22
“Hate reading lurkers” circle
I regularly browse subreddits to stay on top of the gender discourse, so that I’m aware of the prevailing arguments used within the trans community. A lot of these arguments aren’t actually arguments though; rather, they are self-serving rationalizations that have a grasping at straws quality about them. This is known.
Sometimes you can also see a hint of a glimmer of self-awareness come through in the sharing of their arguments. Often in the form of “for years we’ve been saying X but that’s actually problematic and normies are starting to catch on to this; so how about we say Y instead cuz it sounds better and I would like people to think of us in this way instead of how we’ve been presenting our core beliefs up until now”. Thus implying that their ideology consists of nothing but sound bites and talking points patched together in a reactive manner, and when holes eventually and inevitably start appearing in these sound bites and talking points, that’s the time to upgrade to another patch. Bye “born in wrong body”, hello “this is us being our authentic selves”.
Anyway…I know that Ovarit attracts lurkers who are likely member of the trans community. And I think it would be helpful to have a circle where posts are dedicated to these “hate readers”, so that they can see how members of this community actually dissect and dismantle trans positions that might seem completely persuadable to someone within the trans community. The purpose of the circle wouldn’t be trashing or making fun of anyone, but to show lurkers why pro-trans arguments are destined to fail when subjected to scrutiny. They always fail because they are built on a house of cards. Within their echo chambers, they will not get this insight.
I’ve mentioned the trans community, but a circle like this one wouldn’t have to be limited to posts addressing trans lurkers and their allies. It could be to anyone who has heard about Ovarit and hate reads this place.
It seems to me that fantasy and YA publishing is now run by the most shallow and literal of people; people who grew up reading fanfiction instead of books, and whose reading and writing tastes reflect that.
It's like we are all getting echoes of the fanfics they were obsessed with as 14 year olds on fanfic.net.
It's incredibly childish and regressive.
Oof, fanfiction instead of books. Yes, I agree.
I'm trying to break into writing myself, and it's surprising how much people seem to want books to not be like books. They want them to be like video games. They want them to be like TV shows. And yes they want them to be like fan fiction. It's pretty wild.
I write fanfic myself, so I don't have a problem with that, as such, but ... fanfic has to have an original it is fanfic of.
If you just write fanfic of a non-existent book, then there's a ton of characterisation missing.
Oooh good luck! What type of writing are you getting into?
Fantasy and romance. I'm working on a visual novel, plus I have several other little writings in the works. But I've finished one novel-length story already, just it's going into my visual novel so I haven't really put it anywhere to be read yet. I've really loved exploring this creative side of myself.
Oooch, I love fantasy and romance and combinations thereof. Do tell us when you publish it!
(I am dabbling in writing myself, and miiiight ask Ovarites to test read once I'm happy with my latest project.)
Feels like that's most media now. Reality TV, sitcoms, tiktok, vloggers. Real depth is the exception not the rule.
The thing that makes it worse is that there are some amazing fanfictions that, we're it jot for IP/Copyright crape could be powerhouses. They're extremely well written and deep, they just use characters we already know. It's really no different than a new TV iteration of Sherlock Holmes. But the folks OP is talking about don't branch into those sort of fics because they're written by people over the age of 20 that don't give a damn about taboo or making people uncomfortable, and write what they please. There's a metric shitload of antis abounding right now demanding people only write things that aren't "problematic" And a good deal of what they consider problematic is just fucking asinine. Even if someone is writing stuff that is abhorrent, so what? It's fiction. This is how humans explore the recesses of their mind. Let them instead of screaming people down for having dark fic in their profile.
The problem with the Internet is that some people need to have their tantrums in peace, cry it out, and move on. When they're posting online and people interact, it pours gas on the fire.
It really is like when a 5 year old throws a fit for a silly reason. The answer is not to give them attention.
It used to be fanfic.net, but now it's wattpad/ao3. Young millenials go from posting there to publishing the exact same stuff (lady know how), people look for their preferred ao3 tags in physical books and tiktok, the menace of the modern world, made everything worse again.
[Comment deleted]
They promote by trope now??
That offends me on a deep level. It's just so counter to the idea I have of reading - you sit down and open your mind up, for the author to enter and work their magic. You don't order your books about by what you want from them before youve even read a word!
Yeah. I like to read fanfic, but with books, I like a surprise, not be told what the pairings are and what tropes will appear on the first page.
