We could have had it aaallllll- pet peeve fandoms

i agree this is also a big issue

 

And it's so obligatory. Like... aren't there any other stories to tell?

 

gotta love that archive dive feel

I was watching them back before Actual Plot started to happen, so when the plot did start happening? I stopped watching for like... a year or two, before trying to get back into it. And I stopped a few more times, when there were big shifts in tone. (hello freelancers, I guess you are the main characters this season????)



Re: Tortall and shipping stuff

Spoiler: Protector of the Small spoilers

I was glad to see Keladry not end up with anybody at the end of her quartet. It was also nice to explore her having unrequited crushes that occasionally messed with her be as stone policy. Kinda bummed out by how her one relationship with Cleon did end up getting sad-for-him,-but-convenient-for-her wrapped up.

 

i was introduced to it through hearing about the Actual Plot and the angsty stuff, and so it was confusing for me when i discovered that they were more of a rave than a tango at first. so yeah, the expectations i came into it with were pretty different than yours.

Spoiler: protector of the small

i mostly recall being surprised 'cause it broke tamora pierce's usual pattern but also thinking it fit keladry as a character.

 

Spoiler

I was so expecting her to get shoved into a relationship and then SHE DIDN'T and I was so happy. I hate most of the tortall romances, they're all AWFUL AND CREEPY

 

Belatedly realizing that I accidentally took the MC of Shitsurakuen and turned her into my MMO character because I was so mad about how that manga ended

It started out as an Utena tribute and spiraled into a misogynistic abuse apologist mess


Edit: Tamora Pierce has admitted to having a Thing for age gaps which explains...a lot.

 

But don't you know it's women's fault that they're abused and systematically objectified and degraded!!!!!

 

SCREAMS ETERNALLY INTO THE VOID

Spoiler: spoilers if anyone cares

the creepy old men who started the whole fucking thing got off with a slap on the wrist because "we wanted to protect girls" shut the fuck UUUUP

the girls all went to the guys who abused them and comforted them???

Tsuki, who was an excellent antagonist, got the girl in the end despite being a manipulative asshole who drove her adoptive father to suicide and CARVED AN X INTO HER GIRLFRIEND'S FACE TO MARK HER AS PROPERTY

Why couldn't she have been an actual villain, or at least realized what she did to literally everyone was super fucked up

 

...but yeah, my Imry, who is my current icon, is basically Sora only twice as tall and green. Oops.

 

Also I could fill pages of this thread crying about Tales of Xillia 2

I love the premise and the characters, but I want to take the writers by the shoulders and shake them very firmly because THAT IS NOT HOW YOU WRITE ABOUT ALTERNATE UNIVERSES OR TRAGEDY

also they majorly fucked up the personalities of the characters from the first game just so they could fit them into the plot.

 

Yes. He's 18 when she's 10; it's explicitly discussed in the first book.

 

Vanyel is fourteen when he starts having sexytimes with Tylendel! Lavan wants to bang a horse and I know she's sentient and a reincarnated human but ok can we all agree that's really awkward. Almost every major character and the Valdemaran government is divinely guaranteed to be good guys color-coded for your convenience. Appropriate revenge for a sexual offender is to dress him up like a pretty girl and arrange for him to be raped to death. Lackey shoves her every sperg incredibly unsubtly into literally everything, why are the elves doing NASCAR, why are you making your magic system follow the Threefold Law as a matter of course, if you're going to do this stuff at least please do proper research instead of just tossing cool stuff in.

Just. Nnnn. Lackey you have such cool setting ideas. And then ruin everything.

That... explains everything.

Tbh, my biggest pet peeve in Pierces' books is The Will of the Empress, because man, I read those books for awesome pack/hivemind dynamics and then The Will of the Empress throws that all out the window because "i am too embarrassed about my sexy feelings to hang out with my friends" noooo give me my hivemind. They were already powerful and now they've all gone out and caught murderers and exploded things, and now they are going to be an AWESOME FORCE OF NATURE AND DESTRUCTION, COME ON, LET'S GO SINGLEHANDEDLY FIGHT A WAR BY KNITTING.


Also: Pern. Pern's economy makes literally zero sense, they should have had a proletarian revolution centuries ago, what the fuck. One of these days I am going to write a fixit fic.


Also: Persona. Please handle queers better, fucking hell, can we not with the sexism and the weird "lol nope just kidding not actually queer" and the crossdressing jokes.


Also: Diablo. Blizzard oh my fucking god it's such a fun game but you have to go ridiculously grimdark with everything and top yourself in every game and the first one was so good with the setting and the gothic grimdark and why does every female character need heels or a loincloth or both fucking hell.

Although my Diablo pain has largely been assuaged by jumping ship to Path of Exile, which I find better in nearly every way.


Just. Muffled screaming everywhere. Admittedly, a big part of my oh god what the fuck i need to fix this comes from unrealistic economies and race relations, because I'm weird.

 

Re: Lackey: There's also the fact that literally every story of hers I've read, the villain is either sexually predatory or a straight-up rapist. This was not a small sample size.

Re: Persona: I know part of it is that gender and sexuality issues are distinctly different in Japan, and some of it doesn't really... translate quite right to an American cultural perspective. So, say, Naoto gets read by a lot of Westerners as this weird bait-and-switch trans thing when they were actually trying to make a totally different point about oppressive gender roles which flies over the heads of people in countries where there's less intense social pressure for what women are and aren't allowed to do.

 

I skipped over this as a baby, reread it now, and am HORRIBLY SQUICKED OUT.

yeah, that. yeah, that sure is a thing. that I dislike about her writing. a lot.

*is also annoyed by this*

 

Yeah definitely noticed the Tamora Pierce age gap thing. The one in the shapeshifter series was particularly UHMMMM because wasn't dude in his 30s or something to chick's teens?

 

and he was her teacher
YEP

 

ALSO THAT
I know relationships with gaps like that can work and can be very happy and healthy but. Uhm. Maybe not the BEST idea for an intended audience of tweenage girls?

 

Yeah.
I pretty much refused to accept that ship or the book it became a thing in. Nope, not canon.
it was my FAVORITE series before that point, too.
I dressed as daine for halloween

 

And he straight-up says he's uncomfortable with it because of the age gap. But then suddenly in another series they're married and have a kid on the way?

I regularly chain-read the first three of that series and skipped the last book.

 

Honestly that may have been the worst part, he was being responsible like "Uhm, no, you're twelve and I'm... not. So, no. You're hot, but no."

But she's SEXY and DETERMINED and EMPOWERED or something and convinces him it's okay?