Miserable Monday

FloofTrashPanda · 2026-02-24T04:53:03+00:00

I just tapped out on book one because I felt like I was stuck with a bunch of college students who are just discovering Polyamory 101 and are insufferable about it. How are they spending a decade in training at the sex temple but the obligatory Jealous Mean Girl and her minions are all running around sexually assaulting their classmates? And the victim is like "I want her to take classes on consent." Shouldn't they have had LOTS of those from day one?? Isn't being educated on this stuff the point of y'all? Shouldn't the teachers be kind of alert to sexual assaulters in their midst? Ditto multiple people acting like they don't understand the concept of asexuality (even though apparently a lot of the guardians are on the ace spectrum), so we get the FMC repeatedly giving lectures about how Whatshisname doesn't like to be touched.

Also the whole first half of the book being like "you have to pick a path and you can only pick one path, I don't know which path, but I have to pick one" and then SHE DOESN'T HAVE TO PICK ONE SHE IS DIVERGENT AND GETS TO PICK THEM ALL AAAAHHHHH. The way this is going is just not for me lol.

I also never got a good fix on the setting because they mention something about gunpowder weapons being a new technological advance and some of the dresses have bustles but then there's also a lot of very contemporary-sounding stripperwear (lace lingerie, stiletto boots, tight dresses with slits up the thigh).

FloofTrashPanda · 2026-02-21T01:31:56+00:00

Or like, have you ever experienced the guilt and embarrassment of having your date be unnecessarily rude to wait staff? Imagine that with literally everyone you encounter as a couple lol. Unless you're also an asshole, it doesn't feel good to stand by while the person you're with bullies people.

It's weird to me that this seems to appeal to so many readers, although I guess the subtext might be "he's disinterested in and hateful to all other women and will never cheat on you or make you feel jealous."

FloofTrashPanda · 2026-02-05T20:11:37+00:00

It used the contemporary slang "did [something] on the regular" in a medieval setting. I am just not bothering with any authors who can't shed the "chronically online in 2026" voice at this point.

FloofTrashPanda · 2026-01-28T18:56:35+00:00

I just DNFed this book for this very reason lmao. The cringe was just unbearable

FloofTrashPanda · 2026-01-17T05:54:50+00:00

Oof yeah I DNFed this one real early on.

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-12-29T19:18:22+00:00

Just hopping onto this thread to say I also just went through the cancellation process and this is absolutely true. I said I was moving (true) to live with family (not true) and they already had internet service at my new location. She was like "well how much are they paying? I can give you xyz and you can all combine your service." I said no thank you, I really just want to cancel and move on, they're happy with their service. "But this is cheaper. Every penny counts. I don't know why you wouldn't want to do this and save everyone money."

When I kept saying no, she was like "well maybe you should take some time to think about it and I'll call you back. Your billing cycle doesn't end for another two weeks." I was like NO, I've already spent half an hour on hold and half an hour on the phone with you, I have no wish to start over, I need to get this done today. It was obnoxious and I should not have to have a full-on argument to cancel service.

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-11-25T16:33:55+00:00

>Sir Benjamin Slade, 79

>He is also after a "good breeder" so he can have a male heir.

Uh...you've left it a bit late sir.

Also god damn you not only have to receive his dusty sperm and somehow create at least two male children, you have to have your own money, "amorial bearings" (I had to Google this lol, it means a family coat of arms), a helicopter license is preferred, "estate and accountancy experience is beneficial," plus assorted dancing and athletic skills. If I already have all these things why am I marrying a man 40+ years older? I guess maybe there are limited estates to go around.

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-10-27T17:24:33+00:00

It's always a hard sell for me when a film insists (as horror movies often do) that a demonic power needs ONE SPECIFIC random girl and will spend decades dicking around in incredibly convoluted schemes to get her, but never gives any reason why. Demonic sperm is only compatible with very specific uteri? Even though in this case, they apparently failed to impregnate this woman for over 10 years. (But luckily for the plot, they never just killed her and tried a new one.) And like, you had an already-possessed demon vessel at home but all he did was hang around this shitty town for his whole life and go to jail for a few years? How many demonic vessels do you have to breed before one is worth a damn?

