#well.. i only read gay novels so no disappointment to me! but still

[dangermousie]

2023 End of Year Post - kdrama edition

Yes, we have a some of December left, and I want to check out Death's Game but whatever. I got time for this now and not sure if I will have later so here goes.

This is only going to cover kdramas that aired in 2023; if I watched it but it was made in a different year, it’s not on the list. This was an excellent kdrama year, the likes of which we hadn't had in a long time.

DRAMAS WATCHED

In order of liking from least to most as opposed to pure quality so pls don't come for me, fans of some popular dramas that are on my nope list. Also, I am including if I’ve seen enough to make up my mind; yes I realize that’s inaccurate, but that’s my list.

33. The Escape of the Seven - this is so aggressively stupid and mean that it feels like the makers are playing a practical joke seeing how much their audience will take. This has a season 2 coming, so the answer is a lot.

32. Behind Your Touch - the FL gets superpowers by touching people's and animals' butts. Yes, you read this right. Do I really need to add anything?

31. King the Land - yes, it was a hit. Yes, it stars popular actors. I HATED IT LIKE IT TOUCHED MY BUTT TO GET SUPERPOWERS!!! Plastic people in paint by the numbers story, with about as much genuineness or retability as a barbie aisle in walmart. I never expect much from Yoona so whatever, but to have LJH go from The Red Sleeve to this boggles the mind.

30. Mrs Durian - this is so dumb that I think I lost a few IQ points watching this, but its insanity becomes entertaining - I mean what kdrama can you name where a daughter in law declares her love and lust for her mother in law at a family dinner?

29. The Matchmakers - there is nothing offensive about this drama at all. But there is nothing in the least interesting either. If elevator music took drama shape, it would be this show.

28. Destined with You - sorry, Rowoon, I am still fond of you, but you are two for two in drama duds department this year. This is a drama where I loved ep 1, liked ep 2, was indifferent to 3 and...you get the point. Each ep was worse than the one before, and I bailed before I was dragged into a cosmic singularity.

27. Oasis - great first two episodes. Unfortunately it was not a two ep show. The performances are solid but the story is just not there - the effect is like a fancy chef making an amazing sauce to put on pig slop.

26. Boyhood - it's not you, it's me in action. I can see why people would like it but a 34-year old playing a high schooler in a Weak Hero Class 1 Slapstick Edition is no go for me.

25. Castaway Diva - it's so precious and kooky in the most annoying ways, with the most well-adjusted abused castaway in history. I like magic realism when done by Jorge Amado, but this ain't Amado.

24. Island - it had a good concept, good cast and fun visuals but the execution deserved one of ML's swords through the neck.

23. The Worst of Evil - if I wanted an American show, I'd watch one. Very solid performances though.

22. Song of the Bandits - period edition of what I said about The Worst of Evil.

21. Welcome to Samdalri - and goodbye to any hope of emotional involvement.

20. Joseon Attorney - I have yet to like a single sageuk centered around a profession and this was not an exception. I guess it could be worse but it also could have been so much better.

19. Twinkling Watermelon - everyone loved this drama. Everyone except for me. It's the kind of precious that sets my teeth on edge and I couldn't stand half the main characters we were supposed to root for. I guess I like my fruits to shine steadily.

18. Our Blooming Youth - probably the biggest disappointment on this list. This is not a bad drama by any means, but with that cast and that story (I loved the novel), I was hoping for a memorable sageuk not merely all right.

17. Vigilante - it has the emotional complexity and nuance of a punch to the throat but it gives us quasi-gay openly-murderous dudes going after psychos and Yoo Ji Tae holding feral Nam Joo Hyuk by his hoodie at his feet.

16. The Forbidden Marriage - expected nothing but it was a surprisingly enjoyable trifle of a costume drama that was also quite pretty.

15. Arthdal Chronicles: Sword of Aramun - a hot mess but such an entertaining epic one. And it gave us TWO Lee Jun Kis in period gear and who am I to cavil at the bounty of God?

14. The Story of Park's Marriage - it's a trifle, a souffle, so light it might blow away, but it keeps my attention and is so fun and sweet.

13. My Lovely Liar - a huge surprise, that manages to mix a murder mystery and a romcom, and shocked me by showing Hwang Minhyun can act.

12. Tale of the Nine Tailed 1938 - the original ToNT was my fave drama of its year and I did not think it needed a sequel. But this is not a sequel but more of a side-quel and is such a total delight with brotherly love, adventures, romance and hijinks. It's a joy.

11. Perfect Marriage Revenge - it's actually very hard to do a soap right but this slim 12 ep drama managed. So fun, so crazy, such a good ship!

10. My Lovely Boxer - not really about sports, but about two broken people finding salvation because of and in each other. Also, if you like age gap romances, this is delicious. Sort of loses steam by the end but c’est la vie.

9. The Secret Romantic Guesthouse - this was a sageuk that was not on my radar with a bunch of actors I was not familiar with but it took my heart away. A good plot that was perfectly paced, characters and ships I adored, a logical ending. This is one of the biggest positive surprises of the year for me.

8. Tell Me That You Love Me - a slice of life remake (sort of, it's more "inspired by") of my favorite jdrama of all time. It's not as good as the jdrama because nothing could be, but it's an aching lovely story with some incredible performances.

7. See You In My 19th Life - funny and romantic and haunting and hopeful and odd. This was one of my favorites of the year.

6. Alchemy of Souls: Light and Shadow - it's rare for me to like a (1) sequel (2) with FL actress change (3) that is a Hong Sisters drama. But this was such a gorgeous, surprisingly achy story of love and loss and love regained with some cool monster fighting in the middle. Between the two seasons, this is the first Hong Sisters' drama I enjoyed from beginning to end in well over a decade.

5. My Demon - so tropey (chaebols, supernaturals) but it proves that these tropes are popular for a reason. The chemistry is fire, the story is unpredictable and the whole thing is an addictive delight. A rare drama where I like each new ep more than the last one.

4. Goryeo Khitan War - an old school sageuk in every meaning of the term (no romance, no eye candy, lots of bearded men, battles and politics), this feels like watching an epic movie more than a drama. The vast cast all earns their place and the performances (mainly from character actors given a chance to shine) are incredible.

3. Call It Love - two very very damaged people finding love and healing with each other. This is a narrative very hard to do to my satisfaction but when it's done well, as here, there are few things that can hold a candle to it.

2. My Dearest - a masterpiece of cinematography, narrative, performances. This is an old-school epic romance in the best sense of the term. If it doesn't make you swoon or break your heart, there is something wrong with you. A story of two untraditional, strong-willed, flawed people who fall in love in the middle of the horrifying Qing invasion of Korea and have to deal with all that the world throws at them, this is a bona fide masterpiece.

1 - Moon in the Day - who knew my favorite kdrama of the year will star a store brand Domyoji from Extraordinary You and an actress I was never familiar with. But this part period/part modern fantasy tale of doomed cursed lovers is everything I knew I wanted and everything I didn't know I wanted but did. Two lovers where their love did not save them and in modern day it might not again, has got me obsessed the way I haven't been in years.

FAVORITE DRAMA

Moon in the Day - if there is such a thing as a drama made perfectly for me, this gorgeous, emotionally haunting, utterly romantic, twisty tale is it.

WORST DRAMA

The Escape of the Seven. This drama is proof that demons exist and not sexy ones like Song Kang but horrible nasty ones who delight in the torment this hot mess inflicted on its viewers.

FAVORITE MALE CHARACTER

Do Ha, Moon in the Day - a Silla general and a consummate killer who committed atrocities on the orders of his monster father and yearned to die for them, who found the meaning in life in loving his enemy but it did not make him better, a man so obsessed he literally was around for 1500 years of horrifying ghostly existence and still went "worth it" for a woman who killed him as long as he knew she loved him while she did it. He's intense and competent and beyond fucked up and has never had a normal day and I love him so so so very much from a safe distance.

FAVORITE FEMALE CHARACTER

Gil Chae, My Dearest - she starts out as vain and spoiled but the horrors that break so many others bring out all her fierce survivor potential and she becomes such a force of nature - capable of incredible love but also sacrifice and strength and compassion.

Runner Up: Shin Hye Sun's reincarnator in See You In My 19th Life - quirky, damaged, strong, so odd and so vulnerable at once.

NEEDS TO BE MURDERED

There are a lot of characters who fit that category (King Injo in My Dearest? My God) but the crown belongs to So Ri Bu from Moon in the Day. You think you've seen abusive parents but until you've seen a man abuse his son his whole life and then continue for 1500 years after his death, you ain't seen nothing!

FAVORITE SHIP

The doomed by the narrative OTP of Moon in The Day. Only thing that's better than enemies to lovers is enemies while lovers and their impossible relationship where her killing him is a supreme act of love and his refusing to let go is so strong that he stays around for 1500 years watching her, helpless as she dies over and over again, is everything you ever want.

Runner up: Jang Hyun/Gil Chae, My Dearest. They are so strong and so damaged and it takes them so long to figure out what they feel and what the other person feels but their love and sacrifice and complexities are perfect.

FAVORITE SECONDARY OTP

Kim Shi Yeol/Hong Joo, The Secret Romantic Guesthouse - an assassin bodyguard pretending to be a carefree scholar and a widow of the man he killed to protect his king (and whose life was destroyed as a result.) I enjoyed the main OTP of this drama but I was utterly and completely unhinged for the secondary couple.

I'd have probably picked Rang and his mermaid from TotNT 1938 even over them, but they really were the main OTP of that drama.

NOTP

King the Land couple seems like an easy target but honestly, they are both so terribly bland and antiseptic and marketing by committee, they kinda deserve each other. So I am gonna go with Destined with You, one half of which thinks supernaturally roofying someone into loving them is cute and the other half thinks dating one woman while wooing another is totally a-ok. Ugh.

FAVORITE SCENE

There is no competition for the scene in the slave market in My Dearest, where Jang Hyun finds Gil Chae - the way he screams and tries to clutch the hem of her skirt will live in my head forever.

And the scene where he 'wins' that horrifying bet, or the scene where she finds him in a pile of bodies - they are as good also. Or when he fights off a squad to protect her even though he's sick. That whole drama is perfect.

Runner up: the scene of Do Ha executing Ri Ta's family, covered in blood, as she looks at him from the crowd in Moon in the Day.

Or the scene where he talks about how he cannot live as a person but at least maybe she will kill him and he will die as one. Or when her confession in the past intercuts with his walking in the present, or when he comes home in his bloodied armor and she finds he has a fever and it's the first tender touch he's probably ever known. Her murdering So Ri Bu saying she knows she's going against filial piety in loving her parents' murderer, the way they hug, both bloody, as he says "let's live." The way she says she can't go on as she's hit rock bottom and he replies she cannot quit because she must accompany him to his rock bottom now. Honestly, the drama is a font of amazingness.

Also, the opening scene of Goryeo Khitan War or the scene of Yang Gyu ordering to shoot the captives and having to do so himself.

The OTP meeting again at the intersection at the end of ep 1 of Tell Me That You Love Me. SHS comforting ABH as he's having a traumatic breakdown in 19th Life. The love-making scene in Call It Love. There were a lot of great scenes this year.

BIGGEST CRUSH

Lee Jang Hyun, My Dearest - is that even a competition? He's flawed - vain, often emotionally closed off, not great at processing emotions, lashing out when hurt. He is also incredibly heroic in a real, knows the cost but bears it, kind of way. Whatever he does, he commits utterly but it's never without understanding the cost. He felt both larger than life and utterly real. He went through hell and maintained his soul and the way he loved Gil Chae was breath-taking to behold.

Runner Up: Yang Gyu, Goryeo Khitan War - an experienced military commander who wins an impossible victory even as it ravages his soul. Competence is sexy as fuck.

BEST SCENE STEALER CHARACTER

Rang, Tale of the Nine Tailed 1938 - 1938 really was Rang's chance to shine and he took it. For a character I started out disliking in the original, he really stole my entire heart in this drama. I am so glad he got his happy ending with his brother and his girl.

Runner Up: Crown Prince, My Dearest. He started out as a sheltered, spoiled aristocrat, convinced the world owed him for existing. He grew up slowly and painfully into an amazing man. And then was murdered for it and I cried.

NEEDS A SEQUEL

Arthdal - it leaves the story at a good stopping point but it's very much a "world in flux, adventures and conflicts continue" ending and I would love to see more of these characters. I know we won't but it would have been nice.

NEEDS SCISSORS TAKEN TO IT

Behind Your Touch - should have been snipped at birth.

TOO MANY SCISSORS TAKEN TO IT

Vigilante - I don't mean it had scissors taken to it because it's not cdrama and there is no NRTA, but this drama would have benefitted from being longer. I mean, I love fights and gay polycules as much as the next tumblr person but a bit more character development would not have come amiss. (ahaha - I said come. Leave me alone.)

TROPE THAT NEEDS TO DIE

I don't care about cops/doctors/trash collectors/whoever - workplace drama centering on their "cases" needs to die. I hate procedurals from any country and Korea is no exception.

