#so i can bomb it on Goodreads

[savleye]

I was already running late bc I missed the first bus I was supposed to get on. Then when I was on the second bus I started reading the book I'm in the middle of and read the goriest traumatizing raunchiest shit I've ever read. Then when the bus stopped a guy fell and hit his head and started having a seizure. So then a bunch of people were calling 911 and we all had to get off the bus and wait for the next one. By the time I arrived at my college campus my class was already halfway over and I knew the professor was just going to lecture me if I walked in that late. Then I walk to my college's lounge for commuter students bc they're giving out free chicken and waffles and iced coffee today. I then take my food and walk to the library so I can sit down, eat, and start doing my homework. But as I get to the library I put my food and backpack down and run to the library restroom and have the fattest shit I've had in a week. And that was my morning and it's not even fucking 10:30.

[minnepaulitan]

Something I have never understood about Goodreads, and I remember when Goodreads was established, and I’m sure this question has been asked a thousand times before, why are people allowed to rate a book that hasn’t been released yet? I see 4-star reviews, 5-star, 1-star reviews for books that don’t even have ARCs out yet. Why?            ??

[etirabys]

meandering post about reading Orson Scott Card again

I've been offline starting at 9pm every day (except once. I was drunk at karaoke and asked for anons at 8:30pm) for six weeks, with the result that in befuddled boredom two nights ago I picked up Orson Scott Card's Songmaster from the house bookshelf.

I read Ender's Game and three sequels when I was a teen thought the books were mid. Since those are OSC's best works I assumed he had nothing more interesting to offer me and didn't try more of him for fifteen years, but Songmaster was compelling enough that I immediately afterwards picked up The Memory of Earth, the first book of a pentalogy.

TMoE is extremely my jam: after humanity blows itself up on Earth, AIs monitor thriving human civilizations in the planets that survivors managed to escape to, and suppress any tech that enables large scale violence by exerting low key mind control via satellites. But forty million years pass, many of the satellites break down, and the AI needs help from humans to restore capabilities. Because as its control wanes, people are starting to e.g. conceive of airplanes or bombs again, and override the injunctions against entering military alliances more than two edges of connection away.

The AI is worshipped as a god all over the planet, but the fourteen year old protagonist that becomes one of the AI's agents tells the AI from the beginning that he'll break with it if its morality seems wrong to him. I like the fourteen year old – unlike Ender or Songmaster's protagonist (adult minds piloting ten year old bodies), he's a normal gifted kid who's unpopular 50% due to his ego and big mouth and 50% because he's socially inept and offends people even when he's trying to be nice.

Songmaster is also partly about a permanent solution to large-scale violence, albeit through one guy who establishes a monopoly on violence and sweeps in pax galactica. Both it and TMoE are preoccupied with the eradication of suffering from evil / human violence, which is closer to my resonant frequency than narratives about defeating particular people or ideologies. At the moment I can't think of any other book with such an insistent focus on the matter than T.H. White's The Once and Future King. It's hard to make a compelling story out of, and I don't think Songmaster really succeeds, but TMoE's premise is well suited to explore that. (I'm also enjoying the matriarchal culture where everyone is expected to have multiple serial-monogamous marriages.) After reading 70% of TMoE last night I wrote:

Usually when I read fiction there's a small part of me going, how can I use this as fodder for my own growth, how can I remix or improve or react against this, how do the author and I measure against each other? (If the quality and content are at an anti-sweet spot, the small part becomes quite large and I feel all teeth towards the author.) But on occasion I read something so close that the absence of that measuring-feeling is its own sensation – ego departs, or at least is split across two bodies. There's just amity and recognition

And it's pretty interesting to feel this way about Card for, well, the reasons.

(If you're familiar with Card drama none of the following will be new to you; I'm coming to it fresh so the rest of this post is me going "uh... wow")

I vaguely knew he was a homophobic Mormon who'd gotten into fights about gay stuff, but I couldn't tell from the Ender books I read. But in Songmaster his issues spring off the page in such a weird way. Every fifth Goodreads review of this book is "Card, u gay?" because, well,

(One review, possibly from a fellow Mormon, that went "Card, it's so sinful of you to be this gay in your novel". Why did he write this book that would predictably make everyone mad...)

it's full of gay male desire. The protagonist (Ansset) is approximately a castrato and characters notice him sexually a lot. The first and only time Ansset has sex it's with a Kinsey 4-5 male character he loves, who's married to a woman but has fallen in love with Ansset. It turns out the drugs Ansset took to prolong his singing career painfully and only-kinda-figuratively explode your balls when you have your first orgasm and you'll never feel sexual desire again. (You'd think his loving teachers would have warned him of that, but, whatever, they didn't.) The other guy is literally castrated in punishment for inadvertently torturing a highly valuable castrato. It's pretty bald: GAY SEX IS ALMOST IRRESISTIBLY TEMPTING BUT YOU SHOULDN'T DO IT.

(Sidenote: both Ansset and the guy's wife are very close and have a "there's enough love to go around" attitude about the gay sex initially, before they go "wait Josif is a SERIAL MONOGAMIST... he can only love one person at a time... the moment he had the gay sex his marriage was destroyed". It's funny in a mildly stupid way that Card would set up this parable of homosexuality destroying lives and a marriage but almost everyone involved is peacefully ready to sail into an open marriage. I guess it makes sense if you want to say very clearly that THE GAY PART IS THE BAD PART)

which is fascinating to me, because... why would you tell on yourself like that

(81k also told me secondhand of an essay? interview? where Card openly says "we have to stand against legalizing gay marriage because everyone will get gay married and society will collapse", so that's informing my read of Songmaster as well)

I am pretty dang open about my personal life online but if I had a lot of feelings I thought were disgusting and immoral I would not write a novel dripping with those feelings before pointedly castrating the leads for them. Especially if it wasn't relevant to the actually highbrow themes of (checks notes) winning over your adversaries with kindness and never relinquishing your monopoly on violence. I would be so so so so embarrassed to let this go to print, it's so psychologically transparent, what was he thinking

(Well, I assume he's a very different person with different social incentives. For all I know, people in his church went "hey Orson we read your book and it's clear that you're gay but signaling strongly that you won't give into the gay feelings, we're here for you, it was really brave of you to publish this".)

[vaaaaaiolet]

It's the RPD's annual Secret Santa, and Leon's at his wit's end finding the perfect gift for his work crush. No competition, of course, except for the part where you make him promise not to bring something lame. Leon's got a week. He can do this. Right?

gn / m, fluff, romance, humor, leon is a SWEETHEART, you guys work at the RPD but you're leon's senior and also love reading??, no outbreak, inspired by the teapot episode of The Office lol, tw: claustrophobia

word count: 1.5k // read on ao3

a/n: vivi try not to mention christmas challenge go!!! @k1ssaphobe this one's for you <3 literally the ugliest effing banner i've ever made i'm SO SORRY but this completely destroyed my writer's block. i had so much fun <3

It’s all been downhill since Leon plucked your name out of a glass jar last week. Shit. Multiply that times three, rain down a couple red and green sprinkles for holiday spirit, and you have a great representation of how prepared Leon feels about being assigned the most crippling crush he’s had since high school for the RPD’s annual Secret Santa: you. 

Shit, indeed.

His hands shake like tremolo as he rereads your name printed on his little slip of paper, and Leon decides right then and there that the best way to go about this is to not go about it at all. Plain and simple. 

“Aren’t you excited?” you gush after your turn to draw from the jar. Poor you, you’d taken his jittery hands as enthusiasm. 

Leon grins tightly. “For sure, yeah, I um… I love Christmas. Really excited. You get who you wanted?” 

“Hey, no cheating. Not even with me, rookie.” You scrunch your face, clutching your paper to your chest. “Secret Santa’s secret. But it’s no secret that you’ve got to give it your all, so no lousy gifts allowed, got it?”

Well, there’s that plan gone. It’s back to police academy basics: Keep It Simple, Stupid. 

There’s nothing to overthink about making a good impression as the newest RPD recruit, Leon gaslights himself while haunting the Target holiday aisle on Monday night. You routinely save him from Irons’ infamous wrath, so it’s only natural that Leon spends all of Tuesday in a stupor at his desk, definitely not thinking of how he could never pay you back the favor with a silly Secret Santa gift. 

Wednesday rolls by and his coffee from yesterday sits in the break room, cold and overstirred next to today’s breakfast crumbs. How many times has Leon watched you sip tea at your desk? Five, six? 

Your eyes sparkle over the rim of your cup when he asks you about your weekend. Really, he doesn’t get the hate for small talk. There’s nothing small about the smile that bunches up your cheeks when he cracks a stupid joke about the weather, and more often than not, Leon finds himself waterboarding his notes app with the names of all the novels you drop mid-conversation so he can binge their Sparknotes over the weekend. So it goes, according to Kurt Vonnegut.

Ugh, he should have paid more attention in English. What the hell is an allegory anyway? Leon spends all of Thursday browsing your Goodreads profile and wracking his head over the hefty price tags attached to your TBR list. His wallet makes for a terrible wingman. 

But really, finding the perfect gift is no sweat at all. Leon is absolutely nonplussed (according to his 50th vocabulary-related Google search) when he steps into the RPD elevator on Friday morning with a clumsily wrapped, candy cane-striped bundle in his arms. 

“Hold it plea- Leon!”  

Liar, liar, pants on fire – he’s totally shitting his pants when you barely make it inside before the doors snap shut. 

“Thanks,” you gasp. 

Leon nods stiffly, his cheeks growing warm, and jams the second-floor button with his knuckle.

As the elevator starts its maddeningly slow climb, you hum, rocking back and forth in your snow boots. You’re cradling a package of your own, something four-cornered and fairly small. Leon, however, feels like he’s holding a bomb, the object of his affections standing less than three feet from his radius of destruction. How are you so carefree right now? You’ve probably got this gifting thing in the bag and he most definitely doesn’t. 

Leon can see everything unfold the moment he enters the office. You’ve had your gift planned months beforehand, his gift is going to be horrifically lame when you open it, everyone’s going to clap politely but you’re going to hate him forev-

And then the elevator plunges into pitch black.

“Oh my god!” 

Who screamed louder, Leon doesn’t want to find out.

The elevator shudders to a complete stop. Leon’s mental spiral of doom helpfully supplies him with an image of you two dangling in midair, suspended on wires. Maybe this is the universe saving him from delivering the worst Secret Santa gift of his life.

Leon blinks in the darkness, waiting for your unflappable voice to cut through the silence and figure a way out, headstrong as always, except you don’t, and Leon strains his ears to hear what’s surely not what he thinks it is, a whisper that sounds an awful lot like: “Leon, I don’t want to die.”

“What?”

“We’re gonna die,” you whimper. “I don’t wanna die.”

Your voice floats up from a lot lower than he remembers your head being, so he crouches down to find you with your arms hugged to your chest. You’re huddled against the wall, breathing all shallow. The package in your arms lies forgotten somewhere in the abyss.

“Hey, hey, nobody’s dying.” Leon reaches out to find your hand. “What’s the matter?”

“I have, cl-clau-”

“Claustrophobia?” He remembers that one well. Wishes he didn’t. 

You nod fitfully.

“The dark doesn’t help either, huh?” he whispers, craning his head to look at the busted bulb on the ceiling. “Damn.”

Your palm grows colder and clammier in his hand by the minute, and the shakiness in your breathing is starting to worry him. Your head pops above your knees when you hear rustling in the shadows, and then the telltale Christmastime cacophony of wrapping paper being torn to shreds. 

“What are you…?”

“Being resourceful,” Leon grits, tearing his Secret Santa gift open. He fumbles with its contents for a second, slipping something into a plastic compartment. “It’s not the best, but…”

The elevator blooms with soft, golden light.

“...it’ll do.”

“What’s this?” you murmur in awe, cupping your hands around the tiny book light Leon holds. 

