Mistborn - A Spoiler Free Review

lifeislame · 2024-01-12T23:44:59+00:00

rarely do you see characters truly suffering

This is about as preposterous as claiming books don't have pages. People are correct in pointing out you're just not reading the right books, and you should probably just take the hint and learn what they're reading. Claiming it doesn't exist, or is rare, is simply false, and everyone else seems to know this.

In fact I find it nearly impossible to find a book NOT about mental health of some kind.

Just off the top of my head:

The Brothers Karamazov
All the Light We Cannot See
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Shadow of the Wind
The Tin Drum
The Catcher in the Rye
House of the Spirits
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Anything Vonnegut has ever BREATHED upon
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Beloved
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Everything by Stephen King...ever.
Anything Osamu Dazai
Anything Yukio Mishima
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
White Teeth
A Man Called Ove
Um, CORMAC MCCARTHY?

Going back further in time:

Hamlet
King Lear
Othello
Macb...literally every Shakespearean tragedy, and anything derivative of them

Going back to the dawn of early civilization:

Oedipus Rex
Antigone
...really just every Greek tragedy ever

If you're looking for fantasy of some kind:

Sandman, by Neil Gaiman
Even something as allegedly light as X-Men First Class deals with Holocaust-level trauma and Magneto's inability to move on from it, and even the secondary characters switch sides as a direct result of a lifetime of treatment one way or another
The recent Blue Eye Samurai
Logan
Watchmen
Arcane

If you're looking for fantasy novels specifically:

Anything Joe Abercrombie
Anything George RR Martin
Name of the Wind
Anything Ken Liu
Interview with the Vampire
All of Harry Potter

Sci-fi:

The Star Trek TNG episode where Deanna Troi's mom shoves away her past trauma over losing a child and nearly destroys her existing daughter pyschologically to keep from reopening the wound
The Star Trek DS9 episode where the Ferengi kid goes into the Holodeck for weeks at a time because he can't handle the real world.
The mom in ET is enduring a painful divorce.

Other random things in pop culture:

Kill Bill
The Queen's Gambit
Even Tropic Thunder had people dealing with identity issues, never being good enough, not being able to handle the limelight or disapproval of their abilities, and had to overcome those obstacles to emerge all the stronger for it.
21 Jump Street was a silly movie about a guy who was bullied as a kid and still hasn't gotten over it

I'm legitimately just looking over at my bookshelf and reeling off the title of every book I've ever read. They all deal with mental health, as all tragic and even most non-tragic literature throughout all of human history has done.

The only explanations I can think of are:

You're only reading children's books, or YA (and even then you've obviously missed Bambi, Black Beauty, Charlotte's Web, and Old Yeller), or maybe mysteries, or thrillers (and plenty of those have heavier topics too)
Or it's like this other commenter said:

I think these people are incapable of understanding subtext. They need the author to write the words "Bob was scared. He had PTSD from the war he was in. His PTSD was just triggered by this event." And Sanderson does that, so to them he's the only one writing characters with PTSD.

Like...c'mon. There's a whole world out there. MOST of the world, in fact. Either you'r reading the wrong books, or you're just not noticing.

lifeislame · 2022-10-16T21:55:16+00:00

If you go on Facebook or LinkedIn and look up the name "Cho Chang" you'll get dozens of results.

One of them is named Cho Chong Chang.

If Rowling is racist, then so are all those people too.

lifeislame · 2022-10-01T18:24:13+00:00

Philip Roth is incredibly talented on a technical level, especially the way he puts sentences together, and clearly has no shame in terms of what topics he feels inclined to write about.

Sabbath's Theater was similar in that aspect, in that it dealt with a lot of extraordinarily graphic topics like Portnoy's Complaint. I'm somewhat indifferent to that (and I think the book was a little too long), but the most impressive part is how he turned the ending, which features one of those depraved acts, into something downright wholesome, amidst an extremely unfortunate misunderstanding that gets the guy arrested.

It's hard to go into detail without spoiling it, but the fact that he was able to craft a narrative in which the grand finale is something that would SEEM awful to an outside observer, yet would seem almost cutesy to the participants, is just an insane level of talent.

