We could have had it aaallllll- pet peeve fandoms

Fucking Sword Art Online.

Fucking... Okay, so the first half of the first season is awesome. I love it with all my heart. It takes an interesting concept and makes a great story out of what would -actually- happen if people were trapped in a game where you could die in real life. Asuna was my fucking hero. Kirito was cool and surprisingly deep for a gamer guy. The side characters were occasionally thin, but they did what they needed to do and never seemed forced or awkward.

And then it had the absolute perfect ending, Kirito waking up in the hospital, having beaten the game, and going to find Asuna. It would have been amazing if it had stuck with that. Great story with a perfect wrap up. The end.

And then we got the second half of season one. I got like four episodes in and just couldn't do it. Between the incest subplot, the rape subplot, reducing Asuna, the strongest female character I've ever seen, to a prize to be won, Kirito turning into a Gary Stu, and the fucking mess that was the new game, I couldn't fucking do it. I honestly thought it was a new season when I first watched it. One where they had fired all the old writers and replaced them with creepy otaku who wanted to make their weird rapey fantasies a reality.

 

Specifically the one done by Talia, the empathic Queen's Herald who's played up as being very pure and motherly a lot of the time. Except for those times when she uses her empathy to fuck people up. It's done to what's effectively a random NPC; I'm not sure the guy even gets given a name.

Eh, it's probably a subjective stylistic thing? But also, I agree with you - there's no explicit, understandable reason for the elves doing NASCAR, except a vague handwave at one point for "well, doing NASCAR means that everyone will just happily ignore their weirdness so long as they're winning races". Which, sure, Janet. Sure. (The books usually derail into "and now you, the MC, must rescue this poor abused child" about a chapter and a half in anyways.)

Yeah, I mean - sure, the majority of the colonists were frozen? But considering that a good portion of the crew wasn't, it's implied that freezing the colonists is more a measure to keep from using too many resources during the trip. And you're right! They should have had a backup plan for "okay, what if it turns out that the planet, or portions of it, are less inhabitable than expected". ...I'm still annoyed that they plonked their initial settlement down on a volcano. A barely dormant volcano. Like, yes, there's towns and cities where people live on the side of a slightly active / barely dormant volcano and do just fine, but the rational option is not to look at a whole planet full of choices and go "hey, y'know what makes the best sense? the volcanic plain, where we landed our ships because it was nice and flat".

And I just remembered that the initial survey was rushed! Because of Reasons, basically; it was never really explained why, just that a couple members of the survey team had died during the survey (got bit by one of the tunnel-snakes, I think), and the rest of the team was in a hurry to wrap things up and go home, with the implication that they were on a strict time-limit for how long they could stay anyways. Which...doesn't make any kind of sense, because you'd think that you'd want a survey for a colony planet to be as thorough as possible. Are there active volcanoes? How about venomous or poisonous creatures? Any odds of a sapient species evolving between the time when your survey team leaves and the colonists arrive?

And they definitely brought or re-invented knitting, because there's this whole bit in A Guide to Dragons or whatever she called the book where most of the worldbuilding canon got dumped in, where it's explicitly stated that each Hold has its own stitch pattern that's used in knitwear, and how you can really easily identify where someone comes from by that (i.e., if they're wearing a sweater with a stitch-pattern that's used only in the High Reaches, they're obviously from High Reaches). (Which...sure, why not completely ignore the fact that there's a whole trade built around people going from hold to hold and buying and selling stuff, who would ever want to buy a ready-made sweater.)

I would really like to hear your economy thoughts! Different thread, maybe? We can yell about Pern together.

Eep. I admit, the reason I went for Log Horizon, rather than SAO, was that the recs I'd gotten were "Log Horizon's like SAO but actually good". (I lost track of it after the first season, but they did stay pretty consistently good throughout that first season, at least? None of the issues you mentioned with Sword Art Online; probably there's other issues that I missed on the first watching.)

 

I feel bad bc I like the first *half* of the first season of SAO and then they came in with the accidental boob grabbing trope and I just couldn't get into the romance. I don't think I got past the part where they got a house together and suddenly domestic bliss.