FAVORITE TROPE WE’VE SEEN A LOT OF

Supernatural critter devoted to their OTP with all the power of their long life.

BIGGEST DISAPPOINTMENT

Our Blooming Youth - it was far from terrible but it was a giant meh. I was so excited to see Park Hyung Sik in a sageuk (that wasn't the hot mess that was Hwarang) and I adored the source novel. It actually started well and then...it's like Revenge of the Beige!

BIGGEST GOOD SURPRISE

I want to say Moon in the Day but to be honest, I was excited by posters and trailers so it wasn't wholly a surprise despite not having much of an opinion on the actors before I saw them. So I am going to say My Demon. I was bored by the trailers, I can't remember the last time I enjoyed a Kim Yoo Jung drama and before this year I would have said Song Kang was an incredibly limited actor in everything I've seen him in and not appealing to me at all. And here I am rabidly rabiding for this drama!

If I am not limiting myself to dramas but can use this for actors - Hwang Minhyun in My Lovely Liar. I genuinely did not think the man could act and then he gave such a pitch-perfect, nuanced performance out of nowhere!

2023 DRAMAS I HAVEN’T SEEN THAT I MOST WANT TO WATCH

I have actually watched all the kdramas that aired this year that I wanted to check out except for Evilive. I am saving this for when I have time.

BEST NON-2023 DRAMA I’VE WATCHED IN 2023

I don't know if I'd say it's the best but Say You Love Me (2004) with Kim Rae Won as a quasi monk seduced away from his true love by an evil older woman was a hell of a ride.

MOST ANTICIPATED

Love Song for Illusion (Lady assassin falls for her royal target who has two personalities), Captivating the King (lady spy falls for her royal target who is tormented) - notice a theme? Also Flower that Blooms at Night because Honey Lee in a sageuk, The Life of Mrs Ock (Lim Ji Yeon in a sageuk), The Love Story of Chun Hwa (an "erotic" sageuk, hmmmm, what?!), Hong Rang (Lee Jae Wook in a super angst sageuk), Queen Woo (that cast and set in Goguryeo!), Wong Kyung (about Lee Bang Won's wife and I love the cast.) Basically, if it's period, I am there with bells on.

[theyoungeragrippina]

🫶🏻 15 gentlebeard/blackbonnet fic recs

(17 if you squint)

hey legends, in this bittersweet period where a lot of a us are feeling gutted but simultaneously, rebelliously hopeful, i've emerged from my reading den to showcase to you all some of the brilliant talent we have in this fandom! these fics are some of the best of the best, and i hope you love them just as much as i do! <3

they are all complete, do not feature any ongoing steddyhands/edizzy/stizzy, and are above 20k words.

peruse part 1, part 2, and part 3 at your leisure if you want to compare our tastes/devour more fine literature, or check out my masterlist as an ao3 collection.

adrift between the dreaming seas by @dandy-pirate-time

49k, mature, locked

stede lives a cursed life on a moving island, until the monotony of his days is suddenly interrupted by the fearsome kraken.

this was such a fascinating & incredible idea! i love how it manipulates aspects of the original story and transforms them into parts of the cursed island <3 sweet & unique & magical. i want to hug poor stede.

Five Birthdays and a Funeral by @bizarrelittlemew

58k, explicit

"When Ed and Stede's friend groups merge, they meet at a birthday party, and Stede's life is turned upside-down. As they collide again and again, he not only has to figure out what Ed means to him, but what he means to himself."

stede gets to be oblivious and a bit of a silly goose as a treat. also: treasure hunts, lucius is the best, ed has a cat whom i would die for, such a sweet & heartfelt fic. you will be so unbelievably fond of this version of every character.

The Ghost of Frigate Point Lighthouse by @piratecaptainscaptainpirates

53k, explicit

"When history professor Stede Bonnet goes to investigate rumors of a ghost haunting the local lighthouse, he's thrust into a mystery centered around the ghost of one of the most famous pirates of all time."

was SO eager to read this and it did not disappoint!! it has everything - fun, magic, mystery, tired TA lucius, and a lil bit of seduction. good enough that i am worried the author may actually just be a sea witch recollecting events he personally witnessed.

Haunted by @thepirateroo

60k, explicit

"The Kraken is a famous spiritualist, working the music halls of 1920s London to help families communicate with their dead. But Stede Bonnet knows that underneath the fame and illustrious title, Edward Teach works as a ghost hunter, debunking the spirits he makes his living off."

this is, genuinely, in the top 5 fanfics i have read for any fandom EVER. i wouldn't bat an eyelid if i read this exact work as a published novel in a bookstore. the mystery is so good and had me guessing and re-theorising constantly, the characterisation is brilliant, and the emotions are perfect. i cried, i laughed, i felt sick with worry for the characters, and i couldn't stop reading until i was done.

haunt me, then by @hyruling

28k, explicit

"He releases the ropes slowly, barely registering the burn as they slip through his fingers. Then, fallible as Orpheus, turns to meet his ghost."

post s1 fixit fics ily. everyone needs some therapy. really VERY well written and a joy to read.

Homeward Bound by mari_who

51k, explicit

"In the long-ago year 2000, bouncy blonde boy-band member Stede Bonnet is 17-year-old Edward Teach's gay awakening. Decades later, Ed hears a voice he could never forget."

i said 'ohhh no poor ed/stede' so many times while reading this. a lovely exploration of emotion and human connection, and finding yourself when everyone else has always defined who you are on your behalf.

I just need some air by @cuddlytogas

26k, teen

"Stede Bonnet's been having panic attacks for almost as long as he can remember, suffocated by pressure and expectation... When [he] finally takes his life back — divorces Mary, moves to Melbourne, starts his own event management business — things get better, but he's still no good at parties. He still needs some air, even at the very events he's brought to fruition. Meanwhile, Edward Teach, renowned chef and owner of Blackbeard's Catering, is wondering why the newest bigwig in events still hasn't hired him."

zoomed through this faster than lightning mcqueen. such a lovely writing of stede, ed and the whole crew - it feels like there's depth in every character, even background ocs.

also fantastic australia rep (i was jumpscared by mention of the cotton on group) AND i've been to the bar the final scene takes place at!!!! most exciting reading experience of my life.

i'll be your treasure by @monksofthescrew

48k, mature

"Wasn't the Dread Pirate Blackbeard rumored to have a hoard hidden somewhere near Essex? It's a metal detecting AU. They're detectorists. They fall in love."

i LOVE this fic so much it is just,,,, so sweet. stede does self-discovery and is seduced. ed is a bit of a goose and i'm obsessed with him. doug and mary are lovely. alma is so cool and i love her.

+ the sequel! drift o'er the rolling hills, swim through the briny sea (made me cry. btw. doug keeps being the best.)

The Kraken's Sacrifice by @trinityofone

22k, explicit

"Every year, a person is chosen—supposedly at random—to be sacrificed to the Kraken, to quell the sea's worst storms and to stop the taking of ships... Stede discovers that there is much more to the creature than he was led to believe—and that they have a deeper connection than he could have ever dreamed."

i LOVED this okay. it was funny and sweet and gave an interesting spin to the ed-is-the-kraken genre. get both of these boys some self-esteem asap. also comes with art by @avatoh!!!!!

lovers in a dangerous time by @veeagainsttheday

52k, explicit

pacific rim au - "Edward Teach becomes a jaeger pilot, first with Izzy Hands and later with Stede Bonnet. It’s not easy trying to save the world and falling in love with your drift partner…"

made me feel every emotion under the sun, including foaming at the mouth jealous that i don't have a drift partner. absolutely, masterfully written. i've popped this link first since its the fic that focuses on stede & ed, but it was written as a prequel for:

+ catagory five: a shatterdome romance by @owlinaminor (27k, mature), which focuses predominantly on jim & oluwande, and which i also massively recommend reading (first). it's told through lucius' words and made up of journalistic notes and transcriptions, and its really terribly clever. i knew nothing about pacific rim before this, and now i'm really very invested. if i wrote something this fantastic (& creative & wildly unique) i would never shut up about it.

More of the Gravy Basket than of the Grave by @veeagainsttheday

36k, explicit

"Ed and Stede’s ‘unorthodox friendship’ ended four months ago when Stede left Ed without a word after Ed asked him to run away to a parallel universe with him. They’re thrown back together when they’re summoned to perform a supernatural exorcism at the Hillside Hotel during a blizzard."

this has got to be one of the coolest and most creative fics i have ever had the pleasure of reading. genuinely kept me guessing and so so intrigued, PLUS the most sweet stede & ed dynamic!!!

Nothing Missing in My Life by @semisweetshadow

63k, explicit, locked

"Hollywood action star Ed Teach is bored with his celebrity life. Everything changes when he meets Stede, a sweet extra working on the set of his latest film shoot. Stede doesn't know who Ed really is and treats him like a real person and Ed can't help wanting to keep him."

ed plays an action hero called jeff the accountant, and if that's not immediately the greatest synopsis ever idk how else to win you over. hilarious, clever, & so heartfelt. i gasped and said 'oh no' with a hand over my heart nearly as many times as i laughed out loud.

not pickles by smallestchurch

84k, explicit

"Ed's minding his business when the new neighbor's kid comes around holding a human puppet. It's creepy as hell, but as soon as the kid's father rounds the corner, Ed doesn't mind."

i actually feel a bit ill when i think about this fic because i love it so overwhelmingly. there's family, and healing, and good food and friends, and ed teach and louis bonnet become the dynamic duo they always had the potential to be.

Our Fangs Mean Death by @flawedamythyst

87k, teen, locked

"Master Vampire Blackbeard's afterlife is enlivened by the arrival of a new coven in town, lead by the self-styled Gentleman Vampire. Now here's a Master who doesn't mind shaking things up by wearing clothes 300 years out of date, buying a massive gothic mansion for a lair, and leading the most eclectic coven Blackbeard has ever seen."

ridiculously fun. this is the vampire novel/fic i didn't know i needed and i loved every silly second. stede really gets to fulfil his dad-ness. i'm furious i can't join the gentleman vampires coven irl, will just need to embrace the gothic vampire aesthetic in my own life.

Wayfaring by @justkeeptrekkin

35k, explicit

"The downside to being stuck on a desert island is that Stede's not awfully good at adapting. The upside is that he and Ed can finally have some peace and quiet– that is, if Ed ever wakes up from the gunshot wound in his stomach."

the sweetest desert island fic, feat. the cutest piglet in the world, a little bit of pining, a helpful skeleton named dusty, and some of the best & most accurately written stede and ed content ever (imo).

[cornyonmains]

Decided to read the novel for My Stand In, which is titled Professional Body Double. I'm a little disappointed with some of the changes the show made. Needless to say, novel spoilers ahead, though I won't touch on anything that hasn't happened in the show, as I'm only halfway through the book. Anyways, on to my first beef with the show.

One of the most informative aspects of Joe's character was changed. In the novel, Joe had also never been on bottom before, but that wasn't because he was holding out for someone special. At the beginning of the novel Joe is fielding offers for threesomes, the guy's been around the block and doesn't have a huge attachment to his virginity. Joe's character never bottomed because he'd quite simply never gotten the offer thanks to his more masculine looks. What makes this even more depressing is you find out that he thought it might have been his preference in the first place, but Joe being Joe, advocated about as well for himself during sex as he did anything else.

I think it was unwise to switch things up the way they did, because it really does explain a lot about why Joe was willing to suffer so many indignities to be with Ming. Joe asked for very little from the people in his life and didn't get it. Joe never really stood a chance when Ming came along and started giving him what he wanted.

Another thing I thought it was a shame the show didn't highlight is that in the novel, there's a fairly considerable age gap between Joe and Ming. Ming is 20 and Joe is 30. This actually offered a lot of explanation as to why Joe ignored a lot of Ming's red flags. He didn't ignore them, he just chalked a lot of it up to Ming being young and spoiled. But that's not to say the novel lets Joe off the hook.

Joe was, and I truly do lack a better word to describe this, completely servile to Ming. In the novels he waited on him hand and foot, created no real sexual boundaries with him, and preferred placating Ming's temper over challenging it. He was willing to meet any conditions for them to be together.

Ming's character progression is something I wish the show could have found a way to depict. Because during this time, Ming's development wasn't stagnant. What Joe had right, to an extent, was that Ming was young and still learning how to process his feelings. Towards the end of their first relationship, Ming had managed, for the most part, to regard Joe as completely distinct from Tong, and not just as a replacement. It's heavily implied he was in love with Joe, but just didn't know how to process these realizations that kept coming to him in piecemeal.

Ming liked the happy and relaxed environment he had with Joe in his condo, he was convinced nobody would ever be as sexually compatible with him as Joe, and he'd actually wanted to support him the first time Joe came home completely exhausted from set, but didn't say anything about it until he fucked up. Ming, who ran away to America as soon as he realized he was gay, did what Ming always did, he was quietly processing things, and was too young and stupid to give Joe a clue. He took for granted that Joe would be, in HIS words, obedient and docile.

