idk maybe it's having lived the actual irony of a family member who ran a funeral home and was constantly being pulled away from dinners because "people die at the most inconvenient times!" dying tragically young a week before Christmas, you can't make that shit up but it was still anything but tidy
Not really sure why this is my line but something about OPTIMALLY TIMED DEATH! hence GRIEF AS NARRATIVE WRINKLE! makes me feel genuinely insulted as a reader and it makes me so angry that it's almost impossible for me to sit with anything I liked about the story up to that point.
Man there is no way for a story to lose me faster than "Everything is going great! Story is about to resolve! Time for a secondary character to SUDDENLY DIE!!! Guess we've got a whole new set of emotional baggage to unpack!!"
Look I just think it takes an astonishing deftness of hand to write a world where society rejects magical powers when they are obviously really fucking cool and everyone would want to have them/be in the good graces of people who have them, it's been done well obvi but it should not be the default!!
Magic is scary and powers need to be hidden, AND our heroine gets bullied because she doesn't have powers yet! BOO!
Witches are queens, like literally ran the government, AND they've always been reviled by society! EW!
Magic is a status symbol, EXCEPT the extra powerful kind our heroine has! WEAK!
The more romantasy I read the more I realize I don't really care about the design of a magic system but I care a LOT about the role of that magic system in the fictional society
Brand New Video!!!
We're digging into the "All Her Fault" Horror Phenomenon and asking ourselves, is it *really* All Her Fault?
šŖ youtu.be/uaQ3Sb9FIKU?...
The Name of the Wind still has a lot to recommend it I think, it's a bit of a male competency fantasy that doesn't really believe women are people but it's not the wall to wall facepalm that the back half of TWMF has been imo