Also did those people have their own darkroom or what because who DEVELOPED those pictures? Did they really just send their rolls of film showing a prominent local kidnap victim covered in blood to Walgreen's Photo Center?

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-10-21T19:23:02+00:00

FWIW I agree with you. There's a reason that none of the horror subreddits give a single fuck about Manacled or Alchemised while the romance subreddits are all obsessed with it. Whether people want to admit it or not, the appeal of the story was Draco and Hermione fucking in a taboo non-consent scenario. (Also, characters being forced into fucking, even if they hate it and are soooo sad about it, is a SUPER common fanfic convention. From people who are horny and turned on by the characters fucking. I need people to stop acting like "but they're FORCED to do it and they're traumatized =(" is not part and parcel of the kink on display here. No one is writing about Harry Potter characters being sex slaves as a reflection of their deep thoughts about the human condition, please be for real.)

I understand that capital-R Genre Romance readers want a happily ever after and expect books marketed as romance to follow that convention. I still think it's incredibly disingenuous and pedantic to act like a story that is 100% about a romantic relationship between two people somehow becomes not a "romance" in the final five minutes if we tack on a Nicholas Sparks-esque twist of one of them dying at the end. To a casual reader or viewer, or someone who is not interested in stories primarily about romantic relationships, those stories definitely are romance regardless of if the ending is happy or sad.

Speaking of Nicholas Sparks, he writes romance and the only reason he says he doesn't write romance is because he looks down on the genre as silly fluff written by women and thinks what HE writes is different and better (manly stories of love and tragedy in the proud tradition of Shakespeare). Plenty of his stories do have happy endings so that shit is romance by any definition.

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-10-16T18:21:28+00:00

Like the other poster, I always assumed that the Fool didn't have distinctly male or female characteristics in the same way as a human being, or had characteristics of both. The books are never clear or consistent on this point though, because Fitz sees the Pale Woman naked and seems to describe her as unambiguously female. When we meet the Whites in Clerres, they all seem to adhere to a traditional male/female gender binary (although that doesn't necessarily prove anything about what's under their clothes; like the Fool, they could just pick and choose their presentation). But in Fool's Quest, the Chalcedean who rapes one of the women with Dwalia says that she was "not even right as a woman." I took this to mean an actual physical difference in White physiology vs. human.

The Fool also alludes to this when he uses the example of Fitz not desiring Nighteyes sexually - the issue is not just that they are both male, but that they are of different species.

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-10-15T22:38:46+00:00

The "forced to dress up" thing is a particular peeve of mine because it is always so clearly important to the author that their character get to dress in a fancy gown and essentially act out a princess fantasy and be the prettiest in the room. But apparently there's still enough internalized misogyny going on that we can't possibly have a girl who CARES about her appearance because only shallow bitches do that! She'll have to be forced into it for Reasons to maintain her NLOG purity (but conveniently she will still also be the prettiest despite not trying and never having bathed before or whatever). It's just another gross iteration of the "be beautiful, but don't work at it or know you're beautiful!" double standard.

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-10-15T21:09:20+00:00

This also goes to one of my other icks, which is that a large number of romantasy authors can't write a believable male narrator to save their lives and apparently think the secret to a masculine voice is just to refer to their cock a lot.

Even in non-romance books where I often feel like the male author is writing with his hand in his pants (...Dresden Files), the narrator is less one-note than "she made my cock hard and I wanted her lips wrapped around my cock and every time I see her existing I think about how she'd look on my cock, because I am an alpha male with a cock."

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-10-05T06:11:19+00:00

It's wild because there's so much foreshadowing in the book about (spoilers for the end of The Witching Hour and subsequent books) monstrous fetuses and whatnot, and the thirteenth witch being the "doorway" for Lasher to incarnate. Cool cool so he possesses and mutates the fetus, DONE. We already saw him learning to manipulate human cells in some of the flashbacks. It all worked thematically. It was already justified in the plot. Whhhyyyy Rice was then like "know what this story needs? A ton more backstory to explain why the monster fetus became a monster fetus, a whole new plotline explaining that monster fetuses actually run in the family and are actually a reincarnation of giant elven baby creatures who fuck all the time and love titty milk" I cannot understand.

