#scott westerfield

[crow-caller]

The Uglies Trilogy, and its messy legacy

[...]

While Uglies is a YA dystopia series with some interesting sci-fi ideas and cultural commentary, the books themselves are very sparse on anything but hoverboard action sequences in the wilderness. Each book in the trilogy winds up turning into a series of not particularly engaging action sequences rather than really developing the plot, characters, or story too much, so doing a normal plot summary doesn’t work as well for these books.

I was actually mixed on if I’d write anything up about these books at all, honestly. I enjoyed reading Uglies again with a heavy mix of nostalgia and adult appreciation for what is honestly more a morality play for teens with body dysmorphia. Book 2, Pretties, was disappointing but uninteresting. I wound up taking very few notes as I read. Book 3 though, Specials, was where I decided I had to say something. When we talk about the cultural impact of Uglies, I’m not sure there was one, but there was another kind of impact these books had on teens for sure. And that’s going to lead me right to a very strong content warning.

UGLIES features and glorifies- not fully intentionally- self-harm and cutting to a significant degree. I am going to talk about this a fair bit later on.

[indigoswankster]

i have crawled out from my hole

i have crawled out from my decade long tumblr hole to post about my excitement. finally. FINALLY

UGLIES BY SCOTT WESTERFIELD IS GETTING A SERIES. HOW HAS THIS TAKEN SO LONG. WHY. WHY HAS THIS TAKEN SO LONG

I CANNOT WAIT FOR THIS OH MY GOD IM SO FUCKIN HYPE FOR IT I LOGGED INTO THIS HELLSITE FOR THE FIRST TIME IN LIKE TEN FUCKIN YEARS

[deanwax]

I guess deep in my heart I knew I'd live to see Netflix absolutely Fuck Up And Not Get Right a beloved childhood book series but I reeeeaaally wish it wasn't THAT one

[jadempress]

Twilight renissance, hunger games renissance, uglies by scott westerfeld has a movie on netflix coming out this year. Nature is healing

[yourfaveisafictive]

Your fave is a fictive: Tally Youngblood from Uglies by Scott Westerfield

(request by @anendoandfriendo)

[ Image ID: a pastel horizontal striped flag ranging from green to pink from top to bottom with a picrew rendition of Tally Youngblood from Uglies by Scott Westerfield imposed over it /end ID ]

[valtsv]

Underused psychological/body horror concept: Character who knows their body was changed without their knowledge or permission, but also realizes their mind was affected because the change itself doesnt bother them at all. They're in a form unrecognizable to how they've been the whole rest of their life, and the most upsetting part is the realization that they're unable to be upset about it.

oh fuck yeah. i'm definitely projecting here, but there is something so satisfyingly horrifying about being able to rationally recognise that you should feel a certain way, but being physically and psychologically incapable of it, because the part of you that would enable you to access those emotions has been cut away, torn up by the roots and cauterised shut before you could feel the pain of the wound it left behind. the added insult to injury of not only having something stolen from you, but taking all of the rage and pain you might have felt at its loss with it. the body-mind entanglement; phantom limbs and phantom grief.

[themosthatedbeingg]

// EVERYONE SHUT UP ONE OF MY FAV BOOK SERIES GROWING UP IS GETTING AN ANIME ADAPTATION NEXT YEAR AND BY THE SAME STUDIO THAT DID TRIGUN STAMPEDE?!????? MAKSODODOFOFDN

Leviathan!!!! Yesss

[tw1stedthicket]

OH MY GOD THEY'RE MAKING THE UGLIES INTO A NETFLIX SHOW/MOVIE(?) BROOO THIS WAS MY SHIT IN MIDDLE SCHOOL I ALWAYS BELIEVED IT DESERVED A PLACE IN THE YA DYSTOPIAN RENAISSANCE I WAS OUT HERE IMAGINING MYSELF WITH BEJEWLED EYES AND TITANIUM BONES AND WOLF TATTOOS AND SHIT AND WANTING TO VISIT THE PRETTY PARTIES AND FUCK SHIT UP AND WISHING I COULD HOVERBOARD ON SOME RAPIDS HIDING FROM THE GOVERNMENT IN THE WOODS AND I REMEMBER STAYING UP ALL NIGHT TO FINISH THE SERIES WITH A LIGHT ON UNDERNEATH THE COVERS AND LOVING IT SM NETFLIX COME THROUGHHHHH

[keirametzbrassknuckles]

Why did Uglies get a series before Leviathan did??? I know it was more successful as far as the books go but also 1. Was it? & 2. Is it not enough to want to see The Creatures on my screen, huge?

[nat-20s]

I'm reading a semi dystopian YA series right now (I know I know) and honestly it's really interesting to me that the main character is on purpose becoming an actively worse person like that doesn't usually happen!! It's cool I like it I think it's really intriguing to have the main character buy in to the nightmare society and actively want to see her fail!!

[1eos]

wait no way u were also obsessed with the book peeps... it did SO much to my brain and yet ur like the first person i've ever seen mention it. iconique as per usual

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. i think i checked out peeps for like months at a time 😭😭😭😭 like that book was fucking formative and ik i was telling ppl abt parasite facts for YEARS bc of that book. and yeah it feels like no one else read peeps despite how solid of a book it was. i think i liked peeps more than i liked uglies and i was a DIEHARD uglies fan. im so glad we found each other fellow peeps lover 🫂

[thebluecoyote42]

The opposite of the Perspicacious Loris.

thinking about the time a professor said the phrase “it’s just like the judeo-christian concept of turning the other cheek—” to which i immediately said something like “you mean the christian concept? it doesn’t appear in judaism” and he looked at me like a startled slow loris.

