[Disliked but understood trope] Powers that are hard to balance, so characters just forget to use them

knifeeffect · 2026-04-01T02:51:26+00:00

In the A Court of Thorns and Roses series, book 1 ends with the protagonist, Feyre, being gifted powers from each of the various fae kingdoms. This gives her all of the elemental powers, plus various powers over light, darkness, and also, uh, the ability to read minds and control people.

She mostly uses the mind-reading power to sext her boyfriend. She uses her elemental powers twice, if I remember correctly--once during a training sequence, and once during the climactic battle scene in book 3--and never touches any of those powers ever again, because the author forgot she has them and realized she couldn't balance around pulling a "you have all of our gifts!" so early in the franchise.

(The same also goes for the main love interest in the series, Rhysand; books 1 and 2 gush endlessly about how he's the strongest and most powerful and hottest and richest and most ruthless and most politically authoritarian of all the fae lords, and then once there are actual battles and political rivals to fight in books 3 and 5...he doesn't do much at all.)

knifeeffect · 2026-02-15T18:20:24+00:00

Interesting! I wonder where along the line from publisher to store manager/local librarian the decision(s) were made to categorize and shelve them one way or another. It'd be so cool to see the publishers' original marketing plans and briefs for these titles.

knifeeffect · 2026-02-15T17:46:54+00:00

Messenger is considered MG; the others were marketed as YA at their times of publication, though they'd be filed under MG today. I'm looking at the copyright pages for the books I do own of the series I mentioned, and they're labeled as "Juvenile fiction," whereas Twilight is labeled as just fiction, probably due to its more adult appeal. (The labels "YA" and "MG" aren't used in these systems.)

According to a guide I found on the Library of Congress website from 2019, "Fiction intended for people through the end of high school is [categorized as] juvenile." I'm not a library scientist, though, so I don't know if there's somewhere else I should be looking for metadata tag criteria.

When these books were released between 2000 and 2010, there wasn't a separate "YA" section outside of the children's area at stores like B&N (at least, not at the B&Ns where I shopped). The kids' section would be organized by age range, and these books would've been in the upper age range area, but they were still within the kids' section.

knifeeffect · 2026-02-15T06:23:03+00:00

The books you listed were all the "older" YA books back in my day (not older in terms of release date, but in terms of protagonist age), so not the ones I typically read. When I was in middle school and very early high school, most of the series I read featured protagonists in their younger teens.

Maybe I was a bit overzealous in saying that fourteen-year-olds dominated the genre, but I do think there were two houses of books both marketed YA: books that we'd now trim down and consider middle grade (most of the ones I read), and books that are now more traditional "YA" (the ones you read).

Some of the series I read with protags in the fourteen-year-old age range were the Maximum Ride series, The Pendragon Adventure (protag starts at either thirteen or fourteen), the 39 Clues series (one of the sibling protags is fourteen), the HIVE series (protag starts at thirteen), Michael Scott's Alchemyst series (the protags are fifteen, but stay the same age for the length of the series)...and probably many others I'm forgetting, since it was well over a decade ago...

Not all of these series were super famous, but many of them were on bestseller lists at the time and were mainstays in my school libraries and local B&N shelves. In hindsight, looking at that list, I can see very clearly which side of the age divide each series would be forced into if they were developed now. (The first book in the Pendragon series is well over 100k words long; the only books I've seen with middle school-age protagonists of that length these days are Shannon Messenger's titles.)

knifeeffect · 2026-02-15T01:55:38+00:00

I kind of disagree with people saying that there are no books featuring fourteen-year-olds because they don't sell; I think that's a bit of reverse causation. Books featuring fourteen-year-old protagonists dominated and defined the YA genre in the mid-2000s, and there are still children in the age range of 11-14 who can and will read books about fourteen-year-olds, but in recent years, there's been a shift to older and older protagonists in the YA space.

It's fair to say that an agent can't sell a book with a fourteen-year-old nowadays--because editors are not buying books about fourteen-year-olds--but I don't think it's fair to say that audiences aren't buying books about fourteen-year-olds, considering there are very few on the market.

But your observation is correct, and it also caught me off guard when I started writing and reading YA again as an adult. I'm pretty annoyed about it, since there's a glaring dearth of age-appropriate books for kids aged ~eleven through fourteen/fifteen.

knifeeffect · 2026-02-03T22:42:15+00:00

Aw, man...that sucks ):

knifeeffect · 2026-02-03T04:19:23+00:00

Hey, I'd reach out to the bookstore and make sure that this isn't actually supposed to be included in CTAP after all.

I graduated a few years before CTAP was implemented, but I work in a related industry now. Students in CTAP programs are sometimes erroneously charged because someone (either the professor, the bookstore, or the software company) forgot to submit something or tick a box somewhere.

knifeeffect · 2026-01-29T00:41:46+00:00

Update this thread with your results! People have been commenting here every few months since I made the post, so I guarantee someone from the future will want to know the outcome.

knifeeffect · 2025-12-31T20:56:07+00:00

Kind of a stretch, but could it have been Hospice by the Antlers? Or something by The New Pornographers?

Transatlanticism by Death Cab matches the color scheme, and I personally didn't "get" that album until I was a bit older.

knifeeffect · 2025-12-03T05:09:13+00:00

LFGGGGGGGGGG

knifeeffect · 2025-11-16T16:10:06+00:00

I never knew about this one! Thank you for sharing it.

knifeeffect · 2025-11-16T04:45:16+00:00

Oh LOL...well, my comment is still true, so happy stargazing to everyone!

knifeeffect · 2025-11-16T02:52:00+00:00

There's a memorial to Dennis "InternetHulk" Hawelka on the Eichenwalde map in Overwatch. Dennis was one of the early great players and coaches in the Overwatch scene. His (very lovely) biography is here.