Log Horizon is a lot of fun and the characters feel more like...actual nerds? They go into a lot of game play mechanics and how people actually interact with the world, since it still holds onto a lot of MMO structure. (Plus the political stuff where the npcs see the players as these terrifying immortal demigods!? And going into "are the npcs people or just programs? And

Spoiler

a gold selling bot that gains consciousness as an autonomous ai!?

That was awesome to deal with)

If I had gripes they're probably "was Lovable Pervert Guy necessary even tho he gets punched the minute he says the word 'boobs' " and "why are we acting like a 15 year old is a legitimate romance rival for a college student over another college student" and "why is the party healer an uguu moeblob instead of salty as fuck" (Serara is adorable but have you MET an mmo healer ever)

I guess basically it had enough super intriguing stuff to let me pass over the less appealing stuff. (A ton of the girls having crushes on Shiroe is annoyingly haremy but at least he has a personality and the endgame ship is pretty clear.)

Edit: Tbf I'm only partway thru the second season of LH. So I don't know where it goes from there.

Edit 2: Tbf Log Horizon also gets points for having a character whose entire concept is "Dapper Furry Dude".

Also William's speech at the beginning of season 2 spoke to me. :(

Fuck...I should just make a Log Horizon thread.

 

The bit where the players realize how they're viewed, because the game-time is sped up compared to time outside the game world, so Shiroe's been around for centuries as far as the game is concerned - that was really fascinating to me, yeah! And it does have the feel of "this is actually something people played and these are Genuine Nerds".

Ugh, yes, that. Like - yes, the fifteen year old and the college student look the same age, but. They're not? The college student is just short and not terribly busty, which makes sense for a variety of reasons, not least of which are that a) her class is assassin, and b) she had to use a magic item to make her appearance more closely match what she looks like in real life and she's...just short, honestly.
And yes, it's cute that the fifteen year old has a crush on Shiroe, but - idk, the age gap makes me uncomfortable.

Assuming my memory's right and Serara is the fifteen year old (remembering what name goes with who is tricky for me sometimes), I can suspend my disbelief there somewhat, because it's implied that she and her brother had been playing for all of a week before the Event happened and they hadn't get gotten high-level enough to go dungeoning with anyone; they were still stomping around in the newbie areas.

 

Yeah, if they'd played it more like "yeah teenagers get crushes on older people they admire, but it won't go anywhere" instead of pulling classic love triangle tropes (I'm looking at u valentine's episode) even tho its clear Shiroe isn't interested...

I really like Minori as a character and I love her development but the way they handle the crush is...meh. it's more the meta narrative framing than anything the characters themselves do.

And Minori is the one w the brother, Serara is the druid girl, iirc. I should clarify, it was less a comment on "is this plausible for a fifteen year old playing a healer to act like this" (which, probably) and more of a "where did the grumpy healers go in mmo anime, because they're everywhere irl"

Edit: I think Serara and Minori are both 15 *and* healers, hence the confusion.

 

Yeah, I wasn't really thrilled with the forced romance, especially when Shiroe was flat-out going "I don't even have time for romance or a social life right now, I'm busy trying to get society functioning enough that we can send out an expedition to the other continent where the American servers were based, and see what's going on over there". (I sorta did like his disinterest in social biting him, though, since it made it easier for people to spread plausible rumours about him.)

Ah - yeah, Serara should really be a lot more salty, in that case. ...wait no, now I remember who she is.

Spoiler

She's the one who got stuck in another city when the Event happened and couldn't safely go outside without the risk of being basically kidnapped by a roving gang of jackasses who'd taken over that city. And I think she stays approximately as useful throughout the rest of the season. Which would explain why she's not portrayed as salty; it's easier for her to be excused from being a useless load if she's a cute moeblob, after all. (It's entirely possible that this is a deliberate strategy on her part, since she's much lower level than the rest of the main cast and isn't prepared for life after the Event at all, but there's not much implication that she's deliberately trying to be Cute.)

Serara being 15 too would explain why she fangirls over the cat-guy who rescued her as much as she does, though.