“My Secret Santa gift,” he chuckles sheepishly. “I kind of, um, blanked. I’m also really bad at giving gifts, so there’s also this,” he says, pulling out a mug from the heap of trashed wrapping paper.

When I Think About Books, I Touch My Shelf, it announces with impunity. 

Leon blushes when you giggle at the inscription. Things always look better online than in person, rookie mistake. But at least you’re breathing better now. 

“This is amazing,” you laugh, cradling the cup like there’s warmth inside. 

“Not so amazing now that I’ve opened all the packaging.”

“Your Secret Santa won’t mind at all, trust me, not with a gift like this- ‘touch my shelf’, you’re unbelievable! Tell me where you got it.”

He shakes his head. 

“Leon Scott Kennedy, if you don’t stop gatekeeping this incredible mug and this super useful book light, by the way, I’m going to tell Irons you spilled coffee all over his desk. I can be very convincing, y’know.” You cross your arms decidedly, waiting. 

“There’s no need for all that!” he protests. 

“That was a promise, Leon, not a threat.”

“C’mon, be reasonable here.”

“You’re still not telling me.” 

“It’s for you, silly.” Leon tilts his head, face heating up faster than the book light bulb, “You’re my Secret Santa.” 

He must be hallucinating the pink in your cheeks.

“Oh,” you breathe. 

“Yes, oh,” Leon teases, scooching to sit next to you. “I couldn’t think of anything,” he confesses, “so I just went with the basics. I know you read and I know you really miss your old tea mug, the one that broke, right? You’re my gifting competition and I got nervy from how sure you were about your person’s gift. So, um, I played safe.” Leon finishes lamely and squeezes his eyes shut, hoping the light doesn’t also illuminate the shame radiating from his body. 

And then he feels the press of an unbelievably soft kiss on his cheek.  

“It’s much better than what I’ve got,” he hears. 

His eyes fly open. Words don’t form right in his throat when you reach out for the package you dropped when the lights went out. Wrapping paper falls apart neatly in your hands (what don’t you do perfectly?) and you unveil a mini waffle iron, proportioned perfectly for somebody always running late without breakfast. Somebody like Leon.

“You keep missing breakfast and Irons is on my ass about saving you food all the time, so I guess took the practical route too,” you shuffle your feet, bashful all of a sudden. “And um, my gift’s kind of useless if we never make it out. Sorry.”

He fingers the tag in wonder. 

Merry Christmas, Leon! There’s a timer so you don’t burn them :) xoxo, your Secret Santa!

You’re so goddamn sweet. You’re perfect and thoughtful and it’s all your fault that Leon didn’t have the faintest clue what to give you. Think, Leon, think. He knows he’s not this stupid. What do you give to somebody who has everything? 

A kiss. One that’s all smiles and just as sweet as the way you kiss him back, because screw Secret Santa.

It’s hard to keep secrets when you’re Leon’s favorite one.

psst, find more of my work here!

comments and reblogs are very much appreciated <3 take care and i love you!

[genericpuff]

All That Glitters is Not Feminism - An Analysis of LO's Brand of "Feminism" and What Remains of its Fanbase (The Twist)

Alright y'all, I've been waiting a hot minute to talk about this because I wanted to see how it fully panned out before saying anything about it. And it's not even specifically about LO, but I do think it's very adjacent to it in a way that I'm sure you'll be shocked to hear. Much of it speaks to how we prop up white writers even at the expense of POC.

This is 'the twist' attached to my first post that I made just a couple hours ago that concerns an entirely other topic but I feel ties into this subject very well.

If you haven't heard, there's this author who recently fucked around in the Del Rey publishing scene.

Her name is Cait Corrain.

In the original tweet calling this person out, names were not dropped, but it was made very clear that what Cait did was unacceptable behavior.

You can read the entire thread that started it all from Xiran here:

There's also a GREAT recap thread from one of the affected authors, Bethany Baptiste:

I want to make it clear that Cait Corrain isn't just a debut author.

Cait Corrain is - or now, was (foreshadowing is a literary device that-) - a debut author who had an agent, a publishing deal with Del Rey (an imprint of Random House which is a MAJOR publisher) and even an upcoming Illumicrate deal - meaning, her book was going to be packaged in a monthly loot crate subscription shipped directly to people's doors, quite possibly one of the best marketing deals a debut author could ever get, usually unheard of in this industry. All the pre-reviews were strong and positive.

Cait's book was literally set up for success. All she had to do was sit back, relax, and watch the fruits of her labors roll in. She had written the book. It was ready for release. The hard part was technically over.

But I guess the racism brainrot got to her because as it turns out, since April - for EIGHT MONTHS - she's been making alternate accounts on GoodReads to review bomb the indie and debut works of her friends and peers, most of whom were POC and did not have the same opportunities set up for them as she did. There are loads of receipts to back this up that you can find in those above threads ^^^

To say that this is appalling is an understatement. This was an intentional and deliberate act of racism by a white queer writer who claimed to be "jealous" - of what, I can't imagine - so much so that she deliberately sabotaged her peers, people who had supported her and her book.

And then when she got caught? She doubled down on it and claimed it was a "friend", also an alternate account she made up.

The exchange between her and this made-up person is actually the funniest shit out of this entire thing, it's so poorly written and as soon as people noticed the time stamps were out of order, that was when it truly cemented her newfound clown status.

"oooooh he's standing right behind me, isn't he?" energy right here LMAO

yes keep expositing cait, that's really selling the "this is a genuine conversation that really happened with a real person" bit 🤡

Anyways, it became abundantly clear that Cait was just going to continue to dig her heels in over something she caused.

This has been a hot topic in the UnpopularLO Discord, not just because of how crazy of a situation it is that we had to talk about it - and we have people within the community who work in the literature and media sector - but because we noticed one very telling thing in the list of series that she had review bombed in her very own personal act of wrath.

You see, Cait made one fundamental mistake that led to her undoing - she didn't just review bomb the works of her peers, she positively reviewed her own book and others.

What's her book about though?

It's an Ariadne x Dionysus retelling set in space.

It's literally another "modern retelling" of Greek myth.

And wouldn't you know it, guess who else created a modern retelling of Greek myth that she included in her positive review raiding while she was sabotaging the work of her actual peers?

Now, I think it goes without saying that what I'm about to say should be taken with MOUNTAINS of salt, I'm sure a lot of you are reading the headline and going, "Ugh, really? You're gonna make this about LO? Could you give it a rest already???"

I need you to understand, with the current state of Rachel's fanbase and 'modern' Greek myth literature as a whole, at this point Lore Olympus - and the works that are literally inspired by it such as A Touch of Darkness - has basically become the shopping cart litmus test of basic decency. It's like when someone says they like Harry Potter - you can't take it automatically at good faith anymore, because there isn't a whole lot separating someone who simply liked Harry Potter as a kid and still rewatches the movies from time to time from someone who fully supports the politics and agenda of J.K. Rowling. No, not everyone who still watches the movies or reads the books fondly is a TERF by default, but it's justifiably a reason for suspicion when the consequences are often too dire to risk.

There's this thing that's been happening in the LO fanbase that I frankly saw coming, but has really recently started to hit its peak. It's what I call the "Kanye Effect", where the comic has become so absurd and backwards in its misogyny and white feminism that the only people who seem to be left supporting LO are the people who are legitimate white feminists and misogynists - because all the normal level-headed people fell off the comic ages ago (or transitioned into the critical side of the community).

I mentioned it in my last post, but it bears repeating - Rachel's fanbase has literally been shipping Hera, a victim of abuse, with her abuser, Kronos. I'm really hoping a lot of them realize how fucked up that is now that Hera herself has called it what it is - abuse - within the comic, but I also can't count on the LO fanbase picking up on that or even noticing it with how quickly people swipe through it each week, it's very apparent at this point that most of LO's readers don't know how to chew their food and don't pay attention when Persephone and Hades aren't onscreen.

But I'm digressing. Or am I? We're talking about Crown of Starlight after all. The debut Dionysus x Ariadne sci-fi/fantasy romance that was quite literally advertised using Lore Olympus as its baseline-

This. This is what the ongoing cultural erasure and white feminist uwu-fication of Greek myth is doing to the literary zeitgeist surrounding Greek myth as a whole. This is why we criticize Lore Olympus and works like it that are created by disingenuous people who only seek to use the assets of Greek myth material as a way to shoot themselves up into fame and stardom. This is why we demand better standards in the literature and webcomic industry, so that people like Rachel and Cait can't use their privileges to quite literally erase the source material that they used to make themselves famous in the first place.

If anything, Cait's actions didn't just affect the people she negatively review bombed, or the people she was affiliated with, but also the people she positively reviewed. While I don't support what Rachel creates, she wasn't the only one who Cait went out of her way to review positively from her alt accounts, there were many others as evident in the Google Doc - but all this really does is tarnish the legitimacy of these books and their ratings by artificially jacking up their numbers that are advertised to others.

Making Greek myth fanfiction or fun creative retellings was never the problem, but it's now being sabotaged alongside so many other genres and mediums by toxic white individuals who can't even keep themselves from committing hate crimes, let alone create something purely for entertainment that's transparent in its illegitimacy, lest it destroy the illusion that these people are qualified to speak over those whose voices are being stifled, often by these very same people. Many of these writers get caught and are still allowed to continue what they're doing - that was certainly what we feared with Cait.

Until today.

It was revealed today that Cait's book will no longer be featured in the Illumicrate May 2024 box.

Del Rey has dropped Crown of Starlight from their publishing schedule.

Daphne Press will be hopefully following suit.

And, most telling of all, Cait's own agent has severed ties with her.

For anyone not familiar with the inner workings of the publishing industry, Cait has essentially been blacklisted. Without an agent or a publishing house, she'll have to entirely rely on her own resources through self-publishing. Unless she manages to sneak her way back in under an alias (which I wouldn't put it past her to try) she no longer has access to the mainstream publishing industry that was already guaranteed for her before she let her 'jealousy' get the better of her.

Her career was already made for her. She had a red carpet laid out for her debut. Her book was getting good pre-reviews and she had quite literally nothing keeping her from her success. The best thing she could have done was nothing. Somewhere in her head, she made up a threat that didn't exist, and sealed her fate in acting on it, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I think in these situations such as with Cait Corrain, Rachel Smythe, and - also recently and relevant - James Somerton, we need to become increasingly aware of how white voices are still overpowering POC voices, not just in their actions, but in the opportunities they're given over others which they then use to further stifle the voices of those they feel "threatened" by or feel entitled to speak over. While neither James nor Rachel have used sock puppet accounts to "take out the competition" (at least as far as we know lmao) James did quite literally steal the words and voices of queer writers who were deserving of their time in the spotlight, and Rachel's work is being quoted as "rewriting Greek myth" as if its blatant gentrification and appropriation should be marketed as some sort of positive.

It's all too common for these deeply-rooted prejudices to rear their ugly heads and for the people who carry them to act out in this way while justifying it as "jealousy" or "a mistake". This isn't jealousy. This isn't a mistake. This isn't someone "starting drama". This is genuine, targeted hate, with the intention of snuffing out the voices of others who should be empowered, not silenced.

All that time and effort, and for what? Racism and petty jealousy? It just goes to show, it doesn't matter how many opportunities you're given, how high up on the ladder you already are - it won't fix the deeply-rooted insecurity and racial pettiness that spurs people on to do such horrible things.

I've spent enough of my time and words today talking about Cait, and James, and Rachel. So to end this off, I want to join in with all the others who have highlighted the books that were review-bombed by Cait, and help in uplifting them so they can have successful debuts. I'll be pre-ordering a few of them, so I'll be happy to make dedicated posts for them in the future after they release. Please consider purchasing them for yourself if you want some new reading material <3

The Poisons We Drink by Bethany Baptiste:

So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole:

To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods by Molly X Chang:

Mistress of Lies by K.M. Enright

Voyage of the Damned by Frances White:

(I'm sure there are plenty others so if I missed any here, please let me know so I can add them here and check out their books!)

