please stop reblogging this post. chrom has been wriggling jiggling and boinking for six thousand notes now and still counting. he can’t just keep boinking on and on into infinity. please. let this poor dad rest
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the original post was getting too long
i read shit books on purpose for fun and put them on a tierlist
S tier is the "world's okayest book" award
only one book can achieve F tier
full spoilers possible for any given title
here's the list so far
and now
13. Blood of Hercules by Jasmine Mas
so! i've seen many a booktuber video thumbnail calling this the new worst romantasy book on the scene and i'm here to say no, no it can be much worse out there. this is still bad. but it is not the worst.
this book starts out with the following "content warning":
which is fascinatingly vague from a book whose Actual content warnings should include such things as child abuse, graphic violence and death, suicidial ideation, murder, stalking, rape, forced marriage, And More. this is not a content warning, it is a list of tropes (and spoilers for the ending, for some reason). i also don't know what the TRUE part means because this has nothing to do with hercules and hercules was not a true story
our leading lady, Alexis, lives in a post-apocalyptic future where the greek pantheon (all referred to as spartans, and who are NOT related to each other, thank you very much, that would be Weird) are immortals that act as the ruling class above regular humans. beasts called titans roam the earth and are responsible for the decline of humanity. spartans are the only ones capable of killing the titans. spartans are split into two broad groups: olympians and chthonics. olympians good and chthonics evil. spartan children are divided into two groups: heirs (born from two spartan parents) and mutts (born from one spartan and one human. don't worry about that name)
spartans =/= greek gods directly, but they are immortal (after the age of 20) and do have powers.
alexis grew up with no reason to believe she was anything but a normal human, but when she is 19 years old and takes the spartan aptitude test or whatever it was called and has her blood tested, it is discovered that she actually has spartan blood and she is immediately whisked away to a gladiatorial battle. she is one of the ten people to survive said battle and so earns the right to be trained by spartan mentors in the art of... being forced through intensive schooling while not being allowed to eat or sleep and having to run a dangerous mountain trail every time she or one of her classmates gets an answer wrong. ok
alexis really sets herself apart from your violet fourth wings by having absolutely no will to survive at all. every time some new adversity arises shes like okay i guess ill die. time to die. i will throw myself off the mountain maybe. she never actually makes an effort to do that, but it's extremely funny to see in a context where i usually see the plucky weak protagonist decide to survive at any cost. (also it's supposed to be a joke i think? maybe that's what the "content warning" for "sarcasm and gallows humor" is supposed to be about)
anyway, violet - sorry, alexis - has two mentors; achilles and patroclus, here called patro. they are both crazy and violent and they Hate alexis but they will mentor her because if she survives her schooling they will become generals. it's unclear what they actually do to mentor her though. she mostly lives in their house and they berate her for not being good at stuff. then she goes off to spartan school and eventually meets two more angry violent men - kharon and augustus - who ALSO badly want her to survive but ALSO only ever berate her and make things harder for her.
so that's not one, not two, not three, but four entire older (5+ years older than our 19 year old leading lady; 11 in the case of augustus, who is also one of her professors) men who own this girl's life. (there are also two other men who fall in love with her but their inclusion is inconsequential.) none of them ever actually do anything helpful for her. and at least two of them - though maybe all four of them, i won't be sticking with the series any longer to find out - definitely want her as their third. because oh yeah all four of these men are already paired off with each other but due to a new law that just got passed they all need to find a non-chthonic to marry (the olympians are doing eugenics on the chthonics. keep up)
so the thing with this book is that it's definitely angling for a certain crowd that is into such things as domineering older men who can, will, and have killed for you. (and being the middle part of a sandwich of two of those men.) i get that. sure. not my thing, but sure. if you're into that, it's here. however the protagonist is Not into it (which is also maybe part of the appeal) at the start; she is an abuse victim who hates being touched by anybody in any way, let alone sexually. this does seem to just... turn off? when she is being sandwiched by the aforementioned domineering older men. which again is maybe part of the appeal. this book is far from erotica but definitely knows who it's after. if you're not one of the people it's after, you're going to be put off.
