mel 🤠
@pagemelt
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book punk (they/them) 🏴🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
Louisville, KY
Joined June 2021
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i hate "kids-these-days"-ing, but there is... something happening. like, the whole time i was reading Fledgling last year, i kept having this thought of like... if this were written by a debut author, they would have been chased off the internet and maybe out of their career
Authors can't write messy, nuanced, antagonistic books anymore because readers expect self-explanatory and squeaky-clean stories.
Toni Morrison, Octavia E. Butler, etc. would've been torn apart these days (well, if these people chose to read Black books).
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figured out why the tone of this discourse is bothering me so much. it reminds me of when people discover Chuck Tingle for the first time and gleefully mock Space Raptor Butt Invasion as if the humor was a thing Tingle did on accident
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david graeber observed this too, and he said that to lay this phenomenon solely at capitalism's feet was to miss a big part of the picture, and that the way the managerial class has grown and organized itself is something much more akin to literal feudalism
The stuff going on with Boeing has been happening in every industry for a long time. All of the skilled individuals who actually *do* the job are understaffed and overworked while the administrative class of MBA vampires with email and PowerPoint jobs continues to grow.
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i hate to be all "have you ever heard of the library?" because that's very annoying, but these reactions to the spotify news are making me think that a lot of people honestly don't know that you can check out audiobooks at the library! so, if that's you, i have amazing news!
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you can't have it both ways. if you want romance to be taken seriously as art, then you have to be able to deal with serious criticism of it. and maybe it truly is misogyny all the way down, but if that's the case, you need to meaningfully substantiate that claim
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ao3 censorship kids are the chickens of cut computer classes coming home to roost. they can't understand a feed that isn't powered by an algorithm. we're pointing out the "exclude" filter but i think a lot of them don't know how to parse that idea, let alone use it effectively
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gotta tell ya, i don't think the lesson to learn from the freydís moon stuff is "more closely police the writing of people who arouse your suspicion in search of clues that they have been secretly, fundamentally evil the whole time”
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murderbot's gender is not a mystery! murderbot canonically has no gender! it says this a bunch of times! it uses it/its! this is not subtext! this is text!!!
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obviously it's okay to criticize dark romance. but right now what i'm mostly seeing is variations of "anyone who likes this is sick in the head" and that is—and i wish this could go without saying—NOT legitimate criticism, lol
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kinda weird that seasoned romance readers are acting like noncon is some newfangled invention created by tiktok teens
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"yes but how do we know this author is writing disturbing things for the RIGHT reasons?" you don't! you can't! you never will! the very idea is a trick your own mind has played on you! a fallacy! a delusion! hope that helps!!!!
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if i were brave enough i'd make a tiktok saying that romantic fiction does not need to align with your own personal real-life morals in order for you to find it erotic. you can find things erotic in fiction that would be QUITE BAD in real life, actually.
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i don't know who needs to hear this (yes i do) but a sex scene can both titillate AND move the story forward. you don't have to pick just one
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see also: "When ignorant critics praised her wonderful originality in inventing the idea of a wizards’ school, and some of them even seemed to believe that she had invented fantasy, she let them do so. This, I think, was ungenerous, and in the long run unwise."
Ursula le Guin on HP: I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a school novel, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.
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one of the reasons i'm cranky about the emergence of "cozy" as a genre descriptor is that it's a thing fanfic already has language around. in fanfic it's called "fluff" (non-derogatory), and when you see it in the tags everyone knows exactly what it means and what they're in for
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saw this video too and was so confused??? like which part is ugly, exactly? the palette? rich, gorgeous, with skin tones that it feels like I can reach out and touch. the figures? literally perfectly rendered. like if you don't like camp, just say that
Someone on tiktok said they loved the book but think it’s the ugliest cover they’ve ever seen and I am very confused
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personally i think the lesson is to be more suspicious when people co-opt the language of social justice to act like clout-chasing dicks online
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I usually cringe at "oh you think THAT'S spicy 😏"-type takes, but I find this to be legitimately concerning, lol
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a non-bookish creator i normally like made a vid calling booktokers smut addicts, then a bunch of people @-ed me in his comments as a counterexample. so obviously i'm bummed bc it means a lot of people have some extremely wrong ideas about me, lmao
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so many of the "go to therapy"-style jokes at erotica's expense are rooted in SWERFism, but rarely do the posters do us the favor of explaining their views so clearly in the replies
people are always chomping at the bit to make fun of anything even slightly freaky that comes out of BookTok that they don't even care that they're aligning themselves with this person, an anti-porn radfem
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a mutual i really respect (who isn't online anymore) said that the only sustainable way to be a creator online is to go slower and make less. i think about that often: how many of my favorite creators adhere to this rule and how easy it is for them to be drowned out by grifters
i keep thinking about that part in hbomberguy's new video where james somerton says "i would never have had the time to do that amount of research for a youtube video" aaaa
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seth and i have been together for 12 years so i feel qualified to disclose that the secret to a healthy marriage is that one of you needs to like books and the other one needs to like video games
So, friends in relationships: how is everyone deciding who gets to play Zelda first tomorrow?