 

I see Tamora Pierce has already come up in this thread, but I just finished rereading Trickster's Queen, and the plot was so promising, and so dull. Aly is hyper competent and all-knowing, except when she's not, and all her opponents are idiots. The spymaster is sloppy and overconfident, and the rulers keep alienating their own supporters. One guy on the other side seems to be her equal in sneaky spying, but he doesn't do anything about it until the rulers alienate him as well. Even when bad stuff happens that she didn't foresee, it makes things easier for the rebellion overall.

Aly is seventeen years old, so why is she so perfect at spy stuff? She had no field experience before the first book, but everyone's talking about how great she is within, like, a month. Nobody else in the conspiracy has anything near her skill, so she trains some more spies between books, and by the time we see them, they all love and respect her, and call her by a word that means "old lady". She calls them children and patronisingly pats them on the cheek and stuff.

And that's before she gets the perfect invisible spies that can go anywhere and communicate instantly. That was just overkill. They were cute, though. I'm glad they came back from the Daine books.

About the things that Aly didn't see coming,

Spoiler: Spoilering a 13-year-old book

Sarai eloping ended the conflict about her suitability for queenhood without resolving it. Now Dove can be queen, who everyone turns out to love just as much, and, unlike Sarai, was actually in on the conspiracy to put one of them on the throne. Also, that note Sarai left boiled down to "I can't stay here and watch my people suffer any longer. So I'm moving to another country where I don't have to see them. Bye!" Which didn't really make her any more sympathetic.

I must have read this book before, but the part where the boy king was murdered took me by surprise. I didn't think the author would go there, although I probably should have. But by having the bad guys do it, there's no more need for Aly to morally dilemma about how they'd probably have to kill this four-year-old for being in their way. He's conveniently dead, and the bad guys are even bigger monsters for killing their own son.

The characters are upset about those things, but that doesn't have much of an effect on the plot. They just react to it, and move on. Even when they're upset with Aly for not knowing about it, they calm down without consequences. And it's a little weird that Aly never knew about the regicide thing, since she was watching the regents so closely. She knows about everything else they do.

Some of the criticisms of the white-saviour-y elements of the duology come off like Aly was the reason the rebellion even happened, which I can't see much support for in the text, but it is weird how this random white teenager from a foreign country is better than anyone else at such a vital thing. And the one other guy who's on her level also appears to be white. The conspirators are pretty sloppy at sneaky stuff before Aly comes along, especially for being mostly people who've been brutally oppressed for the past three hundred years. They're not awful at it, but there probably shouldn't have been such a big skill gap between her and the other conspirators.

If there'd been anything to challenge her, like opponents near her skill level, the book would have been a lot better. It also would have benefited from a climax she was involved in. Not the battle, because that's not her thing, but maybe she has to discredit someone who's been getting in the way, or stop the bad guys from doing something that could completely destroy the rebellion. The story is mostly just Aly reading reports and knowing everything, while the bad guys dig themselves deeper and deeper holes. I liked the book, but it really could've been a lot better.

 

I just remembered one of my first tragic game loves and wanted to share it. Anyone ever play the Mega Man Battle Network games? They were an absolutely bizarre RPG version of the Mega Man games that took place in an AU where we got crazy Internet tech instead of robots as the framework.
Anyway the core idea is that everyone has a PDA inhabited by a helpful computer buddy (a NetNavi) who is your best friend and goes online with you. You fight internet monsters and other people's evil NetNavi and save the day. 'Cyber-' is basically used to mean 'Magic-' because the list of things with network connections that start malfunctioning due to evil computer viruses include traffic lights, ovens, airplanes, the earth's climate, (robot) bears, the city's water filtration system, and a meteor. Anyway maybe that's not the important part?

Okay, our two main characters are Lan Hikari, the Plucky Human Boy, and Megaman.Exe, his NetNavi and electronic best friend. Megaman is special. He's not just a very clever AI, he is (was?) Hub Hikari, Lan's twin brother. See, when they were both very young, Hub was dying of Anime Heart Disease. At the same time, their Dad, Dr Hikari, was a scientist trying to make NetNavis more powerful and intelligent. Dr Hikari decided to fix two problems at once by giving the NetNavi complete human DNA and jamming the soul of his dying child in there, thus being the first person to upload his son to a smartphone.