all that "if you're into it" stuff aside, there is a lot of weird misogyny slipped in there on the part of the author. chthonic mutts (read: children of one human and one chthonic (evil) spartan) are exclusively male for the following reason:
... women are too physically weak to live with chthonic blood in their system unless they are an heir (pure-blood). which our leading lady turns out to be, if anyone was wondering.
getting into blood purity in your fantasy setting is dicey at best and you are not helping by literally referring to "half-gods" as "mutts." consider your optics for one half of one second i'm begging you. (not to mention achilles being portrayed as a dark-skinned man who is so violent he literally has to wear a muzzle? girl)
additionally, while all the words are in the right order, there are some writing choices that simply do not flow. the book opens with an in-medias-res scene of a character whose perspective we will shortly leave forever - Fate. she has a vision and rushes to tell the gathered spartans that they shall set a required marriage age of 26 in hopes of increasing their birth rate (shinzo abe i know its you). the next chapter is effectively a list of bullet points summarizing thousands of years of history to get us to where we are as of story start; the year 2090. then we pick up from child alexis in her trailer, sleeping in a cardboard box, and living with foster parents who drink cleaning supplies.
alexis (note that i say "alexis" and not "the author"; i believe this is actually a character choice! good job!) also has a habit of saying one thing and then saying something supplementary in a parenthetical after it. like so:
which is flow-breaking at best and baffling at worst. but it definitely gives her a unique voice, even if it does make me want to Also jump off the mountain.
anyway alexis turns out to actually be named hercules (this name was embroidered on the onesie she was wearing when she was found as a baby, which she knew about but just never chose to mention it until the very end) and she is actually the full-blooded god daughter of hades and persephone, which is famously how hercules' lineage looked. she has magic blood that kills people when it gets in their system. she gets roped into marrying kharon and augustus on a technicality and one of the final scenes is them raping her on the altar. another of the final scenes is achilles and patroclus vowing to "get her back" because they definitely also would like her to be Their third.
anyway free the lips (vaginal) and write fanfiction about 19th century mathematician carl gauss. i'm out
I know next to nothing about the larger Impact this book has had (i am not on tiktok.) all i know is what is on the author's website: that in the rush to go to print, the "final stage of editing" was skipped over. and how it was so poorly received that they offered refunds and are rewriting the whole thing. and the whole thing where she's been working on this story for 10 years. which does in fact make me feel like i am punching down a little bit on this one. i am going to try not to be very mean about it because the author is young and inexperienced and clearly holds this story very close to her heart.
but the fact remains that the book is very bad and it needs to go back to the drawing board.
a brief rundown.
everyone in this universe's land (Gardian [sic]) has powers of some description which are based on their zodiac sign. society is split into four "unions" (read: countries) based on the elemental affinity (fire, water, air, earth) of those signs. the signs also somewhat dictate people's personalities - or rather, the norms of what people's personalities Should be in their respective society. (which, by the way, the names of the four countries are Societal, Conviction, Assiduous, and Autarchic. tell me divergent was a formative experience for you without telling me.) it is illegal to live in a Union that does not correspond to your sign, and it is also illegal to marry across Union borders.
there are also three Forbidden powers - Spirit Walking, Libra Healing, and Zodiac Turning. spirit walking involves astral projection, talking to "divinities," and memory manipulation (this is a spoiler.) libra healing is when you are a libra and have healing powers i think. but they are super powerful healing powers. because people with other signs can also have healing powers and that's fine? also, spirit walkers' powers don't awaken until they "come into contact with" a libra healer.
zodiac turning... gives you the power to change peoples' birthday ? and also seems to come with some sort of hadouken ability that is capable of killing people. it is the rarest and Most illegal power in the land. you'll never guess which one our leading lady eventually finds out she has.
but before all that, our leading lady is also a scorpio. these are apparently the most powerful of the twelve signs, but they are forced to live by the restrictive Scorpio Code, which dictates that no scorpio can show emotion, make friends, or fall in love. breaking any one of these tenets is punishable by death. it's also illegal for scorpios to be raised by non-scorpio parents or live with non-scorpio siblings. this is enforced by the Scorpio Stellarium, the governing body of people born between october 23 and november 21. it is apparently thought that the scorpio code is immutable and has always been there as it was bestowed by some sort of divinity. mc and her family - composed of a scorpio mother, a cancer father, our scorpio mc (rieka), and her aries sister (avia) get around these laws by living in these cursed woods that are supposed to kill anyone who enters but for some reason won't kill them. but they tell the government that they actually live somewhere else and nobody interrogates that.
