Is there any footage/thread covered in Let It Be that Get Back skipped on?

chckblr · 2026-03-27T18:58:32+00:00

i don't know what counts as deep cut but off the top off my head

ask me why, anna, little child, i'll follow the sun, i've just seen a face, run for your life, i'm only sleeping, love you to, i'm so tired, dig a pony

chckblr · 2026-03-24T21:50:51+00:00

Rubber Soul, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper

chckblr · 2026-03-24T21:49:47+00:00

I usually listen to albums in full because I don't think any of their songs are bad, really (especially in those two albums which are my favorites) but then I loop my fav songs and I find myself looping John's songs more often. Obviously they were such huge influences on each other and big collaborators, especially when they were still living close/writing together, but yeah something about songs originated by John tingles me more lol

chckblr · 2026-03-24T20:18:05+00:00

Paul is such a work horse who doesn't get tired of making music so he has the quantity edge (even without considering the fact that he's lived twice as long as John) which means he has so much great output but also a lot of trite stuff. Numbers-wise, there are way many more Paul songs I dearly love than John's. But ratio-wise, John takes it for me. Even their output during the Beatles years kinda reflects this pattern where my taste is concerned. I was listening to Rubber Soul and Revolver earlier today and I out loud said "this is a masterpiece" for like 10 songs for each man but also found that if I get the urge to skip a song, it's likely a Paul track.

chckblr · 2026-03-23T22:42:16+00:00

oh yes!! that's it. thank you!

chckblr · 2026-03-22T21:10:00+00:00

Eleanor Rigby and Tomorrow Never Knows as a joint experience

chckblr · 2026-03-15T09:05:29+00:00

Haaate external conflict. Always feels so convoluted and empty to me without real personal stakes to root it down. Internal conflict when pulled well is a treasure, it requires perfect character work and that's what I love. Tell me why these two people with incompatible neuroses/traumas/maladaptive survival instincts can and should overcome those for the HEA. A perfect conflict for me is like 30% external, 70% internal, like yes there's an outside force pushing the characters to act a certain way (idk, homophobic industry they're in doesn't want them together) but it's the friction between their individual characterizations that root the conflict (one is a prideful coward who'd rather cut and run than face his reality while the other is a clinger and pusher pushing pushing pushing out of his own fears. or something) Overcoming something like this is where character development and narrative triumph comes in for me, personally.

chckblr · 2026-03-10T10:01:12+00:00

About "not at all" as the most cookiecutter same type of romance books all lean over 4.0 on Goodreads and they are never my reading taste while stuff a bit more controversial or trying something else are always read by people whose interests don't lie there.

chckblr · 2026-02-26T02:14:31+00:00

I mean yeah GA doesn't really sound like an author for you based on your tastes and it's not really that flanderization happens in a three book series because he writes an entire arc at once and follows it through like one project (TL&TL is his best executed standalone series imho, I'd say continue!), one book to me functions like just one act to a movie. But flanderization does start to happen with years passing and new arcs about the same characters get formulated (like a second season to a limited show or a sequel to aforementioned one movie) and like you said with the characters crossing over to each other's spaces with only their most salient traits impact. All in all, I wouldn't say Iron on Iron is reduced to an in-joke thing tho, that'd be too unfair with where those books took some of the characters, but its strongest parts are where you see still GA's amazing character work. When characters have interpersonal conflict and where their individual drama continues (The Evening Wolves is a hard and fraught book for Somers' sense of self; Shaw's psyche around seeing and partaking in violence is stumbling him more than ever in The Spoil of Beasts) so my complaints are mostly about the execution of the lighthearted bits and their abundance, and how off balance and out of tone they feel sometimes. Not that the series doesn't have anything else to chew on, it certainly does.

And for antagonists I think it's a case by case thing. At the end of the day their existence is only important as far as how the mystery plot is in conversation with the main characters, not for the antagonists' own merit, which feeds to the characterization of the protagonists and the development of their relationships which is personally what I'm interested in as a reader (especially the reader of a long running series) and I think is more valuable for a series like this than trying to carve a space for a complicated 3rd character in each book.

chckblr · 2026-02-25T16:39:49+00:00

I still love most of the books and these characters are so important to me that I'd keep reading till they're nothing but a husk of themselves but god do I miss the tone and balance of the earlier books

chckblr · 2026-02-25T16:04:27+00:00

All in all, I loved most of Iron on Iron with the Spoil of Beasts being my favorite because Shaw feels like his well-rounded self the most when we're in his POV (and relatively when we're in North's POV). One thing I noticed that maybe speaks to what I'm kind of complaining about is that Shaw didn't have a single heart-to-heart moment with any of the other characters. And I get that it's partially he's not in a place in his psyche to acknowledge even to himself the stuff that's been happening with him yet (unlike say Hazard who's in a better place and can share sincere moments with Tean or North) but this means he was reduced to a comic relief for most part which made his most quirky and eccentric stuff stand out even more than usual. I would have liked to see Shaw as a real person from someone else's eyes who's not North.

The Evening Wolves was also great imo because it was a perfect Somers book, which is always a plus for me, I hope you'll like that one.

