#fandom problem 6720 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

damnfandomproblems · 6 months ago

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(mod note: this is an older submission from 2022, and is a follow-up from the person who submitted Fandom Problem #3680. They submitted an additional follow-up which I will be including here as well rather than posting as its own problem. I'm not going to attempt to fit the entire text body into the image this time, the majority will be included under the cut.)

Fandom Problem #6719:

So, Book 2. It starts with Anne and Betty back in their village. Anne’s doing a play for their one year anniversary of going to the school. When they first came back, they got statues built and they had interviews and autograph sessions, started by Anne of course. Anne was surprised Betty came to all of them. But then people got bored and less people came to the autograph sessions. Betty was ok with this but Anne wasn’t. She needed the fame from being the one of the first 2 people to come back from the school because if she couldn’t be a princess, this was the closest she would ever get in this village. And Anne’s father and stepmother is getting married. The stepmother also has 2 sons that I forgot to mention that Anne’s father treats as his own. Father is Keith and stepmother is Luella. Apparently I misremembered, they’re not married in Book 1, they were in courtship or something. They’re getting married in this book. Anne is upset and the play is her plan to talk her father out of the wedding. There was apparently a scene where Luella is portrayed badly. I don’t remember how and the wiki doesn’t say how but I know it’s meant to be bad. She learns that they’re getting married tomorrow so her plays plan are gone.

Meanwhile, Betty is thinking about Cornelius but her mother tries to get her to talk about the evil school and even tries to get her to brew some potions with her. The true story of what happened wasn’t told to the villagers and so they think Anne went to good school and Betty went to the evil one. But Betty refuses and her mother gets mad. She sees a fairy tale book and stars crying but manages to disguise it by chopping onions.

Betty sees Anne visiting her mother’s grave because in case you forgot, her house is located in a graveyard. Anne tells Betty about her mother. She had two sons that were born dead and it was thought she would be unable to have any children until she had Anne by some miracle. And how she feels like her father would have liked a son more and wanted to name him Mitchel. Her complex about her father wanting a son more may have been mentioned in Book 1 but I’m like 60% sure it happened in Book 2. She said that her mother knew her father and Luella, who was her best friend, were seeing each other and that she doesn’t want to end up like her and that she would do anything to see her again.

When Anne goes to sleep, she gets too super special villain dreams where she dreams she is torturer and kills her soon to be stepbrothers. She gets scared because she also gets these symptoms that come with these dreams and she thinks she saw a glimpse of her witch self in the mirror.

This village is ruled by council of three old men with beards. A conversation between Betty her mother tells us that marriages used to be forced by them and that Anne’s father suffered the most from that. During the wedding, Anne makes a big effort to be good and happy for the marriage because last night’s nightmare scared her and she doesn’t want to become a witch again. As for Betty, the entire wedding feels her with regret of what could have been with Cornelius (Girl, why do you like him. You guys barely had any nice and normal conversations. You literally just decided to like him after your “makeover”). Just as Keith and Luella were about to kiss, arrows fly out of the forest. They’re magic arrows who attack Anne who takes shelter in the church, the only place where the arrows wouldn’t attack her. Long story short, she stuck in church, Luella tells her the marriage won’t go on without her so it’s delayed until everything is over, people visit to bring her food, she is happy about the attention, eventually they lock her in along with Betty who wouldn’t leave her to keep her safe, there’s this pillow where she stitched Betty’s face over the prince’s face so it’s two girls on the pillow now, Betty sees some things that make her think Anne is becoming a witch again, half the town is destroyed by the arrows and there are signs telling them to give them Anne.

The three old men tell them that they are going to bring Anne somewhere safer but Betty realises they are going to sacrifice her so she tries to stop them. She chases after them following a trail of face cream Anne left as a trail. She’s mistaken as an attacker but luckily Keith realises it was her when he tries to attack her. She confesses it was her wish that caused this. He threatens her to bring his daughter back no matter what and she promises him.

She runs into some danger in the forest. She reaches a moat filled with crocodiles but she notices they spare the female deer, so she takes a chance. She finds Anne tied up and cover with blood. The attackers see them, and they run away. They follow some blue butterflies because Anne thinks that they are beautiful so they wouldn’t lead them to danger. They make it to the magic train station except the trains are magic vines where they went during their field trip. Betty threatens their way into getting on the vine. They notice a bunch of good women talking to each other while the men don’t talk to each other. The attackers almost catch them, but they make it to the school where Professor Fairy and Lady Ivy find them. They hurry them into Professor Fairy’s office and tell them one of them made a wish that caused their story’s ending to be undone. Betty admits it was her and Anne feels betrayed. They learn that things they have changed since they left this world. And this is also when the series starts going downhill and about when I started hating it.