If there's any silver lining to this, I hope that it makes people aware of the media they consume and who it's being created by. I hope it makes people more willing to seek out the books that aren't getting the same opportunities as Cait Corrain and Rachel Smythe. I hope it's a wake-up call to the industry that matters like this need to be taken seriously and that POC writers are still being silenced under their own noses. And most of all, I hope it's a reminder that we shouldn't even need at this point that this behavior is not okay, no matter what level a person climbs to - that just because someone is part of one minority doesn't mean they're not capable of sabotaging another. It sucks that that has to be said, it sucks that despite these groups being so intersectional there are still people within them who submit to their deeply-rooted insecurities and find ways to feel threatened that they use to justify hateful behavior.

Having a platform is a privilege. It should never be weaponized against your own peers or those who you simply feel "threatened" by for no reason beyond your own imposter syndrome or doubts or internal struggles. Because as much as you may feel like you've earned where you are, that never gives you the right to weaponize your opportunities against others who were never given those same opportunities in the first place. "Feminism" is not using your power to crush "other women". "Progressiveness" is not exclusive to the progress that only benefits you.

I wish only the best to those who were affected by the actions of Cait Corrain. You deserve to be heard and seen and appreciated for the work you do and the abuse you've had to tolerate. I look forward to your debuts in 2024 <3

[redgoldsparks]

June Reading and Reviews by Maia Kobabe

I post my reviews throughout the month on Storygraph and Goodreads, and do roundups here and on patreon. Reviews below the cut.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe read by Matthew Blaney 

This is one of the most gripping and well-researched nonfiction books I've read in a long time. Keefe draws on many research trips, interviews, news paper archives, and personal encounters to tell several interwoven narratives of violence and protest during the time of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. He follows the story of the infamous Price sisters, women who joined the IRA while in college, helped plant many bombs, and became hunger strikers after receiving hefty prison sentences; Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten who was dragged from her home and disappeared by the IRA; Brenden Hughes, a commanding office of the IRA who escaped assassination attempts and prison, who committed a huge amount of violence but ultimately became disillusioned with what he had done; Gerry Adams, who claims he was never an IRA office despite massive evidence to the contrary, who helped negotiate the peace treaty before launching a successive political career; and many more. I highly recommend this book, especially to anyone wrestling with the moral question of violent versus nonviolent resistant, and what the long, messy process of building peace can look like, at least in one specific place and time.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata translated by Ginney Tapley Takemori read by Nancy Wu

Keiko Furukura has never fit in with the others around her. Early in elementary school she learned to keep her mouth shut because people often found the things she said (which felt logical and obvious to her) deeply upsetting. But at age 18, Keiko applied for a job at a convenience store and found her life's calling. The store is the only place where she feels really comfortable, needed, useful, and able to interact easily with others inside the routines of customer service. When the book opens Keiko is 36 and has been working the same low level job for her entire adult life. She has no desire for change but others around her are beginning to pressure her more and more to pursue a "normal life", that is, marriage and a better paying job. Keiko can be easily read as an autistic, asexual character; I really enjoyed how her perspective on life was written, even when I enjoyed less the actual things going on around her. A whiny, sleezy man takes up a lot of space in the second half of the story, but I found the ending very hopeful.

How to Love by Alex Norris 

Short, sweet, and insightful. Norris brings the humor of their "Oh No" comic series to this guide to feelings and relationships, but mixed with deep compassion. The visual metaphors are hilarious and perfect.

Becoming Who We Are: Real Stories About Growing Up Trans by Sammy Lisel and Hazel Newlevant and others 

A wonderful collection of short comics about trans people with different stories, experiences, jobs, and dreams. Each story is illustrated by a different artist which gives each tale its own voice. An accessible and affirming collection, especially for young readers!

Fool’s Quest by Robin Hobb read by Elliot Hill

This book picks up right after the traumatic kidnapping at the end of the previous volume, but packs a surprising amount of big plot twists in before the journey to recover the young people even begins. This book suffers from some middle book of a trilogy pacing issues; the action beats of the story sometimes falling at awkward spots, and the story continuing past what might have felt like its more natural ending. That didn't stop me from being RIVETED during the entire 33 hour audiobook. I am so obsessed with these characters. I feel the weight of everything they've been through, the six decades of in-story time, and the consequences and ripple effects of everything that has gone before. This volume continues to push a running theme of very gender-ambiguous characters; there are now two characters who defy an easy binary, and Fitz is finally coming to terms with that in one of his oldest and dearest friends. I'm excited and slightly terrified to head into the 16th and final book of this series soon!

Vera Bushwack by Sig Burwash 

This book is simultaneously a fairly quiet story of a gender-nonconforming queer living with just a dog on a piece of rural property, working on building a cabin from scratch; and also an ambitious exploration of gendered power fantasies. At the start, Drew is learning how to operate a chainsaw to cut trees and clear property from a rural neighbor. Flashbacks and phone calls reveal how Drew got her dog, some of the shitty men she's had to deal with, a past lover who helped her cut a trail to the river, and a tomboy childhood. These scenes of rough realism are interrupted when Drew jumps on her dirt bike or revs the chainsaw and her fantasies spin out across the page, full of wild horses, monster trucks, naked cowboys, symbols of complete and total freedom. This book is deceptively complicated, full of bold creative choices that I really appreciated, even if they didn't all work for me. I have a feeling this story is going to stick in my head for a long time.

In the Form of a Question written and read by Amy Schneider 

A very engaging memoir from Jeopardy champion Amy Schneider, born and raised in Dayton, Ohio, who moved to Oakland, California as an adult and never left. Each chapter title is a question and cover topics thematically rather than chronologically. Schneider is very forthcoming and honest, writing about everything from her transition, her open marriage, her first sexual experiences, recreational drug use, polyamory, community theater, relationship with her parents and more. She has a humorous and yet compassionate voice, relating tales of her hatred of boy scouts, ADD, and failures to understand her own gender without belittling her younger self. Towards the ends of the book she writes of her experience of fame and what she got out of her time on Jeopardy saying that stepping into the public eye as a trans woman and being met mostly with support and love changed her life as much as the 1.5 million she won over a 40 game winning streak and various other tournaments. If you are a fan of Jeopardy, or just curious, this is a fun listen.

Ruth Asawa: An Artist Takes Shape by Sam Nakahira 

Ruth Asawa was born in Southern California to parents who had immigrated from Japan before WWII. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, her whole family was displaced to the internment camps, loosing their farm, all of their farm animals, and nearly everything else they owned. Ruth finished high school inside a camp in Arkansas but was able to leave when she apply to and was accepted into college. She was faced with discrimination and racism, but eventually she was able to pursue her dream of becoming an artist at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. She studied under influential and well-known teachers who helped her find her own creative voice. She also met the love of her life there. The couple eventually relocated back to California, which had just legalized interracial marriage. Sam Nakahira captures Asawa's courage, determination, and incredible talent in tender line art with delicate grey scale washes. Asawa's best known work, her innovative wire sculptures, are gorgeously rendered. Asawa's insistence on treating every activity of her life, from gardening to parenting to drawing to sculpting, as creative, is a good reminder for me and every artist that living itself can be a creative practice.

People From My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami translated by Ted Goossen 

A charmingly strange set of interconnected stories about a neighborhood in Japan full of unusual characters. The unnamed child narrator tells us of the middle aged woman who runs a karaoke bar out of her house, the old man with two shadows, the child who is passed from house to house by lottery because his parents cannot support him, a diplomat who might be an alien who no one ever seen, the arrival of a mountain of sand, a school built of candy, a girl with prophetic dreams, and more. The stories escalate in weirdness over the course of the book and also introduce more reoccurring characters. The short 4-6 pages chapters made it compulsively readable. I had a great time with this, despite the lack of an overarching plot.

The Contradictions by Sophie Yanow

At age twenty, after a bad breakup, the author signed up for a study abroad program in Paris. Lonely and soul searching in a foreign country, Yanow spots a girl riding a fixed gear bike. Yanow is a committed bicyclist and chases the girl down to learn she is also an exchange student, also recently broken up with, a committed anarchist and a shoplifter. Yanow and her new friend decide to take a poorly planned trip to Amsterdam, intending to hitchhike the whole way. About as many things go wrong as you might expect. In beautifully minimalist black and white panels, Yanow perfectly captures the naivete and first political awakenings of a young college student trying to seem cool and so taking risks and hiding passions in order to impress someone new. A quick read and a master class in understatement.

Little Weirds written and read by Jenny Slate 

There was a lot I enjoyed in this memoir, as well as some aspects that worked less well for me. I enjoyed Slate's writing style and the focus on small moments of beauty and reclaiming one's right to live fully in one's body, acknowledging all of its human needs for softness and love. I liked her whimsy and sense of humor and kindness. I do wish that some of the chapters had been slightly more grounded in some of the facts and loose timeline of Slate's life. I didn't know anything about her before starting the book and it took me until almost the last chapter to learn she was the middle of three sisters; a line earlier on had made me think she was maybe a twin. It became clear that she was writing through the process of emotionally recovering from a divorce, but I only learned from wikipedia that her ex-husband had also been a major creative collaboration partner. I wonder if she expected most people reading this book to already be familiar with her biography? Regardless, don't go into this book looking for facts; go instead for a nonlinear reclamation of some simple but hard-won emotional truths and skip any chapter that isn't speaking to you.

People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, read by Edwina Wren

This book tells a fictional history of a real manuscript- the Sarajevo Haggadah, a beautifully illuminated Hebrew manuscript created in fifteenth-century Spain. The frame narrative follows an Australian manuscript conservation specialist, Hanna Heath, hired to re-bind the pages in the mid 1990s for a Bosnian museum that until extremely recently was in the middle of a war zone. Alternating chapters dip into contentious periods of Europe's history, usually moments of high tension between religious groups (WWII, Vienna at the turn of the century, the Spanish Inquisition in Venice, the banishment of Jews from Spain in 1492, Muslim/Christian conflicts in Seville in the 1480s) and trace how the Haggaadah managed to survive fire, flood, blood, war, and exile in the hands of many different people. This is an ambitious book that mostly achieved is goals; I got through the 14 hour audiobook very quickly. One unfortunate side effect of the narrative structure is that I as the reader didn't spend more than a few hours with any of the characters, and so didn't develop a particularly deep emotional connection with any of them, including Hanna, the lead. My rating is more of a 3.5 or 3.75 rounded up. But still, I appreciate Brooks eye for capturing just most exciting or tense moment from a historical era and will likely try a few more of her books in the future.

Punk Rock Karaoke by Bianca Xunise 

Three friends, recently graduated from high school, struggle to keep their punk band together through the demands of early adulthood. College applications, jobs, family obligations, and makeout partners are all knocking on the door, demanding to be let in. Will Ariel, Michele, and Gael be able to stay true to their creative spirits and to each other? I had a great time with this fast-paced, sweaty summer, friendship-focused book even though the majority of the punk music references went right over my head.

Parasol Against The Axe by Helen Oyeyemi 

Helen Oyeyemi continues to baffle and dazzle me. This one is set in and narrated by Prague, which is a tricky city full of its own complicated whims and desires. Into this self-aware city enter several women: Sofie and Polly, an engaged couple, celebrating their bachlorette weekend together with friends. Hero, a somewhat estranged friend of Sofie's, who come to Prague mostly to avoid a piece of registered mail which is chasing her down. And Thea, a woman willing to commit violence for the right price, on a hired revenge mission that happens to intersect with a dark episode of Sofie and Hero's past. Does that sound straight forward? It isn't. Oh yes and there's also a book, Paradoxical Undressings which tells a different story to every person who cracks open its covers. This book allows Oyeyemi to tell many nested and fantastical anecdotes from Prague's Communist past. As with most Oyeyemi books, there are a few threads I was left scratching my head over, but I had such a good time on the ride that I don't mind. I'll just have to read it again and see if I catch them (assuming it's the same book when I open it a second time!) 