The author of this, Shui Qian Qeng, is so good at writing gay toxicity it's stupid. It made me wonder if they're part of the community, but we don't speculate in this house, it's just a passing thought I had due to how nuanced the depiction of sexual confusion in this book is, particularly with Sol's character. Sexual confusion in BL tends to play very formulaically on screen. Existential crisis, a few heartfelt conversations, one cursed episode, a kiss at the end of the season, and everyone lives happily ever after. In the novel, Sol struggles for years, and is still processing his sexuality in an unhealthy way because the 'I'm straight, but only gay for this one guy in particular' trope so often used in BL is used in this novel, but to convey denial and sexual struggle. Upon Joe's death, Sol is still saying he's straight, but that Joe's the exception. This is treated with much deserved skepticism. Shui Qian Qeng, as a queer person who knows you're not reading this, bless you for that. I so desperately wish Sol's story would have been better adapted for the show.

To wrap things up on a lighter note, I also found out by reading this novel that tops and bottoms are referred to as ones and zeros in China. And my sheltered Midwestern ass was like, "Well that's rude." because one of them was a zero. Then I was like, "Well why would someone refer to themselves as a zero? That's not healthy." Then I started thinking about what the numbers looked like, 0 and 1, and was like, "Oh." It was an emotional rollercoaster.

[bloody-wonder]

mid-year book tag

1. Best Book You’ve Read So Far in 2024? i have read so many good ones this year but no particular one stands out to me as The Best so i'll name top 5 instead (in the order i read them in): a thousand stitches, doctrine of labyrinths, in other lands, big swiss, my brilliant friend - so, quite a range of genres and tones, as usual :)

2. Best Sequel You’ve Read So Far in 2024? the virtu is definitely my favorite part of doctrine of labyrinths and the tropic of serpents, the second book in the memoirs of lady trent, was just a perfect historical fantasy adventure novel - it's like if jane austen wrote indiana jones except it's also a nature documentary about dragons. last but not least, empire of the damned which came out in march solidified jay kristoff's empire of the vampire as my favorite vampire book series. you might have heard me screaming about it from the rooftops. all three of these sequels, i find, are even better than the previous book in their respective series.

3. New Release You Haven’t Read Yet, But Want To? i'm saving kj charles' death in the spires for the fall since it's a spooky campus murder mystery (i think?) and i also want to read apostles of mercy and so finish lindsay ellis' sci fi series (which i have lost interest in somewhat tbh but i'm nothing if not a completionist lol). i was curious about the familiar but the reviews i've seen don't look too promising so i'm probably not going to prioritize it.

4. Most Anticipated Release For Second Half of 2024? i'm looking forward to kj charles' new romance book, the duke at hazard, as well as the new evander mills mystery, rough pages, but the piece of fiction i'm anticipating the most is actually the radioapple southern gothic au by my favorite fanfic author reminiscentbells. she's going to write the whole thing this summer and start posting in september - i'm so excitedddd😱

5. Biggest Disappointment? emily wilde's encyclopaedia of faeries is the book equivalent of a ghoul wearing the skin of your beloved. i wasn't a fan of a deadly education either😒 was very excited to read gaywyck but the expectations of "jane eyre but gay" which the cover of that book gave me were unfortunately not met🤷‍♀️

6. Biggest Surprise? i didn't think i might be into extreme horror and neither did i fancy myself a sally rooney girlie so i was quite surprised that i liked her conversations with friends as well as the sluts by dennis cooper. will definitely read more from both authors next year. an even bigger surprise however was solitaire which i picked up on a whim after tori came out as ace in the last heartstopper volume. i have a complicated relationship with alice oseman's books mostly due to the fact that i'm years past the target demographic age but still feel compelled to read them bc it seems they're the only mainstream books with prominent aro/ace rep out there. so i didn't expect much and was astonished to discover that tori spring is like looking at a mirror reflection of my 18yo self - uncanny in a fun way. ig i shouldn't be so surprised this turned out to be my favorite oseman book since it's the one with the most mixed reviews lol people like to hate a depressed teenage girl😬

7. Favorite New Author? i have devoured doctrine of labyrinths and the cemeteries of amalo in february so now i can safely say sarah monette aka katherine addison is one of my favorite authors. each of her series has a different tone but there are consistent themes of real or magical disability and non amatonormative relationships which are explored in creative ways throughout her stories. i also like her worldbuilding quite a bit, especially the naming systems and fantasy terminology. i read more books by celeste ng as well as by vale aida - both are likely to become favorite authors too. in the latter's case - provided she writes a sequel to hostis. if not, i shall never forgive her😅

8. Newest Favorite Character? okay this is just impossible to narrow down! first of all, liathe from empire of the damned bc i want her Gender: wearing a porcelain mask and a splendid crimson coat, formally bowing to her adversaries before she beats the shit out of them with her blood sword, referring to herself by the royal we and hissing every time she speaks - character of all time material right there. behold my beautiful girl who has done nothing wrong!🥰

(official illustrations by bon orthwick)

secondly, elliot schafer bc he's the most obnoxious prickly boy in other lands and yet everyone wants him carnally lol. i adore his internal monologue - probably the best i've read in ya. his dialogue too tbh - his cutting repartee game is off the charts. honestly, he's just my favorite type of character: a mean bisexual gremlin who scolds people so creatively that they fall in love with him on the spot. what more can you ask.

finally, i have to mention that to my great surprise i liked mildmay more than felix harrowgate🤯 idk felix is this cunty traumatized savant which is a character archetype i'm used to liking so it was a safe bet. the opposites attract sidekick or love interest of such a character is usually not my cup of tea but mildmay is the exception that proves the rule ig. mostly it's bc of his unusual manner of speaking with those funny slang turns of phrase and just generally the contrast between his expressive internal monologue and his reserved demeanor. as a result, he easily rivals felix as the most interesting guy in the book. such excellent character work! taking my hat off to monette🎩

9. Newest Fictional Crush? i reserve this question for that special kind of obsession only a very particular character can inspire and this year it's alastor from hazbin hotel. which, i know, is not a book but i have read so much alastor fanfic in the last few months that he's basically like a book character to me at this point lol

💕Best Ship💕 elliot schafer and luke sunborn are very cute. i don't usually go for cute but here we are. especially after reading that short story from luke's pov i realized i just need more of these two together😌 felix and mildmay with their unholy magic bdsm union - need i say more? forbidden ship that watered my crops. last but not least, i'm currently trudging through the realm of the elderings bc of fitz and the fool and as of assassin's quest it finally started paying off: i'm being queerbaited and asking for more🥲

10. Book That Made You Cry? a thousand stitches is such a wholesome cozy book and it made me cry multiple times the way that a nostalgic movie from childhood can make you cry sometimes. especially the pug scene😭 the scenes of thara celehar walking the corn maze in the cemeteries of amalo made me cry a lot too. the symbolic depths addison is able to achieve with the labyrinth motif, the exploration of grief and forgiveness and letting go - unparalleled🤌

11. Book That Made You Happy? a thousand stitches made me happy! especially the pug scene!!😅 honestly it was like watching a disney movie back when they were good except also more relatable bc atwater's characters read neurodivergent and aspec-coded to me. love how she maintains that the kiss of true love that breaks the faerie curse doesn't have to be romantic. re-reading the three musketeers made me very happy too - it's one of my top 10 favorite books of all time and i was kinda nervous i might not like it as much as an adult. well the joke's on me bc now i can confirm it's one of the best books ever written😊 reading in other lands and big swiss cheered me up a lot too bc they're just so damn funney😄

12. Favorite Book Adaptation You Saw This Year? haven't seen a lot of adaptations so ig dune part two wins by default. twas a fine movie. the wheel of time is also a nice show in my opinion but i didn't read the source material so idk how good it is adaptation-wise🤷‍♀️

13. Favorite Review You’ve Written This Year? my favorite ones are probably the ones i wrote about the three musketeers and in other lands but i think i also wrote some good critical/negative reviews of the mask of mirrors and of the vorkosigan books i read this year (1 2 3)

14. Most Beautiful Cover? behold the cover of the voyage of the basilisk!🤩 i want to frame it and hang it on my wall so that i can gaze at it adoringly and connect with my inner ishmael

(art by todd lockwood)

i also like this vintage romance cover of gaywyck and the uk covers of the farseer trilogy. it's a shame that the books are not as good as the covers led me to believe. especially in the case of gaywyck - this cover is Such A Vibe! but alas

15. What Books Do You Need To Read By The End of The Year? in terms of series i want to finish the memoirs of lady trent, read one more witcher book, at least a couple vampire chronicles and then reread swordspoint and hopefully complete that series too. other fantasy i want to get to at last is fire & blood and the hands of the emperor - both are big and intimidating tho. for my classics challenge i need to finish a couple of tomes i'm reading slowly throughout the year and then also read the name of the rose. american psycho and mona awad's bunny have been on my tbr for ages - maybe i'll finally read them this fall. and i also want to finish reading kj charles' backlist bc the completionism drive is stronger than the fear of having no kj charles to read lol

i never do things a normal amount - every time i take up new media i go all in. so i had a musicals phase, a movies phase, a tv show phase - each lasting a few years and then i barely watched any of these once the phase ended. which is why i've been wondering if my current Book Phase is about to wrap up soon but, given how many books i managed to read since january, it sure doesn't seem that way. instead, it feels like the more i read the better i am at finding books that i'm likely to enjoy - which leads to more reading. and i cannot complain about that tbh😁📚

tagging @magpiefngrl @doh-rae-me @oliviermiraarmstrongs @fugitoidkry @pinkasrenzo @counterwiddershins @figuringthengsout @sugarbabywenkexing @fandomreferencepending @venndaai @weirdsociology @sixappleseeds @theodoradove

please tell me what you've been reading this year (if you want)! one can't have too many book recs👀

goodreads │ old mid year tags 2020 2021 2022 2023

[rainbowcomet]

Rainbow Comet: Gay, Fantasy, Feeder Fanfiction

I'm posting excerpts here from my gay, full-length, fantasy romance novel featuring feedism!

I will be posting excerpts here, and you can read more for free on my website, Rainbowcomet.com! I posted the first chapter and will be posting more shortly. The fic is complete.

Introduction:

Boreas (Brett to humans) is ready to ascend the throne, and that means BIG changes to his body. After all, his weight reflects his people's love and respect, and he's the only fae prince who can take this throne, with his ever increasing girth.

Flint (Flynn to humans) has a secret, and his wife is ready to let him go free to have his secret desires for men and fat men at that. When he gets a request from an old penpal to come bodyguard him while ascending to the throne, he accepts but never expects his old friend to be the embodiment of his wildest, most far-fetched fantasies. Between homophobic norms, a crazy culture that feeds their princes, and families coming betwen them, will the two have a happy ending? Or is the likelihood of their love coming true like wishing on a rainbow comet; almost impossible?

Trigger warnings: Probably everything. Heavy discussions of r*pe, homophobia, mind control, brainwashing. The characters have heavy pasts. Some consent is dubious due to one being an incubus who can read desire. Read at your own risk!

Rainbow Comet: Chapter 1:

"Boreas Everfrost the Third is just Hugely F***ing fat."

A foot steps out of the portal, clothed in fine, pearlescent leather. A finely shaped foot, followed by a leg. The calf, first, then the thigh. My breath catches, and light beams forward, so bright I almost can’t see straight, as Brett steps fully out of the portal. And there he is. Boreas. Still so beautiful I can’t even think straight. His hair has a blue sheen I’m not sure it had before, and it effervesces in rainbow, shimmering as he moves. His face is so handsome, and it lights up in a grin as he sees me, and my whole body goes tight as I take him in. He’s wearing a light blue tunic and pants that are made of pearlescent material, and a fine belt covered in tiny jewels that look to be diamonds. They encrust his collar and cuffs and the tops of his boots as well. He looks like one big sparkling diamond, and he puts his big arms out in welcome as he sees me, expecting to pull me in close. He always was affectionate.

But I just stand there, rooted to the spot, as the rainbow portal keeps swirling behind him, slowly starting to dissipate as I stay there, my feet locked in place, unable to move, my jaw slack and frozen at the same time as I take him in from head to toe, as his body jiggles as he comes closer.

He’s the same, he really is. It’s in the face, in the fine features and the gorgeous body but…

I can see why no one knew how to describe him, and also hate them for not warning me, for not allowing me to prepare.

I’m trying hard not to laugh, more from nervousness at my body’s reaction and fear of being given away in my deepest secrets than because his form is funny.

His handsome face hesitates, and he looks from me to the portal, and I hate myself as he lowers his hands, looking lost and somewhat disappointed.

Move, Flynn. Move.

But he’s a walking wet dream. There’s no way I’m going to survive this.

I’ve never seen anything like this. Outside of my dreams. And he surpasses even those.