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all these authors trying to give their romantic leads Howl energy are forgetting to make him a whiny little bitch (affectionate)
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i'm taking "bodice ripper" away from journalists until they bother to figure out what it actually means
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the thing about booktok, and this is so mean, but you have to understand that I am ON booktok I know it intimately, is that it is not a very funny place. not that I'm a comedy genius, but I've never made a joke in a vid that I haven't had to go on to explain in the comments
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have y'all been on linkedin lately? it's so fuckin bleak man. every other post is about AI. AI training, AI talks, AI job listings. just hoards of people cheerfully heralding their own imminent obsolesce. absolutely ghoulish
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what really drives me nuts about the "nobody is REALLY reading 200 books per year 😏" takes is that reading books is a skill, and you get better and faster the more your practice, like literally any other skill
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i'm so sorry but "i accidentally read a book by a man! i thought the author was a woman because the font on the cover was pink" is not the feminist take u think it is
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no sensible person who writes fanfic wants or expects to be paid for it. so i think it's pretty reasonable, actually, for them to be upset at the idea of their work—made within a specific community context—being used as a tool to churn out profit-maximizing schlock
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critics can be needlessly cruel, and sometimes individuals are unfairly saddled with the blame for group decisions. but the ONLY correct response when people don't like your art is to take it on the chin. you can't just guilt people into liking the thing you made, i'm so sorry
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the world is saturated with excellent books that are easier than ever to access, but i also know from firsthand experience that a lot of current adult bestsellers and viral favorites are unreadable slush (the "to me" is implied). both of these things can be true at once!
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i became a 𝒷𝑜𝑜𝓀 𝒾𝓃𝒻𝓁𝓊𝑒𝓃𝒸𝑒𝓇 because the power trip you experience when you give a book 5 stars and then see a bunch of people add it to their TBRs in real time is better than drugs
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I don't throw around my bona fides lightly but I went to ART SCHOOL and I have worked for 10 years as a PROFESSIONAL DESIGNER and I can *literally* never predict which covers the book community is gonna think are ugly. throws me every time.
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i’m gonna need all the American vector art cover defenders to take a long hard look at how they’re doing things in Japan. THIS COULD BE US 😤
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imagine being this patronizing and incurious. are the concepts of corporate IP and storytelling so conflated—are people's imaginations so completely bankrupt—that they truly can't understand the pure creative FUN of taking a character in one situation and putting them in another?
A peek inside the vast subterranean world of Succession fan fiction
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i want to bring blogs back. i mean i know some people still have them, but it used to be that if you wanted to be on social media, you had to blog. that was good, i think. it made it easier to tell who was completely full of shit
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reheating old mlm fetishizer discourse during the trans rights readathon seems a little on-the-nose! anyway i've never seen this discourse blow through town without casey mcquiston being misgendered, and i'd love it if we could all sit with the implications of that for a minute
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also kind of a sidenote but i think a lot of people are using "booktok girlies" in this way as a socially-acceptable outlet for their misogyny, but that's a tweet for another day
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absolutely bizarre image to pick for this too. julia roberts's character is a sex worker, and she's on the clock here, lmao
girlboss corporate feminism has reinvented the lords day of rest
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What a repugnant, flagrantly irresponsible headline. My public high school journalism teacher would have chewed me out over this before demanding I rewrite it. I'm ashamed I ever took NPR seriously. Al Jazeera on the right for comparison.
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the fact that it was ana mardoll who tweeted this feels like one of those weird historical overlaps. like that hemingway and rupaul were alive at the same time, or that hedy lamarr invented wifi.
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if one more st0rygr4ph evangelist leaves me a smug comment about switching I am gonna LOSE IT. they are a FOR-PROFIT TECH STARTUP and their PRODUCT does not currently meet USER NEEDS, and if it ever does I will switch, but in the meantime please consider getting a GRIP
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this in particular, about the lack of texture? I’ve made similar complaints about romance novels published within the last 5-10 years a million times. am I misogynist who can’t let people enjoy things? I mean I guess I’m setting myself up there, but, like: I don’t think so! lol
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i have one more stanley cup thought, and it's: in the absence of other creative outlets, consumerism ITSELF often becomes an avenue for self-expression. and... i think that's bad? obviously. but i also think it's a symptom, not the root problem. i also don't think it's new
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i rue the day that i first heard david foster wallace say "there's a lot of narcissism in self-hatred", it is a truly one of those things that you cannot un-hear, and now i am passing it on to u
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i think the phrase "morally gray" has officially lost all usefulness and it's time to retire it. the "gray" part is meant as a synonym for "ambiguous", not "literal serial killer"
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the bookriot article is insipid nonsense and steve's thread is very good, please read it, but just as a side observation i'd like to point out that being transmasc and reading romance novels is the equivalent of being a human asterisk lmao
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reminds me of how every few months someone will complain that "booktok is ruining criticism", but the vast majority of booktokers are not positioning themselves as literary critics. if you want professional-quality criticism, i would urge you to look to professional critics!
