janeyshivers

i genuinely do not know how the hell this ended up critically well-liked and with a fairly active fanbase on tumblr. it is miserable. a complete waste of a fun, outlandish premise (following the villainess as she plans to Make That Heroic Twink Pay) to deliver a totally boilerplate magic school book

it'd maybe give some oppurtunity to flesh out the fucking woeful supporting cast, all of whom lack any defining character traits or even the bare minimum of well-rendered designs or cool noteworthy magic powers. i finished the book five hours ago and could not confidently name five side characters

doesn't help that none of this exposition is delivered naturalistically or in a characterful way. El is an outsider who lives isolated from most wizards and keeps to herself until the events of the book, would it kill you to have her make talk some of this relentless infodumping through?

of what hard magic gives you, which is a consistent power set to twist in interesting ways. there was no use of magic that made me go "ohhh, that's clever!" El just pulls whatever she needs out of her arse in the moment and then gives us two pages of backstory about why it worked the way it did

in fact most of it is demystifying all the magical aspects of the world, brutally systematising everything and removing any sense of wonder the reader might have about how any of this might work. it's dull and plodding and miserable, a crude attempt at hard magic that doesn't even take advantage

also i am very patient with infodumps. i love an author taking a paragraph out to tell me how the economics of their stupid setting works. but even for me the sheer volume of them in this book was fucking unbearable. it is constant, for pages at a time, and none of it is very interesting

Novik's page mentions she worked on Neverwinter Nights and i very much believe it because this book reads like i'm playing the boring neutral path in a shitty RPG with all the fun evil options gated off by the fact that this is a novel and the author is a coward

the overarching story is dogshit. there barely is one, the core conflict is just paper-thin characters navigating a school setting that is exceptionally poorly rendered by the descriptive prose. i could not describe a single notable feature about the Scholomance.

might end up getting villainised against her will in a story with an all-american white boy hero! instead her and Orion's suffering is pitched as equal and opposite, because he's put on such a pedestal, but again, nobody knows El is meant to be evil! it doesn't come up!

she can simply choose to stop being potentially evil, because there's no external pressure forcing her into a villainous role! nobody who needs a scapegoat, nobody who she wants revenge on badly enough to do some fucked up shit, no social function and no substantial commentary on how a brown girl

it tries to be about "defying your fate" since El is apparently prophesised to destroy the world, but it completely fails to tell a compelling "choosing not to be a villain" storyline because EL NEVER DOES ANYTHING BAD OR WRONG, and nobody around her knows about her supposed fate either!

El spends the rest of the book stubbornly standing up for truth and justice and never killing or hurting anyone or using evil magic even when the text makes it clear it would be 100% justified, and falling in love with the hunky hero boy in one of the most passionless love subplots i've ever read

sorry this book has been pissing me off all week so now you're all gonna hear about it. it makes a big deal about how the protag Galadriel "El" Higgins is a dark sorceress just waiting to bloom into full evil, and her initial motivation is murdering the school's resident hero boy for crossing her

it's a shame because i remember quite liking Temeraire when i read it, because the premise of that book was "the Napoleonic Wars but with dragons" aka the coolest premise that could exist and the premise of this book is "what is the most joyless magical world we can come up with"

cover of "A Deadly Education" by Naomi Novik, blue background with a gold squiggle on it (looks fucking awful tbh)

made the mistake of poking my head out of the Riordan bubble to read some other contemporary YA and maybe the reason his books got so much worse over the years is his competition was shit like A Deadly Education, like i also would not try if dreck like this was being released to glowing reviews

>:D

Blowback if it was being recorded in the Post-Disaster Timeline [serious music that nonetheless sounds kinda like the FTL OST] KULWIN: and these Tekkadan kids, they have no idea what they're hauling JAMES: no, this guy, Orga... Itsuka-? KULWIN: yeah, Itsuka JA...

Also read @janeyshivers.bsky.social’s excellent Post-Disaster Blowback post web.archive.org/web/20250106...

i wouldn't go out of your way, that's all i'll say lol

(this is not to say Caliban and the Witch is even remotely as bad Court of the Dead but it does perhaps speak to some sort of wider issue now doesn't it!)

i also just finished Caliban and the Witch and it's very funny that if you ask me about the book i just finished that leaves its attempt to deal with themes of patriarchy and queerphobia maddeningly incomplete by point-blank refusing to grapple w the existence of trans people i'd be like "which one"

GENUINELY CONSIDERING HOW I MIGHT DO THIS

we recorded our final episode on Court of the Dead last night and usually those are like, a good way to excise the demons you build up while reading such a shit book, but having slept on it i am actually significantly angrier about it and think i gave it way too much slack lmao

never do this. the fujos are always more powerful than you. be grateful for their blessing always

#gundam

I mean this as hard as I can: cancel your fucking nitro. it is LITERALLY the only thing that they fucking listen to.

i. what. why. my feed has never been particularly Brazilian. i do not see an excess of Portuguese posts. why has this happened. i'm not mad i'm just confused.

what people like Epstein deserved (relentless hounding, universal suspicion, curtailing of their rights and freedoms) is inflicted on trans people. under this weird pseudo-feminist patriarchy the only way a person will experience the consequences those specific people deserve is to transition

from "male socialisation", to the insistence that sharing a changing room with a trans woman is an Act Of Spritual Rape, to the relentless push by swivel-eyed pedophiles to murder trans kids, the only people punished or held accountable for the hideous abuses of powerful men are powerless trannies

at a certain point it does kind of start to feel like part of the massive top-down mainstreaming of TERF rhetoric was a deliberate reaction to MeToo, ensuring that the people held accountable for the crimes of pedophile sex pest billionaires were random unrelated trans people, particularly women

ayo........... 👁️