He’s radiant, he’s effervescent, he’s…so big. He’s—

He looks at the portal, which is shrinking, shakes his head and waves a hand. A big hand. It grows again, swirling with rainbow light. He clears his throat. “Are you ready? We’d better go.” His cheeks are flushing and I hate that I’ve made him self conscious.

I flinch, then shake my head. I’m glad I didn’t touch his body, even if he did find it offensive. I couldn’t have controlled myself if I did.

The fae emissary looks from him to me keenly, then gets a little smile.

Then he steps into the portal. “I’ll be waiting for you, majesty, and getting things ready for the banquet.”

I put a hand to my face, hiding the obvious embarrassment there, and step forward. Reluctantly, I put a hand out for Brett.

He looks down at it, pouting. “You don’t have to touch me if you don’t want to. I heard it, that you don’t want to.”

“What else did you hear?” I ask sharply.

“Nothing,” he says. “I’m told I have very selective hearing. I don’t hear what people don’t want heard, usually.”

“Good,” I say.

He ducks his head slightly, and I hate myself a little more inside for making him feel that way. But I just…can’t.

I’m still reacting. I’m still processing. Someone should have warned me. Someone should have told me, customs be damned.

But they couldn’t have known what I’m like. My particular fantasies…

If they did, they would have told me. They would have had to.

I can’t stand this. How can I take this job, now? How can I just pretend things are normal between us?

My wings feel like they are going to burst out. The only thing that dampens the extreme energy ready to burst out of me, looking at his handsome face, is the shame I see emanating at the edges of his expression, as he puts a hand to his waist and looks down at himself.

“Ah…well, it might take you a while to adjust to my kingliness.” He frowns. “You will learn more about our customs at the banquet. I assure you, this is my sacrifice to the universe.” He turns to the portal, waving for me to go in. “I will ensure you travel safely, and then follow after.” He gives me a somewhat hesitant, sad smile. “It is good to see you, Flynn.”

I just walk forward, rictus straight, wishing I had a good fucking response for him.

Hoping he doesn’t hear my swearing, like that little mushroom person did.

Because as I walk into the portal, still dazed from arousal, the only thought echoing in my mind is that this can’t be possible, this can’t be real.

Because Boreas Everfrost the third is just hugely fucking fat.

[dysiver]

So I finished The Earth is Online.

Lemme start by saying that I started this novel because a lot of ORV fans were saying that the MCs were similar and also their relationship was similar, let me say that this is all bullshit. The two MCs from The Earth is Online and the two MCs from ORV are completely different. They aren't even close to being the same in the slightest. Unless people think that smart people = all similar. So if someone tells you to read this novel cuz it is "similar" to ORV then you'll be highly disappointed.

With that out of the way The Earth is Online was great and a very fun read!

Tang Mo is a very easy-to-follow MC and the kind of guy that doesn't like dealing with bullshit. He is here to do one thing and one thing only: Survive. And he does this very well and in very entertaining ways. He isn't the kind of guy that likes to fuck around unless he's fucking someone over. He is also very serious most of the time and is only playful once he gets into a relationship with Fu Wendou. Without a doubt, he is following the stoic-cold and logical MC trope and I think he fills that role extremely well.

Fu Wendou is a cool and powerful ML and the secondary MC. He is calculating, smart, and very powerful. He is without a doubt busted, OP, and the one that highlights the MC Golden Halo the most, sometimes more than Tang MO. He is very tactical due to his military background but he also has an awkward fun side to him in which he likes to tell jokes but no one ever gets them or seems to understand that he is trying to joke. He is also a stoic-cold face and logical MC but add that to the fact that he's busted.

Honestly, when I first started reading this I wasn't sure how these two were going to get together when both of them pretty much share too many character tropes to the point that they feel far too similar at times, but that's the point. The two are very similar and that's why they work so well together and know how to fulfill a role that the other might be lacking and that's because they know each other so well.

Now, I say that I wasn't sure how the two were going to get together but to be honest, that isn't the point of the novel at all. The Earth is Online might be BL but it is obviously a novel that wishes to be a story first and foremost and not a romance or a trope of the BL genre. The Earth is Online cares more about the story than any of its characters and relationships and it shows. The novel is the strongest when they are playing deadly games, or when they are fighting the tower and the bosses and to be honest, that's what I was the most hyped about.

Yeah, sure, I wanted Fu Wendou and Tang Mo to develop their relationship but midway through the novel, it was obvious that this was gonna be a deadly, and hot slow burn. In fact, the relationship between Fu Wendou and Tang Mo starts very slow, and then steps on the gas and runs off a cliff cuz as it turns out the two are already into one another and once they find out who they are, the relationship develops even faster. Fu Wendou and Tang Mo aren't romantic either, and they aren't big on words, they have a few moments here and there but nothing that's praiseworthy tbh.

But I was having the most fun when reading the games they were playing and the deadly battles and that's why you should read The Earth is Online, because the core plot is amazing. Some of this shit was too high IQ for me and my pea brain but I was still so invested that I couldn't put the book down until I was done.

A solid 9/10 as a Shonen story, and a rough 6/10 as a BL. Finally a solid 8/10 as a whole. The reason why it isn't higher is cuz of the lack of character development and also the relationships in between characters felt too fragile at times, which I understand makes sense due to the setting but it still left you feeling thirsty for some kind of development or attachment.

If you read this expecting the gay Shit Kim Dokja and Yoo Joonghyuk have got going on then no, this isn't it chief, in fact Dokja and Joonghyuk are more romantic and gayer than these two gay men.

[lloydfrontera]

obsessed with this (and many others) story being so dead-set on two main guys and their just absurdly close relationship and then having the balls so say NO HOMO and being so scared of having an open end so it just had to follow the heteronormativity norms. im so sick and tired of it. it just cheapens the whole things. it cheapens whatever respect there was for female characters involved, which was already not a lot because well. lets be honest yeah. i just wish these stories were self-aware enough to leave the characters alone. no relationship is better than what usually happens in these stories :( that's why im so hesitant to read the novel because im not always able to ignore such stupid literary device. im ranting to your inbox because i think you'll get it and my god i was so bitter when i was spoiled about the story's ending and the violent need to have everyone married it's hhghgghhhnng

i get it yeah. i've been deep in fandom spaces for about ten years now, this is not my first rodeo, won't be my last and i'm already used to it. doesn't mean i'm not tired of it too tho kjasdasd

and yeah i agree, at this point i'm not even really asking for a ship to be canon, i truly do believe sometimes the better option is to just have an open ending and leaving things to the imagination, but the amount of times authors feel the need to shove a last minute het romance just so they can beat the queer allegations,,, is too many to count

i think what gets me with tged is that,,, you can really take away the canon romance and nothing changes. it adds nothing to the plot, it really was something bk moon added in the last chapters purely to make it canon at the end. you could erase those bits and the general plot and characterization remains the same. it is... bad writing to be honest. like. from a purely technical standpoint that's a bad relationship, that's not how you add a romance to your plot!

but! on the other hand! the fact that it can be erased that easily does make it very easy to ignore it and focus on the good parts of the plot which are truly worth everything else aksdhskaj

it's like,, the gay equivalent of that thing marvel does where it includes their 'diversity' moments in such a way that you can cut them off and the film is still perfectly watchable. here you can cut the straight bits and you still get an awesome novel with great characters and deeply moving relationships lmao

it cheapens whatever respect there was for female characters involved, which was already not a lot because well. lets be honest yeah.

and this. yeah. Yeah. i did my fair bit of ranting when the webcomic decided to make silurian javier's love interest, retroactively fridging her for his manpain and also straight up ignoring and erasing her arc in the novel about her not needing to marry to be made heir for the city. like. they just didn't mention it. at all. what the fuck.

and then there's alicia who. the more i think about her and the way her relationship with lloyd is handled the more upset i get. she was such a cool character, with her own thing going on, her own motivations, her own worries, her own deal. and then she becomes lloyd's love interest because. well, she's literally the only important enough female character who isn't related to lloyd or already married who can do it. like. that's it.

silurian gets an entire arc about why she doesn't need to marry lloyd, sherazade marries lloyd's brother, marbella is his mom, moira basically disappears after her introduction... and that's... it, i think?? who else?? emily? the mermaid queen? i for the longest time thought raphael was a girl and was sorely disappointed to find out he was not so. yeah.

then there's the "magentano carry" title effect thing going on and,,, that's a whole mess on its own. i hate it. there's literally an otherwordly power making alicia trust lloyd. let me rephrase that. they had to force the canon love interest into giving her full trust to the main character. the very foundation of their relationship is built on her being literally unable to mistrust him because there's an external force forcing down her suspicions and doubts about him.

and we have canon confirmation that if lloyd pushes hard enough when she's already paranoid because of other factors, that effect can break and all her mistrust and wariness about the potential danger he is to the crown come back with full force and she'll declare him a traitor and go to war against him. like. that's the state of their trust and relationship when the novel is 89% done. i'm not even slightly exaggerating i literally did the math.

it's. it's just bad. it's so bad. i'm. i don't know what else to say. she didn't deserve that. lloyd didn't deserve that. we certainly didn't deserve that either.

so like. after all of this it'll sound really hypocrite of me to tell you to read the novel but. i do think it's still worth it. everything i'm talking about is. such a small part of the entire novel. which is kind of the problem but also the very reason i still think it's worth reading it.

everything else makes up for it i promise akjshdjka

[pleas3pretendimnothere]

I'm going to make a little diary on here from now on! I love talking about fiction, and I tend to dislike a lot of "popular" fiction, so that leads me to reading whatever book I pick up that has an interesting summary! However, that means whenever I read a book, I don't know anyone else who's read it! I don't have any (ANY) friends that enjoy reading as much as I do, so I'm just going to put my thoughts down on here!

I started reading more vigorously last year, because last year was the first I wasn't working (I was an RN in the US, but I moved to Tokyo, where I can't work without a Japanese license). By then, I'd collected over 90 books on my bookshelf that I hadn't read, so when the New Year started, I decided it was time to tackle them! This year, I want to discuss what I read with...anyone!!! (and i don't have a twitter...) So keep reading!!

Proxy

By Alex London - Because I've been collecting so many books for so long, I tend to have a lot of YA fiction that's sat on my shelf for years and years and years going unread. This is one of those books! I fully went into this one expecting it to be another terribly developed YA novel. That can be very hit or miss--some YA novels are so bad, they become impossible to put down. It's like looking at a car crash!

Proxy was bad bad, and that's because it was disappointing. The book starts with a lot of positive surprises. It's a cyberpunk retelling of The Whipping Boy, where the hyper-wealthy are able to employ vulnerable, poor "proxies" to inherit their debts and legal punishments in exchange for an education. For cyberpunk, this is a match made in heaven. It made so much sense, I asked myself, "How has this not been done before?" And then, you quickly learn that the main character is LGBT! What a refreshing surprise from a 2013 sci-fi YA novel! All of this was setting up the book to be fresh, fun, and new. Unfortunately, it was none of those things.

The first half of the book is quite strong, setting up interesting characters with compelling dilemmas in a frightening, nonsensical world. The second half falls into the YA pitfall. As action ramps up, pacing ramps down. Things that appeared to make sense no longer do. And of course, now there is a rebel faction, and only our MC can lead them. And, wonderfully, the gay love story--spoilers here--doesn't end well! What a shocker!

Not worth anyone's time, building up an exciting novel only to crash and burn so hard. Read Snow Crash instead, and please SKIP IT!

Rot and Ruin

By Jonathan Maberry - Here is another book that's been with me for ages and ages. This one is a 2010 zombie YA novel. I have so much to say about this book, and unfortunately, it's quite like Proxy. A lot of good ideas, but poor execution.

This book has been recognized very positively, and it's clear why. The book is all about humanity. Introducing a concept like a "closure specialist"--a bounty hunter who specifically finds and puts to rest loved ones lost to the zombie pandemic--was a spectacular idea. It makes sense for any zombie world, and yet, I've never read about it! However, the extent to which this concept is explored doesn't always read well. The narrative wants you to sympathize with zombies, seeing them less as hungry packs of senseless wolves, but instead as hordes of human victims who were never properly put to rest. That's hard to understand. I mean, they want my brains! Maybe they were people once, but I could never see them as still human! Maybe that's the fault of Maberry's, or the concept of zombies itself. So while I LOVED the "closure specialist" angle, the book's goal of creating empathy for zombies falls quite flat.

My central issue was the book's pacing. For a zombie novel, it's incredibly slow from beginning to end. Even when exciting things are happening, it felt like a slog, perhaps due to our MC's frequent lack of agency. Often, characters are telling our MC pages and pages of more interesting things that happened far in their past--believe me, this apocalyptic world is cool, we'll tell you about it! The MC's brother is constantly showing the reader what a more compelling MC he would have been! What a shame! Instead, we are stuck with a rather annoying, childish young MC, whose contribution to the story, by the conclusion, feels minute.

So many good ideas, and in fact, one of the most powerful, emotional Epilogues I've read in a long time, but overall quite boring. Took me 3 weeks to read! If you love zombie fiction, this is worth a RENT IT . Otherwise, SKIP IT!

