coolmaycroft

[coolmaycroft]

Dodici

[coolmaycroft]

Feel the burn

[coolmaycroft]

[coolmaycroft]

the key to truly understanding JoycexDorothy is that Dorothy thinks that if they got together they'd have a knight/princess dynamic where she's the knight and Joyce is the princess, but in actuality their knight/princess dynamic would be Joyce as the knight and Dorothy as the princess.

[coolmaycroft]

"Slavoj Zizek le robó la novia a Andrés Calamaro" suena como un shitpost pero es 100% cierto y verídico

[coolmaycroft]

Ooooooooh you wanna interpret that fictional character as aromantic because there is subtext that would actually back that up and aromanticism would also add another layer to their character and would make so much more sense oooooooooooooooooh🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥🍥

[coolmaycroft]

no longer julia time btw

[coolmaycroft]

the europan ice war was an unusual take on europan sci-fi in that as fas as i saw it didn't explore the subsurface ocean and associated speculations on alien life within it

[coolmaycroft]

[coolmaycroft]

once you realize that the political ad cliche of "[opposing candidate] has never run a business... and yet they want to run a whole city???" is code for "people who aren't part of the bourgeoisie shouldn't be permitted to hold office" you never stop seeing it.

[coolmaycroft]

By the way, not every story needs to have a hidden message. Or a deep meaning. Or be a moral teaching. Or educate its audience.

Sometimes you just want to write something disturbing for the sake of disturbing.

[coolmaycroft]

Now in general for any situation you should be looking past the surface and learning the details of the whole thing, really thinking for yourself and forming an opinion rather than relying on who looks like the Real Villain.

But to be honest in any Big Entertainment Corporation vs AI fight you should be calling for Bob Iger to be broken down and the iron in his blood used for new GPUs. Those guys are NOT on your side. They do not want copyright to help the artist, they want as much power over artistic endeavors as they can possibly get. They'd sue you for seeing Mickey Mouse in a dream if they could.

[coolmaycroft]

One of my pet culture theories is that the worldbuilding energy that produced genuinely fresh settings like Star Wars and Star Trek and basically every other 80s nostalgiabait property that Hollywood has bleeding out on the cross these days has now more or less migrated to the video game space. Like that's where interesting mass market genre-fic worldbuilding is going to be happening now, instead of in film

[coolmaycroft]

2025 Book Review #28 – Someone You Can Build A Nest In by John Wiswell

This is the latest in my attempt to read every nominee for Best Novel and Novella in time to actual give an informed vote at the Hugos this year, and the first that I can be really pretty positive I would never have read otherwise. In this case, for good reason – I aspire to dip my toes a bit into romance as a genre sometime this year, but suffice to say that temperamentally it is just Not My Thing All the more so because the overall incredibly positive buzz about this book has been the kind (cozy, affirming, heart-warming, relatable main characters, etc) that’s honestly more of a red flag than anything to me. But I made an arbitrary commitment and have said I want to expand my horizons so – I really have no one to blame here but myself.

The story follows Shesheshen, the much-reviled and feared shape-changing ‘wyrm’ whose occasional man-eating predations have long troubled the inhabitants of the isthmus she calls home. After being awoken from her winter hibernation by a trio of monster hunters (properly: two monsters and an aristocratic blowhard who hired and is ‘leading’ them) and very nearly killed, she falls off the side of a cliff and very luckily happens to still look semi-human when her body is found by the travelling scholar Homily and nursed back to health. Shesheshen, have little (read: literally no) experience with being cared for and shown unconditional kindness, falls head over heels in love with her and very quickly begins dreaming of making a family together – which, for her species, means implanting her eggs deep within Homily’s body so their children will grow healthy and strong on her flesh as they hatch. Some issues of communication and cultural differences quickly present themselves.