tryn see challengers reviews and its so cool that letterboxd is just useless now
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i think you can get a good measure of a creator by looking to see if they ever talk about the creators THEY look up to, or if they're preoccupied with appearing as the most knowledgeable and experienced person in a given space
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yk that feeling when your student loan balance is exactly $20k and you're 98% sure that you're a pell grant recipient but you've been out of college for 10 years and this shit is hard to remember and the FAFSA website is down so you can't check? is there a german word for this?
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i'm sensitive to this bc when i was critical of the RWRB movie last year for sanitizing a lot of the texture in the book, people came at me for not letting the gays enjoy things, even though: hello? i'm critical BECAUSE i respect the source material and think it's legitimate art!
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thank god tiktok wasn't a thing when i was 20. you all would have hated me. do y'all know what i was doing when i was 20? i worked alone at this dinky store in the mall where i had control over the speakers, and do you know what i would play? full episodes of this american life
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“I just abhor war in all forms.” No, you have a child’s understanding of the world. You think bad guys proudly identify themselves as such. What drives people to commit atrocities is not hatred of love and friendship, but a twisted internal logic of entitlement and victimization.
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it's one thing to be aware of your own preferences (i like adverbs! i like snappy dialogue! i don't like what the kids are calling "lyrical"!), but it's another to approach books like they're something you ordered at burger king. "sticks of deodorant" as le guin once said
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sorry i'm navel gazing again 🥴
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vague, swampy, literary-ness is the number one reason i DNF new releases. Le Guin has this incredible blurb of Dreamsnake (1978) that goes, “this book is like a mountain stream—fast, clean, clear, exciting, beautiful” and wow I would love for THAT to be the goal again
@pagemelt
The number one issue with a lot of upstart writers (in the new wave of TikTok inspired self pub) is that they’re so obsessed by the idea of making each sentence something so beautifully architected that they end up writing something insane and unreadable.
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as an adult who loves YA, i think some adults read YA because they want to read black-and-white morality tales, and that demand is killing the genre for actual young people who need to read about navigating complex situations with no right answers to better prepare for adult life
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was wondering why TikTok loves to show me the Erin Brockovich monologue where she has all the plaintiffs' numbers memorized so much, and then I realized it's probably because I watch it all the way through every single time it pops up
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oh no. i love him, i fear
“Due to the digital age, something so human as having sex feels like an affront.” Oh… Nicholas … I think that’s it. I think that’s exactly it.
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ragequit that one James Somerton video where he talks about Becky Albertali and never watched another one because I was holding a grudge. thought I was maybe being too sensitive about it, but NO, this was the most delicious four hours of schadenfreude I’ve ever experienced
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the fact that the current shipping discourse centers around two characters who work at a restaurant continues to blow my mind. you want to watch two characters cultivate mutual respect for each other? in food service??? babe it'd be weirder if they DIDN'T fuck
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this is not very diplomatic of me to say but if it's been a few weeks and you're wondering why i haven't made a video, it's because i'm going through this quarterly phase where i still love books but i viscerally hate, like, 90% of all book content
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which was the part that scandalized you, exactly? when they kiss on the lips? when they lace their fingers together? when they tell each other they love each other as they share a fully-clothed embrace?
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fellas is it problematic when a fantasy novel fails to invent democracy
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it's one thing to criticize the way trad pub beats trends to death until they're hacky, soulless, watered-down imitations of themselves, but it's quite another to say "romances have too much spice now"
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why, why, WHY is it that whenever i come across a video by a 22-year-old in the throes of their classics-loving, sex-shamey phase and click through to their profile they're always following me? am i giving off the wrong vibes? do i need to get hornier on main????
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still, as a user myself, I really resent the idea of material being hidden from me without my knowledge because another group of users refused to learn how to use the tools that were available to them. i dunno man!
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this is my beef with most buzzy lit fic btw. it's not that i need it to be relatable, it's just that i need the author to not assume that everyone on earth is as bored, rich, mean, and myopic as they are
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when you're mean to me this is who ur being mean to, if u even care 😤😤
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fantasy novels can get cool new editions with retro pastiche covers without people being too embarrassed to buy them or whatever, so I don't see why romance novels can't
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the most coherent anti-shipping argument I've encountered is that people don't like romantic relationships to be prioritized over other types of relationships, and I think that's fair-ish. but I also think it misunderstands what motivates people to ship in the first place
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never raised his voice, let me draw on his office whiteboard then bragged to his coworkers about my art, played chess with me on my little plastic set, asked me to write him a story for his birthday, my name was always his password (he's dead now tho, lol. can't have it all!!)
