We could have had it aaallllll- pet peeve fandoms

-starts backreading this thread

-immediately skips to the end to yell about His Dark Materials because apparently I read it wrong??? and the author can suck my dick??? frankly????? ok let me start from the beginning. this was a formative series for me. the whole Dust thing was foundational to my halfassed personal spirituality-gleaned-from-fantasy-novels (along with Kushiel's Dart, yes, really) and like. the part where they Kill GodTM was... to me, they set him free? he was stuck in a box by literal prescriptivists, and the heroes let him out so he could be a part of the living universe like he was fuckin supposed to be. he was part of the universe again!!! it seemed right and good for that to happen, ok, so years later when I find out it was a sneering atheist middle finger I was all 'haha too late i've already interpreted it wildly differently, fuckin eat me' but anyways

was anyone else honked off by the way Lyra suddenly completely loses the ability to use the alethiometer because she kissed a boy, because hot diggity fuck that pissed me off and also made no sense. like, u have reached the puberty, u are now a completely different person and everything you achieved before now is irrelevant, also something something sexual knowledge enriching a man and impoverishing a woman is a stupid trope for losers

and!!! that was the first epic TeenGirlQuest I'd read where there wasn't even an attempt at a happy ending. it was a pyrrhic victory handed to child soldiers because the Real World involves sacrifice, dontcha know. not like they didn't sacrifice for the entire trilogy to date or anything. no, u will never get to Be Together or even hang out on weekends but maybe you can wistfully remember each other when ur old, and you'd better be happy with that bc it's all ur gonna get fuckos

argh

WARRIOR POLAR BEARS ARE THE BEST THING EVER AND ARGUABLY THE ONLY GOOD PART OF THE MOVIE

 

This isn't news but Naruto is garbage and I hate myself for liking it

 

oh my god, this. it mostly went over my head as a kid until the book where the Good Critters decide to raise a Bad Critter and he's just... bad, all the time, for no reason. it just didn't make sense. looking back on it it could've almost made sense as a trauma reaction, like he doesn't even know how to react to kindness or whatever, but iirc he persistently goes out of his way to be a dick before dying Heroically but In A Grudging Manner, which seemed more like a last reward for his longsuffering caretakers than any genuine gesture of sacrifice on his part

 

Yep. It's written as antiNarnia and then it just goes and replicates the Problem of Susan.

I love all the worldbuilding bits like the mulefa and the dragonfly riders and the panserbjorne but everything about puberty and coming of age in those books is really messed up in retrospect, like the thing with the daemons settling? now you have had the the sex your essential character is fixed and unchanging for the rest of your life.

 

Yeah, I was super "what the hell???" about that. If what the author was aiming for was "she can't read it now because daemon settled = ADULT and she could only do this because she was a child," don't make it that a) she's the only child who can do it and b) the way she reads it is described as simple and algorithmic- the meanings of symbols are determined by how many times in a row it lands on a symbol, modified by the ones before and after. It makes it even more of an asspull that the ability just vanishes Because Adult.

That's not how daemons settle in general, it's just that Lyra and Will's specifically settled when they were making out. The text even says it's unusual.

 

ok, must have misremembered that part

 

Yes, there were major issues with the books. Big sigh, there was so much other good shit in there

 

(Also, not HDM canon, but not contradicted by it: one thing I've seen daemon AU fic do about the issue of "your personality can change a lot in adulthood" is adult daemons that don't actively shapeshift between species the way kids' do, but can slowly change general shape and appearance, to the point of being borderline unrecognizable if the person has gone through something that massively changes who they are.)

 

god I knowwww

I can't/don't want to hate them but some parts just make me so mad

 

oh yay we are back to whining about hdm

which just feels like the biggest fucking waste of neat worldbuilding

 

lol it's never truly a waste if u get something out of the experience, there are many things I feel this way about. the series that is really pushing it for me is the Black Jewels, tbh. I will probably move my old man ranting over here because this seems like a more appropriate thread for it.

the Black Jewels are like a storebought BBQ chicken, there's one good meal to be had and that was my initial readthrough of them when I was eighteen and thought they were the edgiest shit in the world. now I'm looking at this sticky ribcage and trying to figure out if it's worth picking out the meat shreds from the cold skin and congealed juice and the whole thing smells like farts and regret but if you flip it over and scrape off the muck the oysters are probably still there

