#i do have my criticism of booktok as someone who only sees what comes out of it

[someoneintheshadow456]

I said before, now that Cait Corrain’s true self has come out, I can finally elaborate on what happened with her. To put a long story short, I was one of her very first victims - long before she became an original fiction author and back when she was known as Enterprisingly on AO3 - the author of Play to Win.

I know that #reviewbombgate was back in December, but at the time, I did not know about it because I’m not involved in BookTok. However, I WAS involved with the Reylo fandom, albeit indirectly.

The final chapters of Play to Win went on a tangent that seemed bizarre to me at the time. In fact, it seemed so strange that I brushed it off almost completely. It was only when I found Play to Win’s Wayback Machine page after recalling memories of the Reylo fandom last year when I read the chapter properly (instead of skipping ahead to get to the Reylo scenes). And a proper reading made me realize what was so unnerving about it:

Anyone who has engaged with my blog (especially from 2015-2019, when I used to post a lot more content about my personal life) can see the strangely... specific way this character was described. In order to go into this level of depth, one has to have been following me intently and keeping tabs of all the personal things I posted.

And then, she goes from eerily specific descriptions, to straight up maliciously lying about me:

Keep in mind, this screed takes up an ENTIRE chapter in itself. Said character, Ejya Fjord, is a background NPC who is mentioned a total of 121 times in a 161,000 word story. In fact, her name is mentioned so little that you could be forgiven for not remembering her at all:

You'd think, if someone would do something like this, I had to have done something terrible to her, or even just gave her a negative review. But I never did.

As you can see here, I have only engaged positively with her. Since Play to Win was also taken down and you can’t see old comments on Wayback Machine. Unfortunately after this, I can only give my word without receipts.

Play to Win was published first in 2018. I reviewed her story in March of 2018, possibly even earlier. In my review, I praised the writing, worldbuilding, and dialogues, but gave a small constructive criticism in that the politics could be better integrated into the story without feeling disjointed.

In the very early chapters, Ejya was clearly intended to be 100% Swedish - as one can tell from the name. However, at some point in the later half of the story, she retroactively became mixed race and a rival for Ben's affections, while Ben seems to be having none of it. It's clear these choices were made to portray me as some kind of horny fangirl for Kylo Ren who will stomp on other girls for his sake:

When I read the last chapter first, I was horrified. But now I'm just... bemused that someone would ever see me as some kind of calculating vixen who dresses like a Euphoria high school student and only likes masculine hobbies to pick up dudes. When in reality it took me until 2020 to be able to type the word "sex" without having heart attack and have never so much as posted a selfie on here.

It's also funny that Ejya is petite and flat chested while my actual body type is the exact opposite... which she would know since she stalked my blog so thoroughly. Almost as though she's implying something about her own insecurities...

Initially, I was under the impression that Corrain targeted me because of my association with @ainomica - due to her ruffling the Reylo fandom’s feathers (and ending up on Corrain’s hit list) over her opinions on John Boyega. However, that controversy happened in 2020. When Corrain wrote this libel about me, @ainomica wasn’t even on her radar, not to mention it was a year before we had ever even met. This libel was done to target me, and me exclusively.

In essence - Corrain weaved libel about me into her story because my existence pissed her off. We know now that Corrain had a penchant for targeting sapphic authors and WOC almost exclusively. So it's safe to say she was just being a typical white saviour liberal who shows what she actually thinks of minorities when they don't toe the line.

While this does make her less unhinged in my eyes than using me to target someone else, it still means that Corrain was, and always has been capable of aggression towards anyone she’s remotely offended by. Especially if said person happens to be a minority of some kind.

[panic-at-the-waffle-house]

I don’t like BookTok :)

I know the is isn’t the “hottest take” but I just don’t like it for a lot of reasons, one big one is that it spreads the idea of “you can’t read that book”.

