#sorry for this deepdive into a bad quote from a dumb booktok book but this one is just something special

[imadhatt3r]

I love reaserching booktok books bc I'm utterly fascinated by that culture. Some time ago I've discovered a book with the classic "Beauty and the Beast" dynamic of a gruff, scary, rich man and a bubbly, good-natured woman, only in this one he's a billionaire CEO of a theme park (💀💀💀) and she's his employee that's meant to make his park more... Appealing? Like she's meant to design new rides and stuff.

But the guy is painted as this sort of "tortured soul, who does evil things, but he hates it, but he doesn't know how to do it differently, ahhh, he's so complicated!", and I know that this is a common trope in romance stories, but like... This dude is a CEO, and I can't take his struggles seriously at all 😭 I mean yeah, he's a cunt, but he's a CEO- he's the boring, realistic, borderline pedestrian kind of a cunt, and the author is trying to convince us that he's some kind of fantasty overlord who has an evil amulet that makes him smother his servants and burn down mills in pesant villages 😭

This quote is also absolutely amazing, because you can tell that the author was fighting for her life trying to write something that will sound "dark" and "poetic" and "romantic", but it just doesn't work at all imo??? 😭 Like, the idea is there, I know what she was trying to say, but this reads like she wanted to use religious imagery to drive her point, took a grabbag of "religious" words bc they sound cool/edgy, and wrote this paragraph without putting much thought of what she's actually saying.

I think that the last sentece kills me the most; Okay, so she's "divine", but she has enough "wickedness" to make the guy who sees himself as a "sinner" pray to her. But the female character never proved that she is in any way "wicked"? She's a happy goody-two-shoes. Does he mean that she's, like, mischievious, or that she's willing to get intimate with him??? But none of that is "wicked". This word just doesn't fit here. And if he sees himself as that much of a "sinner", then why should he "pray" (so acknowledge that she is in some way "above" him) to a woman who is, by all accounts, pretty tame in that scene? Like it's not like she's about to collar him and extinguish her cigarettes on his arms or something.

Sorry but this just doesn't make sense here. Like I get that the author wanted to say "He thinks she's incredible, but also has a bite, and he loves her soooooo much 🥺" but there ARE better, less melodramatic ways to put this. And no, he's not the kind of character where using that kind of vocabulary and extreme comparisons would make sense either.