(Also, "only one bed" is not a plot, it is one chapter, at most. "Enemies to lovers", well, ok, that can be a plot, like in "Pride and Prejudice", but still.)
The listing of tropes makes sense in fanfic, as a lot of fanfic is so low quality you might not actually want to read it if it doesn't have your favourite tropes. Books should be better than that.
I've noticed it in D&D. The game itself has tended more towards "power fantasy where losing is hard" over recent years as well as bringing in a very "anyone can be anything, do whatever, restrictions are bad" mindset even more recently. Your wheelchair-bound gnome can be just as good a barbarian as your friend's axe-wielding minotaur because that's more FUN and INCLUSIVE.
Fan art culture has changed, with almost everything you see posted being 'soft' or cute in style, very often anime influenced. Very little could be described as 'badass', cool, heroic, gritty, or realistic. Goblins aren't nasty spiteful evil creatures, they're cute fun little guys. Villains are 'safe evil', with wheelchair accessible dungeons and diverse henchmen that are totally accepting of gay and trans people, and are never seen to do anything bad.
It all gives the whole community has way more of a childish feel. It feels like the average game of D&D has shifted from "group of men pretending to be warriors" to "group of tumblr users pretending to run a fantasy café".
Wheelchair accessible dungeons? Lol.
It must be hard to play an exciting game of D&D when your players are terminally woke people who are "triggered" by "misgendering" ... a villain who maims and murders, but thinks calling the heroes words they do not like being called is a step too far cannot feel very realistic.
They're something of a meme in D&D circles after an official guide to creating them was released.
Other changes include them dropping official use of the term 'race' to refer to elves, dwarves, etc and removing innate racial abilities (such as elves being more agile or dwarves being stronger, in favour of totally customisable bonuses) to avoid appearing racist. Combined with a taboo among these players of any races being ever treated differently in game it makes choice of race totally meaningless to a character.
Feeling realistic is not a priority to these players and they actively mock it as an argument, seeing it as inherently illegitimate to bring it up in a world with magic, dragons, etc. "You're fine with all that but draw the line at a ramp in a dungeon!1?!"
Of course in practice none of this affects an individual group since they can play however they like. But most online spaces just have a very different idea about what D&D is all about and what makes it fun.
The wheelchair accessible dungeons are official? Dear goddess ...
I mean, you do need to pretend there's no strength differences between women and men to make a game where the main activity is killing monsters fun to women.
But elves and dwarves? No one IS one of those in real life! Why would anyone feel insulted by race boni there?
And I kinda doubt that many wheelchair-bound people feel a strong need to play a character who is in a wheelchair, too. (Of all the fun things you could invent to help a disabled person be mobile in a fantasy world with magic, they want wheelchairs? This smells of virtue signalling by people whose only idea of what disability is is the wheelchair symbol in the parking lot.)
They company that owns D&D is is ridiculously woke so it was very in character for them. The race thing was because they felt the very idea of racial bonuses promoted the idea of associating traits with human races in real life and they argued only that character's personal experiences should matter. Its sold as more choice but really it just makes the choice meaningless - you just go with whatever's the optimal thing for your 'build'. No more cool interesting quirks to characters - say, a wizard that can use a bow because he's an elf. Might never come in handy, but the potential to. Now he's just got the same bonus every wizard takes to be slightly better at casting spells. (this is another change to the culture - the idea of 'optimizing your build' as if it were a video game, instead of playing a character)
I actually could see a wheelchair-bound character working as a self-imposed restriction for story reasons (an old wise woman, can't walk but still mean with magic and healing power?) but only if it actually is a restriction, something the players have to plan around. If the whole world just becomes wheelchair friendly then what's the point?
I mean, you do need to pretend there's no strength differences between women and men to make a game where the main activity is killing monsters fun to women.
True, but considering there are at least 6 other hominid species running around and interbreeding with each other, you can always make it less obvious. Like a female dwarf and a female orc are going to be weaker than their male equivalent, but stronger than a human male fighter. A female human is going to be stronger than a halfling, gnome, half elf, or elf male most of the time, since all those are built for agility. And the crossbreeding is a minefield/smorgasbord for traits popping up. Someone's granny was an orc but she looks normal? Thagra Skullcrush is going to trounce most humans, male or female.