[highmoonpence]

7/10 love triangles!!

Tally is pretty and she has everything she ever wanted when she was ugly. She has friends, she goes to parties, she’s even pretty popular. But all that she went through with the Smokies make her anxious. She has this constant nagging from the past wherever she is.

Then she meets Zane. And he feels that anxiety too. For months before meeting her he’s starved himself to maintain the clarity from the fuzzy-headedness that pretties live with. And with one kiss they go down a rabbit hole that they can’t come back from. They take the “pretty cure” that the Smokies sneak in for them. 2 pills meant for Tally that she splits with Zane.

Special Circumstances is keeping a close eye on them and even have them permanently cuffed and tracked. It takes a lot of planning for them to break free and break out of the city.

They get separated outside of the city. And Tally finds herself in a sectioned off area of land that houses barbaric and savage looking peoples. They live without electricity or modern tech of any kind and they think of the Pretties as Gods.

Tally comes to realize that these people are caged like livestock for experimentation and breaks free from their reservation, vowing to come back to rescue them.

And finally reunited with Zane, she doesn’t have very long to appreciate him being alive. If at all.

It’s even more complicated with David there… but has he always been this ugly?

The book ends when an unexpected tracking device gets set off and the Specials are on their way. Tally must choose between Zane and David and ultimately chooses Zane.

The rest of the Smokies flee whilst Tally and Zane stay behind and get captured. And who shows up with Special Circumstances but Shay, now a Special herself. Her revenge for Tally’s selfishness through book 1 (I don’t think she acted selfishly in book 2) ?? She gets to turn Tally into a Special herself. Well fuck.

I love how the author made Shay her fre-nemy. Shay is a good friend. She shares her secrets and her friends and her knowledge. Shay trusts Tally completely (enough to have given her the location of the Smoke in the first book!). And Tally betrays that trust over and over. She treats Shay like she’s second rate. Ngl, Tally is a shit best friend. /Shay/ should have been the one to find Valentino 317 with Tally. /Shay/ should have been the first one she told about the cure! Just because things didn’t happen one way doesn’t mean Tally couldn’t have communicated better. Shit and selfish main character Fr.

Also, in this book I really loved the dynamic between Tally and Zane. They were really good for each other. Somehow I feel like she will go back to David, since she thought about him a lot in New Pretty Town. But her relationship with Zane became codependent, was not based on any lies, AND they said they loved each other???? Cmon. That has to be end game.

[hurtmemoreplease]

I was having a discussion the other day about transfem story lines, and we found it a little depressing how deep we had to read for some of them. We started talking about how common stories like Mulan or Scott Westerfield's Leviathan or Ouran High School Host Club or Song of the Lioness or Eon: Dragoneye Reborn are, where a "girl" character finds validation in crossdressing, while we struggled to find examples of the opposite.

Our hypothesis was that masculinity is associated with agency, so there's no shame in a girl protagonist aspiring towards masculinity. It turns them into an underdog; if their ruse is uncovered then they lose the benefits of their elevated social status. On the other hand, if a male protagonist aspired towards femininity, it would be read as transgressive. The protagonist would be read as retaining the "benefits" of their maleness even if they are discovered. The stakes would be lower, and the protagonist might even read as deceptive or underhanded, since they'd be concealing a social position of greater power from the people around them.

This is just basic transmisogyny though, and only applied in the extremely basic and simplistic world of YA fiction. Still, I'd love to be proven wrong and shown examples of crossdressing in fiction that don't treat it as a joke.

[corpocyborg]

the uglies movie is one of the most faithful book adaptations I've ever seen... Good for Scott Westerfield for holding out for it tbh... The pacing felt too fast compared to the book so a lot of the detail was lost... But I did love the easter eggs that were clearly put in there specifically for the book fans... Spag bol lolol

[rivalcobalt]

@naoreco DUDE I KNOW... I also can't imagine copying off of ons and not taking mikayuu when that's the one thing that made most fans have any kind of interest in it in the first place, but, yknow, obviously I'm very biased on that

Imo all the characters are way less complex than what ons accomplishes within s1, which is... yeah. Ons is really not winning any awards for its character writing (and while it admittedly has had some moments/details/concepts I love, those aren't executed well most of the time either)

The minor characters definitely have it the worst though. At least the squad kids in ons early on have likable personalities and backstories and we have some idea of what motivates them and their group dynamic; for the most part, we never learn much of anything about who the other kids in The Watch really are or where they came from, let alone attempting to give them personal struggles. It felt like they were given labels for race and gender/sexuality and a visual description to show "how cool it is that they're queer/poc" (disclaimer: I am saying this as a gay trans mixed guy) and about 1 personality trait. I think if the author had used half of the time spent describing gore to flesh out the characters more, it would've improved the depth of the story a lot

This is by far not the first time an English work has copied a Japanese work and was praised for originality, but "gay trans YA novel rips off mediocre gay vampire shounen" has to be conceptually the funniest and yet there still seem to be 0 google results about it