For all that the romance is the centre of the book’s marketing (and, clearly, appeal), this is actually really quite a plotty story. Romance (and the romanticization of predatory or sacrificial relationships) are major themes, of course, but honestly it feels like the better part of the page count – and certainly most of the action and big set pieces – are instead dedicated to dealing with monster hunters, abusive family, and the overlap between the two. Theoretically, the book’s preoccupied with themes I am intensely interested in (romance aside) and would be very easy to sell on. In practice, everything came out so painfully heavy-handed and focused on making sure the audience both knew and knew the author knew the correct reactions to have that it became kind of insufferable.

I have, it must be said, something of a long-standing grudge against books that market themselves as and play with the aesthetics and genre trappings of ‘horror’ but are actually just life-affirming tales and acceptance and found family which happen to have some fangs and pseudopods scattered across the main cast. Which, to my great displeasure, was more or less exactly what this turned out to be. This is not a book that really asks you to sympathize with monsters – Shesheshen has theoretically been eating people for years and years as the mood and appetite took her, but the book is quite conscientious about making sure she does basically nothing actually unsympathetic while we know her. There is functionally never a point in this book where there is any sort of actual moral ambiguity or tension – it is clear within a page of meeting them how much you should like a character, with signifiers and symbolism applied so thickly it’s be impossible to miss, and the book absolutely never challenges or makes you go back and reconsider those judgments. There are a few somewhat engaging or slightly tense action scenes, but horror? It deserves the label less than the Adams Family.

While I might consider this false advertising, it’s really just more of a genre mismatch – this is a romance with some light horror aesthetics, not a romantic horror story (this is a meaningful distinction I will fight to defend the honour of). I am significantly less qualified to judge the book as a romance, save that it didn’t really work for e. Which is fairly unsurprising – there are definitely stories whose romances are as or more prominent and fundamental to the story than this one which I loved, but none of them were really genre romances like this one was. So like yeah, if you go in expecting The Locked Tomb (or even This Is How You Lose The Time War) this is a 0/10. But also why would you do that.

Though even for a romance where genre constraints preordained a happy ending for the main couple, there really was a tragic lack of real interest or conflict in that driving relationship. The actual drama and tension of the story was more or less exclusively between Shesheshen and Homily against their families and the world – internal to the relationship, there is a lot of Shesheshen angsting about how to admit the whole ‘shapeshifting man-eating monster who has ostensibly cursed and is hunting her family’ thing that all leads up to getting resolved by love and acceptance like 3 pages after it finally comes out.

Which is a shame, because if you squint a bit at the basic conceit – lifelong scavenger and predator who has never received selfless care before in her life realizes to her horror that she fell in love less with the woman and more with her unhealthy coping mechanisms and martyr complex – is in fact an incredibly meaty and interesting character dynamic. But doing anything with it would require Shesheshen to actually show some edge and be less than sympathetic to people you’re supposed to care about (also, for Homily to be even slightly interesting at some point).

It is tempting for me to say that the book’s fundamental issue is that the author spent too much of the 2010s on twitter, but I really have no way to know that. Still, for a basically unsocialized shapeshifting, human-eating magical predator whose narration takes pains to establish that she never talks to people for longer than strictly necessary to acquire a meal, has no idea how to make a first impression, and generally finds human contact hateful and viscerally uncomfortable, Sesheshen’s internal monologue is truly inexplicably emotionally intelligent, attuned to and outraged by the subtleties of exploitative or abusive relationships, and prone to making profound and all-encompassing statements on the nature of human psychology and trauma that line up very well with the progressive conventional wisdom of that milieu. As there was a great deal of buzz about what a compellingly alien and inhuman protagonist she was – and as that was the aspect of the book I really was legitimately looking forward to as I opened it – the incoherence of her character that results is a profound disappointment.

Recommend if you’re a genre romance fan looking for some interestingly-written descriptions of a flesh-eating shapeshifter finding love, I guess.

[coolmaycroft]

??????

[coolmaycroft]

The Witch's Mirror | 1962 — El espejo de la bruja

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