Lol, that's one way to do it, but I am fine with how The Dark Eye does it - same stats for female and male, because ... come on, it is a fantasy world where all wounds heal in a couple days, tops, and we don't even know exactly why women have less muscle mass than males, or whether things could have evolved differently.
(Female TDE orcs actually have a malus on strength, but since TDE orcs are a horribly misogynist society where women are treated as livestock, no one wants to play a female orc, anyways, and I like that they're noncombatants, so that players can kill the male orcs in peace. I don't know if the predominantly male designers of the game intended for that, but an enemy race that's basically all male misogynists is much easier on the conscience than if they had just said "they're evil, believe us")
Like a female dwarf and a female orc are going to be weaker than their male equivalent
Do we really know this though? The sort of sexual dimorphism found in humans isn't actually universal.
For humans, sure, but I see no need to transfer it to fantasy races just because they look human-ish.
Sexual dimorphism with physically weaker females is pretty well distributed among mammalian species. Equal strength would be a rarity
Less than half, according to my link.
Fair enough, link wasn't opening the other day. Still, the standard would hold for Hominid species and carnivores, which covers the D&D species unless it's some iteration where the gnomes are evolved from rodents or something.
There's also the idea that a levelled up character is in a sense going beyond human, in a sort of mythic sword-and-sorcery protagonist sense. Women really can be that strong in fantasy because the world itself is an 'epic' setting where heroes are real and can achieve what would in real life be superhuman feats.
So your average female peasant would be weaker than a male peasant, but a level 10 female barbarian doesn't have to be weaker than a level 10 male barbarian because by that point both are characters out of a heroic epic and normal rules don't apply.
Wondering if there's increasingly an audience/ number of authors who've never really been challenged in any way and so the idea of overcoming something or being in real peril or just anything other than briefly being uncomfortable is just alien and unrelatable.
I mean, fictional tension and its very convenient resolution (not to mention disproportionate focus on heroic or quirky characters) feels very fake, much more so than the boring slice-of-life stories. I wonder if the whole thing started off as a desire to move away from this very formulaic, actiony and unrealistic structure but really just ended up erasing any tension, any goals to look forward to, and not working as a story. Like, even if someone petting their cat for 3 hours in a rocking chair is realistic, that's not what I want to read about.
That would fit in with the university students demanding trigger warnings before lectures, and reports of adult employees who need to cuddle a plushy to deal with their emotional problems in the workplace. 🤔
I thought I was as much of an oversensitive wuss as it is possible to be; but for all that Agatha Christie's Miss Marple novels are nice and old-timey and never have any gore in them, there still is at least one murder, and sometimes even another, and Miss Marple must overcome quite a bit of adversity to solve them.
I feel like it's an effect of Booktok and the growth of a reading culture that discourages people from being challenged or experiencing delayed gratification. I like fanfic, but I don't expect that same level of writing in the published books I read. There's a lot of emphasis in other genres of "cosiness", like cosy crime and cosy horror that seems to come from that mindset.
I've also been reading Maryanne Wolf's Reader, Come Home, about the effects of screens and technology on our reading habits, and she mentioned that people are less able to do deep reading because our brains are more inclined to skimming texts on scree . It makes sense then that people will want stories they have to invest less brainpower on in favour of vibes.
I think this is it. TikTok reviews and a few too many young millennial tumblr graduates in the publishing business, the desperate marketing of late capitalism, along with the firing or retirement of those who are see to actually edit.
Me, I’m mostly reading SFF by women from the 70s and 80s and 90s, now, books I was too young for when they came out, or missed for life reasons. I’ve almost entirely given up on new writers.
Please share your list of recommendations as a separate post, I'm sure many of us here would love to find new/forgotten female authors and their books.
I’m not the one you’re asking, but I would highly recommend Patricia McKillip for fantasy (especially Song for the Basilisk, which haunts me still, and the Riddle-Master Trilogy as an audiobook, which is much more lighthearted than the former), and Tanith Lee for science fiction bordering on fantasy (I think about Biting the Sun and its eerie parallels to today’s world almost every day).
I also loved Julian May’s Galactic Milieu series (sci fi, with supernatural too), although with the caveat that I haven’t reread them in a very long time.
For all her odd allyship of TRAs, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, which was also an excellent series of audiobooks, beautifully performed, was astonishing in its perception of human depravity in a near-future high-tech world, while still being oddly cheerful.
