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I can’t believe this is a hot take that people get slammed for having but I despise booktok. I keep trying to toe the line because I’m glad more people are reading, I’m glad community is being found, I’m glad women are getting a voice through what they enjoy instead of being silenced by the majority, but I can’t straddle the middle anymore.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I have an English degree. I’m pursuing an MFA in the same field. I bring this up not to sound superior but to make a point of what I know through my five years of studying this. Booktok might be getting people to read, but it’s killing critical thinking. Critical thinking in literature these days is dead.

It’s killing the publishing industry. The publishing industry is already incredibly problematic in so many ways that I don’t have time to go into it (the amount of books specifically written about modern warfare that were greenlighted in the last few years is terrifying and says enough) and booktok is making it worse. Things are being written for the purpose of creating virality instead of creating quality.

It’s killing bookstores. There are entire sections devoted to booktok instead of the revolutionary writers of the 21st century.

I’m aware I sound jaded, I’m aware this is an incredibly unpopular opinion, but I really don’t want pretend I’m remotely supportive of it anymore.

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There's some point to be made about SJM type books being like "you can be strong AND feminine" as though there was ever an overwhelming amount of strong masculine female characters and the slow rise of tradwives and girl math and the feminine divine and pink jobs. And I won't say that SJM and booktok are to blame for what is clearly a result of rising fascism and myriad other factors, but I also won't say it has helped it any.

Like it's really funny to look back on all the "um yeah Throne of Glass is soooo revolutionary because Sardines is both strong AND feminine" defenses now in the TikTok tradwife era where it's SO empowering to quit your job and go home and stay there and cook and clean and get fucked and get pregnant :) THAT is the true sign of FEMININE STRENGTH. Like wow how convenient! That doing the thing the patriarchal regime wants you to do is the revolutionary option. How interesting!! How fortunate!!! Quick, all women, CHOOSE this option please!! The option that benefits the powers that be!! It's totally soooo empowering!

It's really kinda sad. Men are being brainwashed by Tates and women are being brainwashed by faes and alphas parroting back the same ideologies but coming from a female mouth and coated with "empowering" language, so it skates by much easier. Like a violent rapist/sex offender saying women need to suck dick and stay at home is misogynist. But your Empowered Divine Feminine protagonists "choosing" to suck dick and have babies while her man rules the country? That's just her choice. It's super empowering and radical actually. And while those two sources would say they're in opposition, fundamentally they advocate for the same things. It's kinda wild. But of course if you point this out it's "um it's just a book sweaty!! nobody actually believes these things or adjusts their behavior according to fiction!! haha grow up we're all adults here!!"

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I was sent this YouTube video and I think the creator makes some EXCELLENT points and he really sums up my issues with the romantasy/BookTok/smuttok/etc community. I know it's long, but I think it's worth watching. At the very least, watch the first half if you can.

He goes over the latest drama on BookTok where Luke Bateman (conventionally attractive white man who has a big booktok following in the romantasy space) got a book deal despite not actually having a manuscript.

And while he does go over the inherent unfairness of this in the second half of the video, the first half goes over how we got to this point and he points out a LOT of issues with this community. He talks about how the romantasy/booktok community does not police themselves and how they prop up dangerous marketing trends which make it easier for publishers to take advantage of them. He talks about how Booktok quite literally props up the Luke Batemans. He talks about the performative activism in the space and how creators are ALL TOO HAPPY to call out Luke Bateman and lament about the state of indie publishing, but how as soon as the drama ends, they go back to their SJM/Rebecca Yarros/[insert other wildly popular romantasy author] corner and NOT read or prop up indie books or BIPOC authors despite screeching about it in the midst of drama.

It's honestly a fantastic video and I would love to yap with someone about it. Go watch it!!

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do fic readers know that their comments actually influence the course of the story sometimes? i don't mean in a "you need to write it this way because i say so 😡" type of comment, i mean when people are asking questions or really engaging with the plot and the themes in the comments they sometimes bring up things that i didn't even think of, or dig into parts of the story that i've overlooked, or get really interested/fixated on something i was going to just kind of glance over--and it has me going 'oh wait that's actually really interesting, that's a good point' and fully adding or tweaking or changing things about the story going forward. i'm literally adding an entire additional chapter to something right now because someone's comment had me like "oh i didn't dig into that as much as i could have." you have impact!

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THEY MIGHT HAVE FIGURED OUT WHATS CAUSING LONG COVID?!?!???

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if you have OCD that moralistic post it not about you. keep scrolling. i love you

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You know what, fuck it. Let’s show some love for the “unpleasant” autistics.

For the autistics who are always accused of being angry or moody when all they’re doing is sitting there.

For the autistics who take everything literally and respond sincerely.

For the autistics who come across as “blunt” or “rude” for being honest.

For the autistics who are called “control freaks” for needing a sense of order and routine.