Basically, after they went home and their story ended, everyone around the world read their story. As a result, princesses started kicking their princes out of their castles and becoming friends with the witches that were once their enemies (not in a gay way, this book makes it really clear that they’re just friends), changing their happily ever after. (There were certain lines in the first book that implied most of the villains die at the end of fairy tales, but I think that detail isn’t important. But I never forgot the world building details that were never delivered or contradicted. Were all the teachers at the evil school just losers that survived their fairy tales or they just became teachers? Is there a teacher school in this world? I never get an answer for this.) The world became what far right misogynistic nutjobs think the world would become if women had equal rights. One day, the girls from the evil school were ejected from the school by a magic force so they went to the good school for shelter. The good girls took a page from Anne and Betty’s story and let them in, which lead to the boys being ejected from the good school and they went to the evil school instead. Instead of the good and evil schools, it’s now the girls and boys schools. Cornelius also got a hold of the headmaster’s tower and is now the headmaster and he also has the magic pen. He wants Betty and there’s a high chance he will go to war for her. The teachers urge Betty to pick either him or Anne. If she picks Cornelius, Anne will go home and the world will go back to normal. If she picks Anne, they will both go home and war will at least be avoided. But first, they need to get the magic pen to write their ending. If neither happens, a war between boys and girls will happen.

They are suddenly interrupted by their dead history teacher’s secret half sister no one has ever heard nor did the first book ever foreshadowed who is apparently now the dean of the school of girls. I can’t remember exactly how she took the position but I think it was something to do with the magic school approving her. She takes them to a welcome ceremony where a bunch of girls in blue pants and veils (I don’t remember the colour of the shirts but probably blue.) dance for them and give them gifts. Anne being Anne and apparently having learnt nothing from last year starts to think maybe she and Betty should just stay here because they’re treated like celebrities here. The dancing girls then rip off their veils and it’s just their female classmates from last year. Except for this newcomer who has red hair and covers her face with a veil. She’s said to be tall and has muscles. She doesn’t speak but makes weird squawking sounds. They’re told she’s named Nila. The good girls have now given up makeup and fashion and some even have gained weight (to Anne’s horror). Genevieve is basically bald now because she hacked off most of her hair. The evil girls are now experimenting with makeup but they’re not really good at it.

I’m really hazy about the events that come next, and the wiki is not helping. But the school has changed, there are now new paintings (it used to be just your typical fairy tale fare) that depict princess being friends with witches and girls being strong warriors and boys dead in the background. I think what happens next is that Betty gets dragged by Anne’s old roommates to a bathroom. The leader of the three (also the one who almost defeated Cornelius last year in the competition) is mad that the evil school is gone. She’s Onyx and the other girl I barely mentioned in my previous rant is Pamela. Pamela actually appears a lot. I know her powers (controlling her pet white rats) and what she looks like (pale white skin with white hair and red eyes) but I genuinely cannot remember anything she does in the series but she’s close to Onyx. Onyx and Pamela are still wearing their old uniforms because their old teacher taught them a spell that gives them rashes if they wear the new one and the dean reluctantly let them wear their old ones after a while. Onyx is mad because she wanted to be the top evil student which she can no longer do. Eli is also there but she’s now pretty and thin and her magic changed from turning things to chocolate to turning things to vegetables. Eli likes it here but her friends bully her into agreeing with them. Onyx says that they hate boys but they think boys are necessary for the balance of the world and wants Betty to choose Cornelius. Meanwhile, Anne is with the new dean Queenie Rose (the dead history teacher has the same last name) who is showing her around the school. Anne grows more and more sure that staying here is the best choice. She ends their tour showing her a giant mural depicting girls ruling over boys. Princesses and witches are like sitting and holding hands while boys are slaves doing work while being whipped. Yes, like that one propaganda art that is being memed on unironically. Yes, this entire scene is as stupid as it sounds. Seeing this, Anne realises this is in fact the future she wants and promises to the dean that she will make it happen.

Classes start and there are now classes for girls. Instead of learning stuff like beauty and posture, they now learn sword fighting and weaponry. There’s also nonsense about how blue was “kept” from them by the boys even though Betty literally wore a blue dress during the entire fight scene last book and a teacher was punished for wearing a pink accessory because it’s now a colour of weakness. Their old teachers struggle to teach them these lessons but they comply anyway because they’re scared the dean will get rid of them. The heads of the two headed dogs can separate, the good one is still part of the staff even though he’s male because he sucked up to the new dean. He no longer has the body as it’s with his brother, the other head. The students weren’t sure if he was male or female at first but the wiki says he is male. The old good teacher who teaches talking to animals refused to change her classes to be about hunting and she was fired. She was ejected into the woods surrounding the school and they think she was killed by the boys school’s guards or the homeless princes who were kicked out of their castles camping out in the woods surrounding the boys school. The guards were the same one who were hunting Anne, they don’t have names but they all wear red cloaks so they call them reds. And they’re apparently led by this random evil boy who’s extremely vicious and who wasn’t there last year and is now Cornelius’s right-hand man. History class has also been changed and is taught by the new dean. Instead of using the old history books, hers is a revised version all depicting girls as heroes and boys as villains. The history book’s title literally starts with “A revised version of”.

During class, Betty sees Cornelius appear to her in spirit form telling her to meet him. She asks the roommates for help and says that she worried that Anne is becoming a witch again because she thought she saw a wart. It disappeared after a second. They were a bit unconvinced until they see a pigeon she accidentally killed in class. Unlike getting expelled and turned into slaves for the school like last year, the girls with lowest scores just get sent to guard the gates of their school at night. So Betty and Eli fails together and Betty sneaks off into the boy school. She gets through the same way as last year by tricking the barrier spirit but with the new five rules for being boys and girls that replaced the rules for good and evil. I forget how but Anne manages to find out so she turns into a bird and follows her. But the shield makes her fall into a snake pit and she uses her magic to turn the snakeskin into a cape that can turn her invisible. I’m about 70% sure she learn this in class yesterday because there’s no way this girl would remember anything that isn’t recipes for beauty products for that long. She manages to get there first.