with me so far?
the actual forward motion of this story is very simple. girl questions the state of things. girl stumbles upon "proof" that the state of things is wrong. girl sets out on a quest to prove the state of things is wrong.
her proof? she found an old piece of paper that says some guy made up the scorpio code, rather than it being some sort of divine order. (which, if you needed to murder your own populace to enforce your divine order, why would you ever think these were inherent truths?) and that a legendary sword ("a mythical sword of immortality [which] curse[s] anyone it touch[es] with immortality") exists and is not just a story. somehow, we decide that this legendary sword (which, critically, does the opposite of killing people) must be key to overthrowing the scorpio government.
if you're wondering how revealing this magic sword to the general public will do anything to the government, so was I - until literally 95% of the way through the story when someone actually asks them what they're going to do with the sword and the characters go. well actually i'm not sure. before it is revealed that the TRUE final boss of this saga... is none other than representative democracy:
i specify that the "forward motion" of this story separately from the rest of it. this is because there is so much lore-dumping and/or exposition going on at all times that there is very little room for scene writing. every single time (every time!) rieka falls asleep during the course of the group's journey, she has a flashback to previously-suppressed memories of herself and this girl who has been trying to kill her in the present day. as it turns out, rieka has had around four years of her memories strategically erased to omit this specific girl, narah, with whom she planned to overthrow the government. long (long long long) story short, narah used to be rieka's girlfriend and fellow anarchy appreciator, but now she is under the control of the scorpio government. this is all written in such a way as to make me wonder why we needed to make all of it into flashback dream sequences. it would have had much more (read: any) impact if it were just written in chronological order.
anyway. it is eventually revealed that all the other members of reika's group ALSO have the super powerful illegal powers and at least one immortal parent (except her sister, who is actually only her half sister, and whose father is ALSO immortal but he doesn't have any special powers so she didn't get any lol sucks to suck avia). OH and btw the deadly assassin gf also turns out to be the sister of one of the party members. and they free her from her mind control and she and rieka kiss in the light of the setting sun to set us up for the sequel.
the plot twists of "secret immortal parents," "secret forbidden superpowers," and "secret sister/gf you forgot about" read like something a kid would come up with.
which is really the core issue of this book. the author emphasizes in the acknowledgements how long she has been working on this story - 10 years, which as of time of writing would have made her 12 when she started. this story very much feels like it was written by a 12 year old. the author may have aged, but the story did not grow up along with her. this book needs a lot more than a final editing pass (like, say, a first editing pass) before it's ready for prime time. it feels like she made up a lot of lore for her world over the years and felt the need to include every word of it instead of constructing an actual worthwhile plot within that world and integrating her lore subtly.
it is very, very bad.
so i'm going to need to break my own rule here.
I am opening up F tier to include this book alongside lightlark. these are the two worst books i have ever laid eyes on and i hope that stays true for a very, very long time.
for all the strange and bad bullshit i've read during this project, nothing has pissed me off quite like this one.
the prose is fine. the words work. but everything those words say makes me so angry. this one is personal for me - from the start i saw shades of a horrible former friend in one of the central characters and those shades only got clearer as the story went on. so while there isn't such a thing as "objective criticism" i'm not even going to pretend that's what i'm doing here.
premise: woman (harriet) and her fiance (wyndham) broke up but haven't told anyone in their lives even though it happened six months ago. they both attend an annual gathering with four other mutual friends, two of whom (sabrina and parth) announce that they will be getting married at the end of the week. harriet and wyn decide that they must pretend to still be in a relationship or else it will ruin the wedding which they did not know was happening this week. this is because sabrina and parth go out of their way to say to their faces that they had their doubts about getting married but seeing harriet and wyn make it work has inspired them to do it :)
it doesn't get less stupid from there. we spend the next 70% or so of the book not even knowing why harriet and wyn broke up, and apparently she doesn't know either. but eventually it is revealed that he dumped her because his dad died while they were long distance and he was having a hard time but also he had bad self esteem and thought she could do better than him but also he didn't even know that she Really wanted him because she didn't get mad at him whenever he was having a hard time and canceled something. so this entire issue could have been avoided if they'd just talked to each other. like adults.