Technically historical fiction, although I’d classify them as magical realism historical speculative fiction, Manda Scott’s Boudica series is excellent (I also like her detective novels). Also very good as audiobooks.
And although they’re children’s books, I also enjoyed Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence, about a modern day (well, 1960s, I think) return of King Arthur, which I didn’t read until I was an adult and still found enchanting.
I gotta say, the fanfic I read usually isn't as free of conflict as the books I mentioned. Sometimes, yes, if it is just a short story to give the characters who have to go through so much in canon moment of peace, but for longer fanfics, there's usually conflict.
The research on people's reduced ability to deep reading seems rather worrying.
I dont know the mentioned books and i'm not up to date on popular fantasy books, especially not english ones, but I noticed in the last years that all characters have to be likeable
And it's not just in the way of a villian overthrowing government and society and thinking of themself to be the hero and good one. Redeemable traits, morally grey characters which are in fact just tsundere or edgy, and if we have a really evil char - it's for the edginess and of course, like in a disney movie, they have to fall and everything is back to being good, harmless, pretty, harmonious, nice.
There is no more variety, despite the trend of the morally grey love interests bad bois it's all black and white, like in the politics and minds of the tiktok generation. If you're not against JKR, HP and everything and anything, you're a naaaaazeeeee
Where are the egdes on a character? The decisions leaving us wanting to punch the char in the face? Bittersweet endings, like a painful farewell? Unlikable protagonists? Going against norms and rules AND falling on the face with it? Characters, especially female ones, with depth??
That was part of my problem with the Cerulean Sea book.
The protagonist had all the makings of a Percy Weasley - think annoying bureaucrat who always plays by the rules and is seduced to side with an evil government, but deep down has a heart of gold - but then he arrived on the magical island and instead of getting into conflict, like Percy does with his siblings, he immediately accepted all the crazyness, and the magical orphanage master immediately saw that he had a heart of gold, and there was ... no conflict whatsoever.
(And, I mean, that is all I asked for. The level of conflict Percy has with his family. Nothing more than that. Nothing on the level of Harry Potter versus Voldemort. Percy is likeable! Well, I liked him, anyway - I would not even call him morally grey. But even that was too much, apparently.)
The target audience is all those tumblrites who think a story about kind, nice people, whose only character flaws are clumsiness or forgetfulness, and whose lives are calm and peaceful, with no tragedies or challenges, would be interesting to read. And they are wrong.
Tbh, I like this kind of books. I read to escape and the world is already too harsh, so what's wrong if someone wants to read a slice-of-life story with little or no suspense? We all read because of different reasons and if you don't like drama free books, that doesn't mean they are not interesting to anyone.
Have you read the books I mentioned?
I like books which don't have big drama, my problem with those two in particular was that there was absolutely zero tension - not even pretend tension.
That's okay, I guess, but I do wonder why that is a thing now, when it never was before. You would think people would have wanted something peaceful to read after World War II.
No, I haven't read the books you mentioned, because I am not into fantasy as a genre.
That's okay, I guess, but I do wonder why that is a thing now, when it never was before
I can't really pass judgment here, since I've never been big on fantasy, but could it be that for some reasons these books just get more advertisement, but there are still action filled fantasy novels?
Tumblrinas can't be a fan of anything sjw's may find "problematic", lest they be branded a bad person for liking it and then must boycott and cancel said thing and its creator.
I don't think that coziness is a particularly dominant trend in fantasy, no. The House in the Cerulean Sea was an outlier in that regard, and as I recall it received mixed reviews. (Also: the people I follow on Goodreads, who are normally pretty kind to books, called it "insufferably twee" and "sickly sweet" among other things.)
Clearly there's a market for it, but there's also a market for grimdark (e.g. The Poppy War), regular-dark (e.g. the Broken Earth series, Scholomance series, etc), and weird-dark (e.g. the Locked Tomb series).
The house in the cerulean sea tried too hard to be whimsy and terribly failed. It's been a while since I read it but iirc there was a whole scene that was like:
Kids are going to get ice cream. Ice cream shop lady tells them "I won't serve you ice cream because you are different >:(". A different lady appears and says "that's discrimination and it's bad. Also I'm the mayor so now it's illegal to be mean nwn". Ice cream lady runs out crying. Everyone claps
Plus the ending is predictable even from reading the blurb. It's the only book that has made me feel good about my own writing
I don't know if it's a trend or how closely correlated it is with fanfiction trends, but I did break from my #readwomen challenge and read Legends and Lattes pretty recently because a coworker swore up and down that it was good, and I found it very underwhelming as a story. I figured I was simply not the target audience because I've never read nor understood the appeal of coffee shop fanfictions.