The good boys have become incel frat bros. There’s this scene where they’re throwing a house party and everything’s a mess. They’re no longer well-groomed or polite but now they’re belching, and I think one of them said they haven’t bathed for a while. The evil boys are mad at them because their parties keep them up at night and they’re making too much of a mess. And they say that there’s no point in taking care of their appearance if there’s no girls and they started chanting how they want girls. Then Betty appears. She and Cornelius begins to talk. She tells him she came like he asked but he's confused because he never asked her to. He’s still happy to see her but he’s paranoid that Anne’s secretly with her. She is in the same room with her invisibility cloak but neither of them know. He tells her that he at first accepted her choosing Anne because he wants her to be happy. But then, the world starts to be ruled by radfems and he’s ridiculed for having his princess choose someone else. He still accepts her choice though but then he senses her wish and decides to get her back. They’re about to kiss but then he stops because he still thinks he needs to kill Anne first or this entire scenario would repeat itself. (He’s not wrong) They start arguing and he accuses Betty of being in cahoots with Anne because only witchcraft could have let her through the barrier. Cornelius, don’t be blinded by what happened at the big battle last book, she’s not smart enough to figure out how to do that. Her intelligence is based on plot convenience. Anne, seeing her chance, shoots a pink spell at them. They think each other cast it and starts fighting. Betty escapes and swears she will never love him because she’s evil. For a series that establishes that evil and good is just different sides of a story, it sure does treat evil as, evil. Betty finds Anne fast asleep in her because she somehow manages to make it back before her.

Cornelius tells his right-hand man, the new evil boy Sedric to let the princes outside into the school because they’re going to war. He tells the dean that there would be competition like last year where each school’s top ten compete. If the boys win, Anne and Betty will be executed and if the girls win, all the boys will become slaves. Betty is 100% on Anne’s side now and she tells the roommates that and she also says that she hasn’t seen a wart or any other sign so maybe she was just seeing things. Onyx isn’t convinced. In the middle of this, Anne cuts in and says that as long as they are together, she will no longer be a witch. The dean accepts the deal and everyone starts training. Anne, Betty and the roommates decide they need to sneak into the boy school to get the magic pen. They realised that the female gnome teaching them is the same gnome from last year who taught them for the mixed good and evil class. Gnomes can change sex when they’re young but they usually settle into just one sex when they’re an adult. They find out that Jim is taking this sex change potion to be a woman so he could stay in this school. He doesn’t have a lot of it, only enough for one person until the competition starts. They decide on Anne because based on the five rules, she’s the closest one to a boy. She needs to get the pen and find Betty during the competition. Anne is reluctant at first but realises that this is the best chance to stay with Betty and not turn into a witch.

Cornelius has put a price on their heads offering half of his kingdom’s treasury for the bounty. He’s King Arthur’s son (yeah, it’s not a fairy tale but there’s a lot of artistic liberties taken including changing some of them to fit the lore of the world-there’s stuff I want to say about that) so he’s apparently super duper rich. Richer than the average prince (even though we learn that Camelot is heading towards ruin in Book 3 after the whole Lancelot and Guinevere thing and Arthur dying but apparently, it’s waiting for him when he becomes king? I don’t know) so even when the princes weren’t homeless, they wanted his wealth. He’s now hated by the boys because he essentially offered them as slaves to the girls without their consent and he’s now realising that they’re not exactly well-equipped to handle this competition so he decides to wake the male teachers. They’re in the dungeons asleep under a spell. The boys found them like that when the schools changed and couldn’t get them to wake up. After doing some research, he realises he needs Harry to turn into a wolf because his special talent is that he’s a werewolf and howl at them to wake them up. He says he’ll do it in exchange for a spot in the competition because he wants to get revenge on Anne for breaking his heart and using him. He realised that after she left that he was used and is mad at her. Cornelius agrees and he wakes the teacher up. It turns out that although the teachers were asleep, they could hear everything, so they know what’s going on. Cornelius loses his control over the school and now also has to compete for the chance of a spot.

Anne decides to use Mitchel as her fake name so she can finally become the son her father always wanted. She drinks the potion and shows up as the prince of Luella Valley competing for the bounty. She gets away with the name because this world is apparently endless so nobody knows every kingdom. She gets stuck in the dungeons because they think that she’s too girly. Cornelius is also there because of the slavery thing. He’s in a bad emotional and physical state because of Betty’s “betrayal” and being whipped everyday. They don’t get along but that changes after she manages to get Sedric to stop whipping him. She makes friends with Harry again who also has to compete for a spot because the spot he was promised became null and void after Cornelius is no longer the headmaster. The leader gets to pick the last spot so she promises him that spot if he helps her cheat. She and Cornelius grow closer and he considers her his first real friend. She tells him she wants to see her mother again and he tells her his father put a bounty on his mother’s head and he will catch and kill her. It’s mentioned in the Wikipedia article that he will do this once he become king at 16 so he was 14 last year during that stupid bathroom scene. She begins to feel her old feelings for him come back. I don’t understand why this book acts as though she had always had genuine feelings for him when she clearly liked him because he was the best prince and also the handsomest one. Time passes and useless as ever, Anne realises she had made zero progress in getting the pen. With Harry’s help, she’s the leader and she picks Cornelius because she couldn’t bear to disappoint him, screwing over Harry again for the nth time and signing her own death warrant. It was at this point I started getting incredibly frustrated at her bullshit. She never learns, her intelligence fluctuates based on the plot and she always seem to get away with everything with a slap on a wrist.