Nobody tells Lan this until the end of the first game when it's dramatically appropriate, so he spends ten years thinking he's an only child and treating his secret twin like a clever computer program. It comes up once every game for the mandatory plot climax superpower but otherwise is basically never discussed again.

So here's my problem. I understand that this is, fundamentally, a children's game. And the writing is quite variable in quality.

But what I want (what I really want) is to go full on Ghost in the Shell/Cyberpunk with this premise. Like, Lan's undead brother is a computer program, and is indistinguishable from other programs. Does Megaman get human rights? Do the other NetNavi get human rights? Dr Hikari basically invented transhumanism, does he decide to convert anyone else into data, or is it actually done sort of cyber crime? Is Hub legally dead? Did their Mom agree to this whole mess? Did Hub age up from a baby as a program or was he uploaded to look the age he always has? Will Hub/Megaman stay twelve while Lan ages? What are the ethics of using sentient data as you smartphone slave anyway? If technologies move as quickly in the game's universe as the do in the real world, how long until Megaman himself is obsolete? Will he then accept his delayed death, or will he be converted to some new, strange technology? Why was an alien meteor compatible with Earth's WiFi signals?

None of these questions are addressed or acknowledged in any notable way, and I will always be bitter about that.

(Independent of anything else, I really like the series, it's a weird little JRPG with what's best described as a CCG base for the gameplay, with surprising depth, sweet combos, and at times a killer soundtrack. Some of it is also really, really, bad)
Anyway that was a lot of words about a GBA game and I don't know how well I explained the important bits but I am tired of typing so that's what you get.

 

Spoiler: Spoilered on account of it feels like these are legit complaints and I'm nitpicking

Some of this stuff is at least handwaved? Aly doesn't have any field experience, no - but she's been learning spycraft at her father's knee since she was little, she knows the tricks of the trade but she's used to working from behind the desk; the first book opens with her complaining at her dad that he won't let her out into the field to get any practical experience and him countering that she's one of the few people he can't risk in the field, what with her being the daughter of the King's Champion and the royal spymaster and basically just - not necessarily politically important in her own right, but it'd be hella inconvenient for everyone if she got caught spying on anyone. It's not said till near the end of the first book, I think, but the reason why she ended up in the position she did was because Trickster arranged events so that he could grab her and get her to help the rebellion out and make sure that Sarai and Dove (and their family) weren't killed by assassins.

Sarai eloping is caused by the Trickster god making a deal with the Graveyard Hag, because Trickster doesn't like Sarai and does like Dove and has Opinions on who gets to sit the throne come the end of this. (I think there's some bullshit about how Sarai's all heart and no head, while Dove is head and heart - basically, Sarai's condemned to being the Brainless Flirt forever, possibly on account of how she dared to try and be as close to a normal teenage girl as her life would let her, while Dove is Different From The Other Girls; I am actually kinda really angry on Sarai's behalf about that, now that I think about it, especially since a good bit of the "she's all heart, no head" nonsense comes from how she had a crush on an older guy who turned out to be plotting the deaths of her family, as if no one in the history of the world prior to her had ever had a first love that was a really bad idea.) The Graveyard Hag says that her boy (the diplomat that Sarai runs off with) prayed for her to make Sarai notice him, but there's enough vagueness there that it's not really certain how much she had to do with it and how much the Trickster had to do with it; there's also no real guarantee that Sarai's going to stay lovestruck, but Trickster mainly wants her out of the line of succession and Aly's made it clear that she won't put up with Sarai being killed.
I'm now wondering about how much of Sarai acting like a brainless flirt who wears her heart on her sleeve (but doesn't seem to care about the native population or the servants at all) is a result of how she grew up in an area where it was made really clear that sympathizing too much with the local not-white people would get her in shit, especially because she wasn't exactly white herself, and her family was already on thin ice because the rulers were paranoid and her family was third in the line of succession. (Second in line, after the king dies and the boy-king and his regents take over.) Because she's not bad at politics, and I cannot remember a single reason why she isn't brought into the rebellion beyond, like, Dove saying she shouldn't know? And Aly agreeing? Both of which, in retrospect, seem a lot like they're still judging her hard for having crushed on and flirted with the guy who turned out to be the main antagonist of the first book. I think Trickster mainly relies on Aly's judgement for which one is a good pick, too.

