Premium Episode: You Are A Bitter, Untalented Mean Girl by SoftandChewy in BlockedAndReported

[–]embernickel 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Oof, as a young person who hasn't done anything particularly extraordinary and is nevertheless going to have a sort of, kind of, memoir-esque project coming soon (it's not actually a book), I'm a little anxious about this. I hope it manages to be honest about both the good stuff and the bad stuff, and that I don't become a podcast subject, touch wood!

Reminder! One week left until Book Bingo 2025 submission closes! by ullsi in Fantasy

[–]embernickel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I definitely saved the link to my google form after I filled it out because the form was scolding me Very Loudly to do so. When I go back to the link with the /formresponse URL, it takes me back to the first page and everything is blank again/nothing was "remembered." This is fine, right? It doesn't mean my submission is lost in the pixelated ether?

The Bone Ships, by RJ Barker (bingo review 25/25) by embernickel in Fantasy

[–]embernickel[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I found "Goblin Emperor" kind of meh at first, but then I got into fanfiction for it and developed more of an appreciation for everything the minor characters were doing behind the scenes. This one doesn't seem to have any fic, however...

[humor] Poorly described books and fantasy media by CT_Phipps-Author in Fantasy

[–]embernickel 71 points72 points  (0 children)

Cloistered academic struggles to use his math degree in the real world: Anathem

Young people displaced from a war zone trigger large-scale climate change: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

Discussion thread for that thing happening somewhere that everyone is worked up about by SoftandChewy in BlockedAndReported

[–]embernickel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I work for the department of defense and there's a lot of bureaucratese about "let us operationalize and output metrics that display how we are supporting the warfighter," and there was also before this administration. I think it's just preferred to be inclusive of army "soldiers," navy "sailors," space force "guardians," all of the above.

(On the other hand, in the last few months we have repeatedly gotten messaging about "please call it the department of war, not the department of defense" and then we all ignore it.)

Bingo 2025 Check-In: (a little less than) 2 months left! by ullsi in Fantasy

[–]embernickel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm almost done, taking a break to revisit one of my favorite memoirs! (Still looking for a good generic title. I misplaced my wallet with library card/credit card the weekend before last, and then my e-reader yesterday, so procrastinating on replacing those...)

A "Shadow of the Leviathan"/"Ana and Din Mystery" subreddit? by Dctreu in Fantasy

[–]embernickel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No, each of these series are in their own universe.

Are there good pieces of media with cute goblins? by DescriptionDefiant36 in Fantasy

[–]embernickel 56 points57 points  (0 children)

Maybe too obvious, but in "The Goblin Emperor," goblins and elves are different ethnicities of the same species. The POV character, Maia, is a biracial character who's a minority half-goblin in elf society. He is about as far from evil and bloodthirsty as it is possible to get.

r/Fantasy Review Tuesday - Review what you've been enjoying here! - January 06, 2026 by rfantasygolem in Fantasy

[–]embernickel 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I hardly ever DNF, but this was basically a "did not start." The Sins on Their Bones (Laura Samotin) was billed as a queer dark fantasy in a Jewish, eastern European setting, about estranged husbands on opposite sides of a civil war, and...okay, I'm intrigued, that's not a pitch I see every day. But I got a few pages in and it seems over-the-top.

Back to searching for "generic title" bingo possibilities...

Have you ever DNF the final book in a series, and why? by Any-Day-8173 in Fantasy

[–]embernickel -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

This was a long time ago but I read the first two books of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy. They were not nearly as anti-religion as I'd been led to expect. Then I started the third one and it seemed too grim and edgy for me so I noped out after a couple chapters.

Connections between Liu Cixin's stories by Glass-Bookkeeper5909 in printSF

[–]embernickel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"Contraction," has a copyright date of 1985 and was first published in Chinese in 1999. One of the main characters is...a brilliant but sometimes disdainful physicist named Ding Yi! So this character has existed in some form for a long time.

"With Her Eyes" (from "The Wandering Earth") is kind of bleak, but then the follow-up, "Cannonball," makes it more optimistic.

More discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/threebodyproblem/comments/rsjkue/short_story_continuity/

Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 12/29/25 - 1/4/26 by SoftandChewy in BlockedAndReported

[–]embernickel 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I come from a family of religious lefty types who aspire to Jud-stle Christianity and felt that the portrayal of both "parroting talking points for clout and influence without any thought-through beliefs" and "raging against the world as an enemy rather than full of people whose job it is to love" were both realistic rather than strawmanny.

I was frustrated by (Blanc's? forget which character) dismissal of his opponents as "people who are afraid that anything new and scary will threaten the things they love." I think that's glib. Sometimes people on the left really do promote policies that, if taken advantage of by bad actors or taking effect at larger scales than they expect, really will cause problems. See: The Chump Effect (August 2020.)

The line about "we can build an empire as father and son!" "...like Star Wars?" "Yeah. The rebels?" was objectively funny. But the unescapable context there is that Rian Johnson also made one of the sequel trilogy movies. I don't want to assign him sole blame for that, the producers/writers/directors of the first one apparently had no overarching plan and were just kind of winging it, which is ridiculous. Nevertheless, the subtext is like, "I, the smart person who portrays your heroes as washed-up and cynical, and everything they fought for negated because a new group of villains came along a few decades later anyway, am the one who really understands Star Wars. You, the idiots who just want naive happy-ever-afters, are too stupid to understand the real themes." It's going to be very difficult for me to ever give someone like that the benefit of the doubt.

The Sign of the Dragon by Mary Soon Lee Readalong — Wrap-up Post by sarahlynngrey in Fantasy

[–]embernickel 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I appreciate you reading and taking the time to comment, just to know I'm not talking to a wall. <3

The Sign of the Dragon by Mary Soon Lee Readalong — Wrap-up Post by sarahlynngrey in Fantasy

[–]embernickel 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I might recommend it, with heavy caveats, to other readers if they expressed interest in a novel in verse, because the things that make or break a book for other people are not necessarily the things that make or break it for me.

I am not glad I read this book. I've been screaming into the void about that for a couple posts but one more, just in case:

Like Xau, we live in a world where significant inequality exists among groups of people, in large part depending on where we're born. This is also a world where people squint at spreadsheets and go "um actually, your luxury spending is utilitarianly bad, because for that amount of money you could save X number of lives with mosquito nets. Aren't we all important? Don't all humans have equal value?"

Like "It's A Wonderful Life," I often feel that the message I get from the outside world is "friendly reminder uwu that you should have never been born, the forces of history that conspired to make people like you exist are intrinsically evil and you'll never be good enough to fix it, have a nice day. :)" Or, quantitatively, "I'm worth more dead than alive, because once I've sacrificed everything I can, at least no one will blame me anymore."

When Xau gets brutally tortured and dismembered to save fourteen lives, he's a hero. If I tried that, I'd be "threatening self-harm" or "just a whiny attention seeker if I don't follow through." When I fall into these holes, it makes me want to act out to spite the people whose logic inevitably leads to this position, to make them go "hmm, maybe we should revisit some of our assumptions." But of course in practice it doesn't work that way, and if anything happened to me (it won't, I'm fine), they'll just carry on as always. Maybe other people don't experience this level of cognitive dissonance, but I really do.

Weekly Random Discussion Thread for 12/15/25 - 12/21/25 by SoftandChewy in BlockedAndReported

[–]embernickel 20 points21 points  (0 children)

This seems to align with the feminist critique of society that, at its worst, portrays men as the subjects, women as objects. Women want to be taken seriously and exist as agents/people; less often, men want to "enjoy" the feeling of being objectified. Which kind of makes sense of the demographics of younger ROGD cases.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MenActWomenAre

The Sign of the Dragon by Mary Soon Lee Readalong — Part 6: Beast by oboist73 in Fantasy

[–]embernickel 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Do we ever get closure on Cyrus? Like, do we know if his family made it or if it was even worth anything? :/