Jul 1st, 2022

Anonymous asked:

For the anon talking about mxtx books. The reason you've heard good this about the translation for svss and tcgf is probably bc the, at least for svss, ones who did the fan translations for them are the ones working on the official.

I can't can't vouch at all for mdzs but the ones for svss at least are the fantranslators themselves, I was even following one of them, that's one of the many reasons why a couple of them had to take their work down, it wasn't just that sevenseas had licensing for the stories now but also bc they'd supposedly be going against their contract if they left the translations up.

Well. There you go, then. Neat that they could get hired to do their work professionally, too.

Jul 1st, 2022

Anonymous asked:

oh I didn't mean to imply that the fantranslations are unreadable or something. plenty of folks have gotten into the fandom before the official seven seas translation so it stands to reason that they're at least decent. I just brought it up because I figured it's good to know.

most of the fantranslations have been taken down because of the seven seas licensing of the books but they're easy enough to find if you know where to look. or you could just use the seven seas translation I heard the SVSSS and TGCF ones are pretty good.

not to sound too pressure-y on this I don't have a horse in this race I just started reading them too

Oh I know I’m just not really interested in seeking out fan translations for a running series. The piracy part isn’t the problem for me, but vetting a translator and finding one that covers the whole series is just more effort than I’m willing to put in something I’m not particularly invested in when I already have a never-ending TBR pile of other more accessible queer stuff. Which is why I’m curious about the official translation.

Jun 30th, 2022

Anonymous asked:

not the mxtx anon but I'm starting to read her work a bit and yeah her characters are definitely canonically queer. I think the main issue would be translation? because I can just read them in Chinese but I don't think the official Seven Seas is complete (and has some controversy when it comes to the mdzs translations I think?) so you'll have to go with fantranslations, which for one are fantranslations and for two mostly have stopped after the licenced novels have been announced so.

well, has anyone read the translation then? because much as i’d like to learn the language i don’t think i could feasibly make enough time to get to the level where i can read a novel in chinese (or if i did, i’d have to have a lexicon next to me and pause every three second to look something up).

Via comicauroraJun 28th, 2022

kingdomheartsrewrite4ever asked:

What Are Your Opinions On Harry Potter's Magic System

comicaurora answered:

“system” is a strong word for that situation

comicaurora:

The Harry Potter universe screwed itself right out the gate by combining the softest of soft magic systems with setting the entire thing in a school for teaching the protagonist how magic worked, and rather than having to establish hard rules on a soft magic system so it could let the magic school do its job, it split the difference by making Harry such a terrible student that neither he nor the audience ever learns anything about how magic actually works. Hermione does his homework for him. He cheats off Snape’s old textbook. He starts and ends the series with the same spell because it’s poetic and also because to do anything else would’ve required letting him actually learn or grow.

We are given single disconnected data points that smack of hard magic systems - individual magic words with static, concrete consequences and limitations, Accio not working on living creatures, etc - and the implication that, elsewhere in the universe, smarter people than Harry are capable of developing new spells. This implies that there is a system of rules at play here. Mispronouncing a spell or changing the associated wand movement can cause it to have a different effect, meaning the words have power on their own. Is there a language of magic? Well, yes, and it’s Latin, but like - is there a reason these sounds produce these effects? In other systems magic is the language of dragons, or the true names of the souls of the elements and creatures of the world. No such explanation is given here. Spells misfire or are miscast by incompetent wizards or broken wands, resulting in intriguing consequences outside the typical spell parameters, implying an intriguing fluidity to magic that is belied by literally everything we’re officially shown or told. Before going to hogwarts, Harry causes inexplicable phenomena (vanishing glass, uncuttable hair, the world generally warping in small ways to help him out) that is heavily implied to be the result of his magic because what else could it be, but after going to Hogwarts we never see this sort of wild magic again, which is a shame, because it seems like it could’ve been useful.

The magic system of Harry Potter is “if the plot needs a spell, artifact, potion, creature or magical doohicky to exist, it does, and if the plot needs it to NOT exist, it does not.” This is not a magic system because its rules are entirely Doylist, and any possible Watsonian rule systems are purposefully obfuscated to avoid the dreaded Worldbuilding More Than The Surface. One book needs time travel, so now there’s time magic. Later books can’t have time travel, so all the time magic is destroyed. All of it. One book needs luck magic so Harry can waltz through five layers of plot difficulty at once, and this game-breaker is never brought up before or after. Potion-brewing is discussed, but how were all these spells and artifacts created in the first place? Who laid down these restrictive rules on what they can and can’t do? Why can’t our heroes or their teachers make new ones that are more useful? None of these questions can be answered because to do so would require worldbuilding any internal rules, which this story does only when the plot needs those rules to exist.

