No Stream Tonight. Sorry. I Have Hit The "can Barely Move" Stage Of Exhaustion

I have no idea how old your book rant post is, but here I am, about to be your problem

I HATED THE SUNBEARER TRIALS

Yeah, okay cool, it’s a book with a trans author and trans main character. EVERYTHING ELSE WAS TRASH

It starts off great, with the MC graffitiing (spelling???) a wall with two birds and then he never does anything interesting again in favor of pining over/think about/hate a guy from his childhood that was mean to him once ten years ago. Before you go thinking the MC’s hatred of him is justified, just know all that is because the guy pulled a mean girls and said YOU CANT SIT WITH US a literal decade ago.

His best friend is a part of a group he hates, but it’s okay because she’s one of the good ones

And now: The cardinal sin

THIS BOOK IS MARKETED AS PERCY JACKSON MEETS THE HUNGER GAMES YET HAS NO CHARACTER DEATHS AT ALL AND SAYS **** IN THE FIRST LINE

WHO IS THIS FOR????????

I adore Hunger Games, but I mean it when I say that if I could travel back in time to stop those books from ever being published, I would do it in a heartbeat just so I would never have to see a book marketed as "X meets Hunger Games" ever again.

If you put even the slightest hint of competition in a YA or YA-adjacent book, it gets called Hunger Games. I could write a full rip-off of Bring It On, but the competition element would guarantee that it would be marketed as an HG style book.

The same thing happens with Mean Girls. Does your book have teenage or early 20s girls being in proximity to each other? Well it's Mean Girls now.

And it's really not doing these books any favors. Cause people pick them up expecting something in line with the brutality and messaging of HG, and end up disappointed as hell when that's not what they get.

I think publishing houses might actually be my mortal enemy

⬆️ Me fighting publishers for all the bs they pull (especially Red Tower - hate them)

Earthlings by sayaka murata; the fmc was annoying, it was always this weird bragging mixed with "poor lil me" also, it dragged sooooooooooo bad, it felt like half the book was only 15 minutes of plot, and it was the most boring 15 minutes u could imagine, nothing happened and it keep dragging and dragging and i couldn't finish it

I haven't heard of this one, but I accept your offering and will hate this book on your behalf

The power at my house is flickering due to the storm, so no stream tonight guys. Sorry

R*wling shows throughout the series that she believes that bad things are only bad when they're done by the Bad Guys. However, if one of the designated Good Guys does the same thing it's not bad.

For example, use of the Unforgivable Curses. When the Bad Guys use them it's horrific, evil, one of the Worst Things Ever. But when Harry uses them, with alarming frequency, it's fine. He's not a Bad Guy, so the things he does can't be bad.

Then there's Snape. He's awful. Just awful. He's an incel creep. He's racist. He bullies young children just because he can, and is outright abusive to them if he didn't like their parents (even when said parents died when the kid was an infant). And oh yeah, he's an incel creep who became obsessed with a girl who did not return his feelings, called her slurs, and was a-okay with her husband and infant son being murdered. You cannot tell me that he wasn't hoping to swoop in and try to manipulate her into a relationship when she was vulnerable due to extreme grief. But, because she for some bizarre reason unwilling to stand aside quietly during the murder of her family, he started working for the Good Guys, which totally means that he's a Good Guy and none of the horrible things he did actually matter.

And then there's Dumbledore! Oh boy, I could write at least an Order of the Phoenix sized book about all the terrible things he did. But I'll keep it short here. He knowingly left a particularly vulnerable child in an abusive situation, and didn't even bother to actually check in on him now and again to make sure that he wasn't being, you know, abused or anything like that. He also left the baby in a basket, outside, for hours, because that was for some reason better than knocking at the door? He then manipulated a young child into basically becoming his private soldier against an evil wizard so powerful that the entire magical world pissed themselves at the mention of his name. But all this gets glossed over and is forgiven as easily as if he had just lost a pen someone had lent him. Because, after all, he's the ultimate Good Guy. And a Good Guy can't do bad things. Therefore, none of the things he did were actually bad.

This got a lot longer than I intended it to be. The views on morality in this series really bother me.

Sometimes I just sit around and think about ways to improve the Harry Potter books. Not even in a fix-it fic way. Just like...there are some seriously dropped threads in Deathly Hallows especially.

Do y'all ever think about the thing with Griphook? Harry choosing to deceive him about the sword of Gryffindor? Well, I do. It bothers me that there are no negative consequences for this. Because oop- Griphook double-crossed them too! So we never have to think about Harry making that choice. And the characterization of Griphook is squicky, man. He relishes the idea of weak creatures suffering, he's obnoxious. We can't even REALLY examine wizard/goblin relations because Griphook is such an uncomplicated little asshole. Did Gryffindor steal the sword from the goblin king??? Harry is uncomfy about it for like two seconds and then oop--guess we never need to think about it again. It's a bad writing choice and when I think about a book like Terry Pratchett's Feet of Clay--a book that complexly and carefully and humanely examines racism--i feel super disappointed in the way the Harry Potter series just like...lets some things go.

This is, I think, one example of a handful of moments when Harry does a Bad Thing: lies, uses unforgivable curses etc. But there's no real examination of it. She nods at it a little like "harry was becoming as reckless a godfather and Sirius was to him" but then it just gets...dropped. There isn't even a "this is war; there is no moral high ground" moment. R*wling just seems to have no plan at all to examine any moral complexity in that final book. It makes me nuts.

Video essays that make me go "oh, so you're like smart smart"

Elon Musk and Grimes: A Retrospective

Bo Burnham vs. Jeff Bezos

The Systemic Abuse of Celebrities

Lana Del Rey: the pitfalls of having a persona

we need to talk about Call Me By Your Name

MYTH OF THE AUTEUR: Stanley Kubrick vs David Lynch

In Search Of A Flat Earth

Envy

The Commodification of Black Athletes

The Lies Of The Lighthouse

The Green Knight: The Uncanny Horror of Masculinity

Max Payne, Kane & Lynch, and the Meaning of Ugly Games

Time Loop Nihilism

How Bisexuality Changed Video Games

The Golden Age of Horror Comics - Part 1 (Part 2)

Weighing the Value of Director's Cuts | Scanline

The True Horror Of Midsommar

a few more -

You're Wrong About Cyberpunk 2077 | An Overdue Critique (this is such great critique of both the game and the genre)

Disney's Fast Pass: A Complicated History

It Has Come To My Attention You Don't All Love BIRDS OF PREY

Adaptation.

The man who almost faked his way to a Nobel Prize

Music Theory and White Supremacy

Here's the YouTube playlist! ill be adding more but that's all so far pls like and reblog xoxo 💕

also feel free to share your own recs in the notes!

Some good feminist YouTubers for y’all!

Annamarie Forcino

Tara Mooknee

Shanspeare

Chad Chad

Noah Samsen

Ro Ramdin

Samantha Lux

Kat Blaque

Jessie Gender

Ethan Is Online

Feel free to add!

250 posts!

Did it really take me this long?? Your girl has been caught slacking

I had some technical difficulties but I am back with Dragon Age Inquisition

i’m suffering from divine madness so let me assign you a new identity metaphor/motif based on my own experiences with gender and being alive.

this quiz includes images of meat and viscera.

What in the 1990s is this