Her Fearful Symmetry

By Audrey Niffenegger - Here is a 2009 novel about a pair of young American twins who inherit their estranged aunt's London flat. Little do they realize, the flat is being haunted... That is the summary that attracted me to Her Fearful Symmetry. I see often the "Horror" genre tacked on to this one. The only horror is the book's lackluster story.

This is a beautifully written piece that left me asking, "Why?" Why was this book written? Who was it written for? Two eccentric 21-year-old sisters, who are virtually connected at the hip and share a mutual lack of ambition, move into a mysterious flat, where they both fall into the arms or the poor, emotionally damaged male neighbors who are twice their age. One man is married and struggling with severe OCD--oh, have pity on him! The other was romantically involved with the aunt. What an interesting choice!

There is a real charm somewhere in here. It's clear that Niffenegger fell in love with London's Highgate Cemetery--she even went on to give volunteer tours of the cemetery following her work on this novel, which is so incredibly sweet! Love for the cemetery reads clearly all throughout and is undoubtedly the strength of the novel, but unfortunately, it's made background to a story that left me confused and sometimes uncomfortable (I am so tired of girls in their 20s dating men in the 40s). Even worse, it's predictable in all the wrong ways. I was never surprised by the story, impressed by the concepts, or invested in a character. I just kept asking, "Why?"

And when the plot twist hit? Ugh! Silly, and overcomplicated. Trying to relay it to my husband just made him laugh. SKIP IT!

The Slanted Worlds

By Catherine Fisher - This is the second novel in Fisher's 2012-2016 Obsidian Mirror series. Thankfully, I didn't read ALL bad books this month. While this book, much like its predecessor, isn't incredibly new or special, it's executed well enough to keep me invested.

The writing isn't special, but it's approachable to readers of all ages, and luckily, the story and characters are enough to keep you glued to the page. If you're able to suspend your disbelief and consume a book about time-travel, this is great addition to the scif-fi genre! There are elements to the story that are confusing, as time-travel is doomed to be, but that is rescued by the book's colorful cast of characters. Each contender is technically working with everyone else, and yet, they all have their own conflicting motive surrounding the series' McGuffin. It's executed well enough that I am constantly wondering who is going to snap first and betray the group. That works magic for the pacing! Every character has secrets waiting to be discovered by both the characters and the reader!

There is an emotional aspect missing from this book, but the rest of it is so strange and magical and weird, that I couldn't help but zip through this one. Wonderfully paced, RENT IT!

Tada! And that was January! Thank you if you read this, and I'll be back at the end of February!

[kyndaris]

Oh! Bento, My Bento!

After a slew of interactions with less than stellar individuals on Hinge, I started to despair whether or not dating was for me and if I ought to put an end to this strange experiment of mine to find a significant other. In fact, after having someone just talk at me about how great Japanese light novels were in comparison to 'western literature,' I changed my dating preferences to women only.

Why, you may ask?

Well, I was exhausted by men. And two, because for a while I've been questioning whether or not if I wanted a man in my life.

Confession time.

During high school and even at university, I never had crushes on anyone. In Year 8, I was told that another classmate might have had a crush on me, but while I tried to suss out their interest because I was flattered by the fact (although I thought I was toad in terms of the looks department - and I honestly still think I am), I never did get a proper read of his interests and began to doubt the claims made by my friends.

In fact, for a lot of my life, I've been told by others whether or not I've 'crushed' on others. But when I try to explore my own feelings on the matter, I've not thought of them as romantic. In fact, romance is a thing I've struggled to understand.

How DO you know if you like someone in that way? I've certainly never wanted to jump anyone's bones and the mere thought of engaging in those acts turns me off.

It's why I've often wondered if I was asexual. After watching a video where a YouTuber explained their own personal experience, I'm starting to think I truly do sit on that asexual spectrum.

But men, women or anything in between, that hasn't precluded me from romancing fictional characters. And in fact, I've enjoyed my time with many a great digital construct be that Garrus Vakkarian or Riku or Morrigan. Then, of course, there's the fact that I ship any and all types of relationships although some of my favourites in recent history has been Imogen Temult x Laudna, Catra x Adora, Kaz xInej, Arenza x Grey and Tifa Lockhart x Cloud Strife (although, I wouldn't mind Tifa and Aerith somehow becoming a pair in Remake). Of course, I also read some very questionable ships like Jacob Seed x Female Deputy...so take what I enjoy reading with a grain of salt - particularly if it has anything to do with AO3. There's a lot of messed up stuff on there.

So, don't read it!

You've been warned, dear readers.

Still, it was the trip that I went on in March this year that solidified that perhaps my interests were a little bit fruity. Despite the fact that the woman was married, there was something magnetic about her personality and I wanted to be around her. Sure, I wasn't going to immediately jump her bones but I did want to know as much as I could about her.

And when I think about a few of the interactions in the past, it's been the same. I might not have admitted it to myself but during a trip to China camp back in 2008, there was another girl that I really wanted to get to know better. It was somewhat disappointing to know that she was also popular with the boys too, but a part of me wished that we would be best friends.

Did it mean I wanted to be romantically entangled with her?

Who knows. I was unsure of my actual feelings at the time though I knew there was a strange sort of obsession on my part to be a really good friend to them.

But the wider implications passed me by.

I didn't know if that made me gay or not. In fact, I never truly pondered that question properly until now. Especially when in high school, a friend pretended (or at least I thought they were pretending) to be overly amorous with me and I never felt inclined to return it.

Heterosexuality had always defined my understanding of romance and I never much challenged it until more recently.

In any case, back to my dating!

Before I was unceremoniously kidnapped by a group of my friends for an impromptu road trip down to Canberra for Oz Comic-Con (and thereby proving White Coat correct that maybe I do go to a lot of conventions), I met up with another hopeful at a small cafe in Chippendale called Something for Jess before we toured the Oh!Bento exhibit at the Japanese Foundation.

This man, from a purely objective standpoint, was probably one of the better candidates that I'd met. Dikotter (my code name for him) had a good job as a software engineer, was always intent on self-improvement and had his own interests that didn't become his entire personality. There was a maturity to Dikotter that I appreciated and found common ground with - especially when it came to our discussions after we toured the Oh! Bento exhibit and Fortress and were sitting at a dessert bar for nigh on two hours.

Dikotter was a man that didn't just talk at me about his latest hyperfixation or how strange it was that he had such 'normie' work colleagues that didn't understand video games. Rather, he was much more introspective and was able to provide more thought-provoking questions than I'd expected.

In fact, I probably came off as the less intelligent of the pair of us as he asked what I might do if I had access to a billion dollars.

He also respected that I didn't feel comfortable talking about my job and we somehow ended up on a semi-serious conversation about dictators and the echoes of current China with Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution.

Hence the codename.

We had both read Frank Dikotter's work on modern Chinese history. And that's not something I ever thought I would share with anyone I've met on any of my dates. Most of the time, I've had the same discourse on favourite video games as men try to think of something interesting to talk about without realising how quickly they limit themselves by making these things the dominant subject.

So, yes, meeting a fellow intellectual and one that knew how to dress well (or at least not in an unironed shirt and cargo pants) and was good at making conversation/ a lively debate on the pitfalls of socialism/ communism was something I most definitely appreciated even though I wasn't sure if we had any romantic chemistry.

Does this mean there might be hope for Dikotter? Maybe.

As yet, I'm still unsure where I swing when it comes to pursuing a relationship. Do I actually fancy the fairer sex? I, honestly, don't know. But I'm also hesitant to commit to Dikotter in saying that we'd be endgame.

A part of that may come from my ambivalence in terms of romantic relationships but I think that if we do become friends, it will definitely be a much more interesting partnership than I've known with most except on the odd occasion when I chat with individuals much older than I am and who have a wealth of life experience to draw on for their thoughts and opinions.

[pridepages]

Gallows Humor: The Comedienne’s Guide to Pride

I just finished The Comedienne’s Guide to Pride by Hayli Thomson. I have thoughts...

Here there be spoilers!

In a time is love isn’t love and pride is sliding closer to protest than parade, I wanted to have a month where I immersed myself in queer joy. So what better time to read Hayli Thomson’s The Comedienne’s Guide to Pride? The novel was pitched as the tale of an aspiring funny girl who finds herself in the wacky situation of being chosen as a finalist for a diversity internship at SNL...but hasn’t come out to anyone yet. The tone felt absurd: funny ha-ha.

That is...not what I got.

Our heroine, Taylor, is an open wound. From tearing up a defaced Ghostbusters reboot poster because of a slur to ripping into herself in self-disgust for masturbating to Fried Green Tomatoes, every page of this novel howls with her pain. 

Which isn’t to say there aren’t jokes. Describing her questioning period, Taylor snarks “my sexuality was still Amelia Earhart-themed--I had no idea where it was going to end up.” The experience of falling in love was watching her crush play a Salem witch and feeling her “phantom touch...reaching all the way to the back row of the theater and strangling the lingering breath of heteronormativity right out of me.” 

Spot the pattern in her jokes? they’re perfect examples of gallows humor: jokes used as a defense mechanism because everything is so horrible that the only way to cope with the pain is to find something absurd to numb the pain. There’s a reason old-fashioned anesthetic was called ‘laughing gas.’

Rather than being notable for its humor, novel’s at its sharpest, its most viscerally impactful, when Taylor speaks directly about her suffering.

When she yearns for romance “self-loathing took me by the throat.” Describing her experience of being closeted, she says she’s “constantly tearing at the seams...If you’re lucky, you get a few miserable, desolate moments to pull yourself back together...You hope that the seam won’t split further. You hope everybody will buy what you’re selling--that you’re totally fine.” But she isn’t simply hiding from homophobia. She’s also busy internalizing it: “soaking in shame and self-hatred for so long that my heart had turned prune-y...Hating myself for who I was and who I loved was the only was I knew how to adapt...Shaming myself was the only way I could grip the seawalls without floating away.”

If the reader is hoping for some relief when Taylor finally, inevitably, comes out...well, prepare for disappointment. This is no Love, Simon fantasy. Her experience is closer to what most of us find in the beginning...especially if we live in a less accepting environment:

“Coming out wasn’t quite sugary sweet. It tasted like lemon icing when you’d been expecting vanilla. It felt like racing toward a crossing and skidding to a stop at the exact moment the walk signal turned red--you had no choice but to pause and watch the traffic move around you. But there was the promise of that green light to come, and that just had to be enough.”

In a way, Thomson’s brutal honesty makes this novel a timely wake-up call to that person who thinks that being gay in 2023 is ‘no big deal.’ The kind of read you hand to the ignorant friend who rolls their eyes at the idea that we ‘need a whole month’ to ‘celebrate what we do in the bedroom.’ 

But me? Even if it’s naive, I think I’d rather step off that gallows and immerse myself in unfettered joy. Even if--for now--it’s just a fantasy.

[kiwiria]

Fic Rec Challange

List your Top (5, 10, whatever) Fanfics of all time...

I don't actually read all that much fanfiction any longer, but every now and then I find something that tickles my fancy. I wouldn't consider myself as part of any of these fandoms, but all of these are well worth reading.

1) Criminal Minds: How To Fight Loneliness by @madlori Summary: In a whirlwind year, Prentiss and Reid went from teammates to husband and wife. Married now for a year, a new case in Texas will put them through the wringer and give them their greatest test yet. Includes flashbacks to how their relationship changed.

Probably my all-time favourite fanfic. The characters are SO true to themselves that I can almost hear them say their lines as I'm reading the fanfic.

2) Harry Potter: Dumbledore's Army and the Year of Darkness by Thanfiction Summary: A novel following Neville and the D.A. through the 7th year at Hogwarts under the reign of Snape and the Carrows.

Absolutely brutal, but so well written that I keep returning to it. I know the author turned out to be wacko and apparently the story's no longer available online (at least not anywhere I could find). Fortunately I've long ago downloaded my own PDF version of it, so I can still reread it :)

(Honorable mention: Oh God, Not Again by Sarah1281, which I actually only came to hear of because of tumblr. The concept (grown up Harry Potter returning to his 11-year-old body and reliving Hogwarts with all his memories intact) is absolutely brilliant, and the execution does NOT disappoint.)

3) Narnia: The Queen's Return by HonorH Summary: Once a queen or king in Narnia, always a king or queen in Narnia. Can Susan find Narnia again, now that she's lost everything?

Probably the best fanfic on "the problem of Susan" that I've ever read.

4) All Clear: Nothing Lost by Drayton Summary: All Clear tells us surprisingly little about what happened in Oxford after Mr. Dunworthy left to rescue Polly. This story, told from Colin's POV, details the decade-long effort to retrieve the missing historians.

The summary states exactly one of the problems I had with the otherwise brilliant Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis. This fanfic fills the blanks very nicely and gave me a much greater appreciation of the story.