Meanwhile, Betty covers for Anne by saying she’s sick but that she’ll be ready for the competition. She realises she still wants Cornelius (WHY) because she keeps dreaming about him. She also finds the snakeskin cape Anne hid. I’m really hazy what happens in the next scene. Lady Ivy is suspicious and asks what they’re planning. She avoids her questions. She gets a hint to go to a cave at the corner of school’s grounds. I don’t remember if it was the butterflies or Lady Ivy giving her a clue. I don’t know why she would give her a clue because it doesn’t help her but my blurry memory says that that’s the more likely option. She goes to visit Jim first who’s just cross-dressing now that he doesn’t have any potion left but finds it on fire. She thinks he’s dead and runs to the cave. I don’t know, something happening in that sequence. She gives to the cave and realises Lady Ivy was a mother. Evil teacher are meant to give up everything when they become part of the staff but she kept her child and raised him in the cave until the old headmaster found out and told her to leave or to abandon him. She abandoned him. Betty realises at this point that the dean controls butterflies (it was really obvious but thanks for finally noticing) and she was the one who lead them to the school. She is chased by them and falls hitting her head.

She wakes up and realises she’s been unconscious until the day of the competition. She’s supposed to go in as a pair with Anne but the dean seems to let her just go in alone. Realising that she knows their plans through eavesdropping on them using her butterflies, she hurries to find Anne. She finally puts together all the clues and realises that Anne was the one who shot the spell at them.

Anne’s potion is wearing off and she’s slowly turning into a girl again but Cornelius hasn’t noticed yet. They encounter a dying Nila who was stabbed by Sedric. She says some cryptic things and Anne realises she was actually Leonardo, the guy who dyed his hair blond to try get Genevieve to pick him and the guy Kira liked. He’s been drinking the potion to stay in the girl school and it’s now wearing off because he’s dying. The reason Nila never spoke was because the potion doesn’t change your voice so he never spoke to avoid losing his cover. He was mentioned to be missing earlier in the book but no one really cared where he was. He went to the girl school because he was bullied by Sedric and he thinks that their school was so beautiful. The dean knew and let him but I can’t remember why or if he was ever given a reason. I mean, considering the state of the boy school, I can understand why. Anyway, he realised that Mitchel is actually Anne and then he dies. Cornelius is confused about everything. Boy, are you in for one of the stupidest sequences of events ever. He thinks he’s imagining things form the blood loss from a previous encounter (I can’t remember) because he thinks Mitchel is becoming more feminine. So he tries to kiss Anne because he thinks he looks like a girl and is so pretty.

Betty sees them, not long after realising Anne’s ruse. Cornelius acts like a guilty boyfriend who was caught cheating. She starts screaming at Anne and Cornelius is confused how they know each other. He doesn’t understand anything but then starts talking about how he finally understands the value of friendship and why Anne and Betty treasure each other so much now that he has Mitchel as his best friends. Betty tells him to look at his best friends and he sees Anne, now fully a girl again. He also realises her trick in the tower at the same time. Anne begins to defend herself but she realises that they’re no longer listening and Cornelius has Betty in his arms, looking like a lovesick couple. Anne starts crying because she realises she has lost her best friend and the chance of getting back together with her ex again. Lady Ivy appears because she was worried that Cornelius hurt the girls because of some disturbances with the barrier over the competition area and realises Anne was the cause for the trouble. Because she broke the rules, the barrier between the boys and girls break and war is minutes from happening. She is swept away by butterflies but before she’s taken away, she tells Betty to kiss Cornelius.

Then, the dean appears, carried by her butterflies along with the magic pen. She uses magic to make Anne start turning into a witch. Betty tells Anne she can’t trust her anymore and that she’s turning into a witch again she kisses Cornelius. But before the pen can write final word, she stops it. Betty notices that Anne no longer look like a witch and it was the dean all along. The dean then reveals that it was Anne’s wish to see her mother again that undid their ending. She conjures up the ghost of her mother and tells her to kiss her because true love’s kiss can even revive the dead. Anne kisses her and then realises that the person she kissed was actually the headmaster. The dean was actually in love with the headmaster the whole time and came to the school to revive him because he promised he would be with her afterwards. He kills her almost immediately and lets the magic pen write the last word. Betty starts to fade as she’s sent back to her village and he tries killing Cornelius but she manages to take him with her at the last second. Both schools turn black and the book ends.