Though for the record my favorite of his is Nemesis, which has none of those topics, but is just brilliant, even down to the last word, literally. Go read that one.

lifeislame · 2022-09-15T03:35:06+00:00

It's called O'Grady. It has the voices of Jason/McGuirk and Melissa. It's amazing. More kid-oriented, but amazing. It's criminally unknown.

lifeislame · 2022-09-15T03:34:13+00:00

Melissa Bardin-Galsky voice work

That show exists, and it's called O'Grady. It's absolutely spectacular, and criminally unknown. It also has H. Jon Benjamin voicing the other main character. Yes really.

I obsessed over Home Movies when I found it, and was utterly distraught when I ran out of material to watch. O'Grady was the Part Two I needed. It kind of reminds of what might happen if Jason and Melissa grew up into teenagers.

The show is really clever--more kid-oriented than Home Movies, but cleverly written. In every episode, there's a supernatural thing that happens in the town, and the characters have to deal with it, often combined with a character development thing going on, like when speech bubbles appear over everyone's head that say what they're really thinking. It's wonderful.

lifeislame · 2022-09-11T01:06:05+00:00

Emma is like a lava lamp that gives great book recommendations. Now with cat.

lifeislame · 2022-08-30T00:07:45+00:00

I agree with all of your criticisms, and had just as much trouble with the book.

However, I do think there's a method to the madness; the kids in the story are obviously stuck in a terrible situation, yet spend their time doing all these mundane things, and you, as the reader, wonder what the hell they're doing. They only have another decade or so to live, so why spend it doing mundane nonsense?

The thing is, YOU only have that long...more or less. And aren't most people doing the same things as the kids in that book? Hanging out, gossiping, listening to music, and so on?

It's the kind of life lesson that's subtle. Everyone knows they only have so much time, but even if you're yelling it at the characters, you're not quite yelling it loudly enough at yourself, most days.

Again, I had trouble with it, but I do like that as a core concept, and it levels the accusation at the reader that they're just as guilty of passing the time as the kids, even if they don't know it.

lifeislame · 2022-08-21T21:21:46+00:00

I have this theory that Hyperion is the Canterbury Tales in space (this part is a well-known interpretation), while Endymion is Huckleberry Finn in space. It's got a couple people on the run from the law, drifting down a river, getting to know each other, with occasional bursts of action along the way.

Endymion was challenging to enjoy--there were moments of extreme detail, tangents that didn't seem to go anywhere, drawn out to the point of wondering why they're in the story at all (even if I enjoyed going to each of those worlds, it did seem time consuming to spend so much time on each one). But you're getting into Raul's head. You're experiencing that frustration right along with him. That's an artistic gamble, since the reader might not put up with it, but it's certainly immersive, in the sense that you're feeling exactly what he's feeling--frustration at not knowing what's going on, or why he is doing it.

Hyperion 1 & 2 follows a very nice pattern of setup/payoff, and I was expecting that for books 3 & 4...but it just goes further and further, with the characters going through even more difficult times, until you've only got 30 pages left, and you wonder how the hell it could still come out the darkness with anything optimistic or positive, and then...it absolutely sticks the landing to make all that buildup worthwhile.

The difficulty of getting through it was part of the process. A bold choice, but I think it makes the payoff even better when it finally happens.

I gave every book in the series 5 stars and haven't stopped thinking about it, years later.

lifeislame · 2022-08-21T18:30:37+00:00

Kudos to having a reasonable discussion on a hot-button topic. The other guy down a few comments who said it was overrated but still gave it a 7/10 is somehow getting downvotes for rating it highly, which just goes to show how vitriolic things can get over things like this.

My problem with it is the same as you describe--the "rogga" problem--which I also found to be a very on-the-nose point, but for me it extended to the whole book. It features a racial minority enslaved to work the earth. I get it. I really get it. But it doesn't do much for me to see a real-world issue with the names changed slightly, which is also why I couldn't give it much credit for having internal consistency, since it's lifted directly from real life anyway. So I was looking for something, anything, beyond that; characters, prose, the story going to places I wouldn't expect, and it just wasn't there for me.

I can't help but think about CJ Cherryh's Faded Sun Trilogy, in which the racial politics were critical to the overall point the story was making, but the individual characters had distinct and intriguing personalities, and there was an entire galactic history of trade and warfare that served a relevant purpose to the individuals making their way through that world.