5) Sherlock: Performance in a Leading Role by @madlori Summary: Sherlock Holmes is an Oscar winner in the midst of a career slump. John Watson is an Everyman actor trapped in the rom-com ghetto. When they are cast as a gay couple in a new independent drama, will they surprise each other? Will their on-screen romance make its way into the real world?

AU, so to me it reads more like original work than a fanfic, but fanfic it is, so it counts here all the same :-D

[eyebright-iris]

Review: The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

Where to begin. I think I’d forgotten how it feels to be breathless in the wake of a truly incredible book, heart racing and hands shaking against the back cover. Shoutout to Samantha Shannon for reminding me of that feeling.

The Priory of the Orange Tree is a beautiful flame-coloured hardback that has haunted my shelves since 2019 when it first came out and I grabbed it because it sounded dope, looked gorgeous and there were dragons on it (your first special interest never quite leaves you). After about three and a half years, and after resolving to read every day of 2023, I decided enough was enough; time to tackle this beast.

While other works of Shannon’s have been on my TBR before, Priory is the first of hers I’ve read. It’s my return to epic high fantasy after a long absence, and I can’t say I’m disappointed. Far from it, in fact. This book rattles with its own intensity, the stakes for each character, the rising romance and drama and the freefall towards devastation that builds all the way until about book five of six (for context, the huge 800-page novel is split into six smaller “books”).

I adored Priory. This review will likely be tragically short in an effort to avoid spoiling some of the fantastic reveals and brilliant storytelling, but for now I’ll discuss the things I loved so much about it without revealing too much.

Our four narrator characters are brilliant. They are flawed, messy, human and devoted. Ead is a secret mage tasked with protecting the Queen of a foreign nation; Loth is a kind and devout young man with much responsibility and too sweet and authentic a heart for the puppeteering courts he finds himself in; Niclays Roos is a bitter and jaded old alchemist with a deep core of darkness and a fierce hunger in him; and Tané is a 19-year-old striving to prove herself and take up the mantle of an honoured dragonrider. All four of them work to bring the rich world of the novel to life, each from a different background, with different goals, all eventually clashing and - perhaps, if the greatest evil is to be overcome - aligning.

I’ll briefly touch on the diversity in Priory. Of our four narrators, two (Ead and Tané) are female; both are also women of colour (Ead is black, and while Priory does not take place in our own world, Tané’s home of Seikii shows clear parallels with Japan). Niclays is the only white narrator, and he is gay; Loth is black. Ead and Queen Sabran are both lesbians, and for those who, like me, fall on the aro/ace spectrum, Tané’s arc has no hint of romance, and there is a strong case for aroace Tané. Not only do we have diversity, but well-written diversity too (I know that you can have all the representation you want, it’s not really worthwhile if it’s all terrible). Shannon draws on both Western and Eastern mythology for this fantasy epic, split between two great worlds of the East and West, divided by a vast sea known as the Abyss. Yet within the hemispheres there is conflict and diversity, Seiiki and the Empire of Twelve Lakes in the East, and the various states of the West - Inys, Mentendon, Yscalin, Lasia, Hróth…

One of the greatest aspects of Priory is the way it interrogates history and genre. A story of a queendom ruled only by women, passed down from mother to daughter for a thousand years, sounds feminist until you realise there is more below the surface. When a queendom is passed unfailingly from mother to daughter, everything suddenly hinges on a woman’s ability to give birth - and how feminist does that sound now? There is also the brilliant weaving of conflicting histories, and how those histories have shaped the world as it exists. Institutions that are founded on a single principle, says Priory, will invariably corrupt everything around themselves to maintain that course, even when new evidence says otherwise. When those who claim to know the truth still operate with only half the story, even they can see the real truth as a threat to the status quo.

Priory sings with vibrancy, it clamours with depth. Not a single character comes out unscathed, but that of course begs the question that the novel, on some level, is asking: what is the price we pay for tomorrow? What is it worth to us, what will we lose, to see the sun rise on a better world?

[ixcaliber]

April

This month I’m going to try not to lose my mind a little bit as I write this post. Fingers crossed.

1. The Murder of Sonic The Hedgehog

The best kind of april fools joke is one where there is an actual thing of substance to it and it stands on its own as something that could just exist outside of the idea that it’s a funny april fools joke.

The Murder of Sonic The Hedgehog is a free visual novel with platformer elements, and it’s a lot of fun. Even as someone who doesn’t know every sonic character, doesn’t get some little background references and cameos this is a fun game with a fun narrative and satisfying payoff.

The platformer elements are like abstractions, little tasks to be completed which if successful indicate the player character having successfully thought their way through to the conclusion of the argument they want to make. It’s a little abstracted but it works well enough in the game. Some of the later bits are actually quite tough but there are accessibility options for anyone who needs them.

Lot of fun. Absolute recommendation.

2. You Are Dough

A new tiny experience from npckc (a year of springs). Playable in browser. Good illustration of a concept. Exactly as long as it needs to be.

3. Gexfeld

A game about nothing.

It’s a game where you traverse awkward geography and listen to the same unfunny jokes again and again as you struggle with the awkward controls. It feels user hostile in a very intentional way and combines these two completely disparate elements in a way that works surprisingly well to showcase what feels like thinly veiled contempt of its source materials. Maybe I’m reading too much into a game about nothing but still.

4. I Want To Pursue The Mean Side Character

Very short and straightforward visual novel about girls being gay for each other. Character deisgn is cute. It’s a little too predictable and simplistic for it to really leave any lasting impression. But it I am always happy to see girls being gay and happy together.

5. Magic Mirror Hall

Short visual novel about seeing an established relationship from an outsider’s perspective. It was interesting to play through as the choices really did make me feel conflicted in how best to handle a situation I was only tangentially part of.

The game does a really good job at evoking the idea of a world with the little snippets that you learn about magic and how it relates to the psyche of an individual delivered in a naturalistic manner.

6. Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands

Playing this game for the first time was like the arrested development dead dove meme. I was excited to play it as I had fond memories of Assault on Dragon Keep (a Borderlands 2 DLC from which this is spun off) and it just never crossed my mind what a full game based on this concept would mean.

It feels weird to say it out loud but I think the thing that I like the most about Borderlands is the setting itself. And some of the characters also I guess. It’s not the gameplay, aesthetic, sense of humour or tone.

In this you’re playing a character playing a game of Bunkers and Badasses DMed by Tina and so instead of the borderlands worlds and their strange worlds and varied creatures you are exploring the wonderlands, a generic fantasy world with generic fantasy monsters.

It really was a case where if I’d thought about it I would have concluded that this would be what the game was but I hadn’t and so it felt a little disappointing, especially since your party for this game are two new characters who I never quite warmed to as much as you would hope given their prominence.

Frette and Valentine are supposed to be there to represent the extremes of ‘follow the rules of the game’ and ‘roleplay and do what you want’, but I never read them this way until they have an entire conversation where they explicitly state that that is their whole thing. I mean rule of comedy has them both ignoring the rules whenever they want. The vibe I initially had was that Valentine was supposed to be like the charisma character who attempts to befriend and seduce every character he meets and Frette was supposed to be playing a murderhobo.

And this reading isn’t supported by the game either but it makes more sense to me in theory at least. Then the conflict between them is more about connecting to the world and the people in it than whether or not a rule that we as the players don’t know anything about because it’s just a game mechanic - or not even a game mechanic it’s a narrative abstraction of a game mechanic - isn’t being followed.

Also the character customization kinda sucks and despite giving myself cat ears I still couldn’t really manage to make a character who looked appealing. Also I think having custom characters of set character classes is just a fundamentally worse way of doing it. It makes the character you play as feel completely hollow as they say the most generic quips.

I picked Sporemancer or whatever. I had a little mushroom buddy, which seemed cute when I was picking the class but when it got to playing the game I quickly realized that they not only weren’t cute their main thing would be farting to get enemy aggro and while useful it means that 90% of things my character said were reactions to my mushroom farting.

That said as I continued through the game there were a couple of areas (the beanstalked village, the empty ocean) that were actually pretty memorable and interesting to explore.

The thing that got me interested was how the villain of the setting The Dragon Lord always talked about Tina and seemed to bear a personal grudge against her and it got me thinking about Spec Ops The Line. Spec Ops The Line is the game I hold emblematic of the brief trend to make a game that makes you do a bunch of bad things and then calls you out for it and while I do like that specific game I did always used to think, ‘if we’re bad for playing it what does it say about the people making it’. 

There are some pretty good moments with The Dragon Lord, where he points out for example that you’re just a pawn in Tina’s game as well. Despite the conceit of the game (you’re the fatemaker the one person in the wonderlands with free will) you don’t actually have free will, you can’t reject the main story to kill the Dragon Lord you can only either do it or ignore it.

He mentions that you’re essentially interchangable, an unremarkable cipher just to play the role of hero so the other characters can exist and do things and brings up that nobody has ever said your name, and it’s true. I mean it’s partially true because you’re given a free prompt to enter whatever name you want (I chose Piss because I was annoyed at the time or something. Look sometimes I just do things and there are no reasons) but it does touch something true about the experience.

Of course we could never have Valentine advocating trying to talk things out, befriending or seducing people because as ever the only verb that Borderlands has is kill. It would be incongrous if he said anything that made you try to connect to the Wonderlands as a world because by the very mechanics of the game you never can and never will be able to do so.

The end was a let down. All this stuff about the nature of the game that I’ve been enjoying for the last few paragraphs, I think it got in the game on accident because they definitely don’t seem to want you to agree with the Dragon Knight. If I’d have been writing this game I would have done some absolutely wonderful bullshit at the end. It could have been so good. I’m seriously considering writing fanfic of it.

7. Sonic Frontiers

It would be difficult to make a sonic game worse than Sonic 06 but they certainly tried.

I wanted to like it and conceptually I don’t think it’s unsalvageable. But the problems are significant and numerous including the aesthetic, the jank, whether or not this is a 3d sonic game or a 2d sonic game in a trenchcoat, the basic act of navigation, sonic’s deathwish, the combat, the characterization and the fucking pinball.

Chapter One: The Aesthetic

Its awful. That’s it. That’s the end of this chapter. You all have eyes you can see for yourself how it clashes with Sonic, how it looks like the kind of premade assets you’d see in an asset store with a bunch of sonic objects just thrown in at random.

I still think it could have worked, with just some attempt at bridging the gap between Sonic and the world he is inhabiting. A more colourful world, even with the same exact scattershot design would look more coherant. I watched The French Dispatch this month and that’s a great movie, I didn’t think I’d be mentioning it in this post. But there’s a line from that, a quote from the editor of the magazine along the lines of ‘whatever you write make sure it looks like you did it on purpose’ and the aesthetic of Sonic Frontiers looks like an accident. Looks as though the designers spilled a huge box of sonic objects over a pubg map and called it a day.

Or alternately a more muted colour pallete for sonic when he’s in the open world areas. I really think that if he could just match the world he’s in it would feel substantially different.

Chapter Two: The Jank

It’s not as bad as Sonic 06. Which is like the lowest bar I could possibly imagine. I just wanted to say that quickly because like... this isn’t the worst of the problems with Sonic Frontiers. When I talk about the jank I’m talking about glitchy behaviour like when you run up the arm of one of the big enemies and half the time you get to land where you need to and half the time you just get launched off in some other direction. Or phasing through the flippers in the Fucking Pinball section.

It’s definitely there and definitely irritating, but it is one of the lesser problems of the game simply because if the game was running perfectly then none of this stuff would be happening. All of the rest of the problems are fully intended aspects of the game.

Chapter Three: Whether Or Not This Is A 3D Game Or A 2D Game In A Trenchcoat

In the game you have cyberspace levels which are essentially 2d levels that you access them from portals in the 3d world. You might think I’m about to make an argument that these are the real content of Sonic Frontiers but fuck that I hated playing those as well. No my argument is that the 3d is actually an enormous number of tiny 2d levels all jammed together.

I would have thought that the purpose of the numerous boost pads, bumpers and grind rails was to help you navigate around the world. To aid in faster movement between locations. In fact the purpose of these items is to briefly shove you into a 2d platforming sequence that can last maybe just a couple of seconds, maybe a couple of minutes. It doesn’t sound like a huge problem but like okay this is kind of trending into the navigation problem now so lets just start Chapter Four already

Chapter Four: The Basic Act of Navigation

Okay so the reason it’s a big problem is that whenever you want to get anywhere your options are to just run there in a straight line or try one of the speed boosty items around you and sometimes you’ll get lucky and you’ll do a fun little platforming section that also brings you closer to your destination. Most of the time you will do that platforming section and find yourself turned around and further away from where you wanted to go.

Or maybe you’ll notice partway through and want to quickly exit from this diversion and get back to what you were doing. That’s not always an option. If your up high in the air there might be safe gaps you can drop through, but this can also happen on just narrow strips of land which still exist in the open 3d world. It feels so silly when you’re standing in a wide open field but still diligently working along a single line of obstacles instead of just stepping to the side of them even though you should be able to.

