It's based off of how World of Warcraft used to have a whole bunch of quests that required you to go get a bunch of material components, and often made it so that these things dropped way less frequently than you'd want. And at least one of these quests actually did ask for a bunch of bear butts, I think. So "20 bear asses" is not just a fetch quest, it's a specific kind of really long and tedious fetch quest that takes far longer than it feels like it ought to! (End pedanticism.)
*dances into thread* so i heard someone describe beautiful disaster by jamie mcguire as being worse than fifty shades of grey while inexplicably being highly recommended and reviewed on Good Reads, which obviously meant i needed to read it immediately, because i like to Suffer apparently. and it's- oh boy it's something. i'm on chapter four rn and i don't know if i have the willpower to keep going. it's your standard Alpha Male Bad Boy Who Is Actually A Textbook Abuser And This Is Romantic, Somehow plotline, and the slut shaming/misogyny is extra thick & gooey. some choice quotes under the cut Spoiler: got long sorry (Kara is our heroine's roommate, who the narrative takes great pains to describe as a Terrible Person for literally no reason, as far as i can tell, except to get in one more female character jamie mcguire the Main Character can rip to shreds to feel better about herself) (this entire scene is Truly Delightful)
yeah im reading a pdf i found on google because fuck paying for this garbage, it hasn't borked my computer yet but ymmv (the formatting is kind of wonky too) here you go
Does my guilty pleasure for cheap Amazon ebook bodice rippers go here because if so I might have to come back with some recs when I'm not on my tablet XDD
those snippets reminded me of like, all of the romance i ever tried reading on wattpad i did find a good sci fi horror but i sadly can't remember the name. or else i would share
bodice rippers are bae Prince of Ice or whatever is one of my faves also theres one with one of them dudes who thinks he's ugly as heck because he was an ugly child but he grew up to be Giant Brunette Adonis and the female protagonist is actually very delightful, i don't remember much misogyny in the narrative, beside what maybe a few characters say, and they have one scene where they kiss for the first time and its raining and that fucking paragraph was the first time i ever read something that REALLY turned me on in other words historical fiction is my jam unless its too bland or sexist
Oh Wattpad. I go there sometimes if I need cheering up because its full of just awful writing. And also the stuff I tend to find has bajillions of comments and stuff which just baffles me because of its low quality. I think I have yet to find anything I could call "good" there. (@bornofthesea670, if historical romances are your thing, my sister-in-law has two books out that you should read -- the first is "A Lady's Guide to Ruin," and the sequel is "A Gentleman's Guide to Scandal." It's one of the few modern romances I've read that heavily features important friendships between women that isn't dripping in misogyny.)
There's a particularly annoying splatterpunk series I tried, in which a point from early on in How Not to Write a Novel was brought home to me. That point being, "from the reader's point of view, the action is what is happening to the protagonist now". So, no matter what horrible things the character described to the other character, the actual action was still just a guy sitting and talking for chapter after chapter after chapter, and we already knew he won in every encounter he had.
i got book recs mixed up and actually paid for a pile of self indulgent garbage about an author who ends up trying to survive being trapped in his own fantasy world. i thought i was getting a GOOD rendition of that trope. it is not good. it is impossible to imagine how either the character author OR the actual book author ever got published. holy shit. im on mobile but when i get home ill post some excerpts. BASICALLY JUST NEVER WRITE A CHARACTER WHO'S A BETTER WRITER THAN YOU, BECAUSE HE WON'T BE.