I feel like there’s a message in the first and second book but I cannot for the life of me figure out what the author is going for. It feels too disjointed and incoherent. In the companion book that’s a school handbook released after the third book, it’s mentioned that the good students’ classes are no longer separated by gender so there’s a message to this mess but I cannot see it. And I’m sick of deaths of characters no cared about but we’re supposed to be sad over them. The history teacher just gave Betty a few hints and then just sacrificed himself to protect the balance of good and evil. Leonardo doesn’t have much screen time in this first book or the second. That was literally the first and last time we hear him speak properly (if we exclude the scene where they realise that Nila can actually speak when she was talking to the dean and I am). The coolest and most interesting parts of the first book that I liked despite its lukewarm plot were the setting. The classes for good and evil were interesting and I liked the competition and talent show events because they were had some really cool scenes. Everything about the world felt magical and had enchanting atmosphere. But this book had none of that and it had a stupid plot with a confusing core message so I didn’t really enjoy it. I knew I wouldn’t enjoy the third book and that it would suck but I thought it was a trilogy and despite everything, I was curious about the ending. And hey, it just one book. If it was a longer series, I wouldn’t buy it. Little did I know that it wouldn’t be a trilogy. And despite my efforts, look like this rant isn’t any shorter than the last one.

I think the only thing I forgot to mention is the dean’s backstory. She used to be the history teacher for evil for about 2 months. She told the headmaster who was still looking for a way for evil to win that she was his true love and that her brother’s prediction that someone who’s not part of the fairy tale world is his true love is wrong. For some reason, she uses her butterflies to eavesdrop on the good students and spread chaos by telling them the secrets and insults they spoke behind their back. Lady Ivy tries to stop her but she blackmails her telling her that she knows that she is raising her child in secret. For the first time ever, Lady Ivy and Professor Fairy decided to team up and tried to convince the headmaster to fire her. He agrees and tells the Professor Rose that he would need to take over her classes and asks why he asked him to give her a position. He says maybe it was too early for her. When she’s about to be evicted, she tells him he will die if he’s wrong about her being his true love. So he promises she will be allowed back to the school if he does die and revive him.

(Mod note: this persons next submission follows)

Somehow I still managed to forget stuff: There was this history class where the dean decided to show the story of Cornelius’ dad. It’s basically the King Arthur legend but biased towards Guinevere and has some shots at Cornelius.

This is the last book that I have read of this story. I had only bought this book because I thought it was the last book in the series and I was pretty curious about the ending. I would not have bought it had I known there were more books in the series. I legitimately cannot describe about how frustrated I was when I learned that there was a fourth book, and I will admit that a lot of my bitterness at this series was because of the money I spent on it. I’m not from America or the UK so the price on the books tend to vary from bookstore to bookstore so I don’t know how much it cost in those countries, but I remember noticing that it was a bit pricier than the past 2 books and I thought that might have something to do with the fact that it was around 650 pages instead of like around 500 pages like the other 2 books. During writing the past 2 rants, I relied on the wiki to fill me in the holes of my memories of the story but the third book’s wiki is incomplete but Wikipedia had a longer summary. It was changed to have a shorter summary not long after the first post so I like to think that someone read my rant and decided to change the Wikipedia article to stop me from complaining further. But unfortunately for them, I just used the older archived version of the article.

So, both the schools are now evil. The difference is that one is new and another is old. The former girl school that was the former good school is now the new school. The headmaster still needs to marry Anne so he can destroy good forever, but Anne is procrastinating because she now has attachment issues due to Betty and Cornelius not choosing her (which was her own fault, not that she acknowledges it). But she eventually accepts the proposal after 3 weeks, but the magic pen still doesn’t accept this as a happy ending. I can’t remember exactly but I believe the storybook won’t close and the magic pen is still hovering over the book even after it already wrote “The End”. The sun gets weaker and if the story is not over, the entire fairy tale world will be gone because of this stupid indecisive love triangle. Anne also becomes a teacher for the new evil school because the headmaster. . . I don’t remember but I think he wants her to be his equal or something and to show him being blinded by his love for her because she is not qualified in the slightest. And he is genuinely in love with her because the plot says so. My memory of this book is the spottiest, but I swear no real reason was given as to why he loves her. Because she’s so evil?? Because loving her will get him world domination?? A mixture of the two?? But I feel like it’s genuine because we later learn he reopened the old spa room so he can spend time in there so he can impress her and there’s like certain comments by other characters about he seemed to have regressed in mental age to like a lovesick teenager.

Meanwhile, Betty and Cornelius are trapped in her mother’s house. They can’t leave because after half the village is destroyed, the village kind of became a dictatorship under the three old men with patrolling guards and everything. There’re bounties on both Betty and Anne’s heads because the old men branded them as witches. When they first arrived in the village, Betty was dragging an injured Cornelius to her house because her mother’s a doctor and she was fantasizing about her future dates with Cornelius at the village and I felt this was OOC even when I first read it because I thought that, despite everything that she did, she would be worried about Anne especially after realising they were both played in the last book. But anyway, the couple was happy for a few days despite being stuck in the same house but then they got frustrated with each other and started fighting. I can’t say for sure, but I think I remember a line where Betty was wondering why she even liked him in the first place. There’s now this scenario where now BOTH of them miss Anne because she was their best friend and they kind of fight with each other sometimes throughout the book about who’s her best friend. This is probably to make it come full circle because Anne and Betty both wanted Cornelius in the first book, Anne and Cornelius wanted Betty in the second and now Betty and Cornelius wants Anne. This doesn’t quite fit though because the friendship between Cornelius and Anne wasn’t ever properly explored after they reunite later.