The other major problem with navigation is that okay for example the plot needs you to now go and interact with a chaos emerald and it’s over here on the edge of like a peninsula so you work your way along the cliffs to reach it but when you get anywhere near it’s all cliffs too high to possibly go up or maybe the area you need to go to is just way up in the fucking sky. At that point you need to step back look at the exact spot you’re trying to go to and then follow back all the loops and rails and bumpers back to the one spot where you can go to to start the actual trek to the place you want to be. It’s just completely antithetical to open world design. It’s like why is this game open world in the first place anyway.

Chapter Five: Sonic’s Death Wish

This is how I’ve chosen to label the chapter where I talk about how Sonic controls. It’s so strange because like, his turning is somehow both too responsive and too sluggish. It’s most noticeable in the cyberspace levels. I think it’s that he has a surprisingly wide turning circle. He’s responsive at turning but even at walking speed he has to veer around in a wide arc it makes it a real pain if you’re trying to do anything precise.

Attempting to use the boost button in cyberspace levels is more or less a guarantee that Sonic will just shoot off into the void, but there are also places where it feels necessary, where you just need that extra distance that comes from mid-air boosting and the unpredictability of it is so frustrating.

Chapter Six: The Combat

The new combat sort of works sometimes but also doesn’t really work at all. In theory having enemies that take more than just a homing bounce or whatever it is called is a good idea, and the cyloop is an interesting way to add movement to combat. In practice fuck fighting any of these enemies.

Early on the second island I fought a group of about four of the most basic trivial enemies that kept shielding themselves and it’s not as though I was struggling but it felt fiddly and annoying. They made the combat more time consuming, more awkward, but not necessarily more engaging.

The game tries to give you all these skills to unlock to try to engage you with the combat mechanics. But like it’s just buttons to press to initiate a different animation while you’re doing homing bounce combos on an enemy. It even gives you a skill to automate that so you don’t even have to engage with these new skills. That’s how little faith it has in these things. Not to mention a couple of times where I would trigger one of them by accident while trying to evade a fight and then sonic would do this whole wind up and go flying at a enemy who always seemed to be in the middle of an attack animation when sonic got there and you lose so many rings when you get hit. Just an ungodly amount. You can hold up to 400 and that’s about 2 hits most of the time. The combat fucking sucks.

Which is to say nothing of the big titan fights. They have cool soundtracks but god the super sonic mode is almost worse than regular mode. Sonic can’t get hurt in this mode. All the enemies can do is knock you back, force you to watch a little animation of Sonic getting knocked away and then regaining his composure for a couple of seconds. The only thing they can do against you is waste your time. And thats exactly what the fights feel like, a complete waste of time. Sit there with the parry buttons held down until the enemies do an attack then button mash until it gets ready to attack again and do that over and over again and then add in some quicktime events and you’re done.

The second titan fight is when I think I went from thinking this was a bad game to thinking this was absolutely abysmal. Second titan fight has you climbing up a tower in the open world, jumping onto a magic ribbon that runs parralel to the titan, running along this to keep up for an inordinately long amount of time, until you can get to its head. Then you get the chaos emerald and enter the fight proper. You fly around after the thing, dodging missiles, parrying attacks and attacking when you can. Around and around this island and then when it was down to 25% health it did some kind of qte attack on me and I start button mashing the appropriate button just like in the last titan fight only to die instantly. This was a new type of qte the game hadn’t shown me before, introduced five minutes (i timed how long the fight took on my next attempt and five minutes is a conservative estimate) into this boss fight. And the kicker is that it puts you right back there at the beginning in the open world to do everything I just listed above again. 

Chapter Seven: The Characterization

Maybe I got spoiled by The Murder of Sonic The Hedgehog. I didn’t like any of the characterization in this one. Every little conversation between Sonic and his friends felt weirdly stilted and unnatural. I wasn’t given any impression that these people willingly hang out with Sonic even once. And it’s kind of funny that like each of the first three islands is about giving one of Sonic’s friends a moment of reflection, to consider what they want to do with their lives and let them express their interiority, and each one of them expresses the desire to go and do something else away from Sonic. About the only plot beats I could actually agree with.

Which is to say nothing of Sage and Robotnik. Every time they had a cutscene it was essentially the same cutscene. Robotnik says ‘let me out of this accursed cyber dimension’ and Sage says ‘no it’s too dangerous but i won’t tell you what the dangerous thing actually is and you won’t even consider asking me about it’ and Robotnik says ‘nevermind that let me out of this accursed cyber dimension’. Repeat for most of the game. Except for that one cutscene where a bunch of helicopters attack Robotnik for some reason and Sage blows them all up really easily and nothing of any consequence actually happens why does this cutscene even exist.

The funniest part of this whole relationship is that Robotnik spends the entirety of the game not showing the slightest acknowledgement of Sage as a person, he talks to her like he’s talking to Amazon Alexa or whatever and then when she gets blown up in space he’s suddenly like ‘my dearest daughter i’m so incredibly sad about your death’.

And don’t get me wrong when I say these things are funny they’re not really actually funny in the moment. Everything is too slow and clumsy to land as a joke. The game never really becomes so bad that it’s good.

Like this isn’t a characterization point but I’m not going back and creating a new chapter now, but all that stuff I was saying earlier about getting stuck in a faux-2d level every time you hit a bumper or whatever. It’s a problem if you’re trying to navigate the world as quickly as possible, but hypothetically if you’re just running around for the fun of it or trying to collect the collectibles then surely having lots of platforming challenges to stumble into is good.

And I’m not going to argue that that isn’t good. Its just that as the game went on I started to notice more and more how long the game would go without needing any input from me, as it bounced sonic around and through loop de loops and all kinds of cool spectacle, i’d notice that I could take my hands off the controller for like ten/twenty seconds, sometimes more and it started to feel empty like I’d have more or less the same experience just watching the game autoplay through these segments.

I got to the point where everything about the game had worn out its welcome; the story, the combat, the platforming, the open world, the cyberspace worlds, basic navigation, just getting collectibles. Nothing felt good. Nothing was what I wanted. That’s when it was time to play the fucking pinball.

Chapter Eight: The Fucking Pinball

At the end of the third island right before the titan your last task is to play pinball and score five million points. Honestly I could make a number list of all the ways in which this pinball minigame is fucking abysmal but I’m going to try to restrain myself, which means making all the same complaints but without the extra bit of unnecessary structuring I suppose.

The score you need to hit is so fucking high. You very quickly notice you’re not wracking up points in the thousands. You need to hit the red coins that appear to get a x2 multiplier and then a x4 and so on up until you get a x255 multipler whereupon you’re actually getting some decent points. The multiplier will reset to zero if your ball... falls down the pinball hole. I don’t know the pinball terminology you know what I mean. The length of time you have to play this pinball minigame, which by the way is completely mandatory you cannot proceed with the game until you reach this absurdly high score in this stupid minigame, is just unconscionable.

It does not help matters that the board is so basic. There are just some bumpers up at the top, a pair of paddles and little bouncy things in most of the walls. No switches to flick on for combos. No little holes to go into. I don’t know pinball terminology but anyone who has played a decent pinball table knows you need more than this, especially if you’re going to be forcing people to spend like five to ten or longer minutes playing this horrible pinball.

It doesn’t help that when you do finally hit this high score the pinball continues and the game declines to give you any more instruction. At this point you need to hit the pinball to a small hole that has opened at the top of the board which is the real win condition. If you gutter at this point, or just quit out because you think you’re done, then it’s time to start the entire thing over again.

This was the breaking point where I decided this was one of the worst games I’d ever played. I made a post comparing it to We Happy Few, and yeah it has less abhorrent sexual abuse victim blaming than that game does but moment to moment I had less fun playing this. It was more difficult to get me to want to sit and play this video game than WHF. I hated this game. Good fucking god.

8. The Birdcage

A little puzzle game I played on my tablet. It consists of about 25 different little birdcages each one has a bunch of little mechanical puzzles to solve which will eventually grant you a key you use to open the cage and free the bird.

It feels reminscent of something like The Room, but in a much more simplified form. There was only one or two puzzles that were complicated enough that I had to stop and think and not just operate on first instinct. But its neat enough if you just enjoy the tactile feel of operating a machine, opening compartments and pulling levers etc. I feel like I’m damning this game with faint praise but I did enjoy my time with it.

9. Pizza Tower

Pizza Tower is an incredible indie platformer with an emphasis on speed and precision imputs. I’m sort of bad at both of those aspects but even so there’s still so much here to appreciate. For one thing the character designs and the animations are incredible in their expressiveness and exaggeration. There’s nothing I can say about that that can’t be better conveyed by just watching this man start running and build up to top speed.

The design of the levels is also really neat. Each level has a main phase and then at a certain point you will encounter a John Pillar (i still wonder if John Pillar is a pun or a joke i just don’t get somehow) you will have to break which starts the escape phase. Everything ramps up in intensity and a countdown timer starts ticking down. It’s such a good design, with enough leniency in timing to allow those who aren’t as good at the mechanics time enough to get to the exit, but those who have mastered Peppino’s robust controls to complete an entire second lap.

The variety present in the levels is really good. Each level has some kind of gimmick. Either some element not present in others, some transformation for Peppino or maybe the presence an ally such as Gustavo and his enormous rattie friend Brick, or Mort the Chicken from the video game of the same name. Every level feels fun and unique in some way.

The boss fights are mostly very fun. I kind of struggled the most with Pepperman (the first boss) because of the one phase where you have to hit him while he’s in the air and I never quite worked out the timing to do so with any regularity. Every boss in this game has at least one hidden health bar and this is probably the first game I’ve played where I don’t think of that as a negative.

The first phase of every boss fight is fairly simple and mostly there to acclimatize you to the mechanics of the fight before the second phase really goes wild with it. The fourth boss (who I will not name for spoilers) was the most enjoyable in the whole game for me. I realized with every new attack I was surviving to that I was laughing out loud as I dodged and weaved through this incredibly chaotic battle.

I had heard about how good a game Pizza Tower was and I had sort of held off on it because a lot of the discussion seemed to fixate around like the speed tech of the game and the mastery of the controls. And that’s not something I really find compelling. I’m super glad I gave it a chance though, as there’s a lot to love here that isn’t just in mastery of the systems. Fully expect this to be on my end of the year best games of the year list.

10. I Commissioned Some Bees 3

I played another one of these. As usual my only complaint is that the levels don’t feel arranged in order of increasing difficulty. In fact I got stuck and needed a hint for the last bees on the first three scenes and then had no problem at all locating them on all the rest of the scenes. Remains fun and chill with nice artwork.

11. Pixross

A little picross game I got from a bundle I think. It’s picross but by solving it you also create a little pixel art object or creature or something. My first issue is simple: there’s an animals category and it doesn’t have a foxie in it.

My second issue is less simple. I don’t have to explain picross do I? Well just in case it’s a grid you have numbers at the top and left of each of the rows and columns which tell you how many filled cells there are in each row/column, but more specifically they tell you how many filled cells in a row there are. Like 3,1,3 would be three cells in a line, then one cell on its own, then three cells all with at least one space between them. Yeah I know you’ve played picross before, sorry for overexplaining.

So as an example if I have a row labelled 1, 1, 3. And I have filled a single cell in the row. Lets say its dead in the middle. There’s enough space to the right that that cell could be the first one indicated by the label. If I were doing this manually I’d have to get more information before I could ascertain which of these blocks that cell belonged to. In pixross if a block is complete then it gets crossed off. So if this was one of the two solitary blocks that one would be crossed off automatically and I would be given more information that I wouldn’t necessarily be able to glean through just looking at the board.

It felt like cheating to use this aspect of the way the mechanics worked as a clue. I tried to avoid doing so for the most part, but you kind of can’t help but notice that and it colours how you would proceed even if you try to only proceed using logic that is apparent. 

12. Plastic Tape

A very short narrative game by npckc. I’ve mentioned them before. In fact I played a little game of theirs back up at the top of this post. This is one of my favourite of their little games. It’s about a series of phone calls across a number of years and it uses a really neat little framing device and it is playable in browser.

13. Aka

Aka is a cute game that deals with a surprisingly serious topic. It is about a red panda who returns home after war. Its main narrative isn’t immediately apparent, but is primarily about helping ghosts move on.

There are things to like about this one. The design of Aka is great, the design of the big capy is great. The world is pleasant to explore, the characters fun to meet and assist. In theory I like the main thrust of its narrative, though I think it has missteps in how it communicates and unlocks that narrative.

The main gameplay is all about gardening, collecting resources and crafting items, and that isn’t a gameplay style that personally resonates strongly with me. It also in my opinion doesn’t feel like it fits cohesively with what the game is and it quickly feels like you run out of crops to plant and objects to make. The game feels too short to really engage with these mechanics in any meaningful way, and there isn’t really enough things to make and plant to keep someone who was here for these mechanics engaged.

It also felt a little janky to me. Just something about the way it controlled that made it feel a little unpolished. And there were a couple of parts where the game offered me a minigame (the marble run minigame and one of the rhythm minigames) where it just didn’t load no matter what I did.