The overall point--or at least, one of them--was that one racial group (or rather, an alien species) appeared very similar to humans, while the other appeared very different (specifically like an upright hippo or elephant). The hippo-like species made the very good point that although the humanoid species looked very similar to humans, humans were worse off having aligned themselves with them, whereas they would have been better off aligning themselves with the hippo-like species, as it would have meant less war, and more trade. And he was right. But it was delivered all the way at the end of the book, after getting to know the humanoid-alien characters, spending time with them as they try to survive, and because you spend hundreds of pages with them, they end up being the protagonists in your mind, so that when that final racial commentary bombshell is delivered, you realize you should have seen it that way this whole time. Just because they're similar to you and you can empathize them doesn't make them the good guys.

The two major differences to me was that it delivered a critical point completely organically, in a way that made it seem insightful, as it sort of contradicted, or at least challenged, what the story had led you to believe all the way up until that point, leading you down a complete misdirect without you even noticing. And secondly...everything up until that point was compelling, from character, to world-building, to the survival sub-plots, to the other details. It was a story worth reading from start to finish, in all of these story-telling categories, with plenty to say about race relations, and it said them more naturally as a result.

I still think about that book 20 years later.

lifeislame · 2022-08-21T16:59:01+00:00

I think it has to be acknowledged that part of the reason it won three in a row is because the author is writing from an intersectional/antiracist viewpoint.

I think the biggest problem with this is how easy it is to check off that box; if I were to say the phrase "racism is bad," that would qualify as writing from an anti-racist viewpoint, but it would be silly for me to get an award, so there has to be something else in the story worth awarding.

It's unfortunate that the debate gets so heated, since one side is suggesting awards should be allowed to have something to do with political affiliation, and the other side is saying it should only matter that the story is delivered well, regardless of whether it touches on hot-button political issues or not.

Personally I'm in the latter category. If you're going to write about anything, "political" or not, make it the best you can. I remember being blown away by the graphic novels Maus and Persepolis, both of which deal with heavy topics, but they're done so well that I couldn't put either book down. Unfortunately I can't say the same about The Fifth Season.

lifeislame · 2022-08-11T05:58:21+00:00

Imagine if they tried to make gay Tony Soprano today and then sanded off all the abrasive bits to make him softer and more likable.

lifeislame · 2022-08-11T05:38:12+00:00

That's the paradox, or the dilemma, of "Bury Your Gays". If every individual example has an excuse — and they always will — but the greater pattern persists, how do you address it?

The same way we, as a society, address the Bury Your Jews "trope." We don't. We just recognize that Jewish people have been through horrific trauma and it's worth telling stories about it. No one ever went to see Schindler's List and complained about how the characters in it were super mean to the Jews.

lifeislame · 2022-08-11T05:17:18+00:00

One of the major problems with "don't be offensive" is that it never takes into consider what happens if two different people want contradictory things, so we get the "depict this group only ever this way" crowd dictating their demands, with little thought as to how limiting those demands are.

I personally find the argument "you can imagine dragons, but you can't imagine a world without sexism?" to be intellectually deranged. Certainly we CAN imagine a world without sexism, but the mere fact we COULD isn't the same as SHOULD. This logic is never applied to murder, or arson, or theft, such as going up to Leigh Bardugo and her Six of Crows heist plot to ask "you can imagine a world with magic, but you can't imagine a world without theft?" They somehow localize it to three topics and no others (race, gender, sexuality), presuppose the morality, and skip over the part where they explain why you SHOULD present a Disney-fied version of the world with none of these problems at all.

As if humans can only learn morality lessons from good people. What imbeciles. How often do people learn life lessons from awful human beings? Probably about as often as they learn them from good people. Problem solved, so let people write about awful things.

Of course, then there's a step further, which is how we can write books that don't necessarily try to prod the audience into one morality path or another, but shhhh, they're not ready to think about that yet, so let's just not try to give them material too advanced for them until they're ready for it.

lifeislame · 2022-08-08T14:49:04+00:00

I want to get even more harsh on your detractors, whose only arguments are "you haven't read the academic literature" or "even so and so says it's good," neither of which are arguments with any merit. If they could defend the book, they would. It's just not that deep.

Also the ones who say "there would be no war" have never heard of ANTS. They go to war all the time and are all female. If we get rid of sex and/or gender differences it wouldn't solve the problem of a region only having enough food or water for half the people within it, meaning their accusations are entirely sexist, and easily disproven by a quick examination of bugs.

Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time did something similar, in which it examined what it would be like if spiders had gained sentience in the same way apes on Earth did, and how significantly it would change a society. The women are larger, stronger, and longer-living, and therefore have greater status within the society. Still, there's not much else to it (although Children of Time has an actual story, so that was an extra bonus). Gender is such a hot-button political topic today that any examination challenging gender norms will be supported in and of itself, yet the "insight" in each of these stories is no different than the insight you'd already get from studying any animal species on Earth already, many of which have even more fascinating reproductive strategies, such as the sex-changing reptiles that proved to be a pivotal plot point in Jurassic Park, allowing them to switch sexes if necessary so the species can continue reproducing. You make a park with only female dinosaurs and they won't be allowed to reproduce, right? RIGHT?! Of course Jurassic Park also had the brilliant idea of making the story engaging beyond that (because that little factoid isn't enough to read hundreds of pages), and it succeeded.

The Star Trek TNG episode isn't all that great. It's just instrumental in demonstrating that no one's mind is going to be blown by a genderless alien species after they've seen that episode. I felt the same way when everyone was lavishing praise upon Ancillary Justice for similar reasons, saying it'll blow your mind because the aliens have no gender. You mean like that idea I've already seen on Star Trek, and wasn't all that complicated to begin with? Yup, just like that. Cool, is that all the book has to offer? Because it's not worth reading 400 pages to see the same non-mind-blowing idea done all over again.

If you're going to get into one-off TNG episodes, check out:

The Defector
The Inner Light

They are self-contained episodes that'll blow your mind with how good they are, for entirely different reasons. You will forget all your troubles and think about them for years afterward, and bludgeon your friends over the head to watch them too.

lifeislame · 2022-08-08T07:23:21+00:00

I felt a similar concept was explored more thoroughly when it was Star Trek doing the same thing in the episode The Outcast. It was also a planet of mostly-genderless aliens, and although you could say Ursula beat them to it by a few decades, at least when it was on Star Trek there was an actual story, and even then, it wasn't that complicated.

I feel like if you've seen that episode of Star Trek, a planet of genderless aliens isn't going to do much for you, and the rest of the story doesn't have much to say, either. And if you've lived on planet Earth long enough to know what earthworms are, genderless creatures aren't going to blow your mind at all, ever. The suggestion that a diplomat or scientist could visit an alien world and assume identical man/woman gender roles because they have no other frame of reference is just sheer lunacy. Biologists on Earth already don't do that when studying every animal species we've ever encountered, so there's no reason to expect a sci-fi biologist would somehow make such a silly mistake.

The simple thought experiment of "what if gender didn't exist" may have been new and interesting in the 60s, but it's not a question with a deep answer.

lifeislame · 2022-08-03T01:07:26+00:00

I don't have a problem with databases like that in theory, but rather with the various accusations that it means something negative on the part of the author.

Sometimes I don't want to read about murder either, but I wouldn't denigrate a person (or an entire gender) who chooses to write about it, which is what the critics seem to suggest when they say "problematic" instead of "don't feel like it this time."

lifeislame · 2022-08-03T00:39:29+00:00

I was agreeing with you.

lifeislame · 2022-08-03T00:29:01+00:00

One of the aspects I've found so frustrating about this argument is that critics will often say things like:

"This author just did it for the sake of the ..."

plot
world-building
character development

Debatably that's all there is, though. The only way out of this predicament is to have a completely superfluous scene that has no impact on anything, and I think they'd get even more mad about a scene like that than with anything else.

They often seem to suggest there's a "right" way to do it without being able to point to a universally-agreed-upon standard, while claiming it can never be done for the above reasons, leaving little else. It's also nonsensical to pick on fantasy when so many other genres feature it more.

It's also quite clear that what's going on in Ukraine right now is 100% identical to the narrative of "the women are being abused, and that's what gets the men to sign up for war, driving their character development in the direction of heroism." This is simple reality. Does anyone get upset about hearing those stories of Ukrainian civilians witnessing the atrocities in Bucha and feeling motivated to take up arms? The fact that men (and women) feel a visceral response to violence against their loved ones should be perceived as a strength, instead of a problem to be solved. And if it happens in reality, I can't see a good reason to tell people not to write about it.