The Sacrificers Vol 1 by Rick Remender, Max Fiumara and Dave McCaig 

The art is absolutely stunning, but the story is a bit too cruel and dark for me to really enjoy. This book takes the concept of the child sacrifice of Omelas and expands it out into a whole fantasy world, in which gods maintain their power through the consumption of innocents. The stunning color panel carried me though the first volume but I'm unlikely to pick up a second book.

Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo read by Cindy Kay

Another satisfying installment in the Singing Hills Cycle! In this one, Cleric Chih accompanies a young woman and her family to the remote estate of her prospective husband. But all is not as it seems. The potential husband looks at least twice as old as the young woman, and he has a son shut up in a pagoda and kept drugged in his gardens. Everyone on the estate is in some kind of danger, but the secrets are thicker and deeper than even the Cleric can guess.

[canmom]

a big mercy in the world is that it's actually much harder to hijack someone's behaviour with some kinda visual stimulus than capital would like.

so despite the constant semiotic fusillades of advertisers trying to 'shit in your brain' as the ad hacking slogan goes, you still get better at shutting it out. the advertisers have to resort to more and more desperate means to try to get you to buy product. of course they sell this to their clients as subtle behavioral modifications that manifest without the target even realising. but despite the occasional breakout viral success, it's mostly just a zero sum desperate battle to remind you that they exist at all. most ad exposures are wasted on people who either were never going to buy the thing or were already going to buy the thing. advertisers mostly just copy other advertisers and follow fads but present themselves as the key to success like a court alchemist to a king. overall it's a cancer swallowing up more and more of its host.

this does not make it any less annoying.

anyway, ads are only one part of marketing, and since they kind of suck, the modern method to promote your shit is to try to get 'organic' promotion through word of mouth, positive user reviews on a storefront, etc. so of course many companies cultivate 'influencers', post shill reviews, buy fake metrics, and all that. since all these mechanisms then become immediately less trustworthy, an arms race develops of trying to camouflage the fake marketing speech as 'genuine', 'honest', 'unbiased' etc. the result of this on communication is bad, there's chaff everywhere, but once again the effort of the marketer trying to control you bounces off the wall that people hate it and will not go along with it if they can help it.

a more subtle approach is to just try and cultivate people assigning themselves the role of reviewer. this can create something a bit more symbiotic. the reviewer gets to build an identity out of consuming product and being a discerning connoisseur, and the stuff they like gets free marketing written about it. hence sites like goodreads and letterboxd. not only that but when the thing they like does well, the reviewer gets to feel proud that they acted as a kingmaker.

one weird upshot of all this is that a small company will get really worked up about a negative review on a platform from some rando and go out of their way to placate them. i feel like we're going to see more people exploiting this - ig the gacha mra shit in korea is in part a ripple of that, though those cunts went a lot further than just review bombing.

anyway I've participated in this machine. arguably all the writing about fiction i do on this blog is feeding into it. when i think about it, i think it stinks, but I'm not sure what else to do. there are authors i admire, and who are my friends, i want them to be read by people and have bread on the table.

obviously just because there are powerful actors whose primary concern is moving product doesn't reduce all the discussion of art to elaborate games around moving product. in some sense the 'product review' form is an invading force, best disregarded. but i feel like it would be unwise to ignore the ecological mechanisms underlying what gets made and how and what makes its way to my eyeballs... and how my own behaviours belong to that ecosystem. even if it's depressing to think in those terms.

[nanowrimo]

How to Write Through Second Book Syndrome

Second Book Syndrome is a unique experience that can affect any writer. Today, author Uju Asika talks about what she learned while tackling Second Book Syndrome and gives advice on navigating it.  There’s something immensely powerful about completing your first book. For a brief moment, you feel invincible. After all, pretty much everyone you meet thinks they have a book in them, but not many people actually sit down to write it.

I wrote my first book, Bringing Up Race, in the midst of a global pandemic. Writing my next book, a picture book for younger readers, was a much less stressful experience. So it was actually with my third book, aimed at grownups again, that Second Book Syndrome kicked in.

You’ve probably heard of sophomore album syndrome (see Lauryn Hill, The Stone Roses) aka the sophomore slump that, apparently, can happen to anyone from athletes to second year college students.

Second Book Syndrome isn’t talked about as much and yet it affects almost every author on some level. Whether you’re a million-copy seller, a mid-list author or a relative newbie, you grapple with the same insecurities and nightmare scenarios. How do I write something as good as or better than my last book? If my first book did well, was it just a fluke? If my first book sold poorly, is this book my last shot? Will it meet my readers’ expectations or am I going to get troll-bombed on Goodreads? Am I establishing an author brand or have I niched myself into a corner? Can I experiment with voice or will I get laughed at by critics? Do I even have it in me to write a WHOLE OTHER BOOK?

Now that you’ve finished at least one book, you might feel like you’ve got this shit nailed. But the tricky thing about writing is that every time you open a blank page, you are starting from scratch. And every time you face a blank page, you are forced to meet yourself there, again and again. No matter whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction. There’s no escaping yourself and that’s what makes it so hard, so vulnerable and potentially, so transformative.

My latest book, Raising Boys Who Do Better: A Hopeful Guide for a New Generation, came out last month. Foolishly, I had it in the back of my mind that writing this book would be a relative breeze. In some ways, it was harder. I had so much Resistance — the negative force that pushes back when you try to do something that matters, as Steve Pressfield talks about in The War of Art.

I also had to deal with the impostor syndrome (a close cousin of Second Book Syndrome) that whispered in my ear that I didn’t have another book in me. That I had used up all my smart ideas and pretty words. That I should stick to short form content and leave the real writing to the professionals.

So how did I get over this? What can you do when you’re in the throes of Second Book Syndrome and feeling like you’ll never write another sentence again? Here are a few things that helped me:

Make a Plan

If you identify as a ‘pantser’ rather than a ‘plotter’, you’re probably shaking your head at this. But it doesn’t have to be a full proposal or outline. Your plan can be as simple as a journal entry, a short mission statement, a sentence describing your premise, or a note to self about what you’d like your reader to learn, feel and experience. Making a plan and reviewing it from time to time can help keep your project alive when you’re suffering from self-doubt, comparisonitis and other symptoms of Second Book Syndrome.

Give Yourself Permission

The only way to release yourself from the pressure of writing your next book is to liberate yourself. Give yourself permission to write badly. I mean, really really badly. Permission to write something that sounds nothing like what you wrote before. Permission to play, to dream, to procrastinate. Permission to research until your head is bursting. For every project, I always keep a notebook so I can write by hand and make a mess and scribble pages of absolute drivel. I can spend hours writing around the edges of what I’m actually trying to explore. I encourage you to start every new project by writing yourself a permission slip. When you give yourself permission, the words might stick and splutter for a while but eventually, they flow. After that, the magic is in the edit.

Drown Out the Noise

We’re surrounded by noise all day, from social media traffic to our own mental chatter to those Amazon reviews (gulp). It’s hugely distracting and can be a drain on your creativity and confidence. Look for ways to drown this out, whether that’s through meditation, writing retreats, long nature walks or journalling. My simplest trick is to put on some noise-cancelling headphones and turn the music up. This might sound counterintuitive but listening to music puts me in a headspace for writing without any filters. Also, as a mother who writes around her family life (the kitchen table is my office), I’ve used headphones for years to signal that I’m at work and to keep the cacophony of my kids at bay.

Get Drunk

When you have another book to write, it’s easy to feel lost at the beginning. What to write and how to say it? When this happens, I immerse myself in storytelling. The poet Charles Baudelaire famously said one should ‘Always Be Drunk’ and it’s a quote that I live by. I don’t mean Hemingway-style binges, I mean being drunk on stories. I consume books, podcasts, films, TV shows, songs, art shows, conversations, eavesdropping, everyday life. I feed my habit and my habit feeds my writing.

Focus on What You Can Control

Creativity is mostly trial and error. Art is subjective and you can’t control how your work will be received by an audience or by critics. Often, success hinges on an indefinable mix of luck, talent, hard work, timing, money, network, reputation and… did I mention luck? Through all this, the only thing you can control is how you show up. I do my best to show up for my readers in a way that’s engaging, impactful and entertaining — both on the page and in real life. Other than that, the rest is not up to me. All I can do is keep showing up.

Track Changes

When you’re editing a piece of work, it can be helpful to track changes on a document. But this isn’t what I’m talking about here. What I mean is keeping track of the changes that happen because you had the courage to put your work into the world. I screenshot comments from readers on social media who tell me my books have changed the way they think about race and identity. I save a file of testimonials from parents who say I’ve shaped how they talk to their children about these tricky topics. I also keep notes on what I’ve learned and how I’ve grown while writing a book. All this is a reminder that so much of writing (and reading) isn’t just about the product or the story but about who we are becoming through the process.

Lean On Your People

Probably the most useful thing you can do as a writer is to find your people and lean on them. Obviously your closest friend/partner/family member who enjoys your writing or offers great advice can be invaluable. But as a writer, your people are other writers and it’s essential that you seek them out. Follow #writercommunity hashtags on social media, join a writers’ group or membership, befriend other newbie authors when your book comes out. You need to be in community with other writers who get it. Especially when Third Book Syndrome comes knocking…

NaNoWriMo Writers Board member Uju Asika is a multi-award nominated blogger, former journalist and TV screenwriter. She is the author of Bringing Up Race: How to Raise a Kind Child in a Prejudiced World and the picture book A World for Me and You (Where Everyone Is Welcome). Her new book Raising Boys Who Do Better: A Hopeful Guide for a New Generation came out on June 1. You can order the book for free worldwide delivery on Wordery: https://wordery.com/raising-boys-who-do-better-uju-asika-9780241608418

Uju is launching a creative writing service for developing and aspiring writers, learn more here!

[ofmermaidstories]

hello, please have this list of sunday evening thoughts & things & questions without any real answers:

1.

“Gaza is basically a man-made hell on earth”, by Jeremy Scahill. A interview with a Toronto surgeon, Yasser Khan, about his latest medical mission into Gaza, and the destruction facing the people and the health-infrastructure there.

I had one young man, about 25 years old, he lost one eye that I took out myself. He spent about five, six, or seven years, basically spent thousands and thousands of dollars in IVF treatment because he got married young and they wanted to have a child and they couldn’t have one. So he spent years on IVF treatment and finally had a baby that was 3 months old. And there was a missile attack by Israel at his home. He lost his entire family, including his baby and his wife and his parents and family. He’s by himself, single guy. I took his one eye out, and he has nobody in this world. He just kind of walks around the tent structures, just kind of walking around with no home and trying to sleep wherever he can.

i genuinely wonder at what a future with israel looks like. not just with the palestinians they’ve displaced, but like, with the rest of the world. israel will be dismantled, eventually, but until then how long is this misery going to be allowed to drag on? the US (and UK) are like—encouraging it. they want it, it’s always been in their joint interest that israel be established. idk. i have no doubt they’ll let that genocidal boot camp of a settlement run rampant like the brain-washed, blood-thirsty nazi wave they are, but all things give—this can’t carry on. the horror our varying governments force on us by watching it will have to boil over, eventually. the question is just—how, when. capitalism has done a bang-up job of separating us in the west from each other. you can’t take down your government if you don’t know your neighbour’s name. :/

2. these comments, on the youtube videos i’ve recently watched.

