#another negative review

[zot3-flopped]

This album is okay. I understand that Taylor Swift is not someone you’re supposed to feel okay about—she is either the great redeemer of English-language arts and letters in the 21st century, as her fans have it, or a total cornball foisted upon the public by the evil record industry, as the haters say. The truth is that she is a talented artist who has reinvigorated popular music as a storytelling medium—but who has, all along, suffered from some quality-control issues.

The Tortured Poets Department, her 11th studio album, could recalibrate the way we talk about her. Much of the album is a dreary muddle, but with strange and surprising charms, and a couple of flashes of magic. This record is not a work of unimpeachable genius, nor does it feel engineered into existence by a committee of monied interests—it’s way too long and uneven to be, from any point of view, savvy ...

Rest behind a paywall.

[shopwitchvamp]

Reminder that our size charts list the length of all skirt types/sizes from waistband to hem. Please check the length against yourself if you have any concerns 🥲

(Got a 3⭐ Maxi review largely about the Maxis being "waaay too long" :[ but they're exactly as long as we tell you)

[northern-passage]

one thing i find really difficult about navigating the IF space is the direct line of contact between readers and authors. we share the same space, and i think that plays a big part in this weird blurred line we have in this community and overall lack of boundaries.

for a lot of people this is a fun hobby and while i personally try to keep it... semi-professional most of the time, it's easy to get wrapped up in having fun on tumblr (or the forums, or reddit, wherever it is that you mainly post/interact) and have a lot of personal interactions with both readers and authors alike - which is fun! i like it more often than not, but i also think that's why a lot of comments in this space can end up being really entitled, over-familiar, and inappropriate.

it's no secret that most authors get really weird messages on here, and while this is also a problem on social media at large and not just specific to IF tumblr, it is still definitely a big problem in this community.

and to be clear i'm not saying that you can't be friendly with authors or readers (i've become friends with a handful of readers myself) and i definitely don't mean to imply that there needs to be a huge divide between us; that's silly - again, most authors are readers, most readers are authors, we’re just people on the internet sharing the same space. but all of us deserve to have our boundaries respected. this is my story, and we are strangers. as a general rule of thumb: if you wouldn't say it out loud to someone you just met, you probably shouldn't be saying it to a stranger online. especially anonymously.

[mariocki]

Betty (1992)

"You know, I wanted to ask Thérèse when I saw her in the cellar. I wanted to say: 'Show me your wound.' I wanted to have a wound, too. I've always been chasing that wound. I must be looking for pity. I'm not a victim. I'm not to be pitied. No one ever hurt me. I'm the one who did the hurting. I'm a fool. Say it! I blew it all. I've soiled everything, myself included."

[aranostra]

ooc // hey if you have i was a teenage slasher by stephen graham jones we should do a buddy read

[my-gf-is-kazuichi-soda]

to me it feels like fandoms have been getting meaner lately with the whole "fandom is mischaracterizing the characters and needs to revisit the source material" attitude

it's okay to get personally frustrated with the way others write the characters, but please be careful not to discourage others (especially younger/newer writers) from writing out of fear of getting the characters wrong, AND please remember that not everyone wants to hear criticism of the way they write (specifically side-eyeing the people who write negative fanfic reviews, which when I was a teenager it literally made me stop writing fanfiction for years, because I felt like I could never meet the expectations of others)

also, multiple people can look at the same source material and get completely different vibes/readings/interpretations of the characters, so just saying "revisit the source material" might not be as helpful if you're looking for an interpretation with a specific lens the other person just doesn't share

if you're frustrated with other people's interpretations lacking something you were looking for, it's helpful to see each interpretation of the character as "[that person]'s version" instead of trying to fit it all into a collective narrative of the same character. I find it's more accurate to accounting for the differences in interpretation, also for things like multishipping

also, you should write what you want to see for yourself, so you can show people your own version of these characters!

[extraliga-related]

[sapphicautistic]

fml the paperwork I sent in WEEKS ago to renew my food stamps and medicaid apparently didn’t get there and I just got a letter saying they’re both going to end on the 28th and I lowkey wanna die i hate this fucking country

[kagehisanotsu]

>repeatedly make an offer on a tenner CD player for over a month

>seller ghosts me

>eventually just ask if it's still available

>reply from seller within 10 minutes

>'yeah it's available'

AcceptMyFuckingOfferCunt.jpg

[doomboogie]

Catty mean tabletop talk about a particular space horror darling /

The recent negative review of Mothership going around is such a good thing. Dwiz is braver than any marine, and still had to regularly insist that he had fun!! Really!! Promise!! I’m anxious for this 5 year old honeymoon period to wear off so people can actually critique the damn game

The ttrpg scene - especially the osr/nsr scene - gets so fixated on darlings that anyone with an opinion that isn’t 100% dicksucking praise is deemed an idiot moron who doesn’t know shit and it’s so childish!