Aly doesn't know about the regicide thing, because it comes completely out of left field. She'd noticed that the regents were getting increasingly assholish and paranoid, but she didn't expect them to murder their nephew/son (I don't remember how exactly they're related to him, but I'm pretty sure that he's their nephew and not their actual child?) and she didn't expect it to happen in such a way that it'd take out Sarai and Dove's brother, either; she was expecting them to start eliminating anyone who was next in the line of succession. This is, again, Trickster actively meddling - he can't do anything overt like kill the regents and the kid himself (partly insufficient power, partly Mithros and the Goddess are in favour of the regents staying in power and are keeping an eye out for any noticeable god-magic happening), but he can plant ideas and mess with their dreams. So by the time Aly notices the increasing dickery of the regents? He's been headfucking them for a while, and has no intention of stopping until they're far enough gone that there's no way the populace won't rise against them.

I agree that a lot of the rebellion's success does read like we're supposed to assume Aly's the only reason everyone got as good as they were and succeeded as well. And it would've been nice for there to have been more textual blatancy about how the rebellion was going to happen no matter what, it would've eventually succeeded no matter what, and the only major differences Aly made were in increasing the speed at which it happened (which meant that the regents were completely unprepared, instead of there having been any warning signs of a revolution in the works) and reducing the number of casualties that the rebellion would've taken, as well as ensuring that Dove and Sarai survived long enough for anyone to take the throne. And I do seriously agree that the book would have improved with Aly being given something to actually do in the climax (I don't even remember what the hell she did, besides maybe get Dove to the winged horse and definitely run across a lot of dead people she'd trained and be Sad about it) and having an opponent she had to deal with who was at her skill level would've been good too, along with there being more action in the book and less "Aly reads a report and considers what to tell people to do, and then pines over Nawat". I think it's one of those things where, if there'd been even just a third book requiring there to be more beats to hit, it would've worked better.

 

Warrior cats is one part interesting xenofiction fantasy to like three or four parts dumb bullshit

how surprising that a book series for 11 year olds should disappoint me, an adult

 

Ohmygod, Ar Tonelico. Being about Anime Girls and whatnot, the Tiddies can almost be excused, but... the series verges into the stupid pretty regularly. And yet, I still love it, for sheer value of FICTIONAL PHYSICS, deliciously fucked up societies, and general awesome. It's lovely, a wide-open, beautiful, and weird post post-apocalyptic fiction. Being myself, I have of course constructed an elaborate scaffodling of headcanons, and want to maybe Do A Thing at some point... even if I cannot music to save my life. Plus, how can you not love a series where the all the magic flows from the great World Tree...

Said 'World Tree' being an eighty-kilometer tall wireless power transmitter, built out of aerogel and something, complete with built in supercomputer and singularity core. It's not a divine gift. People built it once. But... is there really a difference?


And then there's the Manga. The Manga is really more my style, even if the protagonist of the side story is a TREMENDOUS ARSE.

Something something Matthew 18:9?
But uh. I don't think that's how Jesus works.

Ugh. River was... they really tried to slather on the awesomesauce a little too fast. Especially since Moffat's interpretation of 'awesome' is apparently 'Character makes 'clever' quips while all opposition spontaneously crumbles around them.' Moffat is... a large part of why I don't bother watching, the show rapidly warped into Doctor Sue.

I feel this is as close as I can get to an appropriate reaction.

Yeah... I... that's.
That's one hell of a shoot the shaggy dog of an ending.

Like... what was with the school, anyways? I don't remember why it wasn't an option to just... you know, leave.

I mean, you could have done that story, I suppose. It'd have to be very different, though. For instance, make the fights fatal - that would be more appropriate, I think.

And still? No jail time? That's like... an orchard of gallows thing IMO, let alone getting off entirely.


Then there's Valkyrie Drive (Mermaid, specifically), which is... sorta similar? I feel like it should either be reworked as either a bad-people-stories conspiracy drama with a side of existential horror (and, if I had my way, Azazel, Angel of Death being involved), OR a lite fightfest with Yuri-dressing. They decided the plot should be a lite fightfest... except with rape and world mechanics that belonged to the existential horror version.