and also sabrina (who has been micromanaging the group's activities the entire week and giving their friend cleo a hard time for being too busy to allow sabrina to visit) actually knew that harriet and wyn broke up but didn't tell them that she knew and instead opted to force them into proximity with each other because this is the last time the group will be able to have their annual meetup and she wants everything to be Perfect so she just acts like nobody else could possibly have anything else going on? and harriet is like oh i should have figured out that she's only being so horrible because she loves us and is afraid of losing us.
this also makes her and parth's comments about harriet and wyn's relationship at the beginning of the story even more insane. what do you mean you knew, all along, that they had broken up and were trying to avoid each other - but still decided to Tell Them you Only Decided To Get Married because they were together? you decided to trap your friends in a situation they Could Not be comfortable with because you wanted them to get back together so badly because you can't find the point in your own relationship without theirs as a blueprint? you people are insane and i cannot believe we forgave you.
the book really can't decide whether you should feel bad for not communicating with your friends or if you should feel bad for not playing five turns ahead of their personal 4d chess game because it means you don't Really Know Them. but either way, everyone ends up happily ever after and sabrina and parth get married (even after she ran off on the day of their wedding without saying a word to him because of she was soooo sad that her friends were mad at her for micromanaging them all week), cleo and kimmy (the only normal people here) have a baby, and harriet quits her job as a neurosurgeon to move to montana and marry wyn and do her true passion, pottery. all because they learned to communicate <3 but every single one of these characters is so well versed in therapy-speak that i do not believe for a second that they did not already know how
yeah this book pissed me off. we should throw sabrina to the lobsters. every conversation sounds like one that the author's very cool very quirky very fun emotionally intelligent friends might have had in real life so they went in the book. i hate everyone here
i actually started reading this one three months ago. i read 60% of it in one sitting and then stopped. until today, when i finished the last 40%. when i started, i thought i may have found the first S tier book of this project - which is to say the World's Okayest Book so far. but i must have been in a good mood that day because the second half has me wondering why else i would have thought that
i DO remember this one actually doing something i liked. partway through, our leading lady has to tell someone her greatest desire in order to make a magical payment. she says her greatest desire is to rescue her missing sister, whom she's built her whole life around protecting. the magic detects that she isn't being truthful, but she insists that she is. she refuses to acknowledge that there is anything she might want more than to rescue her sister, because she doesn't know who she is without her sister. That's A Character Moment! Good Job! we don't really follow up on it in this book because this is the first in a series but you could probably do something with that. i already forgot everything else about it though.
if you like ya romance which is ostensibly about girl power and independence but textually a bunch of men hold all the cards and the poor gormless woman is at the mercy of whatever they do or do not choose to tell her, this is one for you.
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Please put on your N95s. The same ones used for covid will filter particulate pollution. I lived in a city with yearly winter pollution levels like this. If you can pay for it, you might as well get an indoor air filter to sleep in.
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you may be familiar with disney twisted wonderland, the gacha game in which various disney villains are used as direct inspiration for handsome anime boys. well that game was so successful that disney is trying to do it again but this time they're just animeboyifying whatever
here's mickey, goofy, donald, and chip & dale. yeah they turned mickey & friends into anime boys. they're an idol unit or something. they're technically not anime boy versions of the source characters, they have different names. mickey's guy is "Neo Michel". not michael, michel, like he's french. chip & dale are "Ruska Moncrief" and "Ranka Monk", they have different last names, they're not brothers anymore so that they can be yaoibait instead, anyways this post isn't actually about these guys I'm just setting the stage for the actual humanizations I wanted to show you
They also did monsters inc. And. Well it's obvious from the designs who mike and sully are. but you will also notice. the blonde one on the left. with glasses. monsters inc is kind of famously about just the two guys so they didn't really have a lot of other non-villain characters to take anime boys inspiration from, I guess, so, well,
Yeah it's her. they made an anime boy version of the mean receptionist slug. her name is roz btw, as all of boygachagame twitter has become extremely aware of in the past 3 days as we speculated prior to the release of the full image who tf the third guy was. the anime boy's name is "noah slugger". at this point no parody of the types of things gacha games will make gijinkas of will ever be able to live up to what disney is officially spending their own real money on designing
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