Probably someone who is into them could break down what is missing when that's applied to an original work — I'd guess that it must be that fanfiction authors want the characters to get a break from all the happenings, but if you don't really show what is happening that they need a break from in your original work, then we are all just confused.
I mostly felt that the main conflict of her trying to hang up her sword vs getting threatened by the local gangs was implied to be coming up but never finished. It just all somehow sorts itself out. The succubus thing felt like it must be some weird fantasy p*rn trope reference the author just expected me to know, but I have no idea. He got a sensible chuckle™️ from me as he introduced more and more Gnome Coffee Technology but the little pastry inventing mouse was just pushing it, LOL.
I tried to read Cerulean Sea and failed. I just didn't care. I was similarly unimpressed with Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children: any suspense or conflict felt shoved in towards the end and then Pow! Sequel Hook!! I declined to read any sequels.
I think a lot of books are being published that really needed an old-fashioned book editor before seeing the light of day. The Help, for example, had a terrible plot; a main character who was more boring than the average Mary Sue, faced no conflict or danger at all and did not grow in any way; historical inaccuracies; really bad renditions of the way white Southerners talked at the time; and general over-the-top stupidity. It was a shitty first draft for which the author couldn't even be bothered to look up anything about the assassination of Medgar Evers. (Neither could anyone at the publishing company, apparently. Oops.) Yet many of my intelligent, well-read friends loved it. And that was many years ago now, well before wokeness. I'm sure things are worse now.
I read The Help and I agree that the main character was the worst part of the book. It should have been exclusively written from the perspectives of the maids, who actually did things and had character arcs.
Thanks for telling me, I guess then I don't need to try Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, either.
It is a pity though, I really loved the premise of a spooky children's home. It could be like Hogwarts!
I have read The Help, and cannot recall if I was similarly disappointed with it. (Although I have to say, I don't remember much of it, which perhaps could be considered just as damning. There was a writer who wanted to write about the experiences of black women? I think? But that's all I recall.)
I think the Miss Peregrine premise is a wonderful one, too. And many people disagree with me about the book, obviously. But like you with The Help, I remember very little about it.
The writer character in The Help started out using maids to get household tips for a newspaper column. I don't remember her having any particular personal conflicts. She writes to a book editor in New York and is taken under said editor's wing immediately, for example. Everything seems to go her way.
The need for big intense tension is a given for books written in America and some other countries, but I've read several books in Japanese and they all lacked any big action and any kind of intense tension story arc. (though yeah, I personally found them somewhat boring) It's just a different type of book. Nothing wrong with some more quiet contemplation book if they enjoy it. I'm sure they are also reading books with lots of action, and young people also see a ton of upsetting things on social media these days.
It seems a bit hypocritical to call people reading books with little tension in them trying to escape how upsetting life is while literally reading the fantasy genre, which is also escapism...
Well, I am not an American, and I am by no means a fan of big action.
I am perfectly happy reading Jane Austen novels, which critics accuse of not having much happening in them. But, there is still conflict. People fall in love and aren't sure whether their love is requited. People can't immediately marry the person they want to marry. Stuff happens.
And those fantasy books do not seem to be the kind of quiet contemplation book, either. That's why I read them. They promised some action, then did not deliver.
The House in the Cerulean Sea made me grumpy, because at the beginning I was promised a big, scary evil corporation, and I wondered how the protagonist would ever be able to fight against such impossible odds. And then, he did not even think about the problem until the last few pages, in which he effortlessly solved the problem. By himself.
I don't have a problem with calm stories, but if you don't want your protagonist to have to fight a big evil corporation, then ... just don't invent one?
I think it's both a mix of amateur fanfic writers from fandoms gaining popularity and getting published as if they were serious authors, as well as the "franchise mentality" that prioritises familiar characters over anything else - you no longer need an interesting premise or a tense story, you only need likeable characters and some worldbuilding, and none of it is in service to the story. And then you can churn out sequels or short stories and whatnot even if there's no plot and it's about their quest to successfully bake a new bread recipe. The story is often treated as a nuisance, or something you're obliged to go through in order to provide "cool" or "cute" or "lore" scenes.