The magical worldbuilding in Harry Potter is almost literally paper thin. It exists only to produce a surface aesthetic. If you ask a single question about how and why it functions the way it does, you punch through that paper-thin layer and see the needs of the plot laid bare behind it. This is not inherently bad. There are plenty of soft-logic stories that fully commit to the bit. The problem is that Harry Potter is a soft magic system with pretensions of hard-system grandeur. Instead of just owning up to the fact that magic is fickle and does what the plot needs, it seems to say “there ARE rules, and everybody else in the world knows them, but you, the audience surrogate outsider to the system, will never be told what they are.” And Harry is such an incurious, agencyless lump in his own narrative that he never tries to learn or improve. He has no desire to learn how his own magic system works, treating homework as an obligation to fob off on his smart friend while he dicks around playing quidditch and coasting on his magical trust fund. This handily saves the story from ever having to build the hard magic system it insists exists, and instead lets it populate the world with magical creatures and artifacts and potions and an implied population of very interesting, very smart people dealing with how all that stuff actually works while we hang out in Harry’s back pocket watching him complain that his magical school has the audacity to try and make him learn magic.

Blue has also directed me to a relevant clip where Brennan Lee Mulligan and Matthew Mercer discuss this very question. The internal logic of the Harry Potter universe is nonexistant. That’s not inherently a bad thing for a magical setting, but in this case I’m willing to be mean about it. I’ll put up with a lot from a story as long as it commits to the bit, but when the story and author try and convince the audience that the hard complicated worldbuilding is totally actually there and even was there all along, despite all observable evidence, that just makes the whole thing seem insecure and embarrassing. I’m not mad that Harry Potter’s magic system makes no sense, I’m just mad it keeps lying to me about it.

Via xiranjayzhaoJun 4th, 2022

britcision:

So I was thinking about Iron Widow and the Hunger Games because superficially, they follow similar arcs; a teenaged girl from an oppressive system fights the government

They’ve both got commodified violence as entertainment, a powerful emphasis on glamorous photoshoots, and lots of sinister machinations for our leading ladies

But when you put them side to side, they’re extremely different, and not just in the themes they explore. I think it comes down to one thing: agency

Katniss is living a pretty rough life before her story starts, and her situation sucks, but she is almost entirely independent. She has people she loves and won’t lose, and can consider just vibing off into the woods, even if she never would

The community is on her side and show it periodically, but things go from bad to worse extremely fast for her

Her first enemies aren’t alien hordes or callous killers who’ve led a hundred girls to certain death; they’re just other kids, in the same shitty situation, and as much as she tries to hate them, she can’t

Katniss is reasonably and understandably traumatized by what she’s been through, and loses her agency at every step as she’s pulled around by other peoples’ plans. She doesn’t want the rebellion and she doesn’t want an army; she wants to go home and be safe

Oh, and her love triangle is missing a side

Zetian though? Zetian’s former life fucking sucks, and we meet her on page one ready and willing to die for what she wants because she has nothing left that is hers

She has tried to run away, enough times to have “yet another escape attempt”, and is completely dependent on the people around her. She’s told her life’s worthless until she believes it, but no one considered “what if she wants to go out with a bang”

Zetian does see the political picture immediately, even if her understanding is as vague as “stop killing girls”

And while the army does spend a time trying to torture her with starvation and neglect before she meets Shimin, it’s really not much worse than how she’s used to being treated

Getting on camera and into battle, into physical violence that she can strike back with rather than just receiving, is a liberation for Zetian, and gives her her first ever taste of agency and power

She’s the first Iron Widow to survive and bear the name in public because she’s the first who went live on camera after a battle and couldn’t just be swept under the rug

The army can’t afford to kill her, but she’s perfectly happy to die for what she wants and she pushes back immediately and constantly against anyone trying to control her. She capitulates only on her terms, only when she gains from it

She’s a happy bisexual with two proud bi boyfriends because fuck what anyone else in the universe says, she wants it and it’s hers. She’ll worry for a moment if she’s got to choose (and if she’ll accept the choice made for her) and promptly decides the whole thing can go fuck itself because only her (and the boys’) wants matter

Nobody wants Zetian to lead a movement and change their world; if she won’t die quietly in a chrysalis, they want her to stand quietly at Shimin’s side as an accessory to make him more powerful

Her life is immediately, materially better from the minute she survives a second battle, and arguably from the moment she enlists because it’s finally under her control

Tl;dr? Katniss’s story is about losing control of her life and everyone has something they want from her. Zetian’s story is about seizing control and doing the shit that absolutely nobody wants her to do because she can

Katniss doesn’t want to lead a revolution

Zetian’s not giving the world a choice because she’s a one woman army and is the revolution

May 29th, 2022

Anonymous asked:

Iron Widow anon here. oh I absolutely agree I routinely describe it as "the most cathartic book I've ever read" and have rec'd it to a bunch of people. I've just also seen a lot of people describe it as a bit lacking in nuance/over the top, + that we never get explained how Zetian became this feminist in her society, which I feel is also fair, so I was curious what you think

Over the top? Definitely at times. But like…that’s a stylistic choice (Xiran really shows their anime inspiration there). They’re fighting creatures of the Chinese myth’s primordial chaos with giant mechs that turn into gianter forms. I can see it turning people off, but that’s not the same thing as it being a flaw in the book. You might as well wonder why Pacific Rim (also cited as an influence/used to comp the book) has giant robots fighting kaiju rather than anything else.