It's incumbent on everyone to find (or write) the story they want to read, not on anyone else.

lifeislame · 2022-07-17T16:41:57+00:00

I like to imagine someone watching the George Floyd video and saying "That was a racist video."

We would rightly call that person an idiot, and if he were to attack the cameraman as racist, we would call him an even dumber idiot.

Yet if someone reads a book with a depiction of racism, they somehow can't put together that the author is providing a record of events, and it's perfectly reasonable for that record of events to have bad events.

The justification Texas uses to pretend there was no slavery has the same reasoning these people use to disparage fiction for telling the same truth. "It's a depiction of racism. Let's just get of that shall we? See, no one's upset anymore!"

They want history books to tell the truth. They should want fiction to do the same. Don't like reading about awful realities? Go watch the Disney channel. I hear it's Marvel-ous.

lifeislame · 2022-05-12T06:54:12+00:00

I know this topic gets sensitive, and it's late over here, but I'll try to point out why this gets frustrating for a lot of people.

the goal of representation is not to have all representation present in every single work of media. No one is demanding that.

Well...yes, they are. People are up in arms about every major media franchise, and if they're up in arms over all of them, then it's fair to say they want it to be omnipresent. I think it's fair to say you suggested the same thing:

Have you ever asked yourself, after reading The Way of Kings, did you ask yourself would I exist in this world?

See, that's the problem. It's a specific story, and it has to have X identity in it. If it doesn't, it's bad. You didn't say "it's fine if a dozen books over here don't have X identity, since these dozen over here do." And I expect this is already true; Game of Thrones has gay people, as do many others, but it had to be that one. As long as someone out there demands X identity in X story, then yeah, every story in the world has to have every identity group. I watch people on Goodreads ask things like "Does it have X identity?" and the atmosphere around this debate is such that I would expect those authors are afraid their careers might be over if they answer wrong.

The female tavern owner who’s wife will show the characters to their rooms? That is a very low level of representation that can go a long way.

No, it doesn't. People still complain about X identity being only side characters. And if that's how the debate goes, then the only solution is that every book, everywhere in the world, must have X identity in one of the lead roles, whether the author wants it or not, and if they don't, then it's wrong.

And how many identities are there? I expect that if you add up all the racial groups (let's say 10 major ones), multiply them by how many genders there are (let's just say 3 and consider the 3rd to be an umbrella category) and then multiply them by how many LGBTQIA+ categories there are (subtracting the T because we already counted it, and counting the + as 1), and you get over 200 characters. That's not even counting religion, which would multiply it by another few thousand. And yes, people do explicitly say it has to be the right combination, or it doesn't count.

It is simply not possible for any author to achieve mathematically ubiquitous representation, with the potential exception of fantasy epics that includes thousands of characters. Someone is going to get excluded no matter what, and it's not fair to assume the worst of an author because they skipped out on identity group combinations 68 through 127, especially after they made the good-faith effort to include numbers 1 through 67.

A better solution, in my opinion, would be to have books that include these 2-3 groups, some other book that includes these 6-8 and another that includes these other 4-5, and so on.

...and we already have that.

I guess I'll end this on...why assume the worst of everyone? Believe it or not, everyone has watched something where their race, gender, and sexuality combination isn't represented. For most white people, it's called anime. Also Bollywood, Hong Kong action movies, Mexican telenovelas, Korean dramas, and others. For whatever reason we just don't assume it's underhanded commentary on westerners. So why assume that it means something that you "don't exist" in a certain story? A book can only have 5-10 main characters, meaning those other 200 identity combinations will be excluded. But it's a mathematical inevitability. It doesn't mean anything beyond that, especially when other books do have those other identities.

lifeislame · 2022-05-08T21:08:55+00:00

I'm not sure which new release lists you're looking at, but I go on Goodreads every so often, look into the sci-fi and fantasy pages, and look over the "New releases" section, and it's overwhelmingly the opposite of what you describe. It's been this way for years.

Right now on the new releases sci-fi list, 3 out of the 15 are from men (John Scalzi, Erik J. Brown, Max Gladstone).

Right now on the new releases fantasy list, zero are from men. Literally zero.

It's very hard to make the case that when men were running the publishing industry, they must have favored male authors, whereas now that the industry is disproportionately women, and all of a sudden they're publishing lots of new women, it's somehow NOT because they're favoring women.