They were eventually caught by a guard when they found out her mother was stealing food for them. And they found out that her mother and Anne’s father were made into guards as punishment. I don’t know why her mother didn’t tell them, it’s not like it would change anything. Cornelius puts his foot into his mouth by revealing that he’s the one who destroyed the village, getting them a worse sentence where they and Betty’s mother were going to be burned alive. But her mother saves them by revealing she can use magic (you can’t use magic in this world so this is added to the surprise) and sacrifices herself so that they can escape. They were told to go to a grave. It was Anne’s mother’s grave. They went through it and ended up in a graveyard in the fairy tale world. They also meet up with Betty’s old teacher who talk to animals who was presumed dead after she got kicked out of the school last year, Princess Tora.

She explains everything about the world ending and how a bunch of dead villains are now zombies that are hunting down the heroes of their stories to change the endings of their original fairy tale. She’s taking them to meet up with a bunch of old heroes who have gone into hiding who were assembled by Merlin, who Cornelius has an abandonment issue about. They’re attacked on the way by some undead villains and Princess Tora is petrified so they had to carry her there. All the heroes are old and not really capable of fighting anything and their first appearance can be summed up as a lot of fat and old jokes. Jim the gnome is also there because he wasn’t shown explicitly dead off screen. A lot of them aren’t happy to see them and even suggest giving them to the villains so that everything can go back to normal.

And Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk and Sleeping Beauty are dating. This is not really important to the plot but I was very curious as to whether they started dating recently or not because I distinctly remembered a comment about their honeymoon being delayed and also, like how many times finding your one and only true love is emphasized in this damn story, I wanted to know how remarriage would work in this world. Peter Pan is also there but he’s old and so is Tinkerbell. There’s also a couple other fairytale characters that didn’t have romance in their original story there but I’m focusing on him because I vividly remember him being unmarried. I had assumed every good fairytale characters had like a romance (and if they didn’t have one in the original, the story would be tweaked in-universe to fit the lore) because the entire reason the headmaster wanted marry Anne was because evil can’t love, and he believes that it would make evil win again. Like, you literally have no idea how fucking hard this story pushes about how every fairytale has a prince and princess happily married. And from how the story went, it very much seemed that he would correct in that assumption had he succeeded. The whole fucking riddle in Book 1 about what good always has and what evil doesn’t. And no, platonic love doesn’t fucking make sense because there was a whole scene where the book shows that both the evil students and their parents love each other very much and it’s very much referring to romantic love. Romantic love is literally taboo for the evil students! If there are fairy tales where good wins without romance, then it means that there’s a different reason as to why evil keeps losing and therefore a different solution.

Anyway, Merlin arrives and breaks up the argument. He tells them that in order to stop the headmaster they need to specifically get Anne to destroy the ring he gave her with Excalibur (something about it the strongest good weapon or whatever). So, they and Merlin set off to the school to rescue Anne and get the sword because Cornelius dropped it when he was sent to the village. I literally cannot remember most of this trip except for Merlin being your usual stereotypical eccentric wizard, some relationship troubles and Betty’s loss of her powers to grant wishes (a plotline I have completely forgotten most of the details of that didn’t really play a big part in the plot anyway). They sneak into the school with the sex change potion and some hair dye as like transfer students. Cornelius won a trivia contest between who knew Anne better, so he rescues her (yes, the Anne-is-MY-best-friend plotline is still present) while Betty has to get the sword in the old evil school. This was to make Betty wonder if she ever properly got to know Anne but I feel like this would have been better to showcase this in book 1 to show that this friendship isn’t entirely horrible because of Anne and not in book 3 after she tried killing her, ruining her love life and getting hitched with the evilest guy ever after her friend got angry at her for lying to her and also failing to do her one job. On another note, I expected to experience interesting morality because they basically said that good and evil are just perspectives but we’re just straight up having the headmaster be evil but like, even worse than usual evil.

Meanwhile, Anne is trying her hand at being a teacher, taking over her mentor, Lady Ivy’s class. Her mentor is still there, just doing other things and seemingly on evil’s side now, disregarding her friendship with Professor Fairy and all her ex-classmates hate her for obvious reasons. Her ex-roommates seem to be thrilled with evil though and have let bygones be bygones. Harry is also hot now because yes, if you’ve noticed the pattern by now, he is now going to become a main character and a possible love interest of Anne. He’s been working out and going to the spa room. He seems to hate her which upsets Anne because she’s now a bit attracted to him because of how he now looks. She’s also attracted to Sedric, the new evil boy from the last book, who’s actually Lady Ivy’s son that she abandoned. It was hinted at so not a surprise.

The ex-roommates however were secretly working with the old heroes and snuck the couple in. Betty does her obligatory trick the barrier spirit with the new five rules thing and gets the word and finds out the old evil school is filled with zombified old villains and Cornelius ends up getting to Anne. Before all of this, Anne was starting to doubt her decision to marry the headmaster so she asks the ring who her true love is and something weird happens and it shows Cornelius’s name on it so she’s been hiding it from the headmaster’s view. He reveals his identity and manages to convince her to leave with them (Betty’s also there) agreeing to her demand to give her another chance. Betty realises that Cornelius is lying to get her to leave. If you’re not sick of this love triangle yet, you will be and so they and Harry (the ex-roommates stay behind as spies) all escape with the headmaster letting them go when he can stop them. He tells Betty to remember his ring. I am so fucking convinced the author wrote the entire Anne becomes a guy and Cornelius’s best friend plotline in book 2 so there’s an explanation as to why he doesn’t hate her anymore and to continue the love triangle so that Anne’s chance of getting with him isn’t 0. But like, it totally is because no one would actually believe he would pick her.