 

Honestly the good species bad species moral alignments of Redwall were disappointing for a lot of people who interacted with it and imo if it had just been... not a thing a lot of people wouldn't have had an issue with the series. Also if the vermin hadn't been defined as basically 'poor and stupid' imo. Redwall was something I loved as a kid, so I had a lot of hope in it to eventually do better and grow, and then it just... kind of didn't.

 

Also, I loved Prometheus (despite its flaws) and got super excited for a movie where David and Shaw looked for God together and all the themes of creation and AI that story dealt with and imo Covenant just... destroyed the good potential I saw set up

Spoiler

I mean. Shaw died and I could literally see Shaw dying directly as more likely than what happens to her. When I first heard Shaw trusted David enough to trust him while she went to sleep I thought 'not good, but okay'. If that's how she dies though than that's an inexcusable plot point for her character.

I have not been more viscerally disappointed about a movie sequel in a long time.

 

Current canon Mando lore infuriates me so fucking much.

I'm not as big a spoilsport as many though and will feel free to cannibalize it when I so please but really I detest the vast bulk of it.

 

....ugh. There's two supporting characters (Sieglinde and Victoria) who I love in this one manga. It's a martial-arts-sports manga. Sieglinde and Victoria are WAY long childhood friends - going back years and years. Sieglinde was for Reasons very lonely as a child, and more than a little traumatized, and Victoria was her first friend. Because of her support, Sieglinde was able to become the local martial arts thing's reigning undefeated champion. Victoria, and a few others, were basically set on beating her in the ring.

(I have read a LOT of lesbian subtext into these two, by the way. they're very cute.)

So there's a lot, obviously, riding on who will beat Sieglinde first. Because there's a lot of people trying to do it, since she's undefeated. The only recorded loss she ever had was a match where she didn't show up.

In a recent OVA, we got to see Victoria and Sieglinde FINALLY fight it out, onscreen. And Victoria won! Which is delightful...

or rather. it would be. if we had gone into ANY depth about their relationship. or what winning meant to Victoria - whether it meant that she felt she could stand beside the person she cared about as an equal, ANYTHING. instead? it's glanced over in a minute. obviously I can still read a lot into it and i never expected canon to really focus on them (because that would require knowing what they were DOING) but fuck it is annoying to see canon do one of the things you really wanted it to do - but without any of the detail or emotional depth or even cool fight choreography that was the entire reason you wanted that thing to be included for!

 

the fact that early red vs blue has an entire "time travel" arc that makes no sense when put together with the rest of the series' timeline

well, okay, it makes some sense (wyoming does have time powers in his suit, church going to the past isn't that nonsensical) but... not much (the reds and blues couldn't have actually went to the future, the reds and blues travelled in space even if they didn't travel in time)

... well, now that i think about it, simmons did use a teleporter before the "time travel" happened so maybe... church and wyoming got time travelled and the rest of them got space travelled.

and that would maybe work, except... later in the series, they said it was a simulation and just... okay, which parts of it were a simulation and if it was a simulation, how the fuck did they get out of it? and when did the simulation start?

i just want red vs blue to have a coherent timeline! is that too much to ask?!?

 

I love Tamora Pierce's Tortall and (especially) Circle of Magic books with a fiery passion, warts and all, and vibrate impatiently in anticipation in the long gaps between books (GOD DAMN IT GIVE ME THE TRIS/LIGHTSBRIDGE BOOK, I DON'T GIVE A RAT'S ASS ABOUT NUMAIR AND HIS BACKSTORY AND NEVER HAVE), the most recent ones have been a smidge more warty to me. :I

Spoiler: spoilers for the most recent two Circle of Magic books/grumbling at length

Melting Stones was 90% all right, but I'm still a bit grumpy at a development at the climax where Evvy briefly snaps at a younger kid in a moment of distress after one of her rocks gets broken, which thanks to diabolus ex machina means that the kid runs crying back to her just-evacuated home which is about to get exploded along with the whole island, that's what they evacuated for. When Evvy finds this out on the evacuation ship, Rosethorn gives her a Stern and Serious Talk about how Evvy is taking the road to being a 'destroyer' because of this, which strikes me as being just a bit fucking much jesus christ????? given that Evvy is still a minor herself with PTSD and ffs she didn't tell the kid to go back to get blown up, there is no reasonable expectation that she should have known that a moment of minor pique, while unkind, would put the little kid in lethal danger and thus she needs to be warned obliquely that she's turning into a monster or some fuckin thing. Probably not TP's intent and it's a minor thing but it still irks me.

