#maybe i'll make a whole one for mtfl

[cadybear420]

Cadybear's Reviews- My Two First Loves

Welcome to the twenty-seventh official Cadybear's Reviews! Today I'll be talking about My Two First Loves, which I have ranked on the "Rotting Flesh Tier" at 2 stars out of a possible 10. My last and only playthrough of this was back in April-June 2021.

Oh boy! Oh boy oh boy oh boy! I could write a whole essay on everything wrong with this…  

So I will. 

To put it briefly: this story feels like it was adapted from a Wattpad story that was written by a 12-year-old whose only ever exposure to high school media and depictions of teenage sexuality was Glee, and then had serious queer and mature themes slapped onto it in order to make it seem better. Y’know, the equivalent of trying to polish a turd.

Or, heck, it’s probably PB’s attempt at ripping off “The Kissing Booth”, seeing as both have a MC in a love triangle between her childhood best friend and a bad boy named Noah, after all. Which, funnily enough, was also originally adapted from some tween’s Wattpad story. That’s about the equivalent to a dog eating some rotten food, shitting it out, then another dog finds it, eats it, and then shits it right out again. And THEN that second dog’s owner comes along to try to polish that double-toured turd. 

Number 1: The LGBTQ+ tag is clearly an attempt to appease the queer players that they probably think are being whiny. 

Ava’s arc about realizing she’s a lesbian who had been experiencing compulsory heterosexuality is pretty solid in a vacuum. But her being an LI was so blatantly only a last-minute decision PB made during the writing process, and it shows because Ava’s CG just uses her game sprite while Mason’s and Noah’s are fresh art. 

MC starts to fall for Ava sometime around at least 30 chapters in, but we don’t get to officially pursue her as a romance option until about 70 chapters in. I get delaying her as a love interest a bit because of the whole thing with MC realizing she’s bi, but even then, there’s just so few opportunities for building any kind of relationship with her that it hardly feels authentic. 

Speaking of, MC’s supposed bi awakening is completely rushed and treated with about as much value as a Family Guy cutaway gag, even outside of Ava being sidelined. As someone who realized I wasn’t straight three years ago and is still questioning if I’m bi or straight, I understand that people take different amounts of time to figure out their sexuality. But this MC does not spend any period of time figuring out her bisexuality. She basically just goes “Welp, guess I’m bi now”, and then it’s back to being indecisive as per usual except now there’s a female love interest in the mix too.

To add insult to injury, "discussions of sexuality" is placed in a "player discretion" warning, alongside "racial tensions" and "occasionally violence" to boot. How the fuck is discussion of sexuality even remotely on the same level as either of those? If they meant discussions or depictions of homophobia then maybe I could understand… but I don’t even recall seeing any depictions of homophobia in the book, so including this in the freaking warning tags is pointless at best and kind of insulting at worst. 

Not to mention, plenty of other Choices books like MOTY, ILS, D&D, etc. have had discussions about sexuality/LGBTQ+ stuff before, and didn't have to warn us about it. Not even MAH, a later book which had discussions about freaking conversion therapy for Christ’s sake. Sure, some of those books did have content warnings, but they were generally vague and/or mainly warned for violence, and didn’t warn specifically for depictions of queerphobia or discussions of sexuality. Yet for some reason, MTFL feels the need to include a player discretion warning for sexuality discussions, even though it contains far less harsher queer themes. 

Number 2: The portrayal of teen sexuality in this does not feel earnest. 

Let me just say, I found it very jarring how this one was much more sexually charged compared to PB’s other high school books. PB is usually way more “safe” and PG-13 at most when writing high school characters. Even in books like ROD and WEH, where the characters are 18+ and do have smutty scenes, it’s clear that those books are a lot more restricted compared to the adult cast books.  

I mean, with WEH, the safeness makes sense– it was meant to be a serious and tender story from the start, and it does actually follow through on those themes. But ROD feels like it could have easily been as horny with its writing as MTFL was, what with being about a studious “good girl” who goes rebellious. In fact, the story’s loading screen was pretty infamous at first for looking “steamier” than other covers and loading screens.

In actuality though, ROD had only, what, one smut scene? And despite a lot of MC’s outfits being revealing or arguably sensual, there are practically no moments where MC fawned over how “sexy” a revealing diamond outfit looked. Like, I’m pretty sure there were just little to no sexually charged scenes in general. 

My point is, whatever compelled PB to make MTFL *this* sexualized is beyond me. My guess is the fact that PB called this one a story about “navigating sexuality” and thus wanted to focus more on the aspects of sexuality, but if that’s the case… hoo boy, did they do a terrible job at it. 