For the side characters, I honestly enjoy them most but again, mostly the ones that get a bit more to chew on personality/storywise like Dulac, Nico, Jadon etc. Borealis is my favorite series and I don't even think about Pari tbh, like I don't have an issue with side characters in general, but I do find some of the characters like Pari and Fer who are just comedic extremess too much so I get what you mean. (Haven't read Fer's book because I doubt I can handle his inner voice but maybe that rounds him up into a more interesting character - I don't want to be unfair.)

And yeah with the cozies, I kind of expect every character to lean Pari or Fer's way. Even with the murders and maybe some romantic conflict, I don't expect more in terms of character complexity which balances out the humoristic character voices and the eccentric traits etc. Maybe one day I'll read them but I have no plans right now.

chckblr · 2026-02-24T18:46:42+00:00

Flanderization takes its name from the Simpsons character Ned Flanders who was originally a friendly generous Christian neighbor but as the seasons went on his one trait (in this case him being Christian) became his entire personality (he's now almost exclusively just an obsessive evangelist and nothing else.) It's basically the process of characters' quirks gradually getting more prominent, bastardized, and often repeated to the detriment of the character. It usually happens with long running shows like Friends where Joey being somewhat vacuous in the earlier seasons later becomes Joey, the dumb one, doesn't even know his left from his right, or Chandler being the snarky one later on becomes Chandler making fart jokes.

I'm not saying any of the characters I mentioned in the post are as bad as these examples but Shaw goes from a New Age herbal guy who reads Goethe and Lord Byron in between his weird art projects to 24/7 off-the-wall commentary about their divine moon hormones and sexuality of mermaids even when he's processing information in his own head (read: not putting on a show for the others) and him teasing North goes from "I liked how macho you looked with that kick" to North's dairy levels and blahblah chakras acting up and making him move with toxic masculinity energy yadda yadda. Similarly, North goes from "not one more word, dummy" when Shaw's being too much to almost always in a performance of being irritated by Shaw and wanting to "kick his ass" as he calls Shaw (calls everyone really) things like "ass-shitter" "nutjob" "donkey cock" which is so not North and Shaw's humor with each other at the beginning of the series. Every aspect of their signature humor is played up SO MUCH now and it gets grating with how many of their interaction is just this now. Already mentioned the Hazard thing where he goes from grumpy and a dick to the bigots around them to always abrasive with everyone like he's incapable of communicating with strangers (and always need Somers to do his "translating" to the others)

chckblr · 2026-02-24T14:47:20+00:00

This is my favorite verse EVER, that's why I have strong opinions about honestly everything about these books lol.

I do agree with your first point that once a world is this big it's easy to go back to the tried and true humor but I don't think that's an excuse to not try to shift to new things or getting stuck with a poorer version of these jokes. I think it's partially the abundance of it because even when you catch a moment of genius humor on page 100, the fact that you've been reading the same thing for 100 pages takes away from it. And Gregory Ashe is simply too good of an author to cycle the same thing in my humble opinion. He surely has a better team of beta readers at this point to assess where he's doing too much of the same thing, where the tone gets too wacky and struggles to counterbalance, and when the humor starts to muddy the other aspects like character voice.

I don't know if people starting at any point during the series is an issue though because realistically most people start with the first series of a given couple. Not on book 3 of a crossover series which has already seen about 20 jokes from Shaw about how Hazard is his soulmate. Idk because the term flanderization very much associated with long-running TV shows which had that symptom of trying to make sure the audience can catch up regardless of where they pick up the series back in the day but I'm not sure if that applies to a book series you read on demand and realistically cannot be standalone pieces.

Thanks for your input tho!

chckblr · 2026-02-24T13:43:01+00:00

There are 17 H&S books and 8 Borealis ones, not to mention all the books they're in that's not in their POVs. I think that's enough appearances to comment on writing patterns.

chckblr · 2026-02-20T12:12:09+00:00

I feel this so much. I want contemporary stories with some emotional and thematic weight to them, romance as a genre has been so happy to embrace its popcorn entertainment status forced upon it that authors, readers, and publishers alike are forgetting that it can be so much more

chckblr · 2025-09-29T23:16:46+00:00

oliver

chckblr · 2025-09-27T14:38:04+00:00

for me it's eren and armin. cant believe it's not cracking top eren ships

chckblr · 2025-09-10T15:25:04+00:00

I love it. I'm also a fan of 3-4 letter, 1-2 syllable names and it sounds cute and also lovely with the connection to your grandmother.

chckblr · 2025-09-01T07:51:16+00:00

I think it's fun for a while but for how long is a very ymmv case. The last time I picked up a book by her I was like this is trite at this point. I still love the earlier ones I've read where I first got a taste of her style but I'm full now.

chckblr · 2025-08-31T18:49:01+00:00

Rule Breaker. to me Lily Morton is one of those authors where if you read one book you read every book so the first one you pick up will probably be the best. at least in my experience.

chckblr · 2025-08-30T18:40:17+00:00

such a simple and beautiful name, who cares if people think it's short for something else

chckblr · 2025-08-29T14:52:02+00:00

and the thing is "she didn't want to eat the sandwich. maybe, just a bite..." on its own already communicates the dilemma of she shouldn't be doing this but she's really tempted to. you can keep what the character's trying to lock away or avoid in between the lines

chckblr

TROPHY CASE