I think the authors are playing it safe because of how ridiculously easy it is to get canceled in the author space nowadays. Like, if you write a racist villain in your story, people will assume you are racist IRL and that the villain's statements are your sincere beliefs. Or they will freak out if your content has "triggers". Or if you include slavery as a plot point and you aren't Black. Or if your book's romance had "problematic" elements
So the result is books that are boring as fuck because the author is playing it safe
And I must be old because I didn't know "coffee shop" was an entire fanfic genre nowadays! 🤣
Coffee Shop AU - yes, it is. I'm not sure why exactly coffee, and not book stores (there are fanfics like that, too, but not as many) but I suppose nothing beats a meet cute where one of your romantic heroes is a barista.
Having to make any type of sacrifice is no longer understandable in these times, I think.
Horror fiction is doing this too by making all the characters completely unlikeable from the beginning. The reader doesn't care when bad things happen to bad people, so we get a "cozy" horror that leaves readers comfortably numb. There is definitely an audience for that kind of writing, but if I see a #BookTok tag next to a title, I will probably give it a miss.
Legends and Lattes sounds like it just stole the story of the orc restaurant owner in Pixar's "Onward" and made it less interesting 🤣
I hated that movie so much. It was so giddamned bland
I hated that movie so much. It was so giddamned bland
100% agreed. Recent Pixar/Disney movies are dull as dirt. Onward had a decent premise. But the execution was shit. And they didn't do ANYTHING interesting with the "fantasy creatures in a modern setting" gimmick. The characters could have just been normal humans and literally nothing about the story would have changed
Possibly - though there's a short story it resembles even more:
https://slugfestgames.com/startusks/
(I recommend that story - it was very fun to read. No live or death situations there, either, but a baking competition our hero might lose.)
Can't speak about Baldree, but TJ Klune wrote in the queer romance genre for at least a decade before Cerulean Sea. The genre is infected with the "softly softly everyone's valid uwu" approach, with a common conflict being the ostracised queer kid in a sea of bigots, and he's always made sure to be on trend with the dominant good opinions and rightthink. Cerulean Sea is his attempt to get into YA (more money) but as you've noted, it's not compelling or well-crafted. Typical for him, but at least with the romance books, there was the usual will-they-won't-they tension along with the sentimentality.
Part of the issue will be the publisher. They're all running scared of negative reviews and press on twitter. God forbid they do their job and actually improve stories so that they're entertaining.
Now that you mention the sea of bigots ... there was a sea of bigots, and they were made out to be the unreasonable ones for not wanting the literal Antichrist live next to them.
(And were inexplicably hateful towards characters such as a living garden gnome and a boy who turns into a tiny dog when nervous.)
I think SJWs like reading that stuff, because they never bother to think about why people might be against transnonsense, but it all felt very artificial to me.
SJWs read books searching for evidence of wrong think. Anything bad or potentially upsetting can be twisted and overanalysed then ranted about online. Knowing this, I suspect writers self-censor anything ambiguous or morally grey out of their work.
Bad characters can be bad, but they must be obviously bad and get their comeuppance. Any character that's obviously "different" is clearly (/s) coded as queer or disabled or other, and therefore Good. So they must be always good, or have relatable flaws. Doesn't matter if they're objectively whimsical, such as a boy who turns into a dog when nervous. If they're different, someone must hate them because they're different, because that's real lived experience (and they ignore any real lived experience that counters this narrative, away with nuance!). It's like writing for children.
SJW readers are braindead, and their outrage is fuelling fearful writers penning braindead stories.
To illustrate, a few years ago, I saw one person gushing about a trans character in a novel. The major amazing thing about this character? How "active" she was. Literally, the character did things to propel the plot and this was worthy of great acclaim.
I haven't read any of these books. From the description and reviews "Legends and lattes" sound like I'd hate it, so I won't even try. But "Cerulean sea" has made good impressions on people whose taste I trust, so I'll try.
They are people well into adulthood, and I guess they liked the cosy vibe and that the stakes aren't high as they usually are in fantasy. One can read only that many books about saving the world before it gets old. And being adults they meet daily challenges at work and life in general, so it's probably a nice break to go somewhere where everyone's nice and polite and good vibes only.