 

wonder woman

Spoiler: upsetting content relevant to movie

there was way too much stuff happening throughout the entire movie. personal gripe: i can appreciate the fact that for once in a superhero movie war isn't glorified, but.. graphic imagery of people with torn-off limbs screaming in pain is not what i watch superhero movies for. the main men were barely developed as characters. no one ever explains anything to diana: it's all handwaved as "that's how the Human World works". the entire point of the movie (i thought) was that ares wasn't forcing people to do things they didn't want to do, but when she kills him the fighting all stops. i couldn't take ares seriously because he was remus lupin with terrible facial hair. doctor poison was a flimsy character and wasn't developed. the pacing was awful. another personal gripe: i was not emotionally prepared to watch people trapped in a room suffocating from poison gas, that's one of my biggest fears. "love is the answer" no the fuck it isn't. get this cliche het romance fuckery out of my face. this would have been so much more meaningful, imo, if diana and (steve?) chris pine hadn't been macking on each other. i did cry when main guy died, but other than that i didn't feel any emotion throughout the movie other than stress. there was no real reason for Evil General Guy to be huffing supersoldier vapor, it didn't really add anything to the plot, imo. there was some interesting stuff with diana questioning her beliefs but not remotely enough time was dedicated to it. she let the evil chemist lady go which was incredibly stupid and irresponsible. i mean yes yes etc morality giving a second chance to people no matter how awful but this is on the level of batman not killing an unhinged clown responsible for the death of hundreds (or. however many people joker has killed at this point.) as far as "upholding morality even when it's completely impractical". that's probably not everything about the movie i hate but i've been typing for too long so

man, i wanted to like the movie, but i just. bounced really hard off of it

 

Not a pet peeve work of media in general, but a single specific episode of a work I absolutely adore aside from it. See, there is precisely one Steven Universe episode I never rewatch if I can avoid it, and that's House Guest.

It's the one where Greg breaks his leg and Steven loses his healing powers because it turned out Greg had faked his leg still being broken?? Which...okay, I get why his healing powers had to take a hiatus from a plot perspective, but there were so many other ways that could've been done! It could've so easily been a matter of him needing to learn to control his powers, because that's a theme in his arc!

And Greg is so absurdly OOC to the point that it's genuinely offensive to me--like, he's such a great character and an amazing dad, and that episode just...portrayed him totally differently than he's portrayed in every other goddamn episode save for a few admittedly cute moments. They could've done a really sweet episode about Greg wanting to spend more time with his son and portrayed him as, well, Greg, but instead they just...made him into a douche for one episode.

Fortunately the episodes immediately before and after it (Ocean Gem and Space Race) are fantastic, but that also kinda makes House Guest's shittiness stand out even more, IMO? Like, you've got a show that's normally great, and then that ONE FUCKING EPISODE happens.

(I know a lot of people have other episodes they hate more--The New Lars seems especially reviled, and while I didn't hate it I can get why--but House Guest is just...fucking infuriating.)

#also selfish request: #if anyone has any genuine "su critical" stuff can you spoil it? #i'm fuckin weird about people slamming my special interests sorry

 

To be honest? That sounds pretty accurate for Imperial China. Well, except the bit about the protagonists getting to roll their eyes and disapprove. Remember how Sun Tzu killed several thousand concubines to make a point? The mountain of skulls (and feet?). The whole business with the great wall? Burying scholars alive so no one would remember you had not always been Emperor? Burning the Imperial Gardens (and all the gardeners) because of one wilted rose is entirely in character. I mean, they pretty much perfected the hydraulic empire.

As for the mages being terrible... egh. 'Ambient magic' does seem like the exact kind of thing that a China-inspired culture would go for, TBH, and they did have a strong tendency to periodically purge all knowledge, and would absolutely reject any foreign knowledge, you'd think if anyone knew what they were doing, it'd be the Imperial Court. (Historically, all knowledge of astronomy, cartography, or... really, anything in general, was a state secret due to fear of others using magic against the Emperor.)

 

IIRC other than his foster-mom and a few others, he grew up surrounded by people saying he'd be bad because of his species. It's been almost two decades since I read it, but IIRC there were Redwallers saying this to each other knowingly in his hearing, and periodically to his face.

So it was constantly communicated to him that he wouldn't amount to anything and that he'd be a terrible person. No fucking wonder he was persistently a dick!

 

oh no :( :( :(

well now I'm gonna have to reread it, that's way sadder than I remember

 

That's the problem. Besides some of the worldbuilding details like the polar bears and the daemons I got nothing out of it. I was ferociously bored reading them as a child and an adult, and then we got to learning what the ending was and that was like nope. Yeap. This is shit. I hate this. I will never ever finish the series because it was just so incredibly unlikable for me.

As far as Redwall goes I never read them as a kid and I am curious about them now but the morality of the books really puts me off. I know it's for kids, but it's just not my thing. I did read the first Mistmantle book though which I adored as a kid. Series about a bunch of talking animals that live on a magic island shrouded in mist. The main character of the first one is a very pale squirrel named Urchin of the Riding Stars. As far as I recall there was no designated EVIL SPECIES in the book. The main villain is, like the main hero and several of his friends, a squirrel. Also there is a horrifying tradition of culling children with defects which is always fun to start off with.

 

oh holy shit I thought I was the only person on the planet who knew mistmantle existed

still call meteor showers riding stars in my head

 

omfg you are the first person i've ever met who knows about that series

 

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT
BACK UP BACK UP, MISTMANTLE, I HAVEN'T READ THOSE IN FOREVER
edit: that book introduced me to plant symbolism