#krow.reading

I'd actually love to read you going into detail on why you think the prose is mid and what exactly works and doesn't for you. TBH Pacat is so Dunnett-influenced that the only thing I'm capable of seeing when I read it is "simplified Dunnett", would love to hear a more neutral take

​i'll see if i can scrounge some time to make a post about the prose with examples (been a bit busy lately)...won't lie i am just a hater sometimes and i also just finished the sympathizer and the committed by viet thanh nguyen which are both very good "literary" novels (the former was the author's debut novel and won the pulitzer prize for fiction) (also i put "literary" in quotation marks bc i think this whole genre thing is so artificial lol but anyway i digress).

so reading captive prince is a bit well. different. it's not bad and obviously one is expected to judge it within its genre i.e. romantasy (which tbh i would disagree with lol. like why not judge it against "real" novels tm? because it won't hold up? why/why not? etc. it's like how @tajmutthall said "I did not expect Ursula K. LeGuin or JRR Tolkien or even Jane Austen here." but why not? why not expect more?

and i suppose i was expecting more because i've seen similar tropes (captivity, slash, slavery tropes etc) written better in fanfiction which is seen as romantasy adjacent and/or "lower" in the tier of what constitutes "real" literature (compared to say. dostoevsky or dickens or any other "western literary canon" author)