I don’t really care about the hypersexualized writing of the teenage characters on its own, or how the characters were initially not confirmed 18+ when the earlier smut scenes were written. What I find far more important is the fact that this sort of cliche and formulaic hypersexualized writing is in a book that markets itself as being about “a young woman navigating love and sexuality for the first time”.

Teens do indeed have sex and can be all over the place with their hormones and sexuality. A lot of us have been there in some way, myself included. And there are ways to talk about that type of stuff in a manner that is silly and/or exaggerated, but still earnest and respectful. But the particular way that MTFL handles super-horny teen sexuality, specifically while claiming to be a coming-of-age story, is neither earnest nor respectful. 

The way this story handles these sorts of topics is the writing equivalent to doing a surgery with Fisher-Price toy surgery tools. It’s genuinely difficult to take MC “navigating her sexuality for the first time” seriously when has to constantly blubber about how Mason and Noah are so muscular or how a diamond outfit has “naughty little thigh highs” or how she wants to do a “down and dirty” cheer routine with Ava for Mason and Noah. 

That last one especially feels like the kind of stuff we’d see more in a campy chick flick that doesn’t take itself seriously. Honestly, if this was a more campy high school book with the tone of DLS or the 2023 movie “Bottoms”, it probably wouldn’t be as glaring. But in a book that markets itself as a coming-of-age story, the tone feels completely off and the whole book honestly felt like it couldn't decide what it wanted to be. 

(Also, while we’re on this topic of MC’s premium outfits, I really fucking despise how MC gets so upset about wearing "mom clothes" if you choose to wear the free modest clothing instead of the revealing diamond outfit in Chapter 2. Ugh. Yes, the dad was being shitty about not letting MC dress how she likes, but all it does is it just makes you feel like shit for not wanting to dress in more revealing clothes. Stop making me feel bad for wanting to wear simple non-revealing clothing. Same goes for you, Chris Romantic Getaway story with your “the regular jerseys aren’t cute enough for girls to wear, we have to cut one up into a cleavage crop top in order to make it good for us girls to wear” bullshit.) 

And it just slaps you in the face with these sexual moments too, placing them in frequently whenever it feels like it, and the amount of it that actually contributed to any coming-of-age navigating-sexuality are few and far between. Honestly, it felt like it was trying way too hard to look "mature" with how it handled sexuality (as well as some of the other stuff like them drinking alcohol). Like it maybe was trying to portray teens realistically, but it only does so at a very shallow level. 

It's literally just "Look at the teens that talk about sex and like doing sexy things and having sex and doing grown-up stuff like drinking alcohol, see how MATUUURRREEE they are!" and they don't do anything more with it. It's just tacked on so they can pretend their book is a realistic story about maturing/being mature, when it fails at actually doing so.

I mean, I guess you could argue that the MC is meant to be seen as more messy and hormonal. And in that case, I could give it a pass. But, again, MC’s supposed arc of “navigating sexuality” never goes anywhere from that until the very last few chapters where you choose which LI she ends up with. It’s pretty much the same crap all throughout the book. MC doesn’t navigate sexuality, she just runs around aimlessly in it like a chicken with its head cut off.

Number 3: All the serious themes they try to have in the story are overshadowed by MC’s stupid indecisiveness plot. 

I’ve already said MTFL tries way too hard to make its story seem “mature” with the trashy way it sexualizes its characters. I’ve said it feels like it doesn’t know what it wants to be. Honestly though, this just sums up MTFL’s writing in general. 

MTFL has quite a handful of subplots, and I will admit, all of them are pretty compelling. You have Ava figuring out she’s lesbian, Mack dealing with gang drama, and Mason and Noah dealing with their past and Mason’s dad’s abusive behaviors. And an admittedly decent arc about MC discovering her love for photography instead of cheerleading. 

And then you have MC going on about how she can’t decide between her love interests, which is just the bad apple of the bunch that ruins the rest. It just makes it very hard to take everything else seriously. You ever seen that one meme where the Power Rangers put their hands in a circle but then a Teletubbie tries to join in? It’s the writing-equivalent to that, and MC’s indecisiveness plot is the Teletubbie. 

And maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if MC’s indecisiveness wasn’t the main focus plot of the whole book. I want to take these other storylines seriously. I want to take this story as a whole seriously. But how can I when the main focus of the story is so god damn shallow? No matter how many "soft positive heartfelt" piano tracks and “so sad and tragic sad” piano tracks from WEH they try put over it, it doesn't change the fact that the focus is MC going on and on about being unable to choose between Mason, Noah, and Ava. 

I get teens are shallow and can have shallow issues, but did we really need it to be that big of a focus of the story? Especially when the way it handles it is completely empty? Something like OG HSS was great because even though a lot of the issues the characters had were seemingly shallow and basic (such as the band fighting over which song to play), they do give a little more depth to it and reason to care about it (ie. Aiden starts to feel like a failure at music because of the band infighting). MTFL just throws MC’s indecisiveness at you for 95 chapters and expects you to take it seriously with nothing else surrounding it. 