This first comment was a response to @/mynameismarines book review, ‘is to gaze upon wicked gods a colonizer romance?’. i find colonizer/colonized pairings to be intensely interesting, because they’re so often done so badly LMAO. i am not a person who believes there are topics/things you’re not allowed to write; everything is fair game. but the price of that is that you have to do it well, and by well i mean like—you have to ask yourself the question, “what does this mean for the people involved?” and you have to answer it. and you have to be prepared that at the end of the day the audience you invite might not agree with your answer!!! like, i think people in the romance/YA spheres think of colonizer/colonized as like, shorthand for a power-imbalance trope (which it does involve!) but it’s like, more than you know, some Billionaire/Secretary cliche. it’s literally the question of, ‘can you come to care about someone who is currently perpetuating the misery of your people?’ Like!!! that is a big question!!!!!!!!!! and you have to do the asking of it, the thesis of your book, justice. and that is a hard thing to do!!!!!! most of us tend to like… not like people who hurt the other people we love, LOL. so if you’re going to write that, you have to work overtime with it.

i’m sharing this comment here because it’s particularly addressing molly x. chang’s (the author of to gaze) knee-jerk reaction to (genuine, thoroughly detailed) negative reviews. which on one hand is understandable: molly was one of the targets in the goodreads sock-puppet review bombing, by one of her peers. but her reaction to these genuine reviews (brought to her attention by a third party!) has been an interesting case-study in like, why the lines between fanfic communities and traditional publishing blurring is a bad thing. because @/aclutteredlife is right, we have different rules here in our community that properly published books have, with their readers!!! i think it’s natural, for instance, for readers to be drawn to a proxy (Reader-chan for us) to be put in a position that generates a lot of angst (losing your family to a raid by a band of fantasy barbarians, for example), because that angst creates an opportunity for The Romance (the comfort, the understanding, the regret and then the assimilation into a new life with ur romance at the centre, cherished wife of the Hot Fantasy Barbarian Husband). in a fanfic, if you have issues with how it’s being presented, you might leave a dissatisfied comment—(“why is she forgetting that Hot Fantasy Barbarian Husband murdered her entire family???”)—but the general understanding is that it’s not for you, at that stage!!! like it’s probably some 14 year old kid that’s just recently discovered captivity tropes or something, like sure you can be annoyed or frustrated but if the writer doesn’t want to answer (or be asked!!!) those questions move on, you know? you didn’t spend money on this, you can hit the back button and find a different fic. complain about it to the group chat if you absolutely have to, LOL. but move on.

but when it’s a traditionally published book who’s author was supposedly given an advance for it the size of half a million dollars? half a million dollars that the publisher is going to try and make back by selling it to readers like you, who will part with your hard-earnt money for a copy? yeah. we’re not a community just trying to entertain each other and ourselves anymore, at that stage. you made a transaction. a transaction to then engage with this piece of art, and the transaction part of that exchange means you get to ask those hard, uncomfortable questions—especially if the art in question doesn’t.

this point kinda bleeds into the next one, tho, so i’ll let the screenshot speak for itself:

LOL. yeah….. yeah. yeah. 🥹

the third comment is from the same video as the second (booktok, brainrot, and why it’s okay to be a hater), but i thought the highlighted part was interesting because it like, kinda made me think of the way things work around here on tumblr, in our fanfic corners LOL. like… you know. how we might share little soundbites about ideas, or just a throw away couple of sentences about an AU or character. and we all do it, that’s the culture of our community, i just find it interesting—telling—that it’s such a… quick and almost guaranteed way of like, getting enmeshed into the community, getting followers, etc etc etc.

like i said, these are just some thoughts & things without any real answers to them. i am always happy to hear ur opinions too (unless they are wrong in which case i regret to inform u we will have to knife fight over it 😔😌🫱🏽🔪).

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

There’s a lot of grossly simplified, unsympathetic, or outright misinformation-filled media about the Yeerk war and the Animorphs in the years following the end of the war. Does anyone write something that is actually truly resonant with the survivors and victims?

Huh. I feel like this is a classic case of "tastes vary."

Sometimes a play can depict a real experience so well it leaves you sobbing cathartic tears — but it leaves your friend with the same experience checking their phone every 5 minutes. (True story.) Some people love dark humor about their own trauma. Some people will find dark humor about trauma disturbing and disrespectful. I dislike Glass Onion because its discussion of COVID and classism is about as substantive as cotton candy, but I have friends who felt it was exactly the cotton candy they needed after the horrible years of eating road salt.

I remember my grandmother getting upset when Twilight Zone played an air raid siren — she lived through real atom bomb drills, and said repeatedly it was "inappropriate" for a fictional show to use that noise. But then I've had a few close calls with tornadoes, and I've only ever felt a shiver of anticipation when storm sirens go off in movies. It varies by experience, it varies by person, it varies.

It's hard to say what will resonate with survivors after the Yeerk-Human War. The obvious answer would be anything written by a fellow survivor — Jake's memoir probably rings truer than some civilian's post-hoc biography would. Even then, historical inaccuracy can be deeply cathartic (R.F. Kuang's Babel). Or it can be disturbing enough to ruin a story (Our Flag Means Death). It's hard to say, and you only need look at Goodreads to know: one person's offensive schlock is another's favorite reflection of their own experiences.

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

Do you have any books to recommend for people who are new to writing but want to get into it? Ive got some money to spend on books and I’m not sure where to start, and I don’t wanna buy something that’s not worth it :,) but you’re one of my favourite writers and I trust that your taste is good considering your writing is beautiful 🫶🏾

ANONNNNN I’M SO SORRY THIS IS SUCH A LATE RESPONSE 😭😭😭 i spent … a little too much time stressing over what books to include. and how to describe them. blame my faulty brain ok!!!

BUTTTT first of all!!! i’m so honoured that you’d think to ask me this!!!! and that you trust my taste!!!!!! that you think my writing is beautiful (i sobbed btw) YOU’RE SUCH A SWEETHEART… thank you very much 🥺🥺

i decided to make a list of some of my overall favorites, but pls remember that writing is subjective!!!! i hope you can find at least one or two books on this list that intrigues you, and that you’ll end up liking the way they’re written too, but. y’know. there’s never any guarantee!!! i added links that’ll take you to goodreads, where you can check the summaries and reviews of each book to hopefully make the process easier for you 🫡🫡

with that being said!!! here are some ari book recs just for you <3333

war of the foxes - richard siken

my absolute favorite poetry collection, from my absolute favorite poet <3333 i’m assuming that you’re looking for novels rather than poetry but. i HAD to rec this one. because i love it soooooo dearly and it’s inspired my writing so much!!!! siken’s use of language is just …… sooooo tasty. so good. i’m completely obsessed with him. his other poetry collection is called crush and centers around tenderness/sex/violence (and the ways they blur together), but i’d say this collection is more about. art. making art. it’s also about love and war and. lots of things. but art is a big theme. paint on paint. etc. it made me severely ill in the best of ways <33 i really couldn’t recommend it enough!!!

eureka street - robert mcliam wilson

this book is . sooooo underrated 😔😔 i hate it so much. not the book i just hate that it isn’t widely renowned because it SHOULD BE. i read this for one of my high school english classes and it. changed my brain chemistry forever. it’s so good. wilson’s writing is so insanely gorgeous?? it reminds me so much of the writing in disco elysium (my fav video game + biggest writing source 🙏)…. honestly i think it’s worth reading for the writing alone. anyway!! this is a book about love. it starts with the quote ”all stories are love stories.” it’s also about the troubles, which is a conflict between catholics and protestants in ireland during the late 1900s. this book takes place at the end of a period of terror and bombings, but still manages to be about love first and foremost. the main characters are charming and silly and kind of insane in the head <33 this book is VERY funny btw… it had me laughing out loud a lot but also had me feeling so much. it’s so, so heartfelt. you can tell wilson loves belfast. and you can tell belfast loves its people. this book is so special to me and i don’t think i can explain its entire appeal with just words, so you’re just gonna have to trust me when i say it’s wonderful <33

the human flies - hans olav lahlum

do you like murder mysteries 👀👀….. i do. this is my favorite one. it’s very near and dear to my heart!!! the human flies is a classic whodunnit where a man has been killed in his apartment complex, and the other residents are all suspects. it’s about trauma. kind of. and it has a really good historial twist where it turns out that they’re all connected through ww2… but i think the greatest charm point of this book (aside from the mystery) is its characters!! they’re all really vibrant and charming. or not so charming. but they’re hard not to get attached to i think!!! this book also subverts the detective genre by making its detective really useless which i love <333 he ends up being contacted by a girl in a wheelchair who’s basically sherlock holmes and she does all the mystery solving. it’s great. if you’re into the murder mystery genre then i really recommend this one!!

beartown - fredrick backman

THIS BOOK . god. this is another one that i can’t really talk about coherently because it means so much to me. i think every single person on this planet should be strapped to a chair and forced to read it <333 this is a book about…. literally everything. if i had to pick just one thing it’d be community. but like… it’s about family. it’s about friendship. it’s about hockey. it’s about sexual violence and locker-room culture and their devastating consequences. it’s about cherry blossoms and the hope they carry. it’s about healing. it’s about a small town and the people who live in it. every single one of them are interesting. when it comes to the actual plot… i think it’s best to go in blind but i doooo feel obligated to tell you that the center of the book’s conflict is a rape. the first half of the book introduces beartown, its famous hockey team, its people and their stories. the second half deals with the consequences of this rape. backman wrote this book so, so thoughtfully. the topic is obviously sensitive but you don’t need to worry about the perpetrator not getting what’s coming to him, because he will. and ohhhhh BOY backman’s writing. his writing is so unbelievably pretty. that’s the best word for it. he’s literally carrying swedish literature on his bare shoulders. holy fuck. in conclusion; this is maybeeee my favorite book of all time? and you should read it :3 it’s very long but i promise it feels so fast once you get into it. it’s the kind of book that i think everyone can fall in love with!!!! it really did change my life i think.

the travelling cat chronicles - hiro arikawa

honestly, i think this is the book i’d recommend to you the most!! not because of quality (though definitely that too!!) but because i think it’s perfect for someone who’s just getting into reading. minus points for being kindaaa long but that’s all!! i think i should preface this by saying that this book made me cry LMAO. ugly cry. sob. i’ve never cried so hard reading a book before…. it wasn’t a bad cry though!! this book is sad but it’s also so charming and hopeful and sweet. it’s about a cat who travels around the country with his owner satoru(!!), not knowing where they’re going or why they’re going there. the kitty is the narrator and he’s sooo charming. satoru is too. their dynamic is so precious :(((( if you love cats then you’ll love this book, trust me!! anyway… to me this is a great pick for new readers because the writing is super pretty but also really. easy to chew? the story is also written in a very compelling way which should make it a pretty quick read despite its lenght!! it’s very much a roadtrip book :3 i love it a lot and even though it made me cry i consider it a bigggg comfort read (but i’m a jjk fan so take that with a grain of salt)

the stranger - albert camus

ok so!!! i did try not to add any classic books to this list because honestly i don’t think many of them are good introductions to reading. the educational system could learn from me . BUT…. this is one that i think you can get really hooked on even if you don’t study literature. this is a book about . existentialism. or just apathy (and overcoming it)… the protagonist doesn’t really want much in life. he just follows the herd. he’s basically like…. just some guy?? but also very much Not just some guy. because just some guys don’t answer their girlfriend’s proposal with ”if you want to.” or chainsmoke. or kill a guy because ”the sun was too hot.” yeah. he’s very charming (<- worrying taste in men), very weird and very interesting. most analyses on this book are just attempts to diagnose him. the central conflict of the book is the murder he commits, and the trial that follows, where the attention shifts from his actual murder to… the fact that he didn’t cry at his mother’s funeral. hm. this book is really fun. :3 and i love camus’ writing!!! like many books on this list it’s pretty but easy to chew, so i think you’ll enjoy it. read if you want to Think about life. or if you want to see meursault have his bisexual awakening in the middle of a murder trial.