But Anne won’t destroy the ring because the headmaster’s her backup in case Cornelius won’t love her. So they go to a safehouse for this entire relationship drama to play out. Harry’s also her guard now even though he told her that he hates her earlier because he didn’t really mean it. Princess Tora is fine now. When they arrive, they learn that Guinevere and Lancelot have always been living there and no knew except for Merlin because he put them there and Cornelius has to go work out his issues about like everything. During the trip and the stay at the safehouse, the following series of events play out and probably not in order: Betty gives Cornelius and Anne space, Cornelius is pissed but tries to give Anne a proper chance, some plotline about her talent, Princess Tora tells her how she manages to kill her villain without her prince and how that emasculated him to the point that they broke up over it and this somehow relevant but I don’t remember how, Betty starts feeling kind of ok about Anne and Cornelius getting together, Betty asks how Guinevere is fine with not being able to interact with anyone for years and she says something something about love fulfils you or whatever, Harry uses a plot device from book 1 I forgot to mention that shows an all-black wedding between him and Anne and wants Betty to get her and him together but she says that it just shows wishes and not the future, Betty realises that she’s ok with giving up her love because she doesn’t want to become Camelot’s queen.

Anyway, it all culminates with Cornelius kissing Anne and feeling nothing, so he literally tosses his sword to her and tells her to destroy the ring and then immediately runs off to kiss Betty. Anne is initially going to destroy the ring for tricking but realises only the headmaster has never lied to her so she summons him and he takes her away. And also, she feels used by Betty and Cornelius. Girl, Book 1? Book 2? Also, you couldn’t have just fucking stayed until she destroys the ring, Cornelius. I think he’s made up with the Lancelot and Guinevere by this point and now he and Betty finally get together but for real this time really.

They start preparing for war. Betty’s the leader for narrative parallels with Anne who’s the queen of evil now. Anne tries executing her ex-roommates for being spies as she’s now ultra-evil now but Merlin saves them at the last minute. The old and young pair up to defeat their old villains with several of the villain kids team up with the ones that killed their parents. Cinderella is with Betty. Cinderella is ugly, fat and unpleasant because why are you surprised at this point. She has tough time getting along with Cinderella but they eventually see eye to eye. An the true story of Cinderella is that her stepmother was evil but her stepsisters weren’t and she was forced into becoming a princess because her prince loved her since their school days and he killed her stepmother and stepsisters. I am not even going to re-complain about how the lore works. Anyway, the last battle takes place in a forest and Merlin has gotten all the students on their side with Lady Ivy’s help because she was a double agent because good and evil are like yin and yang.

Now for the stupidest fucking plot twist in this series, Betty and Anne were twins all along. They found this via the dead blind history professor’s magic device after they each were separated from their armies. And this was so unnecessarily convoluted. Betty’s mother used to be an evil teacher but she was pretty and wanted to fall in love so the headmaster was interested in her. Meanwhile, Anne’s mother was bitter and jealous that Anne’s father loved Luella, the most popular boy in school- uh, I mean village. She was plain, this shocks Anne who remembered her as beautiful, and didn’t have blonde hair like Anne. She tried befriending them to get between them but she failed so she wished for a way to make him love her. This coincided with Betty’s mother running away from the headmaster and she heard her wish so she was able to go to the village. Anne’s mother made her make a love potion that would only last for a day which she used to rape Anne’s father and managed to get herself pregnant. He took responsibility for that but he never stopped loving Luella. All her babies died in childbirth and he started to hang out more with Luella even though she was also married. So she panicked and asked Betty’s mother for another potion. She managed to give birth to twins, one ugly with her features and one beautiful with his features. She told Betty’s mother to get rid of the ugly one but she took her as her baby because she was her one true love (familial). But it didn’t work, Anne’s father still didn’t look at her so she tried to make herself look more like Anne with beauty products. There’s this little scene where he smiles at little Betty playing. She eventually gave up getting him to love her and died of a broken heart. Betty’s mother also tried to make herself look like Betty so she could pass as her biological mother. This is why the third book is more than a hundred pages longer than the others. Why was this necessary? Couldn’t they just be given some generic backstory that’s also intertwined with each other instead of whatever this is. Sometimes, boring is better. I also feel like this is when the ship died though I won’t blame those who only watched the movie to ignore this. As much as I loathe Anne, I genuinely think that she and Betty had the most strongly written relationship. I know, the bar is on the ground but there’s nothing better.

After learning this, Betty tries to get her to come back but this just reaffirms her belief that only the headmaster could ever love her. Anne runs away with Betty chasing her, but they get separated again. Cinderella gets killed by her undead stepmother while she was attempting to reconcile with her undead stepsisters, and this caused the barrier to the village to be broken. The headmaster takes Betty’s father and tries to get Betty to kill him with Excalibur (Betty and Cornelius got captured) because this was like the last condition to get eternal victory for evil. In his evil speech, he implied that this village exists in a bubble, with no one who exists outside the village. And this has haunted me for years, way more than it should, because literally how does this village exist with no trade and no new blood with two kids taken every 4 years. The village is small so incest? And everyone in the series has acted that there’s something out there other than this village. Questions that will never be answered aside, Betty tells her that she will always have their friendship which makes her switch sides and finally destroys the fucking ring. He dies and all the undead go back to being dead.

