fae-fucker

[fae-fucker]

Y'ALL

Sasha Alsberg's sequel to Breaking Time came out in 2023 and NONE OF YOU told me??? Omg omg omg omg!!!!

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Okay no I need to talk about the book version of Howl's Moving Castle. I love the movie but the book has such a different vibe and you, yes you, should read it.

Movie Howl is a soulful and quiet. Book Howl is a drama queen and Causing Problems and has a long string of jilted exes and couldn't shut up if you paid him.

Sophie and Howl drive each other up the wall at the beginning and it's really funny. Sophie and Howl are (despite themselves) very much in love by the end and they still drive each other up the wall and it's even funnier.

In the movie, Howl has been ordered by the king to participate in The War, and Howl is avoiding it because he is a brave conscientious objector. In the book, Howl has been ordered by the king to rescue his lost brother from the Witch of the Wastes, and Howl is avoiding it by any means necessary because he is a cowardly weasel who wants to stay as far from the Witch as possible.

In the movie, the Witch cursed Sophie because she was jealous about Howl speaking to Sophie for five minutes. In the book, the Witch cursed Sophie because Sophie had been doing surprisingly powerful magic for years without knowing it and it was actually starting to cut into the Witch's plans. (Sophie does not discover any of this until nearly the end of the book, but the reader can start to pick it up much earlier and the way Sophie's magic works is pretty darn cool.)

In the movie, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens, but this is implied to be nothing but nasty fearmongering. In the book, there's a rumor that Howl eats the hearts of maidens because Howl started the rumor so people would stop asking him to do wizard junk all the time.

The book lightly parodies a couple of tropes from Western fairy tales. In particular Sophie has internalized that, as the eldest of three sisters, her "destiny" is to fail so that her younger sisters will look cooler when they succeed, which is why she's so resigned to the hat shop at the beginning. (Sidebar: Sophie's sisters come up much more in the book and they're great.) There's also a really funny bit where Sophie attempts to operate a pair of seven-league boots.

In the movie, the fourth and final location that the magic door connects to is some sort of black void / mindscape / time portal dealy. In the book the fourth location is Wales, in the UK, on Earth, so that Howl can visit his family, because from Howl's perspective this is an isekai story.

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Hewwo?? Is anyone ... still here?? 🥺

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Tbh some of u take romanticized writing way too literally and it is killing ur media literacy.

"Growled?! Like a dog?!?!" No like a human person making a low rumbling groan.

"Fanfiction writers overexagerate words too much." Do you not understand that fanfiction as a culture is deeply rooted in the romance genre? The entire basis of fanfiction was to romanticize Spirk.

Exagerated language is a huge part of romance as a genre. It's necessary to give the exagerated, romanticized feeling. It effectively serves as rose colored glasses. It helps build and maintain sexual tension. It's an incredibly useful tool in creating a visual image for the reader to follow.

Please stop looking at completely normal terminology and curling your lip in disgust. Just because its not the way you would tell that story doesn't mean the story is told wrong.

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yall do realize just because something has been a target of misogynistic criticism, that doesn't make stanning it completely uncritically in response some kind of revolutionary feminist praxis. right.

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She spilled 💀

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Booktok makes me sick, not just because of all the shitty books. It's the prevalence, no, the celebration, of toxic masculinity. Every single booktok book features some variation on the same man. And without fail, against all sensible reason, these characters are portrayed as handsome and charismatic and desirable.

It makes me sick when these authors hold up these toxic, predatory traits and put them on a pedestal as some kind of Ideal Man.

It makes me sick when their aggressiveness and possessiveness is treated as romantic. It makes me sick when these shitty men forcibly grab women, invade their personal spaces, and render them helpless by 'purring' in their ears, every. single. fucking. time.

It makes me sick that these misogynistic, heteronormative, and hypermasculine social conventions keep appearing in so-called feminist literature.

Strip away the idealized elements and you have what is basically the rich, white, cishet, alpha-male archetype. He's tall, usually six feet, physically fit and muscular with obligatory six pack abs, and conventionally handsome, with a chiseled jawline. He's usually clean-shaven, and any hair he may have on his body is minimal. He maintains composure at all times and rarely shows anxiety or uncertainty. He exudes raw charisma and charm and navigates social spaces effortlessly.

His hobbies, if he has any, are stereotypically masculine. When it comes to sex, he's confident, skilled, exclusively dominant, and always knows what to do without communicating with his partner. The sex he enjoys is usually rough, animalistic and overpowering. He may have been with several women in the past, and he may be regarded as a sex god, both in-universe and out.

His toxic traits are rarely portrayed as negative. But when they are, they're usually held up as some edgy, anti-hero persona and the reader is inevitably manipulated into sympathizing with him. He'll be portrayed as a tortured, wounded animal, and his female love interest (and, by proxy, the reader) will decide on some variation of 'I can fix him'.

He is essentially the unrealistic standard the ideal Proper Man; the one that men are expected to emulate, and that women are expected to swoon over.

But what really irks me is the lost potential.

If there are men who don't fit into this mold, they are depicted as pathetic, ineffectual, or any number of negative traits.

The narrative quietly and passive-aggressively mocks them and portray them as boring and un-sexy.

After all, is this the kind of man who will bravely swoop in and sweep a helpless woman off her feet? Of course not. Such men are boys. Wimps. Cowards.

These books are supposed to be fantasy: a genre in which easily anything can be explored. If faeries, magic, and contrived mating bonds can exist, then why can't we also have male characters who exist outside the stereotypical, hypermasculine mold?

Why is it that we can have so many fantastical, impossible, and wondrous magical forces, creatures, and peoples, but we can't have men who aren't possessive, abusive, or controlling?