the great gatsby - f. scott fitzgerald

jay gatsby they will never make me hate you…. remember what i just said about not wanting to add classics to this list? the great gatsby is another exception <333 honestly i just . really love this book!!! it’s such a short and tasty read!!!!! i’ve heard that american students really hate it because they were forced to read it and like . i sympathize but 🤨 c’mon. there are sooo many classics that are so much more hellish to read for school…. they don’t know how good they have it……. anyway. the writing is very pretty and the descriptions are soooo…. captivating. so many lines are stuck in my brain. (”they’re a rotten crowd. you’re worth the whole damn bunch put together” my BELOVED <333) people will tell you that this book is about the futility of the american dream and it IS but i also think you should make your own interpretation!!! because there are lots to make. personally i favour the queer one <33 because i’m…. me. gatsby is just . such a tragic character. but also so pathetic. and charming. he’s one of my og meowmeows. this book is worth reading if only for him. i need to dip him in olive oil.

kafka on the shore - haruki murakami

…. sigh . look 😔😔 do i like haruki murakami? no. do i like his writing? unfortunately yes. this book is fucking wild and kind of gross in . a plethora of ways (tw for umm cat beheadings? almost rape (in a dream)? fantasy incest kind of maybe…?? it’s not as bad as it sounds but like. it kinda is. idk.) but for some reason it’s still one of my favorites. i feel like murakami’s classic blend between fantasy and reality stays the same throughout his works and it’s just….. reallyyyyy tasty to me. i think that’s why i still think of this book so often. it really really moved me. and i mean…. let’s face it, his writing is very pretty. this is a book about growing up and it really doesn’t shy away from the discomforting topics that come with that. it’s also about talking cats and mommy issues. kafka has lots of them. i think he’s kind of annoying. the other characters are very charming though!! in this book you basically follow two different plot lines, and both are really captivating imo… buuuut the book is Very Long and very weird so i don’t know if i’d recommend it to someone who’s just getting into reading 😭 it really is very good though… if nothing else, read it for the Vibes. they’re very tasty.

waiting for godot - samuel beckett

this is a fun one <333 and a weird one. NOT a good rec for a new reader lmao but i do have to add it because i adore samuel beckett…. and this is my favorite play!!!!!! it’s usually associated with absurdism which i think says enough on its own. this is a play about…. waiting for godot. that’s all <3 the two main characters, didi and gogo, are basically stuck in a timeloop where they wait for godot to come. he doesn’t. they keep waiting. i adore this play for many reasons but some of them are: timeloops my beloved (1), didi & gogo are super funny and gay and their back-and-forth dialogue kinda turns into poetry sometimes (2), it’s SO much fun to analyze (3). godot can literally be whatever you want him to be. that’s so fun!!!! it’s a weird play but if you want to get into reading plays then… it’ll be here <33

giovanni’s room - james baldwin

aaaand finally!!!! this lovely gem <333 i’m actually not completely finished with it myself but i can tell you that it’s already one of my favorites!!!!! it’s about . shame. and tenderness. and morality. all that good stuff :3 i’ll try to keep this short but . basically…. it centers around a closeted gay/bisexual man who goes on vacation to paris while his girlfriend is vacationing in spain. in a certain bar, he meets a certain barman, whose name is giovanni. they really hit it off. sadly they’re doomed by the narrative. goshhhh this book is just. ough. first of all??? james baldwin is SO . fucking good. his prose is so gorgeous. soooo so gorgeous. worth reading just for that. but the dynamic between david and giovanni is …… so lovely??? and the glimpse you get into their heads is just so. beautiful. :((( this book is so SAD . but also not really. it’s bittersweet. david has to choose between a safe life and a happy life and he’s doomed to choose the safe life. that’s all there is to it.

aaaaand those are my recs !!!! i feel like i’m forgetting some really good ones……. but i don’t want to keep you waiting any longer :’3 i really hope this helps anon!!! i’m so excited that you’re getting into reading!!!!!!!! it’s really just a matter of finding writing that you actually like. i recommend searching up some quotes from each book, just to get a feel for the writing itself!!! pls know that i’m cheering you on in your reading journey 🫂🫂🫂

(and if you end up reading any of these then. pls do let me know!!! i’d love to hear your thoughts 🥺)

[olderthannetfic]

It's not unusual for shitty authors to go after competition. Not even that rare to have really shitty bigoted reasons for it, kinda interesting to see one of these actually blow up. I've heard it mostly be handled internally by the publishing houses, agents and lawyers though, I didn't know the authors themselves are expected to intervene.

like so many are shocked rn abt smth like that happening, but I guess some ppl only get all their drama from big names opening the doors and don't know abt the rest of the times it happens. Queer stories regularly get review bombed by queerphobes. Queer stories getting review bombed by other queers. Pocs get review bombed by racists. Pocs review bombing other pocs happens a lot. Problematic stories getting review bombed by the book-version of antis and pearl clutchers. Authors top rating their books with sockpuppets or just asking friends and family to give full star reviews, pretty commonplace. Sending threats to publishers or reporting other authors. The publishing world is just filled with assholes, guess this time the stars aligned and ppl get to see one of the 1000s of times this happens regularly.

Guess racist white woman going bananas on X with fake screenshots and blaming her racism on her racism-meds and an imaginary friend, while her real friends joining is just more spicy than all the other situations. Fair tbh, racist going bananas blaming it on the racism-meds and imaginary friend is more exciting that most of the times I see it, most ppl are honestly kinda boring when they get caught. But it gets especially spicy when the receipts are publicized by THE [Name redacted]!!! Woohoo drama, this person is know for their hot hot youtube essays, let's go and watch this drama!!! Top rated influencer! Damn look at all that drama!!! Look at this spice! Choo choo coming through with the pathos folks! Woop woop. Not speaking against [redacted] but I think people can all agree that this situation only blew up because [redacted] has the social media presence they have, because otherwise it would've disappeared the same way all the other times these things happen in the publishing world. Probably dealt with internally sooner or latter, or not at all fuck if I know.

People wanna have a bit of current drama, be outraged, from seeing how drama happens in a different field. I'm anticipating that most the people reacting to it rn are gonna forget about it in a few weeks because it's not current enough. I do actually wanna see if people being angry right now, claiming they wanna support the debuts are actually going to buy the books when they do come out next year, or if it's just a reaction to "issue of the week". Would be cool for the debuts to get some extra sales, but who knows normally this publishing drama goes nowhere. TL:DR Just read the entire thing or don't. lol

--

It's not unusual, especially on Goodreads. This particular instance is a little juicier than some because a bunch of these people were friends in Reylo circles.

This isn't the only one to blow up though. They don't all make it to my tumblr, but they do often make it further than just behind publishers' closed doors.

[crowcaws]

Rant incoming: Yes, it's both good for you and fine to enjoy books that are mindless, fun, and tick boxes for you. I think we also have to remember that we're not 80s housewives trading $2 paperbacks back and forth.

Every time you post about a book ESPECIALLY to Tiktok and Instagram, you are helping to advertise it. Yes, even if you're not a big account, you are helping those phrases to trend by posting about them, commenting on other posts about them, putting those keywords in posts. You do not exist in a vacuum on social media, people will see it and form opinions based on your advertisement. If you're not honest about the quality of a book when feeding its name into the algorithm, then you are also feeding your own wave of evil haters who are yucking your yum.

Because those haters are people who have now dropped real life money on your "mindless indulgent read" because so many people said it's the best thing they have ever read, and then what they get is Icebreaker. They are now very understandably irritated and have a vendetta against that book they wouldn't have spent $20 on if we didn't start teaching ourselves that 5⭐ = it had all the tropes I like.

Don't get me wrong, my shelves are almost ENTIRELY self indulgent or nostalgia reads. I partake in the garbage! I'm in the dumpster with the rest of the raccoons! However, I don't really post much about my reads unless I believe they are genuinely good, well written, and that others might get something out of them. I also don't read as much because I feel I can no longer trust recommendations from others. A book I thought was mindless fun gets review bombed on goodreads, a book others think is mindless fun but it's more popular on Booktok, or it has a more grumpy more broody MMC, or it has a weird sex scene that people talk about, gets over 4 stars. There is no standard.

If you don't know how to review a book at least a little bit objectively (and this might ruffle some feathers) then maybe you shouldn't be reviewing them at all.

[mermaidsirennikita]

The Cait Corrain situation is entirely Cait's fault, but I can't help but think about how it indicates how uneducated some writers are about the realities of publishing and what is "good" versus what is "bad".

Cait, based on screenshots compiled of what she said and screenshots she gave of what "Lilly" (the person Cait made up and was pretending to be to take blame off herself) was insecure about her advance and the marketing of her book. She clearly thought she was at some kind of disadvantage, which--along with plain old jealousy and cruelty--led her to review bomb other books (like, to a delusional extent imo--giving Thea Guanzon's The Hurricane Wars wasn't going to stop that well-marketed book with a big built-in fandom thanks to the extremely popular fic it was adapted from, from being successful; she also review-bombed Ali Hazelwood, one of the most popular contemporary romance authors right now, who again writes contemporaries that didn't have much crossover appeal with Cait's books anyway).

Things in Cait's advantage that many, many other authors don't have:

A) Cait is a white woman, which according to publishing trends and also, I don't know, reality, is automatically an advantage.

B) Cait had a $75K advance. I don't know much about Cait's series plans, I don't know her deal, this could've been anticipated to stretch over multiple books. But advances, especially right now, are not FABULOUS for most authors. This, based on what I've seen, was pretty solid coming from the imprint publishing Cait's book, for an adult fantasy with some romance (perhaps enough to market as "romantasy", whatever that is). Which, by the way, is having a bit of a moment, so that was in her favor too. $75K, meant to stretch over a year or more, most likely, is not exactly "quit your day job" money. But the typical author doesn't quit their day job, especially not early. I can think of some authors a lot of people would consider pretty successful who still maintain part or full time jobs, often coming from dual income households.

C) Cait was known (positively) by the reylos, who've had a good bit of success in making books sell.

D) Cait was friends with successful authors like, again, Thea Guanzon, who blurbed her book and met her in person. Having a successful author invested in your work matters, especially when they share your genre space. See: Ali Hazelwood blurbing reylo books. It can help a lot and made it even clearer that this book could potentially appeal to reylos at least.

The reality is that marketing issues with trad books stem to the publisher, almost always. I don't know why some trad books are pushed more than others; I can speculate, but I don't think a lot of authors know the exact formula either. Marketing books is hard. But Goodreads rankings aren't going to make or break your book. Tbh, as much as GR and Amazon are connected these days, Amazon probably has a larger effect on your book making it or breaking it than GR (and it's harder to review bomb on Amazon, especially when the book hasn't come out yet).

It's just... so ugly and so stupid.

[tairona-is-taken]

A review of Truce at Bakura

(Originally posted to my RL Goodreads account a few years ago.)

Unevenly written, but super fun. This book picks up 24 hours after Return of the Jedi ends, and it’s billed as the book that wraps up the loose threads from ROTJ. I would say it only 50% delivers on that. It does do a good job of portraying Imperial/Rebel relations now that the Emperor is dead and the two sides have to work together to defend Bakura (an Imperial world) from whoever the aliens are who are invading from outside the galaxy (the Ssiruuk?). There’s a great scene in particular where the Imperial governor of Bakura doesn’t believe the Emperor is dead at first, but when Leia tells him Vader killed the Emperor, the governor is like, “Oh never mind, I take it back—that jerk? I TOTALLY believe he killed the Emperor.”

But the book only does a mediocre job of wrapping up the emotional threads after ROTJ, which is what I was really looking forward to. Luke is struggling with the health effects of the Emperor’s Force lightning, which is interesting, but apparently he’s 100% over the emotional trauma of what happened on the 2nd Death Star. Han has zero thoughts on the revelation that Luke and Leia are siblings (one day was apparently all it took for that truth bomb to sink in). I will give Tyers credit that Leia does struggle a lot with the revelation that Darth Vader is her father, and there’s even a scene where she meets Anakin’s Force ghost, BUT unfortunately Tyers just isn’t great at writing emotions/interiority, and so all of Leia’s angsting over this just comes off as predictable and lacking in true depth.