In the midst of that nonsense, Anne’s father learns that Betty’s his daughter and he’s like, I always cared for her and felt this mysterious affection for her. NO YOU DID NOT! I don’t care if you smiled at kid her in the flashback, that is a retcon and loads of people smiled at kids, ugly or not. You casually disparaged her in Book 1, and you straight up threatened her to save Anne in Book 2 with zero care for her well-being. You could tell he felt that everything that happened to Anne was somehow Betty’s fault in Book 2 and early on in Book 3. You could easily tell that he loved Anne but he showed nothing resembling care for Betty. You know what, I take back what I said. His and Anne’s relationship was the one that was written the best and most consistently actually. But all the fairytale characters all disappear from the village before anything more could happen so whatever.

They coincidentally find Sedric fatally wounding Lady Ivy, with Professor Fairy (the good teachers were locked in dungeon all this time by the way) killing him right after. And Lady Ivy wasn’t mad at her for killing him?? This confused me because this kind of goes against the grain for most villain parent-child relationships in the series and also one of the few details we know of her character, which was that she did loved him even though she abandoned him. Also, why does this plotline. Like was this necessary? Sedric barely does anything in the two books he was in. We only know that he is hot, sadistic, evil in a bad way and hates his mother. Reading the wiki tells me he is more relevant posthumously in the next few books but I don’t care, what exactly does his presence contribute in the two books he’s in? Anyway, before she dies, she tells Professor Fairy and Anne and Betty her first name, something that she always kept mystery. Because Professor Fairy and her are supposedly best friends even though we don’t see much of their relationship and Anne’s like her protégé, that she cares about and Betty’s just there. We also barely see her and Anne’s relationship. I cannot stress how little Lady Ivy and Professor Fairy appear despite them being important to the plot. I know her and Professor Fairy’s relationship are meant to parallel Anne and Betty’s but I thought a major part of Book 1 was how special and unprecedented their relationship were and I think this just undermines that especially with how little it was utilised. And also, the mentor-protégé parallel is kind of weak here with her basically doing nothing in Book 2 and Book 3 (except stabbing her best friend’s son) and her role as mentor kind of being relegated to Cinderella. Anyway, they say goodbye to her before she dies. Other students also die but no one with any substantial screen time so who cares and Cinderella was the only old hero who died. Who we honestly didn’t know much of so again, another case of no one we care about die.

The school goes back to being good and evil. But, Betty and Cornelius prepare to go to Camelot, along with Guinevere and Lancelot because Cornelius managed to work out his issues earlier. Anne is supposed to go with them but just before they leave, she finds out that Lady Ivy made her the dean of evil in her will so she stays behind, having finally found a place she belongs. And also some character development at last because when Harry asks her out, she says no because she is complete as herself. And Anne and Betty parts ways. This sounds like a really nice and touching moment. If only the build up to it was actually good. A mentor-protégé relationship we barely see, Anne sucking at evil both as a student and teacher-literally the most unqualified person to be the dean of evil and did she even enjoy being in the school of evil? This story should have ended at Book 1.

And so, for a year or so, I thought this series was over. I did see a spinoff book for what happens to the school after Book 3 but I didn’t read it because I swore I would never buy a book from this series again but I wasn’t bothered by its presence. Until, a little over a year later after seeing that spinoff book, I see Book 4. It was the start of a sequel series and it made me so mad because I wouldn’t have bought Book 3 has I known. I did remember in Book 1 that we were told that education at the school was 3 years of schooling and 1 year of questing but I really thought Book 3 was the final one with how final it felt. And as I’m writing this, there’s also a prequel series.

I actually read a bit of the spinoff when I was in the bookstore, just a few chapters. So here’s stuff I want to highlight. Anne is a terrible dean like we all knew she would be, with narcissistic decorations and events about her. She knows nothing about teaching. She also changed the evil uniform which isn’t bad by itself, but she made it to honour the headmaster. She’s literally learned nothing other than that she doesn’t need romantic love. Also, she also holds some bitterness towards Cornelius. So much for that best friend plot, I guess? All that effort to make it to complete the “love triangle” was all for nothing. Also, feminism is a thing now (no more gendered classes for good and a feminist society was set up in the fairytale world) and you can apparently change schools if you don’t’ want to be good or evil and be the opposite instead? Which kind of makes the messages of Book 1 and Book 2 even more confusing. It’s honestly hard not to read the message that you can’t change from being good or evil and Book 2 just seems to say that if you even slight disrupts traditional gender roles, the world goes to ruin. Something I managed to stumble across about the sequel books were that the background prince who asked Genevieve, that good girl who was a mean girl in Book 1 and shaved her head in Book 2, to the ball is Cornelius secret half-brother?? And what do you mean that the new antagonist is the son of the headmaster and the dean of girls from Book 2??? And what do you mean he has a secret twin brother???? Is the author trying to get a secret family reveal every book?????

Okay, I’m done complaining. And to whoever read this from beginning to end, why? I wrote this for me to vent my hatred so it’s barely coherent. Why did you subject yourself to this.

#email submission #fandom problem 6720 #book problems #the long problem

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