And Mothership has had the scene by the throat for years now. Back in 2020 i decided not to back the KS because “it’ll be out next year I’ll get it then.” Lol. Lmao.

It’s been tiresome to see a mediocre ruleset hailed as some divine gift. A good GM can make an underwhelming game interesting, good players can, modules can. I’ve never felt this applies so much as to the Panic Engine and MoSh specifically. People really will get distracted by pretty design, neat setting bits, and interesting supplements and think the game itself is good for it

[davyreads]

review of nisha sharma’s the letters we keep

a story of beautifully written love letters; love letters to one another and to the south asian community, that sharma holds close to her heart.

"there is no sunshine without you here, my bachcha,"

the letters we keep follows ravi kumar, nepo baby extraordinaire, and jessie ahuja, hardworking scholarship student, as they try and unravel the mystery of the legend of davidson tower, where it is said that two star-crossed lovers suddenly vanished in a fire. nisha sharma details the struggles faced by the south asian community, and how those hurdles seem to transcend time. however, so does the love that these characters have for one another, and we follow these two parallel love stories as they grow closer and closer to not just each other, but to the truth.

keep reading for my personal thoughts (there will be spoilers)

this story follows hartceller students, jessie ahuja, a hardworking freshman, and ravi kumar, a senior who is also part of the very well-known kumar family and who is deemed by jessie a “nepo baby.” though their relationship starts off very rocky, they eventually call a truce so that they can unearth the secrets of the davidson tower at their university, since one of the campus legends is that a south asian woman and her boyfriend disappeared without a trace after the tower was set alight. with the help of some letters, jessie and ravi slowly start to unravel the story of these long-lost lovers as well as develop their budding romance.

hartceller is set up, from the beginning, as almost a hotspot for south asian students, and its place in the rich history of south asians in america is, in my opinion, very well done. sharma shows us how hartceller served as, to an extent, a safe haven for south asians just arriving in the us and allowed them an opportunity at higher education that were few and far between for this demographic. it was refreshing to read about indian characters and the different ethnicities and cultures of india, as well as have a small glimpse into the unique culture and identity carved out by the first migrants; i felt lucky and excited to have this chance to see it, considering i am neither american nor south asian.

another aspect of the book that i really enjoyed was the relationship between jessie and her father, and my favourite quote from the book actually comes from one of their interactions, because it is truly so beautiful to read. it is clear through jessie’s diligence that everything she does is out of love and service, and a debt she feels she owes to her parents for all that they have done for her to get to the point that she is at now. it is through these interactions that it becomes easier to see this story as a love letter in and of itself to the south asian community and, really, the forefathers of any community who took those first fateful steps to procure a future for generations to come in a land that promised hope and success. this difference between jessie and ravi is clear as ravi’s family has more established roots than jessie; he is wealthy, with a powerful family as a safety net should he fail, and his name automatically draws attention and respect, things that jessie (and her parents) have had to work at from the moment they got to america. the differences between the two main characters and their social classes are visible and you are able, to an extent, to understand them.

all of this being said, i did not enjoy this book. romance is already a genre that i do not immediately gravitate towards, and i am trying to read beyond young adult fiction, so once it was picked by my book club, i knew this book was never really going to be a good fit for me. the book feels very ya-esque, which obviously is not surprising, but it was to the point that it constantly took me out of the story, which already felt quite flimsy anyway. the book is paced quite quickly, and this seems like an instance of “insta love”, which made it even more difficult to read, because everything just felt a bit incredulous and that truly means something because i really enjoy books with fantastical elements to them. none of this was helped by the fact that these characters were not particularly interesting, and they fell flat at times. they had very strict archetypes that, once you get to my age (the haggard, wizened age of 20) and you’ve read as extensively as i have (wattpad, tumblr and ao3), get very tired and boring, especially when executed in a basic manner, as was the case for the characters of this novel.

let's first discuss insta love which is basically a very fast-paced romantic relationship (insta being short for instant, i assume) and it’s something of a universally despised trope; it is unrealistic, annoying and, honestly, a tad lazy. it is also present in this novel, and for me, it made the reading experience very frustrating because ravi seems to be immediately captivated by jessie, but we don’t actually understand why? he’s always talking about how surprised he is by how she can’t see what he sees, but what do you see, ravi? we are only told about his crush; we are never truly shown actual reasons for this sudden obsession. also, before reading this book, i had just finished reading the twilight saga for the first time, and there’s a point in the novel when ravi admits that he followed jessie home after their first meeting, and i got immediate edward cullen flashbacks. we as readers don’t actually know why he’s so taken by her, and we never really find out; this tends to be a feature of insta love – because everything happens on an accelerated scale, everything is underdeveloped, and i can just tell that this book was marketed as a “he falls first” book. this love story was not convincing, and it isn’t just ravi and jessie who suffer from this, but also the lovers whose letters they are reading. it’s worrying that the love story that brings our main characters together is weak and uninteresting. the “mystery” isn’t particularly captivating and over the course of the book, i didn’t actually find myself caring about their story. something else that weakens their story, as well as ravi and jessie’s, and therefore the novel as a whole, is that it’s kind of nonsensical? ravi and jessie find letters sent by the anonymous woman to her lover and they examine them for a class assignment, but they never once think about the possibility that the recipient would also have written back (those letters appear at the end to solve the flimsy inevitable angst that develops, quite weakly, between ravi and jessie). they try and tell this very old story and they don’t realise that they only have half of it, which really bugged me because it was the first question i asked upon realising we only had letters from one person. the whole thing felt quite shaky and it didn’t make for a fun read.