With that said, the story is still a fun romp that feels reminiscent of Star Trek: The Original Series, and I enjoyed it a lot.

Things that I liked, in no particular order:

- Leia is a total boss in this story. It’s clear she’s been coaching Luke and Han on diplomatic protocol now that they’re trying to form an alliance with the Bakuran Imperials—and in one scene it’s even clear that she told the guys to let her do the talking because they don’t know what they’re doing. LOL. This was a relief after The Thrawn Trilogy, where she gets talked over by other characters a lot.

- Luke gets promoted to fleet commander in this book and he kind of sucks at first. He gets better at being a leader as the book goes on, but in the first battle, he ends up leaning heavily on his flagship captain, Tessa Manchisco. Tessa is pretty amused by his inexperience, but is chill enough that she doesn’t rub it in, while Luke recognizes that she’s more competent than him, and is fine with following her lead. I loved their dynamic.

- Han at one point tries to romance Leia aboard the Falcon and asks Chewie to set up a romantic nook on the ship for a date. Chewie instead just puts together a bed where Han and Leia can get it on. Hahaha, at least Leia takes it in stride.

- At the end of the book, Luke pulls rank so that he can fly a TIE fighter, which he’s apparently always wanted to try—it’s one of the most gleefully in-character moments he has in the book.

- The Imperial characters are pretty nuanced. Gaeriel (Luke’s love interest) in particular is super ordinary—which is refreshing in the Star Wars universe. She supports the Empire in the way that most real people support the countries we live in—because we’re stuck here, so even when our home countries do bad things, it’s instinctual to try to move past it and look for the good.

- At one point, Luke Force heals this senile old lady who Gaeriel is taking care of and who Luke suspects got her mind kriffed up by the Empire. At the end of the book, this old lady turns out to be a complete badass who helps save the day with Gaeriel as her side kick. I just loved seeing an old person use their wisdom and experience to kick ass for once, instead of it always being the youngsters!

Things to file under “so bad it’s good”:

- At one point, Luke is despairing over his love life, so he calls to the Force ghosts—all three of them; Obi-Wan, Yoda, and Anakin!—because he basically wants dating advice from them. Man, that’s some Anakin-in-the-prequels level of romance fail right there. I guess it’s genetic?

- To be fair, this scene leads to a genuinely moving one where the Force ghosts don’t show up (wisely), but Leia does, and she and Luke have a touching moment of sibling bonding. What I particularly loved is that Leia doesn’t make fun of Luke’s crush on Gaeriel, but is actually relieved because he’s acting like a human being again instead of being super detached like he was in much of ROTJ. This is really the one nod we get to the emotional trauma Luke went through after Empire Strikes Back, and it’s a good one.

Things that were just plain bad:

- Luke keeps mind tricking people left and right in this book, oftentimes for frivolous reasons, and Tyers seems to have no awareness of the ethical implications of this.

- Han gets weirdly jealous in the middle of the book of both Luke’s (totally innocent) interactions with Leia and also this one random Alderaanian officer who kisses Leia’s hand. It makes no sense and it’s like Tyers is trying to just check off the “romantic tension” box.

- In the final battle, Tessa dies—and in fact, Luke’s entire flagship gets vaporized—but neither Luke nor any of the other characters spare a second thought for these deaths. I blame this on bad writing, not on the characters themselves, but it leaves a bad taste in your mouth regardless.

[genericpuff]

The Elephant in the Room - Queer Erasure and Westernization in Lore Olympus (and all its horrid stepchildren)

This is one people have been asking me for a while now, and I've been waiting for the right inspiration to hit, as is required for my ADHD hyperfixation-fueled rants. After recently watching a video that did an objective review of Cait Corrain's Crown of Starlight, I felt now was the time, because Crown of Starlight effectively proves exactly what Lore Olympus - and other Greek myth interpretations like it - has issues with.

And I want to preface this post with one question - why do we keep getting these Greek myth adaptations written by queer women that still wind up perpetuating toxic heteronormative culture?

Buckle up, because this one's HEFTY.

In that aforementioned review of A Crown of Starlight, there were a lot of points that came up about how Cait wrote the female protagonist - Ariadne, wife of Dionysus - where I immediately stopped and went, "Wait, this sounds awfully familiar."

It should be mentioned briefly for anyone who's unaware - Cait Corrain is an author who was recently (and still) under fire for using sock puppet accounts on GoodReads to intentionally sabotage the ratings of other debut authors, many of whom were her own peers or from the same publishing imprint as her (Del Rey), and most of whom were POC. I mentioned in that previous essay that I just linked that Cait Corrain is a fan of Lore Olympus and decided to give it 5 star ratings from these alt accounts, not just de-legitimizing the reputation of the books she bombed, but also the ones that she praised (including her own book, because of course she had to leave an obvious calling card LMAO). I felt it necessary to tie Cait into my discussion of white feminism in LO and its fanbase because people like Cait are exactly who we're talking about when we dissect the intent and consequences of LO's writing - much of its brand of "feminism" seems to only be catered to a specific kind of woman (i.e. white women who fetishize queer people/relationships) and seem to encourage/embrace violence towards women if those women aren't "behaving correctly" or just aren't fortunate enough to be white and rich - and so Cait choosing to give Lore Olympus 5 stars in her hate-raiding and even have it visibly in the background of her headshot photos was... not exactly disproving my argument that these are the types of people LO caters to and encourages, to say the least.

But then I watched Read with Rachel's "Did It Deserve 1 Star" review of Crown of Starlight and it cemented my assumptions and concerns regarding Cait's intentions and influences even more.

As a brief tangent, I've read A Touch of Darkness by Scarlett St. Claire. It very obviously is using Lore Olympus as its blueprints, but it's not super obvious that if you didn't read Lore Olympus or weren't aware of it, you probably wouldn't notice. It's still not a great book on its own, it's riddled with writing problems, but at least it can call itself its own thing to some degree.

Crown of Starlight is just blatant Lore Olympus fanfiction pretending to be original, even down to its marketing (which I'll get to shortly) but swapping out Hades and Persephone with Dionysus and Ariadne, and setting the entire story in space. Why is it in space? There doesn't seem to be any actual necessary reason for this, it just is, go with it. I'd be willing to accept this because changing up the setting of pre-existing stories can be fun (god knows I loved the premise enough of Lore Olympus being a modern day Greek myth retelling that I had to go and make my own version of it that's still in that modern setting) but as RWR says in her review:

"... we're told that it's the 'island' of Crete, but then we talk about commbands, airlocks, [holo-shields] and it wasn't really written in a way that I felt meshed 'Greek retelling' and 'sci-fi' in a cohesive way."

Needless to say, Crown of Starlight unsurprisingly suffers from the same problems Lore Olympus does, where it will try to "subvert" the original myths by changing their setting and characters and then doing absolutely nothing interesting with them to justify those changes.

To really drive my point home that Crown of Starlight is undoubtedly Lore Olympus fanfiction, Lore Olympus was literally used as a comparison point in Crown of Starlight's marketing which is a fair tactic to use to advertise to a specific niche or demographic, and while some have argued that Cait isn't technically the one to come up with that marketing jargon, it's made much more clear that she used that comparison herself when writing and pitching the book because it is quite literally just Lore Olympus with a different couple in space, right down to the main female protagonist being part of a purity cult. And of course it wouldn't be a bad Wattpad romance if it didn't have our main female protagonist Ariadne talking about how inconvenient her MASSIVE BREASTS are and of COURSE Ariadne is a poor innocent uwu babygirl who needs a man to come in and rescue her from the evil purity cult and of COURSE it hints at them eventually having raunchy sex just for it to wind up being milquetoast bondage and of COURSE it all just winds up taking traditionally queer characters and stories and turning them into this sanitized Disney-esque plotline where the boy and girl were always meant to be together and nothing else matters except their love-

And that, at its core, really just screams "this is bad LO fanfiction". From the stylization of the book's writing which never outgrew its "adorkable fanfiction writing" phase-

"Realizing that I'm being gaslit by my entire world doesn't make it easier to deal with, but hey, at least I still have some part of my soul!" - an excerpt from Crown of Starlight quoted from RWR's review timestamp 13:03

-to the "creative" choices made to turn Ariadne into a chastity cult girl whose resolution is obviously going to be to have what's implied to be dirty raunchy sex just for it to be like... the most tame level one bondage stuff;

-to the classic "she breasted boobily down the stairs" focus on Ariadne's body and breasts and sex appeal that's being kept in check by that pesky purity club.

And that's really disappointing because I had seen people say, "Yeah, Cait did an awful thing and deserves to be removed from her publishing schedule, but it's a shame that that book was written by Cait because it's actually a really good book!" because now it's just making me even more sus of people's Greek myth adaption recommendations (I'm still mad at BookTok for convincing me that A Touch of Darkness was worth reading). All I could think while listening to some of the excerpts quoted by RWR was that if I didn't know about Cait Corrain and read Crown of Starlight blind, I'd undoubtedly assume it was being written by a heterocis guy... but it's in fact being written by a queer woman.

And this is where I segue into talking about the root of this problem, where the calls are really coming from - Lore Olympus and its erasure of queer identities and relationships, despite also being written by a queer woman who should know better.

I could think of no better character to help carry this essay than Eros.

Unlike many of the characters in LO that Rachel has managed to straightwash by changing their motives entirely or straight up changing their identity from the source material (ex. Zeus, Apollo, Crocus who was turned into a flower nymph, Dionysus and Achilles because they're both literally babies, the list goes on), Eros has largely remained the same on paper who had zero reason to not be queer within the story.

Eros is still the god of love in this, he's still a guy and presumed to be an adult, but we NEVER see or explore him having relationships with anyone other than Psyche, aside from a brief mention of organizing orgies in the beginning that's used as a quick joke and then promptly never mentioned again.

Just like with Crown of Starlight and A Touch of Darkness and all these other "dark romance" stories, it's that brand of "pretends to be sexually liberating but isn't actually" writing, where they'll briefly mention orgies or sex-related things and then beat around the bush or avoid involving them entirely like a kid at Sunday school who doesn't want to say the word "penis".

(fr out of all the corny and awful slang for genitals I've seen used in stories like this, "a certain part of my anatomy" is definitely one of the most boring and stupid, like for god's sakes Hades you're both adults and at the beginning of this comic you thought she wanted to bang in the kitchen, why are you suddenly talking like a 7 year old boy LOL)

All that aside, while Eros might still be hinted at being queer and sex-positive, it's only as vaguely as possible so that the story can quickly move on to focus on him and Psyche or, better yet, Hades and Persephone. When Eros isn't deadset on finding Psyche, he's being the gay best friend for Persephone, who he has NO right having a friendship with when he introduced himself by intentionally getting her as drunk as possible with the intent of dumping her in Hades' car as per his mom's command. It's brushed off later as "well Aphrodite maaade him do it, for Psycheee!" but Eros still agreed to potentially put Persephone in danger over a relationship that had NOTHING to do with her and was also mostly his fault in its fallout (which Artemis calls him out for, but of course, like all the other times characters have called out the actual issues in the story they're inhabiting, they get brushed aside so that Persephone can talk about Hades):

Now, the Eros and Psyche plotline is one I've talked about before here and not the focus of this essay so I'll keep this tangent brief, but it's absolutely wild to me that Rachel took a story about a woman going to the ends of the earth to prove her love for someone whose trust she broke (a common theme in a lot of Greek myth stories, such as the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice) and turned it into... woman of color gets turned into a nymph slave for Aphrodite to 'test' Eros, a test that isn't clear at all in what it's trying to achieve, and wait hold up, didn't Eros actually fail that test by kissing Ampelus while completely unaware that it was Psyche-

This is just that episode of Family Guy where Peter justifies emotionally cheating and eventually physically cheating on Lois because "well you were the phone sex lady the whole time so no harm done!", isn't it? (×﹏×)

Anyways. It's all very convenient that the comic will hint at queer rep just to either have it be a constant question of whether or not they're actually queer (ex. Morpheus) OR to have it be promptly swept under the rug to make way for other characters/plot points. It's like when mongie tried to be "inclusive" by writing a stereotypical vaguely Asian character with no specific ethnicity just to get angry at her fanbase for calling her out on this that you can't just call a vaguely Asian character "representation" of anything (because Asia is MASSIVE and covers so many different ethnicities and languages and cultures).