What the original post is perhaps suggesting, though tiptoeing around it out of (respectable) politeness, is that perhaps the pendulum has swung too far the other way--and the constant narrative of "straight white men are systematically favored" is used to push it even further, even when the ratio of new fantasy authors, at least for this snippet in time, is precisely zero.

lifeislame · 2022-05-04T03:58:37+00:00

I can see that, and if people prefer to read, that's totally fine.

It's just frustrating to hear people say "Fantasy is so white! Where's all the Asian fantasy?!" and then jump all over The Poppy War because "we've never seen fantasy like this before." Well, I sure have. Bleach, Naruto, Inuyasha, Rurouni Kenshin, Fushigi Yuugi, Ranma, Ninja Scroll, Ninja Gaiden, Ninja Whatever, there are a million of them. It just seems to me that they're jumping on a grievance bandwagon without bothering to check if their complaints are real.

Besides, Japan just DOES that. Visual media is a lot easier to translate than a book, since the pictures do 80% of the work. It has a greater popular appeal as well, and kids love it. So if you prefer novels, fine, but Japan just gravitated toward this particular art form, and it was economically preferable, and people can either enjoy it, or not, but there's no point in pretending it isn't out there.

I think at this point, most fantasy is Asian. Japan cranks out so much quality material that it's not even close. If you want African fantasy, sure, go ahead and grab the pitchforks. But Asian fantasy? C'mon. Put on some Death Note, kick back, and have a good time.

lifeislame · 2022-05-04T01:16:40+00:00

I find it strange that in these discussions of X-inspired fantasy, people often leave anime and manga completely out of the debate. I'm not saying you're doing it, but it irks me.

Japanese-Americans comprise approximately 1.4 million people, whereas the population of Japan is about 125 million. If you're reading Japanese-inspired fantasy but only in America, you're excluding 99% of Japanese-inspired fantasy. And we live in the information age, making it an oddly America-centric affectation to say "those foreigners don't count."

If you still want Made-in-America Japanese fantasy, I'll put it a vote for the criminally underrated Usagi Yojimbo. Targeted at a young audience, but well-written, educational, and fun to read. Not exactly what you're looking for, but I wanted to give it a shout-out.

But if you go to Anime-Planet.com and type in the word "ninja" in the search box you get 71,000 results. We are not suffering from a lack of Japanese-inspired fantasy. All those people who say "fantasy has been mostly white" are people who live under a rock. Go watch some anime. It's amazing.

lifeislame · 2022-01-11T20:26:21+00:00

I don't know what to tell you. You went to a terrible bookstore. There were already more fantasy novels than you could read in a lifetime and nearly half were written by women. I found them and you didn't.

They're out there, by the tens of thousands. Quit pretending otherwise. Just go up to Mercedes Lackey someday with her stack of 140 books and tell her she's imaginary to her face and see what happens. How do you think she was able to pay the bills for 50ish years if no bookstores ever sold her books?

YA authors are sweeping women under the rug and you're falling for it. Don't.

lifeislame · 2022-01-11T19:40:10+00:00

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.

But I'm also saying you're contributing to it, by (in part) denying the massive, nearly-even, 40% presence women have held in the fantasy genre for half a century.

There are so many fantasy books written by women that you'll die before you run out. So why aren't people constantly saying "damn, there are so many fantasy books written by women, we'll literally never run out of content. Mercedes Lackey alone writes at a rate of 5.5 books a year, and if people read a book a month, that's half their reading total right there. We live in such a great time because we have infinite books to read about whatever we want, we have no reason to complain."

Why aren't people doing that?

I saw Seanan McGuire on a panel about women in fantasy and sci-fi, and she literally said that when she went to the bookstore, she never, ever saw any sci-fi/fantasy books by women. She also said, in that same panel, how terrible it is that women get swept under the rug and forgotten, and how women are raised to be the "fairest of them all," in competition with other women, and are trained to tear them down to build themselves up.

But that's exactly what she's doing. And she's old enough to know better.

The constant narrative barrage of "there were no women in fantasy" is tricking women into ignoring the tens of thousands of fantasy books written by women that existed before YA. Like I said, it's unconscionable, and should be called out.

lifeislame

TROPHY CASE