Growing up, I always lived by the idea that you should read what you enjoy/makes you happy. Reading in general does wonders for the brain and creativity. This is coming from not only an avid reader, but someone whose mom was a reading teacher, albeit for elementary school. The growth of all of the students was amazing and they weren’t English speakers at all. She had students who could fluently speak it/read it to kids who knew nothing. I grew up in a VERY diverse town in the Midwest. Like white people were the MINORITY. So that also meant we had a lot of different cultures and different books/entertainment that was specific to that culture.

Anyway back to books lol.

The biggest critique I have with BookTok is that if there’s a book or series you like, someone is bound to nitpick it for some reason. I love criticism of a book, I think it’s great and being able to point out flaws leads to deep discussion. But a lot of the time, people like these books simply because THEY LIKE IT. You don’t have to like it, but they like it. Main examples are books by Colleen Hoover (I have my gripes with her, I can’t stand her books), but the people who read her books enjoy them so I’m not going to harass or bully them for something they enjoy. SJ Mass is another author who gets a lot of flame, again for reasonable reasons, but even I have enjoyed her books.

I really got into YA fantasy like early high school and late middle school. One of the first series I read was the Throne of Glass series which I picked up since my mom had the first book. I actually really enjoyed it and I was in like 7th grade at the time so some of the simplicity and common tropes were well worth it for me. But as I got older and tried to re-read the series, I couldn’t. I fell in love with the side characters more than the main ones. (Dorian was my number one boy and he still is. I was so excited whenever he appeared. Still my fav character.) I didn’t care for Aelin, Rowan, or some others simply because I just didn’t really care for them. They’re fine, just not my favs and I know some people love them which is valid.

I couldn’t even finish ACOTAR. I got halfway through and DNF’d it. I don’t care for first person point of view in general and I didn’t like her characters or the plot. Roman e was never my thing—I love it as a side plot but if the entire book is about romance I find it boring. I barely made it through The Selection.

Before fantasy YA, I was big into dystopian. THG was my first real YA book and I loved it, with the Maze Runner after it. It’s my favorite YA fictional series to this day even though it has its flaws. The move from dystopian to fantasy was very much in a certain span of my life and now I see it being so popular in media which is great. Except for the people who don’t know how to respect OPINIONS. Not only that, but gatekeeping makes me mad.

All through my life I liked reading classics, classics of every region. My mom always had classic books lying around so I would pick them up and the ones from the different ethnic groups and cultures were always at the public library for me to read. That’s how I got books like

Crime and Punishment- Russian Literature

No Longer Human- Japanese Literature

The Iliad- Greek Literature

Dracula-Irish Literature

Journey to The West-Chinese Literature

The Idiot- Japanese Literature

Don Quixote-Spanish Literature

And so many others at an early age. Some of them are well known and some aren’t—which is normal. But when some people who read classics look down on others or say “you can’t read that because you’re doing it to be quirky”, it bothers me. I always wanted to talk to others about these books and damn it I was STRUGGLING to find people to talk to about The Great Gatsby who actually liked it in seventh grade. This is PROMINENT in the BSD fandom since the characters are named after famous classical authors and some people are stuck up, not wanting these books to be read.

It never made sense to me. Maybe I’m the stupid one.

Overall, there are very few people on BookTok who I enjoy watching or listening to. Each series has its highlights and its flaws, like humans do, so just let people enjoy a book damnit. And if people want to vent or explain why they DONT like a book let them damnit.

Anyway what’s a book that scarred you for like???? I read Where The Red Feen Grows at like 10 years old and am still traumatized by it. :D

[animentality]

I haven’t read your books yet, you know how it is, money~, but I bet they’re pretty good and I am planning to buy and read them, they’re on The List, and I hold you in high regards as a person I kinda vaguely barely know. I say this first to preface, because, from the kindest most adoring place of my heart okay, this reminded me of you, no offense: https://www.tumblr.com/pjackk/721300009283420160/whats-up-tunblr-basically-i-just-wrote-this-book

Ouch.

Glad you preceded this with a compliment...

But brutal.