And they try to pull the twist on the title at the end where it’s all like “LI and photography, the two greatest loves of MC’s life”. Which is an interesting idea in concept, except it feels so artificial and non-earned when MC’s romance plot was spending 95 chapters being unable to decide between the LIs. 

Number 4: It reuses way too much from HSS. 

I know this is a less severe issue, but I just can’t get past it. Sprites, backgrounds, school colors… even plot points like the corrupt principal embezzling from the school, or MC and LI(s) being locked in a large school room (remember when HSS:CA MC and Ajay were locked in the auditorium?). Heck, even MC having lost her mom and having a photography passion connected to that, rings way too similar to one of Autumn’s arcs from the freaking HSS PRIME GAME! Oh yeah, and both of those characters have a love triangle with a golden boy and a bad boy. Holy hell. 

Easily the most noticeable part is the sprites. In my playthrough, I counted 7 whole HSS sprites that were used in MTFL: Sydney became Iris, Payton became Toni, Frank became this random kid in a flashback for Mason and Noah's past, Morgan became a kid in Elijah's gang named Lucy, Lorenzo became Chad, Aiden's mom became Asian Noah's mom, Skye's dad became White Mason's dad (PB really said use that sprite for abusive dads huh). And there’s probably more, I’m sure. 

And the worst offense? They even reuse the iconic bird's-eye view of Berry High in MTFL. Call me petty if you must, but that's just criminal. It's one thing to reuse and alter a bunch of the sprites, uniforms, and backgrounds from the series but to reuse another book series' iconic background like that? Honestly, it feels rather insulting. They couldn't even be arsed to change the "Go Tigers!" on the football field, that’s how little sense it makes to use that background outside of HSS. Fuck’s sake.

I know it’s kind of the norm for Choices to reuse assets throughout different series, but the fact that they do it so much here and majority of it is from HSS just rubs me the wrong way. At best, it’s jarring and lazy. And at worst, it comes off as trying way too hard to be a “more mature” version of HSS. When in reality, it makes HSS:CA’s side characters look like Citizen Kane in comparison. I mean, at least Clint and Natalie and MC stopped whinging about Rory ⅓rd of the way through the series. 

At least when other high-school-setting books like ROD, WEH, and ILITW were made, they at least somewhat bothered to change up a few things and make it feel like an actually different school. They changed up the backgrounds a bit, used different school colors and uniforms, and didn’t reuse nearly as many sprites from HSS.  

In MTFL, all they did was make new cheer uniforms for the non-reused sprites and remove the Berry High logos from everything HSS that they used. Yeah they made some changes, but it’s clear that they didn’t put nearly the same amount of effort into it as they did in the other high school setting books. 

All it does is just make me miss HSS. Like, stop toying with my heart by piggybacking off of a better series (that has better queer rep too) so much. It’s to the point where it feels like they should have just used the time making this book to instead make a HSS senior year (Which, y’know, would be nice, especially since the sendoff we got in HSS:CA 3 was absolute flaming fucking garbage). 

So… in all honesty, I don’t hate this book. But it had a lot of things that annoyed me to no end and it sure as fuck is disappointing wasted potential. It had a great opportunity to be a nice queer coming-of-age story. But instead it felt like a Kissing Booth rip-off with serious themes only hamfisted in order to make it seem more “mature”.

[danlusional]

06 - damn sure

book: My Two First Loves pairing: Noah Harris x Jules Price rating: PG-13 (light making out) word count: 1,301 summary: Despite Mason’s sudden “confession”, Jules know - have known - that she wants someone else. 

The chilly wind bit into her, getting underneath her jeans and sweater as she stood on the front porch to wait for him. It was past midnight and only 13 minutes after Noah’s last text, meaning he had only two minutes left to make it as he promised.

Jules was more concerned about the impending return of her father, darting her gaze from each end of the street, almost anticipating the headlights of his car. As if the world heard her thoughts, something shined its way from the end of the street. She gulped as her stomach bubbled with nerves.

It was a singular headlight and Noah with his red hot bike stopped on her curb. She sighed a breath she didn’t realize she was holding and made her way towards him. “Right on time.”

“I’m a man of my word.”, he casually replied before getting off from his ride. She could see his eyes looking down at her wrapped-up wrist. All the commotion that happened this afternoon seemed so far away already, but the pain and soreness she felt reminded her it was still fresh. “You look badass with that cast.”

“Not as much of a badass as you, though.”, Jules grinned and nudged him softly with her elbow. “How about that walk?”