something else that hampered the reading experience was the characters themselves. we are repeatedly force-fed the idea of jessie as the “unattractive nerd who’s actually really hot” and ravi the “misunderstood bad boy nepo baby with a heart of gold who really has a passion for the arts and who actually has it just as hard” and this is something we are consistently told rather than shown, and it is drilled home so incessantly that it gets annoying and then angering. these characters seem to exist around the love story they share with each other and it’s aggravating to read because we don’t really know anything about these characters; even worse is that we don’t really want to know anything about them – they’re so uninteresting and boring and we don’t get why they even like each other. the characters and the story in which they appear are both so underdeveloped and you don’t really care about them. as i mentioned earlier, my favourite relationship in this whole book is the one that jessie shares with her father; the love they share is so tender and unhindered and so raw, it’s truly beautiful to witness. i wish as much care was put into ravi and jessie’s relationship; there seemed to be a preoccupation with hitting all the marks of a typical young adult romance (including the sex scenes which come out of literally nowhere) and the story suffers because of this strict adherence. you also see it in the inner thoughts of jessie and ravi, where they seem to constantly reiterate their personal standpoints in a somewhat unnatural way, and this only hurts the reading experience.

i feel it necessary to bring up here that this book also makes attempts at an enemies-to-lovers storyline with ravi and jessie, and it is so poorly executed. i would say that this is something that plagues many inclusions of this trope nowadays in some mainstream novels because the rivalry is either so laughable that it’s not serious or so severe that it’s unbelievable that these characters are actually breathing the same air right now. ravi and jessie are the former, and i don’t even think whatever they had before dating can be called a rivalry because like them and their story and the letters and the book as a whole, it is unconvincing. you’re not rooting for these characters, let alone rooting for them to get together because they are boring, as is their “rivalry” which ultimately comes from them liking the same study room in the library, and on a deeper level, jessie has some pre-conceived notions about ravi since he’s a nepo baby, a term that’s only used 6 times in the novel but that’s still 5 times too many.

something else that was annoying was the attempt to make it seem as if ravi has it just as hard as jessie which, let’s be real, is not the case.

“just because her life had been different from his didn’t mean that it was less than or worse off than his had been. if anything, it was better. she had people who appreciated and loved her for who she was, and as cheesy as it sounded, that was something that money couldn’t buy." – chapter 13 – ravi

what would’ve been really interesting to see, and which would’ve really brought the theme of class disparity to the forefront, is if jessie spends most of the novel, preparing herself for an interview for an internship that she really wants, she spends every waking moment padding up her cv and getting experience. she manages to score an interview and she prepares herself as best she can, only for ravi’s family to secure the position for him with little to no work on his end. that would have created a real tension between them, one that’s understandable, palpable and convincing and furthers the themes present in the book. the story doesn’t delve deep enough on any aspect and that really sucks.

imagine my surprise when i found out it was apparently modelled after jane austen’s pride and prejudice.

[ranger-kellyn]

i'm so annoyed i've been so stressed out all fucking weekend bc i'm preemptively stressing about work this week since i've been tasked with helping another engineer with their inventory, something i just. still don't. feel comfortable doing. and i have a huge inventory to start working on tomorrow and UGH i just wanted to enjoy my weekend!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[genspiel]

sometimes i read negative reviews of books i enjoyed, just for fun, and i can't get over this one person who read The Stone Sky and said it was confusing because.......... second person is used for multiple characters. like??? no???? it's still just essun

[emeryleewho]

I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got paid to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

Update: This is literally just a thought exercise to help you be more intentional with how you critique media. I'm not enforcing this as some divine rule that must be followed any time you have an opinion on fiction, and I'm definitely not saying that you have to structure every single sentence in a review to contain zero negative phrases. I'm just saying that I repurposed a rule we had at that specific reviewer to be a helpful tool to check myself when writing critiques now. If you don't want to use the tool, literally no one (especially not me) can or wants to force you to use it. As with all advice, it is a totally reasonable and normal thing to not have use for every piece of it that exists from random strangers on the internet. Use it to whatever extent it helps you or not at all.

[butt-puncher]

Absolutely humiliated myself in front my teacher my brain dead email, I got another whole ass essay due in like a day that I haven't made progress on, and the left hinge on my laptop broke earlier so fuck me I guess

[lucky-clover-gazette]

new taylor adams book next week and the reviews look really promising