Why is it that male characters, have to be so innately dominant, abusive, and violent? Why do they have to be so fit and muscular and strong?

Even worse, why is it treated as something that is so natural, so inescapable, even in the realm of fiction?

Where are the men who aren't tall and fit? Where are the men who don't have sculpted abs or chiseled jawlines? Where are the men who aren't lean and muscular?

Why can’t we have men who are skinny or overweight? Why can't we have men who aren't handsome or attractive, but just average looking? Why can't we have men who are shorter or just average height?

Why can't we have men with non-stereotypical hobbies? Why can't we have men who love to read, or paint, or write, or sing, or dance, or build model kits?

Why can’t we have men who are timid and shy? Why can't we have men who feel anxiety, fear, and sadness? Why can't we have men who aren't afraid of crying openly?

Why can't we have men who aren't sex gods? Why can't we have men who aren't confident in bed? Who are anxious, or even scared, at the prospect of sex? Who are passive instead of dominant? Who want to experience intimacy and affection?

Why can’t we have men be kind and gentle and sweet for once?

I'll tell you why we can't. Because booktok says men like these are not 'man' enough. Booktok says men like these are the 'boring' option, and completely devoid of interesting quirks, traits or personality. Booktok says men like these are underserving of attention, and only fit to be background noise.

As far as booktok is concerned, men like these can't exist.

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Sarah Janet Maas is obsessed with the aesthetics of oppression and loves trauma porn back stories, especially ones where male love interests were subjugated by Wicked Women™

But she also dislikes actual rebellion. She thinks people have their place and the ones who get uppity are no good

So she writes protagonists and love interests who belong on top, who were born to rule and inherit overwhelming power, being forced down by antagonistic forces

Her wars and battles and story arcs are simply the world correcting itself by having the MC and their friends in power

No groups of people, no marginalised minorities etc are uplifted as a whole and anyone from an oppressed group who used or uses violence is cast as dubious at best and a flat out villain at worst

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Honestly we could REALLY get into the fact that a lot of the insanity in Acotar is an excellent exercise in why you can't really separate the art from the author.

Sjm's zionism is OBVIOUS in the text. The ic destabilize governments to the detriment of people they will never have to care for, steal artifacts from other countries, displace people, cause invasions, commit war crimes for 50 years "for the greater good" all while their own people are living under unchecked brutality and poverty.

They are rich megalomaniacs that care for no one but themselves and their own emotional and material satisfaction and they are PRAISED for it. In fact anyone who even remotely disagrees with the IC is almost always one of the villains in the story (Beron, Tamlin, etc) as if to condition the reader that asking questions that are critical of the IC puts you on the wrong side of the narrative morally.

All of that sounds REALLL familiar huh?

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“sjm is a feminist she empowers women in her books” no actually she kills and assaults women in her books in front of the men that love them so she can give those men sad backstories and make them seem deep. some examples include: feyre being tortured and killed in front of tamlin and rhys, aelin being tortured in front of fenrys, sorscha being beheaded in front of dorian, mor being rescued by azriel with a nail in her stomach, jesminda being murdered in front of lucien, rhysand’s unnamed mother and sister being murdered and their body parts being hung as trophies, the lady of autumn enduring domestic abuse, and so on. what sjm focuses on isn’t the actual death or assault of these women, it’s how their pain made the men feel, how the brutalization of their bodies traumatized the men. but yeah sure, sjm is just spreading the good ol’ feminist agenda with her writing, right?

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i saw people saying how TikTok is turning reading and publishing into the next 'fast fashion' and I feel ill. Because. Yeah.

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no offence but i just read an excerpt from a "booktok" romance and i can see why everyone's writing style is. like that. now. not taking time with the prose. writing isn't a craft. just deliver this dommy daddy you're a bad girl kitten into my brain as bluntly and artlessly as possible no thought put into word choice no nothing dude we die like men. it's like the literary equivalent of hitting yourself in the head with a shovel or maybe watching really really really bad repetitive soap operas. i just think constant exposure to that does something to your brain. not a good something either guys. they all write the same thing i think cuz they're all just reading the same fanfiction tier trope garbage so it's sort of like a - no i'm not gonna make an allusion to "human centipede" in 2024 the year of our lord. it's bad. and we should all feel bad. i don't think it even occurs to those "writers" that you can have a unique stylistic vibe in writing the same as any art man it's so weird i'm shaking and freaking outtttt helppppp. it's like if everyone was posting their sonic recolours and being really defensive about them. it's so copy and paste and brain rotting and artistically stunted. absolutely no sense of intimacy or eros either it's like they're doing 1:1 translations of bdsm videos or something i just don't get the appeal at all i might tie myself to the train tracks very soon

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He was a man written by a woman, unfortunately the woman was Sarah j Maas

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sjm when she arrives at the deeply disturbing hades and persephone retelling competition and rachel smythe is already there

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listen i love my little anti this anti that curated tags and shit but isn't it fucked up that we HAVE to have a completely separate tag for criticizing media and any sort of criticism in the more general sense gets completely shat on? I get having your own curated internet space and all but i don't think seeing criticism of your favorite show is gonna be the end of the world. I dare even say it might widen your horizons.

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faebound by saara el-arifi was fun and also super mediocre! the world building had incredible vibes at least it might be exactly what you’re looking for

Owo? Owo??? Will check it out, thanks so much!!

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So. I am sorry for not updating this blog in a while. I am swamped with other stuff that takes priority.

BUT! I have been feeling like reading some more fae bullshit, for personal reasons. So if y'all have any recs (bad or mid stuff only, something easy to digest that won't require emotional investment), please drop them and I'll read the stuff and even write a review! Maybe. Probably. No SJM or Holly Black. I can't be fucked.