For what it's worth, I also hate having to reduce my books to tropes...and I try not to, with any of my promotional posts...

But uh...good to know this is how I come across :S

But in my defense...and in defense of other authors... it's super easy for people to make fun of how we have to promote our books, but in this terrible digital economy...I mean.

It's hard to keep people's attention, and it's hard to sell books.

It's not like selling art, doing commissions, making animations, or well-edited videos. Books are inherently harder to sell and market and build an audience for, because they're an investment of time and focus.

They aren't as easy to dive into and enjoy. A webcomic chapter you could read in twenty minutes. A pretty picture you can reblog, and you can commission the artist if you love the style. A Youtube video can be ten minutes of investment. Maybe an hour, tops.

But a book?

Books will always struggle more than shows or animations, because it takes a certain kind of person to read books, and in this day and age, attention spans are shorter than ever.

You spend fucking years writing your books, and you edit, and you revise, and write some more, and edit some more, and revise some more, and then you have to promote.

All the time, in every way you can imagine. Using whatever tools you have... all the time, every way.

Otherwise, you don't see any sales at all, and then it's like you wasted three years of your life fiddling around, while everyone you know is making bank on crypto or whatever the fuck.

If I was good at fucking BookTok? I wouldn't be fucking here promoting at all.

I could leave my blog as the little meme machine it's always been.

But I'm bad at fucking TikTok.

And I mildly resent being compared to a TikTok author, because if I was any good at that, I WOULD NOT BE HERE promoting my books at all.

Tumblr is the worst place to promote anything, ever.

That's part of why I like it...but at the same time, that's why it's such a torturous practice, trying to promote my novels here.

No one here gives a fuck. And I'm fine with that.

I'm ok with that.

But I can't throw away hard work without at least trying.

I don't really get the criticisms of authors in those comments anyway.

What have those people tried to put out into the world?

You think self published authors are just jokes, or that they aren't marketing themselves well?

Maybe both are true, but someone who makes something, no matter how shit, has still MADE something.

It's easy to tear others down. It's not easy to make something that you care about, and put out into the world for others to see and judge.

And for those people in the comments too, I have to ask.

Is a book only good, if it's published by a company?

Because books that are self published are actually a LOT LESS likely to be made up of tropes and cliches.

People who self publish tend to write weirder and more out of the box things. They RESORT to tropes because they feel you won't pay attention to their books without them.

they feel you won't give their concept a try, unless they dumb it down for everyone.

They pretend the book is something it's not, out of sheer desperation.

I market 7 Deadly Habits like it's a fucking adventure action romance comedy...?

It's actually pretty fucking dark and grim and sad.

the main character is fucked up, and so are all his exes. So is the entire world they live in.

It's really not a funny book. It has dark humor, but it's hinged on an unhinged concept, one that I find darkly interesting.

But I lie and say it's a funny adventurous romp of sex and violence.

Because that's how I have to market it.

I try other things, of course, but I have found most people would rather read a romance than an anti-romance, which is more of what it is.

People don't want to try new things. They want more of the shit they already have.

to make something new, or different, or non-conventional, is to accept that you will have to water it down when you're trying to offer it to people.

So yeah.

I get it. Authors who blaze their book promotions are desperate losers and weirdo freaks with very bizarre interests and isn't it funny, how hard they're trying?

But you know.

What else can we be?

Leigh Bardugo?

Trust me. I wish I was a good writer. I wish I wrote straight YA fantasy books that kids and adults and everyone can enjoy. I wish I had a literary agent and five star publishing houses giving me 20 million dollars for my next book.

I wish I was a multi millionaire white woman, in an industry of rich white women, who write sexy murder mysteries and cozy thrillers and steamy vampire eroticas.

But I am what I am, and that's a queer self published POC author, who has no one in my corner, but me. Whose only means of promotion is my own efforts.

So no, I don't really look at other self published authors with disdain or wry detachment.

I know how they feel.

I know how much it sucks.