14. Riven: The Sequel To Myst

I have had a weird relationship with the Myst games. I have played all of them when I was too young to really even be able to solve the puzzles. I have a distinct memory of playing one of the later Myst games and all I was doing was looking up the answers in a walkthrough or hint book or something and then carrying them out. And I wasn’t even really following the story. I distinctly remember thinking something along the lines of ‘why am i playing this I’m not engaging with it on any level’ and giving up.

In 2021 I decided to replay Myst and had a great time (except for the fucking underground maze sequence). I remembered the shape of the island but not any puzzle solutions. I think I maybe also remember trying to fill a real life notebook with all the fireplace panel combinations. I hope that I didn’t actually do that and somebody stopped me.

Anyway so this month I saw the hbomberguy patreon video about Myst and my brain went, oh yeah Riven. I had about the same experience that I had with Myst where as I played it I began to remember the shape of the island but no concrete puzzle solutions. I remember being absolutely convinced that there was a secret area under the lake, under the big rock with the spyglass, that you just needed to find the right combination of levers in the control tower and then the submarine would go into there somehow. I mostly have memories of being stuck, wandering around the island trying to work out what I was supposed to be doing next.

The thing about Riven is its openness is its best feature and also its biggest problem. Like the first couple of hours is fun as you explore the various locations. It’s also a little annoying as each place that you come to you find yourself blocked somehow (a bridge that needs to be extended from the other side, a panel with buttons but no clues as to what to do with it, levers that control things on walkways you can’t reach, a number of eyes that clearly allude to something but what). Its like having a roll of sellotape and you just can’t find the edge to let you start peeling it away. And the most annoying thing about it is that the big puzzle here is you need to close a specific pair of doors behind you and finally you can actually make progress with the rest of the game. It was that simple.

The worst part is being stuck in that part of the game and you’re still learning about how the game works, how the machines you encounter work and what they do and sometimes you just don’t have enough information. If you see a puzzle its really hard to know if you have the knowledge you need and you just need to work out how to apply it or if you just need to close some more doors till you find the rest of the game.

Once you’re going though, the way the game gradually unfolds out and all of the things that you’ve been seeing throughout your playthrough finally become apparent. That’s great. Very few games made me feel as excited to solve a puzzle as when I first arrived at the plateau island and realized what I was looking at. I believe everyone hates the fire marble puzzle but I loved it. It turned the whole geography of the video game into an enormous multilayered puzzle.

Riven kind of is a masterpiece but I wish it was a smoother transition into the complicated puzzles. I will admit that the second time an important location was hidden behind an open door and I struggled and struggled to figure it out was on me though.

[boring-side-effect]

i love it how when you see a fan stuff on tumblr before you read/watch the original piece and you never know if that's what really happened or what *should* have happened. like were they really in gay romantic relationship or were they just very close friends with a hint of homoeroticism

[stresswriterblog]

BAB:TQFTIM Fan Continuation

Howdy, Y’all!

If you recognise the absolute keyboard slam of an acronym in the title, I’d say I’ve found my target audience!

So this is a project that I think will be a fun little thing to do on the side as some writing practice, nothing too serious, and will hopefully bring joy to fellow BABTQFTIM enjoyers :)

Disclaimer

I am no longer a fan or supporter of Rouge herself. As I’m sure many of you have heard the drama surrounding her Undertale art, there are many things she has done wrong which I simply cannot ignore.. When I was younger, I did not realise the weight of some of these things, but now that I’ve reviewed it after a few years, I no longer support her. This is why, while I will still credit her for her creation of BAB:TQFTIM, my likeness for the SERIES is separate to her. Her Undertale work was tainted with a lot of what caused this controversy, but thankfully BAB:TQFTIM has not had these themes. There WAS a ‘Stripper AU’, but it was quickly taken down by Rouge herself and was separate from the original series. Therefore I am still comfortable with this series, but Rouge and her Undertale art crossed many lines.

Before I get right into this, allow me to introduce myself.

I am (or will go by) Stress, I’m a guy (he/him), aaand I am something of a writer. When I was like 13, I used to adore Rouge’s work, and especially her series, BAB:TQFTIM.

I decided to go on a bit of a nostalgia trip recently, and found the series again. I was quite disappointed to realise it was over, until I decided.. Hey, why not continue it myself?

So here I am! A socially inept, stage-frightful disaster, deciding to continue a story which once had a huge following. While I am terrified of such an audience, and do not know if anyone will see this anyways, I also want to bring the continuation and eventual conclusion to a story that was not only dear to my heart, but to many others as well.

I never really used Tumblr much except to read the story, and admittedly this site is pretty dead, but hopefully it can still be a nice place for old fans to reconnect over this series.

Now, to focus on the actual story itself.

First things first, I am NOT an artist. I am a writer... Or rather, attempting to become one. I’ve got many novels in the works, but thanks to ADHD--this is now the only thing I can focus on writing.

While I will not be able to draw like Rouge did, if any other artists out there would be willing to do so, feel completely free!

I’d also like to touch on some aspects of the story:

- Regarding the gay aspects of the series, namely Felix questioning his sexuality and Bendy’s crush on Felix, will still be kept but may be portrayed slightly differently. In 2017, it was still less accepted to show, but now I would like to include it in a better light. It seems Bendy has some slight internalised homophobia, while Felix has never allowed himself to explore his sexuality and is now having some internal conflict. As a gay person myself, I do not want to see anyone fetishizing these aspects of the story, or being homophobic.

- This story featured a lot of dark subjects, such as abuse (Vanny and Brute), suicide/self-harm (Cuphead), and slight alcoholism (Bendy). I would like to put trigger warnings before any of these subjects show, whether actually written, or just generally referenced.

- Bendy’s Inkness is often also used as shock-factor, angst, bad-timing for intense moments, or just general character development, as he does not often show vulnerability except when being affected by his Inkness. For anyone with emetaphobia or general discomfort towards description of this character being in pain, I may also put trigger warnings before it. This will be just as present as it was in the original series, once per day, and possibly more if I choose to make it ‘get worse’.

- Though this will not be drawn (at least by me), there will be graphic content described, like Boris’ current injury from the Boulder-Spiders, Mugman’s injury in the earlier parts, etc. I probably will not put trigger warnings before this UNLESS you guys ask me too. I would be 100% willing to if that is the case.

- Continuing from the last three points; this story is generally very angsty. If it ain’t Bendy’s Inkness, it’s Cuphead’s fear of his own power, or Oswald’s grief, etc. Obviously so it can actually be a good story, I will be having fluff and generally enjoyable scenes in between. But to stay true to the original, this angst will still be present. It’s good for shock factor, for plot progression (OR to slow down the plot), and to get readers more reactive and emotionally invested in the characters. So... Yeah. Angst will return!

- I would like to continue this story in the same format as Rouge did, minus the art. Basically, I will begin posting some continuations, and if there are any askers, I will respond to those asks with more story (MOST of the time). I loved how it was almost an interactive story, where askers could check on certain characters, or interact with the characters to inform them of something, etc. So I would like to try that, if anyone shows interest in this. Askers will be portrayed as:

- Voices in one of the character’s head, or multiple if it is addressing more than one person.

- An actual person, an Anon, such as when an Anon kissed Bendy in the earlier parts of the story.

- Not actually present, but rather just gives me an idea of where to take the story in a direction to the asker’s request.

- One of the other characters. E.g. if an asker asks if Bendy is alright, Boris will actually be the one to ask if he’s alright.

- Underage characters will NOT be put into any inappropriate scenario, for example Boris, who is canonically 12. This was a huge controversy regarding Rouge for some sexual content she drew of underage Undertale fanon characters, which seems to have been one of the reasons Rouge discontinued the series and pretty much left Tumblr.

- Continuing from that point, sexual content will be kept to little to none. At the most, sexual flirts, innuendos, etc. MAY be included, but any actual explicit content will not be shown. There is a chance I may create a second account for more sexual content, if you guys show interest in that kind of thing, but this is not 100% certain and probably will not happen anytime soon.

- Regarding the main plot. Depending on how this continuation goes, I may do one of three things:

- If many people show interest in this: Write a continuation with the ask-box open, plenty of filler for everyone to enjoy, and the main plot will only happen occasionally so that this does not end super quickly.

- If very few people show interest in this: Write a continuation with minimal filler, just enough for the story to be enjoyable but it will end quickly. That way people receive an ending, without me trying to beat a dead horse.

- If no one shows interest in this: I’ll probably just delete this account lmao. I can just write it for myself, no need to share it if no one cares.

So... Yeah, that was a lot to read. But if you’re still here, hang in there! We’re almost done!

Buuuut back to me for a second here, because ~creator boundaries~!

All of these boundaries are stated in the case of this continuation actually gaining traction. I just figured I’d say it beforehand instead of having to state it in every point.

- Please do not spam the ask-box. I am adult and have a life outside of this, so if I am taking a while, that is most likely why.

- Please do not try to find out my real name, face, etc. My personal life is none of your business, and I will share what I want to, when I want to.

- Please understand that I am completely new to creating for an audience, and my content will not be the most professional, skilled, and confidently-created work. This is just for fun!

And finally, credit

I plan to give credit after every post to both Rouge and the original creators of the characters, but here I would just like to list out everyone.

Obviously, credit to @/Blogthegreatrouge ( @/thebbros ) for the characters and stories.

And of course, I must give credit to the original ORIGINAL creators of the characters in Bendy and Boris: The Quest for the Ink Machine. Those being:

Bendy, Boris, Alice: Credit to Joey Drew Studios and TheMeatly Games, developers of the original Bendy and the Ink Machine horror game.

Mickey Mouse, Minnie Mouse, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Donald Duck, Goofy, Max Goof, Ortensia the Cat, etc.: Credit to Disney.

Felix the Cat: Credit to Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer.

Cuphead and Mugman: Credit to Studio MDHR, developer of the Cuphead game.

Black Hat, Flug, etc:  Alan Ituriel, creator of the Villainous TV Show

[everythingblreview]

BL games with an English translation

After my last post I thought it is a good idea to share all the bl games you still could play even without having to playing untranslated Japanese games.

Games with an offical translation

Hashihime of the old book town No thank you Room No.9 Togainu no chi Sweet pool Dramatical murder Zettai Fukujuu Meirei

Games with a part-/ fan-translation

Lamento-beyond the void | full patch Lemures Blue's 2 A.M. | full patch Dramatical Murder Re:Connect | full patch 24-ji, Kimi no Heart wa Nusumareru ~Kaitou Jade~ | full patch Gakuen Heaven 2 ~Double Scramble!~ | full patch Taishou Mebiusline | common route translated Cage -Open- | partly translated with VNR (visual novel reader) Omertà ~Chinmoku no Okite~ | partly translated with VNR Lucky dog 1 | 3/4 routes translated

Soon to be released/ announced games

Uuultra C by Adelta/ Mangagamer After Hashihime was released and took over the no.1 best rated bl game spot in the west, Adelta’s next game about Monster x Hero’s was announced. The translation and editing is already done, so we can expect it to be released soon.

Comment: I’m really happy that more of Adelta’s games are released. Their games are really special to me and I enjoy the crazy world Kurosawa sensei creates. I hope we can also expect a release of their newest game that is supposed to be released this year. 

Luckydog 1 by Tennenouji/ Mangagamer The Luckydog 1 franchise is the biggest and most popular one. Always taking the no.1 spot of the best bl game in Japan, with a few spin-off games, a fandisk (that counts as it’s own game), drama CDs, short stories and more, is finally making it’s way in the English speaking bl game community. There is no release date yet and Mangagamer is working on it since 2018 and hopefully it will be released soon.

Comment: I adore luckydog 1, it’s one of my favourite bl games and deserves the high popularity it alreday has. With a bigger English speaking fandom, we hopefully can get more content here too.  

Slow damage by Nitro+Chiral/ Jast

The newest N+C game that was released last year. Jast is working on it right now and the release should be early winter as far as we know.

Comment: I have 2 worries with this release. 1. I don’t like jast and their work. Their last translation was really bad, and this game relies on the writing a lot, hopefully this time they can proof that they can do more than just disappoint. 2. I’m not sure if the western fandom is ready for this game, this is not a “haha they are gay” game, that you should make fun of like people did with dmmd. The themes in this game are really horrible and painful to read and I don’t think the fandom will takes it seriously, which makes me sad.

Tokyo Onmyouji by Tyrant/ Moonchime Localization

Moonchime Localization’s first bl game release, the game is supposed to be released in Feb 2022 and a demo version will be soon released too, so look out for it.

Comment: It’s the only game I haven’t play yet on the list, and I’m looking forward to the English release. From Moonchime Localization’s twitter it looks like they are really big fans of the game themself and  seems to really love what they are doing. Also, from the teasers they showed us, the English version and translation looks very well made. I hope to see more of them in the future and will try my best to support them.

There are way more bl games than one may think, only sticking two 2 games calling them the best without even trying other won’t get you far, you never now which game will turn out to be a masterpiece.