Lacking nuance? I don’t think that’s a good way to put it. I think part of it is that, well, the book is using a very on the nose metaphor to talk about its themes (the ending twist regarding the Chrysalis piloting setup comes to mind), but I don’t think that’s necessarily bad either, especially for YA.

But also, maybe this is my growing cynicism, but I think at times we demand more nuance out of our depictions of sexism, racism, classism (all major themes and antagonistic forces in this book) than they really deserve. Real instances absolutely do look cartoonishly evil at times, and I think by demanding more we just end up spending more effort trying to humanize bigots in our fiction than we spend actually supporting their victims. Not to say that morally ambiguous bigots don’t have their place, just that they don’t have their place everywhere and should be used with caution, rather than treated as the gold standard.

But also, I don’t think the book is exactly lacking in nuance so much as Zetian as a narrator sharing a lot of her inner thoughts.

As for Zetian having a proto-feminist outlook on the setting…I have complained in the past about protagonists in dystopian YA feeling like they were dropped from our world, and I didn’t get the impression of that here. Her assessment of the world she lived in was one she could make from observation of that world; it never felt to me like she wast judging her world by our standards and values, which is usually what I take offense with.

Revolutionary and political thought can and does occur in marginalized people, because, you know, they are the ones who are the main victim of oppression, making it easier for them to notice institutional injustice. And yes, that does mean among lower class and uneducated people, since the correlation between those things and marginalization is of course high. So I wouldn’t say “Zetian is very conscious of institutional sexism” is really a problem. Tons of people can and do notice these things, it’s just that by virtue of being marginalized and not protagonists of a book they generally don’t have the individual power to challenge or change that.

But like I said, this is just my (very cold) take on the book itself; I haven’t sought out more specific criticism nor am I responding to anything in particular. And I’ll fully admit that these are things I am partly more willing to disregard because the book was a fun and engaging read, and they might bother me more otherwise. Literary criticism is complicated or something.

May 28th, 2022

Anonymous asked:

a bit late but can I ask your opinion on Iron Widow? my thoughts on that book is so complicated because on one hand I agree with most good faith criticism of it but on the other hand I don't think that diminishes the book to me?

I’ll preface this by saying that i did not seek out any criticism of the book

But as far as I’m concerned Iron Widow is an absolute breath of fresh air and everything I didn’t know I needed in YA. So much genre YA wants to be about modern social issues by way of metaphor, which is great, but so rarely does it allow its protagonist to be angry about this injustice. And to just flat-out let the protagonist do a little fucked up shit and veer into her flaws.

I’ve literally recommended it to people offline who were like “i want to read more books, you read a lot of books, got any recommendations?” because of that.

Though I’m not gonna lie, it centers a f/m/m threeway relationship with a bunch of disaster bisexuals and a woman who is a little fucked up and will commit murder. So I’ll admit it was pandering to my exact tastes from the word go.

May 8th, 2022

Anonymous asked:

For future snark projects I'd actually be quite interested in the crescent city by Sarah j mass. Or possibly a court of silver flames (or whatever it's called). I've seen a lot of discussion related to both, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on the matter :] For other things I'd actually be interested in you going into analysis of jkr's detective stuff because I have not heard a single thing about it at all

I’m hesitant to do the ACOTAR sequels because I feel like I’ve already pretty much lived them through readywithcindy but I didn’t know Maas had started a new series or that it was about demonfucking, I mean, sign me up, I’m here for this trash

(this is not a commitment for a snark, but I’ll look into it)

though i am amused that she’s still out there unironically doing the “A place of noun and noun” title scheme in the 2020s, after it has become such a wild subject of derision and she was one of the trope codifier for it. I’m almost impressed, to be honest.

May 7th, 2022

Anonymous asked:

holy shit you weren't kidding about the Darkness Outside Us. Finished it in less than 6 hours and it's just sunk itself inside my brain

:)

May 2nd, 2022

seventhstar asked:

I think it'd be great if you did more blog posts about books you actually enjoyed! I follow you on Goodreads and enjoy seeing your updates and reviews there. If you're looking for a truly terrible book, The Gender Game by Bella Forrest is both badly written and badly thought out.

That one is actually on my potential snark list, though since it’s a few years old there is again that question of relevance. But I’ll consider it! The terfery of the premise sounds like there would be a lot to talk about.