Noah replied with his signature smirk before starting to walk, expecting her to follow. She fell into the steps next to him, carefully keeping a distance as to not bump her injured hand against him. They walked in silence, letting the soft sounds of wind, crickets, or the streetlights humming above them filled the air. 

Despite the almost complete silence, Jules couldn’t stop thinking. She was glad Noah and Mason could set aside their differences for a moment back in the football field. She was happy to have two people cared for her that much. But she also felt guilty, knowing she led one of them on all these times.

She felt vulnerable. Something she didn’t really like, because being the oldest daughter in the family meant she needed the emotional capability to take care of her dad, Mackenzie, and everything that could go wrong in the household. She had to have control over everything.

Now, with Noah? Everything could happen. She had to trust him and her feelings for him.

Their path took a turn towards a small playground just a few blocks away from where they started. Her eyes gazed left and right, looking for a sign of someone else’s presence, but there was none. She couldn’t risk being seen by one of the neighbors that might snitch about her and Noah being out in the middle of the night to her dad. 

As Jules was still busy with her thoughts, he already stopped and took a seat on the grass, facing the street they came from. She quietly sat down next to him, shoulders brushing as the comfortable silence enveloped them once more. “Can I say something?”, she spoke up, turning her head to face him. 

“I’m being true and honest with you. I like you, Noah... and I’m sorry if it seems like I’m playing games with you and Mason. That wasn’t and isn’t my intention at all.”, she took a deep breath in between with her arms wrapping around herself, fingers gingerly tightened on the sleeves of her sweater. “Yes, I did like - no, love - Mason back then but after he dated Ava, I just stopped and moved on. They were my friends, for God’s sake! Then, I met you and I just liked hanging out with you and now I like you—“

Without saying anything, Noah wrapped an arm around her shoulder to bring her closer to him. Their sides flushed against each other, making her arm had to snake around his waist. “You don’t really have to give me the whole thing.”

“Well, I feel like I do...”, she said quietly, as if she was scared anyone else would be around to hear it. “You deserved my explanation and more.”

“Yeah... Maybe. But, as I said before, I don’t own you, so your past with Jennings or whatever isn’t my business.”, his voice matched her volume and his eyes softened as he looked at her face in the dimmed lighting, only shined by the lamppost at the playground. “Thank you for that, though.”

“Hey, you were the one who helped with first aid today and... Take a beating for me. Sorry if it became a routine.”, Jules could only smile bashfully. Now, she didn’t know what was going to happen next to them. Would they be okay? 

After what felt like a tense moment in her head, Noah gave her a smile. A genuine one that she rarely saw since she knew him. “Nah, Jennings didn’t get anything on me. Him being judgmental is the real pain in the ass.”

They shared a laugh and any questions or doubt she had about whatever it was between them melted away. She was sure about this, about him. He made her feel safe and gave her the confidence and courage she always wished to have. Maybe, just a maybe, she never could be with Mason because she supposed to be with Noah. Jules secretly thanked her past self for never having the guts to confess to her best friend. 

“So, can we continue our little locker room rendezvous? We did say we’d take a rain check.”, Jules flashed him a mischievous grin with her eyelashes batting in jest. It didn’t take a whole second for Noah to closed the distance between them, lips finding hers perfectly in the dark. 

She laced her fingers on the back of his neck, bringing him closer while his own locked on either side of her hips. The kiss was more carefree than the one they shared earlier, with no worry of anyone going to walk in on them. Jules could feel the affection he exuded with each movement of his lips, and the respect he had for her with the way his hands softly traveled up and down her sides. He never wanted to make her uncomfortable and his actions definitely spoke louder. 

Noah carefully guided her to his lap, with a small pause to wait for her confirmation. She gladly let him and let her legs wrapped around his waist. How could she not get enough of him? They were practically pressed against one another, limbs wrapping around each other. Noah Harris drove her crazy, physically, and mentally.

What felt like a while, they finally broke the kiss with a soft gasp. Jules scanned the aftermath of their connection; his lips reddened and slightly swollen, his eyes focused on her as if he was doing the same, and arms still strongly holding her close. “That was definitely better than before.”, she giggled softly while her thumb gently brushed across his bottom lip. 

“You deserve the best.”, he shrugged cooly with a shadow of a smirk on the corner of his lips. “I guess I should take you home before you get into trouble.”

He was right. After the broken wrist commotion, her dad could’ve just put her under house arrest. He didn’t give her any hard time but it was apparent that his way of worrying was to put more pressure and protection. “What if I ask you to whisk me away?”

“Don’t, you rebel.”, Noah chuckled and softly pinched the tip of her nose. “I might take you up on that.”

With much hesitation, Jules sighed and stood up from his lap, wishing wistfully for the what-ifs. What if they could? At least, for the time being, she just wished they could be together with no one bothering them again. 

Well, now it was up to her to make sure it happened.