I wonder how I'll like "Cerulean sea", as I'm more grumpy and quicker to hate a book than them...
Lol, have fun.
It was not awful just ... disappointing in a "What? That was it already?" way.
I mean, cute kiddie stories have been around forever... nothing terrible happens in Pippi Longstocking that I recall.
Yeah, but the books I mentioned aren't for kids.
Also, there's conflict in the Pippi Longstocking books. That might just be Pippi going to school and driving the teacher mad, but ... it is appropriate for the premise.
When you give me a coffee shop that's being threatened by a fantasy mafia, I don't expect that to be resolved with a friendly chat over tea. Just seems off.
Doesn't her father get swept out to sea and she gets kidnapped by robbers?
May well be. From what I remember, Pippi's superhuman strength makes sure things don't get too frightening, but well, it is a different genre from those fantasy novels for adults. And Pippi often does have problems she finds difficult to resolve, iirc, they just are problems she cannot solve with her superhuman strength.
UGH I find this so obnoxious and stupid. Legends and Lattes is recommended constantly! No, I don't want to read your stupid coffeshop AU book. People keep reccomending both of these in threads looking for books that have similar vibes to ghibli movies and I'm like.... we are not watching the same ghibli movies lol. It's a bit like these books are just cutesy for the sake of being cutesy, fluff with no substance.
The target demographic is anyone who thinks having their ideas challenged is "unsafe". That they should never have to brave grueling conditions, unfair odds, rough seas, difficult coworkers, etc. That they should, when confronted with the onerous demands and "unfairness" of life, be able to get through unscathed or, more troublingly, unchanged. Anyone who opposes them should either have an epiphany and become simpering servants or should, with no real work, be trodden down and made to suffer.
The target demographic is forever emotionally 6 years old.
I fear you might be right.
(Though ironically, the very target audience of "House in the Cerulean Sea" is enraged at the author. Apparently he based his very saccharine-sweet story about orphanages on a real life event in which native children were taken away from their parents and put in institutions in order to be brainwashed out of their native ways. And now the woke crowd is enraged that he took that and made it sweet and harmless. About half the one-star reviews on Goodreads are about that, not about the book's lack of real conflict. It is quite ironic - would a darker story, one more accurate to the event that allegedly inspired him, have found more favour with those people? Or would they have never read it, because it would have been too upsetting?
Of course, more mature readers could be angry about this, too, but I noticed a surprising number of reviews that were originally five or four stars, and were changed to one star after the reviewer found out about the alleged inspiration - which had so little to do with the actual plot of the book that you never would have guessed it.)
Since the author is (presumably) not Indigenous, I'm sure he would have been torn apart for "exploiting Indigenous trauma" if he wrote a darker story that was more clearly inspired by residential schools. But, because he wrote a happy story, he was accused of covering up their trauma instead. He couldn't win because these SWJs actively look for shit to be offended about
Probably. I mean, I do think it was in poor taste to mention his inspiration at all, seeing how different his book turned out to be.
(I mean, I get it. That happens. You set out to write about something horrible, then you can't bring yourself to actually do that and it turns out all fluffy bunnies and unicorns. Whenever I try to write some very serious and insightful story about the plight of prostituted women, it instead turns into an cozy fantasy story where brothels are burnt to the ground, with the pimp still inside ... after the heroic city guard saved the women, of course. It ... happens. But once the work gets too far away from its inspiration, perhaps the public does not need to know about the inspiration.)
But yeah. SJWs and their demands make writing very difficult. Can't write about any "ethnic" people because that's not your lived experience, but also, medieval Europe is bad and boring. What am I supposed to write about, then? Unlike many Americans, I cannot claim any heritage but that of boring ol' medieval Europe.
And you can't even make up fantasy races because God forbid you take design inspiration from a real life ethnic group and someone gets triggered
When I was much younger and seeking an art career, I considered drawing a comic set in the pre-Civil War era about a slave woman who breaks away from her captors and assembles a motley crew to free other slaves and have adventures.
Thankfully, I was smart enough to realize that I wasn't a good enough writer to pull that off. So it didn't get beyond some basic character designs and a story outline. 😅
When they are facing a tough challenge, the proper response is to wait for someone else to fix it, in their minds.
Their responsibility begins and ends with complaining about it.