For the autistics who get told to shut up for infodumping about uncomfortable topics.

For the autistics who find it too exhausting to mask and pretend to be sunny and friendly.

“Unpleasant” autistics, I love you.

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I don’t know if anyone’s thought of this, but something that’s always intrigued me about A Court of Thorns and Roses is the way faeries age—and how deeply underexplored that concept is in terms of actual behavior. In Prythian, we’re told multiple times that faeries live for centuries, sometimes thousands of years, and yet, when it comes to their emotional, social, and psychological development, the series often maps mortal expectations onto them—especially regarding maturity. And that raises a lot of questions.

In human society, we have a clear (albeit socially constructed) marker for adulthood—18. In most countries, that’s the legal threshold where you’re considered mature enough to vote, join the military, sign contracts, or be held accountable under the law. But let’s be real: biologically and developmentally, most 18-year-olds are still maturing. The brain doesn’t finish developing until the mid-20s, and emotional regulation, impulse control, and long-term planning all sharpen much later. Even historically, this line was blurry. In medieval and early modern Europe, for example, girls were often married at 12 or 14, and boys were deemed men as soon as they could wield a sword or work a field. These standards weren’t based on actual maturity, but on survival, labor, and social structure. Meanwhile, in Ancient Rome or Greece, concepts of adulthood varied dramatically across gender, class, and region. What’s “adult” has never been as fixed as we like to pretend.

So how does that translate to fae?

We’re told in ACOTAR that faeries age incredibly slowly. A fae in their eighties or nineties might still be considered a child. But what does that mean in practice? What does a “childhood” that stretches over a century look like?

And more importantly—why don’t we ever see it?

The series tends to write younger fae (like the priestesses, or various High Fae we meet) with the emotional maturity of seasoned adults. Even Feyre, once she becomes fae, is immediately treated as psychologically equal to people like Rhysand, who’s literally over 500 years old. Yet logically, if an 80-year-old fae is the equivalent of, say, a 12-year-old human, then someone in their 50s or 60s should be acting like a moody tween. Immature, impulsive, maybe precocious, yes—but still fundamentally not an adult. Still learning about identity, morality, boundaries. And that opens the door for some deeply rich storytelling that just isn’t there.

I would have loved to see fae in their 50s and 60s behaving like children. Not just in an “innocent and wide-eyed” way, but in all the messy, intense, emotionally volatile ways children are. Think of a 60-year-old fae noble throwing a tantrum in court because someone slighted them. Imagine how layered a dynamic it would be if Nesta or Feyre met a fae who looked thirty but acted like a six-year-old—playful, emotional, deeply curious, easily hurt.

It’s not just about making the world feel more real—it’s about the consequences of immortality. If you live for a thousand years, then why wouldn’t a century-long adolescence exist? And how does that warp power structures, especially when you consider people like Rhysand or Cassian potentially having lovers who, in human years, are still literal children?

This kind of worldbuilding matters. It forces us to examine the ethics of power, of emotional development, of autonomy. It also invites more nuanced conversations around trauma, healing, and time. A mortal girl suffering trauma at twenty might be expected to “move on” within a few years. But for a fae, what does that look like when five years is barely a blink? Are young fae punished for childish mistakes because they “should know better,” or are they protected under fae law until their first century is complete?

Ultimately, I wish the series had leaned into this more. There’s so much potential for complexity, for culture, for age-based customs that aren’t mapped onto human standards. The real tragedy isn’t that the fae are inhuman—it’s that, too often, the narrative forgets to let them act like it.

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I do think there are a lot of valid criticisms regarding modern media consumers' impatience. There definitely is an unwillingness to let plots develop or initially flawed characters grow and change, and that's definitely a problem. Gratification can't always be instant.

But we also have to consider that there's a whole lot of shows that have promised us so much and then absolutely failed to deliver on it. Sherlock, the Moffat and Chibnall eras of Doctor Who, Supernatural, Game of Thrones, The Expanse to a lesser degree - they all had a lot of trust invested in them by audiences only to betray it.

I don't support the level of impatience modern audiences show towards media but I absolutely understand it.

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it's fascinating how many ai art discussions enter this weird loop where someone goes 'it uses too much energy!' and people rightly point out the amount of energy it uses is comparable with many other recreational uses of a computer nobody objects to on environmental grounds so then someone else says 'you can't compare it to playing videogames, it's bad because it's plagiarism!' so you go into an extended argument about fair use and how expanding copyright to cover the sort of things that happen in AI training would be pretty fucking terrible for anyone who cares about freedom to make derivative works, so then someone else says 'I don't care about the plagiarism, it's killing the planet!'...

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I literally did not know that sag aftra is currently on strike against video game companies and has been for six months

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armored core shows that the line between "critique of capitalism" and "sexual transhumanism fantasy" is SHOCKINGLY thin and blurry at some places

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dystopia au where we are all assigned one of two chosen genders at birth