#but matt pulling kevin off neil didn't need to involve andrew

[thisloveforyourmom]

wow i just saw the worst aftg take i've EVER seen 😭 like do i think the upperclassmen shouldn't be so surprised when andrew gets violent? yes absolutely. but we are not gonna sit here and pretend it's justified for him to respond to an open handed slap by choking allison out for several minutes because he was 'just reacting' 😭

[astreiants-archive]

"there are reasons i didn't include it". i'm... interested. could you elaborate?

oh boy yes i can (it’s going under a read more so if anyone doesn’t wanna read it they don’t have to and also then they have no excuse for getting pissed off at me)

ok ok so:

the most minor reason why is that it’s really unrealistic. like a made-up sport becomes the most popular in the country in only 30 years? pull the other one. it’s also never really clear what the sport actually involves rules-wise. plus like hell would the authorities allow any of this shit to go down without sanction! you especially wouldn’t have a top school have a team made up solely of victims of trauma. it’s just unrealistic. (also, ever heard of anti-doping rules? yeah. those ones that mean andrew would absolutely never be allowed to play. and not to mention he wears freaking knives during a contact sport.)

the “bad guys” are the most hilarious thing. like they live 16 hour days in a basement painted all black, they wear all black, they’re basically a fricking cult. and meanwhile the yakuza run around doing gang-related shit, and yet this team is the bad guys? spare me. (honestly, the yakuza thing just feels thrown in like sakavic is going, hmm i need some higher stakes. only it ends up that those aren’t at all related to the end stakes.)

it’s really bad on the mental illness front. i mean, not even considering the “anti-psychotics” that andrew takes (no drug works like that, and no drug has you suffering from withdrawal symptoms within 4 hours). andrew has this unspecified mental illness that basically makes him a psychopath (he attacks people! he threatens them with knives! he shows severe callous-unemotional traits!).

to expand on the andrew attacking people. he attempts to choke matt, he pushes his brother’s girlfriend up against a wall and tries to choke her (while neil watches on like, yeah this is just andrew lol), and he attacks allison for like, touching his car or something ridiculous. you can’t excuse that! he never gets called out for it, everyone’s just like oh that’s just andrew. as if that explains it. (also let’s not talk about how that demonises actual psychotic illnesses.)

everyone treats kevin as a coward for not having faced up to his abusers and for not wanting to antagonise them. i mean like. victim blaming much?

the only characters of colour are the really bad guys (the freaking yakuza at that) and nicky, who is effectively just comic relief. great rep right there.

it’s basically torture porn at points. there are very graphic rape and torture scenes (i felt physically sick reading them) which seem to serve the most contrived of plot points, almost as if she’s putting them in because she wants to write them rather than because they move the plot along. like in order to set it in motion, the coach of the bad guys’ team has to make sure that andrew’s abuser is at the house, that his foster mum sends him upstairs alone, that he’s then sent to an institution where a corrupt doctor is going to kill him unless neil agrees to spend time with the team (where he ends up being tortured. and then as if that’s not enough, he also gets kidnapped by his dad in the third book and tortured again! as i said. torture porn). like. that’s actually beyond contrived.

and the scenes are so so graphic. and then compare this to the scenes of the games where everything’s just skimmed over and woops they’re done. it’s not looking good. they’re pretty much written for shock value.

in the first book, there’s a scene where neil is taken to a club and gets drugged by one of his teammates (andrew i think?). because they want to get information out of him about who he is really. so they do it by drugging him. and to avoid telling them anything, he gets himself knocked out. and these people he later describes as “family”. like. wow.

so yeah. that’s it. (i will admit i did initially enjoy the books, but then i thought about it and yeah. this is the result.)