Eros is only as gay as he needs to be to fill the role of "gay best friend" for Persephone.

Krokos is no longer a male lover of Hermes but a flower nymph created by Persephone because... apparently we can't dare imply that Hermes would be into anyone besides his unrequited childhood love, Persephone.

Achilles is introduced as a baby even though it makes no sense in the comic's own timeline where Odysseus is presumably already a well-known hero in Olympus, so much so that he was invited to the Panathenea.

Apollo is turned into a flat-out rapist who's only concerned with getting Persephone at all costs and when that doesn't work, he tries to get ANOTHER flower nymph (Daphne) who's actually genuinely interested in him (contrary to the original myth, there's that "swap it subversion" Rachel is known for) to cut her hair so she'll resemble Persephone more because we can't have a single plot point not resolve around Persephone.

Despite there being loads of genderbent characters already, Morpheus is supposedly the only one we're supposed to assume is specifically trans and not just a gender-flipped version of a Greek myth character. Why? Not because Rachel stated so explicitly, not because the comic has actually explored her identity as a trans woman, but because the readers just assumed it in good faith and Rachel was clearly fine with taking credit for trans representation that's only there via assumption (and only confirmed via her mods in Discord, which is... not how you establish canon information in your comic, Rachel.)

Hestia and Athena are part of a chastity club, until uh oh how convenient that they're secretly in a relationship with each other even though it further vilifies them and their morals, particularly Hestia who was promptly called out for being a hypocrite for taking Persephone's coat gifted to her from Hades while secretly being in a relationship the whole time. Not only does the Hestia and Athena relationship manage to commit queer erasure - of two gods who are considered icons in the aroace communities - but it also makes the only two lesbians in the story come across as assholes AND ON TOP OF THAT ALSO manages to somehow invalidate queer sex and relationships as being legitimate due to the even deeper implication that breaking their chastity vows "doesn't count" because it's not a male x female relationship. It's the 'ole poophole loophole all over again.

And then there's Artemis, who has MORE REASON THAN EVER TO BE IN THE PLOT but keeps being conveniently ignored. Her finding out about Hestia and Athena doesn't get any more screentime than her going "oh you're in a relationship, okay" , we never see her question the true intentions of TGOEM or what it means to her, we never see her have any opportunity to carve out her identity beyond just being Apollo's twin sister (it tries to at times, but then immediately goes nowhere with it, amounting to just poetic word salad), and she really just comes across as what a lot of people assume aroace people to be - alone and standoffish, because obviously someone who's nice and a good person would be in a relationship, there has to be a reason they don't want to have sex or fall in love, and that reason obviously has to be that they just hate everyone and want to be alone forever (￢_￢;) Then again, like many of the queer characters in LO, I don't know if I can definitively call her aroace because it's kept as vague as possible, and - going by Rachel's answers to these questions way back in her Tumblr era - apparently people can't be gay and ace at the same time-

There are undoubtedly loads more examples that I could cover here but that goes for practically any essay I write about LO - the more you peel it apart, the more you start unearthing some really questionable and frankly mean-spirited stuff. Queer people feel largely ignored in LO, alongside many of its derivative offspring such as A Touch of Darkness and Crown of Starlight, and it really speaks to how so many people - queer women, no less - have somehow managed to bastardize and sanitize what were traditionally very queer stories with queer characters. It's like these people think "olden times" and can only get as far as "women were slaves and men were rich assholes". Like, yeah, okay, that was the case for many cultures, but not all of them, and for some of them it wasn't as clear cut as that, many had misogynist power struggles in them while also still celebrating women and queer people in their own way. Greek myth is full of stories of women being forced into marriage or being made the victims of assault, but many of them are supportive of women and their struggles, unlike works like LO that somehow manage to be less feminist and sympathetic to women and queer people than these works from thousands of years ago.

This is another topic that's surely meant for another post, but it really speaks not only to the straightwashing and whitewashing of Greek myth, but also the Westernizing of it. That's not to say Rachel Smythe and Cait Corrain and Scarlett St. Claire are intentionally trying to whitewash another culture's works here, but if you're raised predominantly on Western media, you're undoubtedly going to absentmindedly adopt ideas about society that are primarily molded around Western beliefs .

And this is apparent in LO, while Rachel is from New Zealand, you can tell she grew up on a lot of Western media and its influences are sorely showing through LO's worldbuilding, character designs, and narrative choices. That "modern setting" that I mentioned before is much less Greek and a lot more adjacent to The Kardashians which lends to the theories that most of the media that Rachel consumes is American. Rather than actually going to the effort of doing her research on Greek culture, she seems to just prefer defaulting to the easiest assumption of how modern society is across the board - a generic Los Angeles clone with big glass skyscrapers and pavement walkways. She rarely ever draws food or clothing from those time periods; despite this story being about gods she's spent so little time on the people who passed on the stories about those gods, the mortals, and the gods themselves rarely feel like gods, rather just like Hollywood celebrities covered in body paint. The clothing feels very generic and uninspired with often very little Greek influence, even though Greek clothing is designed around Mediterranean living which you could do a lot with, to such an egregiously Western degree that Hades and Persephone's wedding was Christian-coded. The food... well, there ISN'T any because as we've seen, like the stereotypical American child, Persephone apparently only wants chicken nuggies and Skittles for dinner, so we never see her eat; and not only do we not see Persephone eat, but Rachel weirdly tries to use Persephone's vegetarianism as some kind of anti-capitalist characterization when much of the Greek diet is predominantly vegetarian. It's NOT HARD or uncommon to be a vegetarian in Greece!

(it looks like they're literally all eating the same thing so IDK what Hera is referring to here, it looks like they're all eating toast and lettuce LMAO)

All that's to say, much of LO - and the books like it that I've gone over here - are written with this idea that every culture - including the one that it's trying to adapt - was subject to the same ideas that Western culture lives by in the modern day - that being a vegetarian is "counterculture" in every culture, that the notion of sexual purity is enforced in the same way it's enforced in the Western education system (cough Christianity cough), that queer or otherwise "unconventional" relationships should stay inside the bedroom and not be seen. As much as Rachel claims she wants to "fight the patriarchy" and "deconstruct purity culture", all she winds up doing is reinforcing it through a Westernized lens, which is, as I've talked about before, very indicative of right-leaning white feminism and what it embraces and promotes - being a "good woman" who follows the rules and willingly becomes part of the system that's oppressing them because that's what "good women" do. Women who are confidant in their sexuality are evil and should be shunned for being "sluts". Women who are in relationships with other women "don't count" as real relationships the same way heteronormative relationships do, and cannot be trusted because they're likely trying to spread an agenda that's designed to brainwash heterocis women. Women should only aim to achieve marriage and their entire personality has to be built around their true love. Women are allowed to be kinky, but only as kinky as roleplaying the exact same gender structures that puts the man in a position to dominate a woman, and it should always and only ever be with her first love who she marries immediately, no one else.

This is exactly what the critics are getting at when they hold LO - and its creator - accountable for the messages it's been sending for five years to its audience of middle aged women and young girls. Having a demographic is fine, if this were just a comic for girls it would be fine, but it becomes a lot more problematic when that demographic is being fed toxic power fantasy stories based on a culture that's being gentrified and sanitized of all its original messaging and characterization right before our eyes. It feels blatantly misinformed from the very beginning in its intention to be a "feminist retelling" of Greek myth, because somehow Lore Olympus manages to be less feminist than these stories drafted and written by men from 2000+ years ago.

I opened this essay with a question: why do we keep getting these Greek myth adaptations written by queer women that still wind up perpetuating toxic heteronormative culture?

I think cases like these really highlight how deep the heteronormative brainwashing from childhood onward goes. That, despite these writers being queer or women, still manage to reinforce the same ideas and tropes and harmful predisposed notions that were designed to be used explicitly against queer people and women. These are things that we can't ever stop challenging, and asking, and truly deconstructing, because it runs deep in many of us who grew up on popular media even as innocent as Disney. Learning about more complex social concepts like sexism and misogyny and queerphobia doesn't automatically absolve us of those very same biases that have been both blatantly and subtly ingrained into us since childhood. All that said, Rachel being bisexual does not mean she's not capable of straightwashing; Cait Corrain being a queer debut author with a POC main character didn't stop them from targeting other POC debut authors at their own imprint; being part of any minority group or identifier does not automatically protect you from perpetuating the cycle that you, too, likely had enforced upon you at some point or another in your life. The fact that these creators and writers are still perpetuating that cycle to begin with is indicative of why it's a cycle at all - it takes work to break on a subconscious level because those cycles are specifically designed to target and hijack the subconscious.

At its worst, do you really think Lore Olympus can claim to be a feminist retelling that's "deconstructing purity culture" when the creator herself admittedly never fully identified or understood sexism until her mid-30's and has the audacity to say her audience is "harsh" on the female characters that she constantly vilifies through her own narrative?

"I feel like female characters in general, people will be a little harsher on them and sometimes way harsher on them, and I used to be like.. before I started writing the story and like making a story I was like yeah, sexism is not that bad, and [now] I was like oh it's bad. It's quite bad [laughs], so like, I don't know, I feel like the female characters in the story don't get so much of a pass. But this isn't consistent across the board, it's not all the time" - Rachel Smythe, in an interview with Girl Wonder Webtoon Podcast

If Lore Olympus truly was just a series meant to be for fun "no thoughts head empty" drama and spice, that would be fine. I've said it time and time before on this blog and I'll say it again: I wouldn't have an issue if Rachel was just writing a story exclusively revolving around heterocis men and women. I'm just frustrated and tired and annoyed that she keeps lying about it, and doubly so that this comic and its creator who claim to be "feminist" have inspired other people in the same headspace to continue to perpetuate that cycle through works that are clearly inspired by LO and never challenged the things LO promoted - violence towards "unconventional" women, violence towards POC, and erasure of queer people. And worst of all, for writers like Cait Corrain, it's more than just writing a really bad book with really bad messaging, it's going so far as intentionally targeting those same groups of people that are regularly vilified in works like LO - people who are just existing, who don't pose a threat to anyone, but had the misfortune of becoming the target of a white woman's insecurity.

I don't know what the answer to this problem is. I don't know what form the solution will come in, if any, to address the ongoing issues with Greek myth adaptions that are being sorely written through an "America as the default" point of view and praised for "rewriting the script of Greek mythology", quite literally cultural appropriation happening live right before our eyes all for the sake of cheap entertainment. Maybe it'll take the failings of works like Crown of Starlight to really get people talking about it. But so long as the roots of these works - such as Lore Olympus - are still being protected and marketed en masse by the same kinds of people who don't see the issue in Americanizing other cultures and their stories, then Lore Olympus and Crown of Starlight will not be the last ones to cause harm to the source material - and the cultures that source material is born from and a part of - they're taking from.

I opened this post with a question, and I'm going to close it with another to really leave it as food for thought. That question comes from another video that I'll link here for you to watch at your convenience that spends even more time diving into and discussing the nature of works like this that have seemingly attempted to "deconstruct" the very dogmas that they still wind up reinforcing all the same.

Does the romance genre have a white supremacy problem?

(yes. yes, it does.)