilacnothlit]

Most dedicated Larpers ever written.

Stephenie Meyer's sci-fi novel The Host is like. it's almost so much. the alien bodysnatchers at the center of the plot are like Animorph's yeerks if they got really into cottagecore. no, they don't want intergalactic war and domination! they want intergalactic peace and domination! they make every planet they visit a peaceful socialist utopia and like, okay, yes, they have to violently take over the bodies of a planet's native inhabitants to do it. yes, they have to suppress the unwilling minds of their host bodies. yes they are for all intents and purposes committing a genocide of their chosen planets' initial inhabitants and then puppeting their husks around playing at homogeneous, sanitized versions of the cultures they destroyed. the alien main character mentions that even episodes of the Brady Bunch were scrubbed because they were deemed too violent. and they call themselves souls, which is so loaded on so many levels. impossible not to read into the spiritual connotations, especially when written by an author coming from the mormon church which so highly values mission trips. just by sympathizing with humans who don't want to be possessed, by helping them hide out and stay free, our protagonist becomes a pariah, an outlaw from her own society. peace is valued above all else but not peace for the colonized, who are meat to be processed. it's better this way. they had so much potential but squandered it with foolish violence so now we have the right to overtake them and make them live correctly. isn't it beautiful now? isn't everything perfect? there's like almost so much happening in this story except Stephenie's a fucking mormon so she never draws any meaningful connections to anything and the happy ending is that the alien brain parasite protag is gifted the body of a beautiful coma patient that she can "ethically" puppet around, easy peasy problem solved. also there's a fucking love triangle.