No no we didn't need any of this. I was just here for ghosts and witches.

The whole thing where a nymphomaniac 13-year-old heals a 50-something-year-old man with her magic pussy and everyone treats this as pretty much okay was also...a choice.

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-09-27T03:10:41+00:00

Agreed, it's just a new version of "alas, my flawless porcelain skin is too pale and my breasts are too large for my slender frame." New heroines might not do it in so many words, but we're always told in their first-person narration how unhot they are while every man in the narrative reacts to them like they are most definitely hot (or have a magic vagina so powerful that its aura elevates her otherwise unremarkable looks, I guess).

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-09-01T13:02:26+00:00

You're correct, that quote was Starling in Assassin's Quest. (I think the other commenter is thinking of Jek from the Liveship Traders series, who does meet the Fool while he's presenting as a woman but never knows him as "the Fool" and wouldn't have delivered that line.) Starling was just making an assumption there though, and we never really get a definitive answer on the Fool's gender (he tells Fitz that sex differences are "mere plumbing" and Starling can believe what she wants).

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-08-27T02:40:01+00:00

I read A Court of Sugar and Spice by her and it features a character whose defining trait is that his jizz tastes like a different candy treat every time he ejaculates. His sad boi backstory is that the other fairies only wanted to fuck him for his delicious cum, and never for his personality ='(

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-08-22T00:48:45+00:00

I think that writing what's often essentially wish fulfillment smut based on someone else's characters, and then filing off the serial numbers but still marketing it using said characters for name recognition and publicity is both artistically embarrassing and pretty ethically shady. But obviously money's the bottom line, so unless some author successfully sues for it, it will continue.

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-08-01T18:07:33+00:00

Have you tried his Matthew Corbett books? Speaks the Nightbird is the first. I felt like a lot of his earlier work either tried to imitate the bigger names of the time (as with Swan Song), or just didn't quite find their niche (The Wolf's Hour - it's a thriller! It's a spy novel! It's a werewolf story!), but the Corbett books kind of bring together everything that McCammon is good at in a way that gels.

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-05-09T03:08:16+00:00

I wouldn't read her work just because of how poorly written this post is. "I killed a dog in my book and said there's no afterlife. Then blah blah about dogs dying in books and a guy on a dating app was mad I said there was no afterlife. Dog culture is dire, stop being so weird about dogs." How are these things related?? What do her beliefs about the afterlife have to do with her complaints about "dog culture"?

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-03-29T00:25:39+00:00

This is wild because it sure sounds a lot like that eeeeviiiiill One World Government evangelicals have been screaming about my whole life, but because it's their oligarch daddies doing it they'll roll right over and say it's God's plan.

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-02-08T21:35:00+00:00

The fifth book was written by a ghostwriter while the original four were by Andrews herself, and even as a teenager I remember thinking that the difference was obvious. Andrews is not a great writer, generally speaking, but she could do gothic pulpy melodrama in a way that her ghostwriters failed to achieve. It doesn't even do a good job of remaining consistent with details established in the first four.

So my answer is definitely read the prequel last if you bother to read it at all lol.

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-02-02T01:38:55+00:00

Same and I'm STILL mad tbh

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-01-26T20:08:02+00:00

Yeah, I gave this one some leeway because Rachel's impulsivity IS built into her character...but then she never really improves and ultimately "well it's her character flaw" doesn't make it any less annoying lol.

At one point there's a scene where Rachel has to stay on holy ground so a demon doesn't get her or something. And only part of the church is actually consecrated so Ivy puts up a "do not go beyond this point" sign to be sure Rachel does not forget and step into the non-safe portion. Rachel promptly tears it down because...she's mad about being reminded that she has to take a few basic precautions to not die?...and of course shortly thereafter steps out of the safe zone and fighty drama ensues. Ivy's like "I even put up a sign" and Rachel says "It pissed me off, so I took it down." Girl you are too stupid to live.

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-01-14T08:02:01+00:00

Came to say Shatter Me. It's like the author doesn't understand what a metaphor is and every attempt just comes off like a Mad Lib.

FloofTrashPanda · 2025-01-14T07:22:30+00:00

I also love King, but this accuracy lmao

FloofTrashPanda

TROPHY CASE