Collin > Recent Status Updates

fifty pages from the end of this book and I'm STILL putting the book down every time it switches to Lia's POV... that's what happens when a whole 1/3 of your POV cast isn't actually involved with the plot of the actual book, huh

reading books like this is so exhausting tbh... books that expect you to do all the heavy lifting of emotional resonance. here's all this information that will be narrated to you, the audience, in poetically distant third person; now aren't you feeling things?? aren't you sad/angry/happy for Yeva since that's what I, the book, am telling you to feel??? do some STORYTELLING ffs

not to sound like a Disney simp but when I watched The Mandalorian and reached the very few scenes where Din took off his helmet, I was so uncomfortable with it that I looked away because it felt so wrong to see his face. marketing for this book drawing that parallel when the impact of armor/helmet removal is just noottttt here is........ meh.

you can't use The Mandalorian as a comp title if the armor/helmet come off Just Whenever. such a big deal is made about Yeva never taking off the armor, needing to wear the helmet, and then two people are like "hey you should take off your armor/helmet" and Yeva's like "well okaayyyyy if you insist :3" like. come on. you have not earned the removal of armor/helmet.

I think I've read more retellings of Hamlet than any other classic retelling and I've never liked their Ophelia as much as I like Ophelia Prime, if I like them at all. she has such an interesting place in the play, and she's ripe for interpretation, but people get so lazy about it... sigh. when will someone do my girl justice.

losing track of how many Hamlet retellings I've read where the author clearly thinks they have to Fix the character of Ophelia. like I'm not saying that the original character was some beacon of feminist writing but the way almost every retelling's Ophelia is turned into like... a hard, bitter character who is mainly characterized by her anger/resentment towards Hamlet is Not Empowering. it's still centering Hamlet.

Yeva is like the dragon-killer version of when a character is meant to be a brilliant criminal but the author isn’t clever enough to pull it off so it just feels like the world’s standards for a mastermind are comedically low. or when a character is supposed to be a great poet but the author isn’t, so it feels like the world’s poet laureate is fantasy rupi kaur.

also I went into this expecting a nonbinary protagonist and have been sorely betrayed on that front. I would say ‘unless Yeva figures out some stuff in the book’ but there just isn’t room for such an arc to mean anything. We’re 1/4 through already and she’s still just an empty slate and I don’t think a nonbinary gender journey would be satisfying. like at all.

this book is so obsessed with doing worldbuilding by association and character by tropes that I could probably write the outline for it myself. I’m boreddddddddddd.

It's a testament to how much I've been enjoying this book that it's almost halfway through the book and we haven't even gotten to the conceit that made me want to read it (the Haunted/Demonic Children's Show), and I don't even mind. It's like Mister Magic all over again but actually good and actually! scary!

For a long time I’ve just assumed that I couldn’t actually be horrified by horror in text form as opposed to audio or visual but I am delighted to report that the 1979 portions of this book have been RIVETINGLY terrifying and I love it. So good.

"Even with one eye, she was incredibly intimidating." baldur's gate 3 says I gain +1 to intimidation when I lose an eye so idk what you're talking about with this "even" thing.

wait. you're telling me that 1) one phrase everyone uses is "Lumos below," 2) they say "Rest in the depths" when someone dies, and 3) the stuff they're mining from the giant monster corpse at the bottom of the ocean is literally called ICHORON, and yet NO ONE has connected the dots??? no one SUSPECTS?? come onnnnnnnnn

Nix telling her only allies that Leone is "gone" instead of growing up and telling them he's a traitor, thereby ensuring that THEY think he's dead and will be taken by surprise (possibly fatally) when he inevitably shows up again is suuuuch a stupid move, both on a Watsonian and Doylist level. like Nix is an idiot for doing it and Thorne is transparently making Nix an idiot for the sake of shock value later on.

"He was clearly accustomed to climbing stairs. To be fair, most shortscraper citizens were." to.................accustomed to.......climbing stairs? HUH????

this is such a deeply stupid plot twist, I'm going to howl. not necessarily intrinsically stupid, but in the way it's being launched, the way there was no buildup whatsoever. it really does feel like Thorne got bored or wrote themself into a corner and threw a brand new idea at the wall and never went back to foreshadow or build it into the story.

"everyone knew who Lumos was" okay but can you key in the reader because I would never have guessed that adherence to "Lumos's path" is even tangentially related to the current war going on, much less that it's a key factor in determining whether someone is an enemy or not. like... is this a first draft? is Thorne a pantser who never went back to make things make sense?

also trying to shove in state religion when, up to this point, I haven't even been sure if Lumos IS a god or if it's some nebulous metaphysical Concept or just a secondary-world swear. you haven't even mentioned places of worship! prayer! religious mores! literally anything!

again I know it's uncharitable and mean-sounding to say this but there is something so funny about people who are probably not religious trying to write about religious society. you'd think an American author would at least pick up SOME nuances of cultural religion but nooooooo.

oh nooooo this book is already half incompetent at simple locked-room (locked ship?) horror, now it's trying to do religious politics?? oh baby noooooo you are not grown up enough for this

the fact that it's taken almost 3 hours of 10-hour audiobook just to get onto the dadgum submarine............

I don't know how messed up it is that I keep thinking about it while reading this book, which is about real people doing serious work, but also, reading about saboteurs wrecking Nazi railways and blowing up munitions buildings really takes me back to watching Hogan's Heroes for hours on end.

performative rage on my part because unfortunately it WAS the GotG 2 scene that made the "The Chain" click for me and I wish I'd got it earlier, or at least that OFMD had been the spark point, but we are who we are.

"'The Chain' has also frequently been used, [...] in movie and TV soundtracks: in The Americans; The Handmaid's Tale; I, Tonya; Fresh Off the Boat; The Kitchen." [also cites F1 and Guardians of the Galaxy 2.]

NO OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH MENTION? oh this is an injustice I shan't soon forget

starting to feel very The Exorcist in here, esp. with the recurring images of Bartolome falling to his death.

"She caught his kiss between her teeth and returned it stripped of chastity."

this is a really good line and it sucks that it's happening to a couple I couldn't care less about

"If someone had asked her weeks ago which would be more shocking to her, the fact that her sleepwalking was driven by demonic forces or that she would be sent into a girlish fluster by a rough-hewn peninsular with a sordid history...
Well."

ANNOYED SIIGHHHHHHH

Elias gets attacked by possessed!Alba and when he finally gets in a good position to defend himself, he gets horny because she's wearing a nightgown and that's what lets her get the upper hand again? die. Elias deserves to die. put him out of his horndog misery.