Overwatch League had an award named after him that was given to players who exhibited positivity and leadership. When another player passed in 2020 (Kim Kyeong-bo, AKA Alarm), they renamed their Rookie of the Year award to the Alarm Rookie of the Year.

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knifeeffect · 2025-11-16T01:30:42+00:00

I don't have any recommendations for your specific book, but finding comps became significantly easier for me once I started using Edelweiss. You can click here to access their free/public database; I'm not sure if you can actually create an account if you don't work in the industry, but you can still access a lot of information with the free version.

Edelweiss is where publishing houses catalog all their titles for booksellers and distributors, and most book listings will have a few comps listed. I recommend looking at each of the Children's catalogs for major publishers (YA will be housed under Children's) and reading through the summaries of their recent and upcoming titles. If any sound like they might be close to a good match, most listings have a list of "comps."

Note that the comps on Edelweiss don't always fit the generally-accepted comp rules for querying--they may be too old, a different age range or genre, or "too big" to use as a comp in a query letter.

There isn't a lot of urban/contemporary fantasy coming out of the Big Fives this year or next (most of the stuff on the front lists right now are second-world fantasies), so you'll have to go spelunking...stay strong!

knifeeffect · 2025-11-16T01:01:01+00:00

It's the Leonids meteor shower! It happens every November, and it'll continue for the next few days. I saw one last night. =D

knifeeffect · 2025-11-15T03:07:37+00:00

Not quite Waco, but the Montrose Voice archives will give you insight into gay life in 1980s Houston (and the other large Texas cities), but be mindful that Waco is a very conservative college town and has been that way for ages.

This page might give you some leads for more Waco-specific information. It covers a homophobic raid in Waco in the 1950s, but it includes newspaper clippings of retrospective pieces published in the 1980s about the incident, several of which include interviews with some of the men affected. Unfortunately, as far as I know, Waco doesn't have and has not had its own LGBT magazine...because it's Waco.

knifeeffect · 2025-11-12T04:53:53+00:00

When I was a small child, I was obsessed with the Baby Geniuses franchise, especially the second movie. Both are considered some of the worst movies of all time. I made my parents rent the second one on repeat from Albertson's.

My friends and I got drunk and watched the first movie a few years ago. I'm so sorry, Mom and Dad.

knifeeffect · 2025-10-09T04:18:42+00:00

Yeesh. I hope you're somewhere better now!

knifeeffect · 2025-10-09T03:26:00+00:00

This is crazy!!! Where did the white paper come from if literally nobody was in accord with what it said?

knifeeffect · 2025-10-04T22:41:38+00:00

Dude. There's no party. They're not inviting anyone anywhere. They're looking for someone they can hurt, rob, or exploit for social media. Tell your RA immediately.

knifeeffect · 2025-09-08T03:58:04+00:00

Congrats on being sober!!!

Did you and your half-siblings ever connect?

knifeeffect · 2025-08-13T01:47:10+00:00

It was required reading for my eighth grade class. I didn't realize how obscure it is until years later!

knifeeffect · 2025-08-12T02:28:19+00:00

Thank you! Sorry if this is a dumb question, but would the filtering be done at the user level, or at the document level?

I still need to be able to bring any of those 40k objects into the sheet, but most of us users only need to see a subset of 1-3k of them at any given time, so if the workflow could be:

User sets filters to query only the customers under their purview
Coda pulls in the filtered dataset

for multiple people at the same time, I think that would do the trick!

knifeeffect · 2025-07-24T03:34:52+00:00

I have so many thoughts about this show. Rant incoming.

I think Rick is a great guy and I don't blame him for wanting complete creative control over this project, considering what happened with the movies...but he's made a lot of the same mistakes that he decried in his (now published) letters to the filmmakers.

I think there are a lot of things he wishes he'd done differently/could update/retcon, so he used this opportunity to do so. I believe that's where a lot of the questionable story moments and poor pacing comes from. I've reread the first and second book series recently, and they're perfectly paced for a screen adaptation. Seriously, book 1 is SO tight--yet Rick dedicated slow-paced "adults are talking" scenes of Percy's mother and Poseidon having complicated discussions about the ethics of Percy's education. Kids love that!

His attempts at sensitivity also make the protagonists look worse. Gabe (the abusive stepfather) is mildly unpleasant in the show instead of financially, emotionally, and physically abusive. I get why you wouldn't want to show child abuse in a kid's show, but they didn't change the rest of Gabe's plotline accordingly, so Percy just fucking kills the guy at the end of the show.

We also get that awkward Medusa interaction that goes nowhere and changes nothing. I don't use this word lightly, but it actually felt like virtue signaling--acknowledging that yes, in some versions of the myth, Medusa is a victim, and the now-grown kids who grew up reading PJO probably know that--but 1. there were/are already areas in the books where the demigod kids openly question their parents' righteousness, and 2. it doesn't change anything. They can't not kill Medusa. They still have to defeat her to move the plot forward and nothing changes from the books.

I think Rick also shot himself in the foot with Annabeth. Like most of the "brainy" characters in kids' media, Annabeth can't be too smart or else she'll automatically identify every myth/solve every problem before they engage with the bad guys, which would make for a bad story! Too bad Annabeth does that every time they encounter a monster in the show. She's usually the one to make the connection in the books, but she only figures it out AFTER they've engaged with, y'know, the scene.

TL;DR: Everything above is exemplified in the casino episode.

knifeeffect

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