#sageandginger

okay, i need to preface this that there are some actual deeper things I could talk about (and might! who knows! maybe i'll get there) but this is primarily about my 11+ year long personal grudge with this woman. my negative opinion of her is incredibly rooted in the fact that I am a grudge-holding person and for the past 11 years people have been trying to convince me her books are good when they aren't. they just aren't. on a craft level, she is a bad writer and her books are bad. she is, tragically, a storyteller who occasionally comes up with interesting and inventive ideas that will never ever reach their full potential because she doesn't need to invest in her own skill to sell the shit she writes and so she doesn't. she will occasionally create a cool and interesting character, but because she has the attention span of a goldfish, all of her characters get personality reassignments every 1.5 books in a series. since i was SIXTEEN people have been telling me how good she is.

tbh the only reason i ever read anything she's written is because she happened to do an author event at a library near me and i attended because i attended every library author event, and acquired the first 3 books in the throne of glass series. she seemed like a legitimately nice person when i got my books signed. this was circa....2014? there was then some unpleasant scuttlebutt i learned about her after that due to being a teen bizarrely in-the-know about YA publishing at the time, but I shan't repeat any of it because I do not have access to any sources other than the citation: (I Was There, 2014) and i am uninterested in practicing citationless behavior. due to acquiring her books and having an impressive teenage wherewithal for reading things I didn't like that much, I read them. I thought throne of glass was mid at best, i hated crown of midnight (the twist at the end is so stupid it's mind-boggling), and i actually loved heir of fire, which, in retrospect, i'm 95% sure is because the main character got tortured during it and i really hated her. she might be my least favorite YA protagonist perhaps ever, actually. which is saying something, as a person who's read a lot of bad YA.

this was the beginning of my spiral. because, you see, i liked heir of fire. that meant I read the next book and, in fact, the only book in that series i never finished was the last one. i gave up, i couldn't do it, tower of dawn (book 6) sapped the life from my body and i couldn't even hate-read anymore. in between the throne of glass books, i read the acotar series as it was coming out (the original trilogy, I have not subjected myself to any books past those). and the thing was: some of those books were better than others to the point that i could convince myself she was improving. and then she'd publish another book that was so bad I wanted to burn it out of existence (tower of dawn). this was pattern. it lured me in. i didn't escape the demonic pattern until 2019, i think. to this day, if i say sarah j maas's name in my household, my mom goes "not her AGAIN" because i've complained about her so much. i think she was my first toxic relationship, actually. we had a 5 year long toxic relationship

beyond my own petty grudges and admittedly parasocial toxic relationship, there are some serious problems with her books that go beyond craft-level bad writing. not to keep harping on tower of dawn (it deserves it, though), it's pretty egregiously racist imo, not to mention ableist in ways i can't get into without spoiling plot points. i don't think her stories are even in the ballpark of feminist, and certainly not the way some people think they are, particularly some of the more recent ones that carry some really unpleasantly conservative messaging about like. informed choices around childbirth (again, can't be specific without spoilers) and...let's not even talk about the male characters. that would need to be it's own post. after receiving critiques about a lack of people of color in her books (not even TOUCHING on the Nehemia of it all) out of nowhere there was official art of two different characters exclusively described as white in the books as being Asian. it was a whole thing. and don't even get me STARTED about her decision to include intentionally titillating, sexually explicit scenes OUT OF NOWHERE in the 5th book of a YA series that had exclusively had fade-to-black sex scenes in the past. like, i'm of the opinion that sex (explicit sex, at that) 100% has a place in YA fiction, but smut does not. I don't care if your YA protags are 19-20; outright smut is for a different age-range. and to do that in the MIDDLE of the series, with no warning, was appalling and arguably has negatively affected the genre ever since, but that's a different conversation.

i've just watched the video now oh my god i had no idea i'm so behind on c3

you didn't miss anything!! no version of finn or griffin has explicitly said anything about sexuality. the closest would be all the way back here, when finn said "I don't care that you're gay. // But you just said it, in a room full of people, and no one cared. // ... Maybe I was kind of jealous." but even then, he was more concerned with the realization that the world has moved on without him and that he missed it all. that’s as specific as he’s ever been about the subject! and i honestly might keep it that way in canon... but yeah, i write him as gay. i think i’ll wait to elaborate on this until after the next couple posts, because there are some small pieces of context that will be relevant. for now, i’ll just say: he’s notoriously great at blending into his surroundings and not rocking the boat, in order to get something he needs. after the childhood he had, griffin will do pretty much anything to achieve a life of stability and peace, so whether or not he’s actually attracted to jules/women is kind of irrelevant to him at this point in his life

Oh my goodness, thank you so much for asking this! This is my favourite kind of question to get.

I gave quite a lot of thought to how the fictional locations of the Sims fit into the real world. The Gillespies live in a version of England- the major cities like London and Bath still exist, but there are some fictional additions. Windenburg is a fictional county, located approximately somewhere in the Southwest of England- I refuse to get more specific than that. The biggest town is Greater Windenburg, which is located close to the Gillespies' village of Little Windenburg.

I imagine that Annie and Edwin have traces of something like a Hampshire accent- something like this. Because Annie is an aspiring social climber, she has worked hard to eradicate her accent and make sure that her children speak the 'King's English' (what is today called 'Received Pronunciation' or RP). Edwin has put significantly less effort into getting rid of his. Honour, being a vicar’s daughter, has slightly more polished RP than Clem, and Daisy also tries harder to speak ‘properly’ than Clem and is embarrassed if any rhotic Rs slip through.

stands for guild wars 2, it’s an open world mmo my friends and i have been playing for a little over four years now? the name is somewhat misleading, and i assume a holdover from the original guild wars, while guilds are still an active part of the game, it’s less about guilds having wars and more about, dragons.

friendly dragons, evil dragons, dragon science makes the world go round, all of that (it’s a good game, i like the plot and also the dragons)

it first came out in 2012 but they’re still constantly upgrading the game and the story, it’s not free to play unfortunately but there is a free version of the game if you wanted to try it out, it’s just pretty limited in what you can do

it’s also very fun to play as a cr fan, because sam plays this guy, who is my favourite character

and matt plays this guy, as well as voices one of the player character options

and liam plays this asshole

along with 500 different tree people, the first of whom you meet is this guy

and they all do hundreds of additional voices for minor npcs, so it’s hard to walk around literally anywhere in the game without running into a cr cast member, sam and liam especially, and it’s always fun to see who they play (two of my favourites of sam’s are a failing bard in the main capital city trying to get people to listen to his music, and a fishmonger in one of the human towns whose fish have all been poisoned by a nearby toxic spill in the lake, and he’s trying to sell them to you anyway, they both feel like very fitting roles 😂)

(liam’s just good at playing fancy tree boys, though he does a lot of other voices too)

and since the character creation options in this game are relatively diverse, and i was planning to make two new characters tonight anyway, i decided to make them percy and keyleth! (since i assume these posts is what you’re here from)

The skintone update did not change anything about the way default skins are made, so nothing different for me there!

To me, Lotus is on the Maxis Mix side because it has a lot more texture/noise than most Maxis Match skins do. A lot of mm skins super smooth out the face (as one of my favorite creators once called it, the smooth yoda look). Lotus does that a bit too, but also has a lot of textured shading and detailing. Plus almost every skin I used to blend was self described as Maxis Mix, too. Overall it’s still mostly maxis match, but it does have some extra somethings.

I need to stop trying to make jokes on here, I think I’m bad at communicating tone.

oh what

oh WHAT