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man, i like reading in bars because I can sit alone for long stretches of time without having to order food. if i found out someone approached ME while i was MINDING MY OWN BUSINESS reading a book, and then later called me PERFORMATIVE and SEMI-LITERARY for doing it? get a LIFE
Its weirdo behavior to be interested in someone for their taste in books and then, with no evidence, act like it's a performance specifically to attract you
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do you think I'm the only one at this sold out Reds game reading a baseball romance on my phone
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started a tiktok just to trick people into giving me this compliment, and then I started a twitter so I'd have a place to brag when people gave me this compliment
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being a person who reads fantasy and romance and is on book social media, my occasionally seeing ACoTaR fan art is unavoidable. anyway, uh, apropros of nothing, this is what it means when someone's eyes are described as violet.
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I'm 33 today! here's my (new and used, respectively) birthday haul
(why yes I AM entering my paranormal romance era)
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if your novel is contemporary, that choice should be just as informed and intentional as setting it on a sand planet or in renaissance italy, i feel this so strongly
I want contemporary fiction w/o a speculative element to care about world building more! Writing a book that lacks time signifiers (& explaining references to death) is bad world building. The characters & plot will be way more engaging when they feel like they inhabit reality
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i've never even read the books, but the tiny little shit-eating grin he pulls after he drops this made me a peeta stan for life
peeta mellark was so cunty when he said, “if it weren’t for the baby”
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"soldier, poet, king" has had booktok in a chokehold for a year or so now, and i still can't tell if people know it's about jesus?? no judgement tho, y'all chase your bliss
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honestly these are the kinds of author beefs this country needs. let's bring this back. put them on a podcast and let them hash it out
seeing an author publicly fire mild shots at ol*vie bl*ke was not on my 2024 bingo card I must say
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made my peace with the rwrb movie simply not being made with my indie freak sensibilities in mind and how it's okay for other people to like it, and look!! look how the universe has rewarded me!!!
Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal in their romance film ‘ALL OF US STRANGERS’.
(Source:
@VanityFair
- )
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decided to make the romance i'm writing "clean" and by that i mean "add a scene where they jerk each other off in the shower"
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been trying not to add too much to the noise, but I care very deeply about media literacy, and I just want to point out that the discrepancies between NPR's top headlines (left) and Al Jazeera's (right) are, uh, WILDLY telling
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about to make a video where i refer to patroclus as a transmasc king, wish me luck
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the thought that jean valjean is what people actually mean when they say they love a morally gray MC has occurred to me more than once. he stole bread? to feed his starving family?? and spent 19 years in prison feeling sorry about it???? unhinged 😍
@pagemelt
The amount of times i was sold a "morally complex" character when really it was a "thief with a heart of gold" is too damn high (it was just twice)
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I would like to share these facts:
1) there's a spreadsheet of problematic authors circulating on book twitter
2) Ayn Rand is on it
3) on her entry her name is misspelled as "Any Rand" and I think that's very funny
4) I hate Ayn Rand
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we used to be a country
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I’m a big believer in observing-not-blaming when it comes to user behavior, but I really don’t know what the solution is here. you can’t magically MAKE people know how to use technology
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what's up dorks, if u are a cis ally u have to give me one (1) lil pat on the head today
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LESS gatekeeping romance from men who know what they're talking about, MORE gatekeeping romance from authors who think big dicks are a genre requirement
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lit fic aesthetic accounts are my (very unserious) enemy. a lot of them are giving radfem, for one thing, but much less importantly: they'll say "this is great book to carry in your bag" and ????? like the book that's in my bag is the one i'm currently reading, what do you MEAN?
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for as long as I can remember I've repeated phrases from books and movies and TV shows and lyrics verbatim in everyday convos. when I was a kid I did it to approximate normal human interaction, but now I just do it for fun. lil easter eggs just for me.
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probably my least favorite genre of content on the internet is "outsider attempts to make themselves feel normal and well-adjusted by describing with barely-masked anthropological glee a somewhat niche thing they discovered 5 minutes ago"
Imagine working in the industry and being this out of touch with what is one of the most popular fantasy romance tropes for the last decade.
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ARCs are marketing! if you are viewing them as payment in exchange for your services as a reviewer you are severely underpaying yourself!!
Y’all gotta learn ARCs only purpose is marketing. Publishers and authors are giving you a “gift” so you’ll talk about it. I agree that books are cool, but getting sent books is no different than ad campaign emails about “sending product for honest thoughts”
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