Battle Magic irked me a bit more in more spots, which is a damn shame because I was looking forward to filling in the gaps that Briar, Evvy and Rosethorn refer to in Will of the Empress and Melting Stones.

Mostly the depiction of Yanjing/the emperor's court and all the characters therein... rubbed me the wrong way? I mean OBVIOUSLY I knew that the emperor was gonna turn out hecka villainous and that they'd be the aggressor in some war, that was straight up mentioned in both books before this one. It was just like... once the scenes in Yanjing show up, it's a fucking parade of 'Yanjing and Everyone In It Aint Shit', with a good helping of every negative ancient Chinese/Asian trope/behavior cranked up. Everyone has to wear Uncomfortable Fancy Clothes and makeup to the palace(except Briar and Rosethorn who get to be Free and unencumbered and roll their eyes at the violently uncomfortable Evvy), all the court are fawningly servile and have to partake in extensive title announcements/elaborate and extended displays of obeisance so the Free and Enlightened protagonists can roll their eyes and disapprove, the emperor keeps war prisoners as pets and parades them around, he throws a fucking baby fit when they find a wilted rose in his prized gardens (because, no joking, he feels that how fucking dare this flower fail him when he visits the garden with honored guests), insists on it being uprooted and destroyed even after the plant-mage protagonists fix the problem on the spot, and only after CONSIDERABLE GROVELING allows it to live, and then the very next night burns the entire garden to the ground along with all the gardeners because why fucking not!!!! and lol even all of Yanjings mages are dumbasses and can't magic properly and know jack shit about ambient magic and how ambient magic users can and do fucking wreck their shit repeatedly, aint they stupid!

ANYWAY what I'm saying is that it was all a Bit Fucking Much. Like, half of the cackling over the top villainy would have sufficed??? And maybe not have had literally every Yanjingyi character introduced in the book not be a tittering sycophant or horribly evil? And was the whole 'the entire particular Yanjingyi style of magic aint shit/is horribly flawed and not even the most skilled mages know the basic properties of their materials that Briar (a plant mage!) learned just by READING A BOOK' thing necessary?

I still like both books but sheesh :V

sorry for the text wall under the cut :V

 

I never got around to Melting Stones myself, but a friend has ranted to me at length about the way it tears into Evvy for... basically daring to be a kid with PTSD, and you have my sword on that one. >:(

And I know nothing about Battle Magic, but jeez, that sounds obnoxious as hell just to have to read through, much less take seriously as a setting and story.

 

I am actually very grateful for the textwall because I'd heard middling things about Melting Stones for that scene (which is fucking incredible given that the rest of the series at least tries to handle Kids With PTSD pretty well) but the Battle Magic thing.... yeesh. I'll probably still read them one of these days, but it's nice not to just run face first into AUGH without warning.

 

yeah I mean I STILL LIKE THEM and there's never been a TP book that didn't make my eyebrows raise SOMEWHERE no matter how much I love them (hell most of my even most favoritist novels have a niggle hidden among the relentless quality), those two more recent ones just cheesed my onions more than most of the others.

Spoiler: one more thought/niggle re: Battle Magic

in retrospect maybe Tamora Pierce was doing a heavy-handed commentary/vent about China being a horrible dick to Tibet IRL? Cause everything in Gyongxe is Aggressively Awesome (if also Aggressively Weird in points and cmon was it really necessary to handwave a 'lol u guys will forget the weird bits mostly because it'd cause continuity problems' at the end) which contrasts all the more with the Needlessly Aggressively Totally Horrible (though I guess the food is good) Yanjing.