@ariel9217 I don't think she cares and honestly "you spayed my mate" is a cursed line regardless and doesn't really mean much until you get into the story.
It's a super common fanfic smut trope, I highly doubt it's ever going to stop.. All these slop novels sound like what you read in a/b/o fanfic.. Same editing level too: none 😢
I’m at that point that the moment I even smell a _hint_ of Fae I will toss a book to the “Do Not Read” pile. It’s not fair, but I also cannot take any more omegaverse nonsense with the fur shaved off. Smelling arousal and spaying??? Please 😭
@@TheNumnutRandomness I hate what's been done to fae, because in mythology they're really interesting and no authors ever do anything creative with them. In mythology fae are like Dryads and made of trees and shit, but all these authors just make annoying elves.
(In the tune of Pure Imagination) ~come with me ~and you'll be ~in a world of OSHA violations! (Video of a man swinging from the shovel of an excavator)
Like at least when that happens in Pitch Black the character sardonically mention it to each other and are then like ‘well, f*ck it, we crash landed on an alien planet with little hope and might as well go down with a nice buzz’
He did say "unless you have to relieve yourself" (I assume this is that part being discussed), but by fey ambiguity rules he never said "unless you have to piss or shit" soooooooooo . . . . . . . . .
If you're looking for a recommendation, I'm a huge fan of the Saint of Steel series by T. Kingfisher: they don't fall into a lot of the typical romantasy tropes and they're really charming and cozy
Because T Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) is a REALLY good writer, who knows how to write relatable protagonists that don't feed into cliches, and her love interests are sexy without being just broody and mysterious. I feel she comes in with a sort of tongue-in-cheek, let's subvert the cliches, kind of attitude.
I think it's because in theory, good romantasy is somewhat balanced 50-50, maybe variable to 25-75 either direction for taste, with focus shifting in different parts of the story. In practice, it's 85-90% romance with a bad fantasy background 95% of the time
1:08:45 The smell of her (months old????) *arousal* can be mistaken for the smell of her brother? What do arousal and siblings ever have to do with one another? Is that you, Cassandra Clare?
Oh, thank god, I'm just getting to that part and I was getting worried she was going to find out she'd been sleeping with a guy that turned out to be her half brother or something
Authors, I am begging you... if you must write long-winded proselytizing dialogue, PLEASE practice saying it out loud so you can at least attempt to make your characters sound like real people. That whole "the people in our ward DO deserve basic human rights actually" speech in the beginning was exhausting to listen to, which is not how I should be feeling about your underdog protagonist! Also, I am so sorry to the author, but I keep expecting that cover to come alive like a blingee.
Ooooh my god, this. I was reading Vampyria by Victor Dixen (a book that got me hooked with "Sun King Louis XIV becomes a vampire and has ruled Europe for 300 years" and lost me with "fem protag goes to high school") and the book has TWO major scenes where the pacing is telling us that the characters are in a hurry, but the characters themselves take their sweet fucking time explaining backstory to each other. The first scene was literally the beginning of the book!
THAT'S WHAT I SAID WHEN I HEARD THAT. He genuinely thought she was banging her brother?? So he grabbed the man who smelled of her coochie juice?? Plus, the conversations these two are having would make me die of humiliation if I were there. Within one week of meeting each other they're trying to crawl into each other's laps, this is beyond insta-lust. This is the opposite of slowburn. Plus, the fact that "arousal" is such a strong pheromone KILLS me. I can't imagine everybody knowing I'm in the mood or who I slept with, that's horrifying.
I’m not a big reader so I enjoyed it. I laughed and cringed quite a lot lol but I spent like half of the book worried that she was gonna do a “ ha ha he’s actually your brother and you f*d him “. I had the worry 🤮
20:07 Should she... Be telling her oppressors that there's any kind of rebellion brewing? Throwing this out there, Katniss never would have told the Peacekeepers anything.
So apparently ‘brand new’ isn’t about commercial brands, it’s about something being fresh out of a furnace. So I’d say for a story about metal it’s actually pretty appropriate. It’s also from the 1500s, but the phrase ‘brand spanking new’ is from the 1860s as a combination of ‘brand new’ and ‘spick and span’. Technically it would only be anachronistic if it’s set before the mid 19th century (If you can’t tell I’m procrastinating)
12:27 CARRION?! Like rotting flesh?! "Hey, how're you doin'? My name is Rotting Flesh and I'm great in bed. I'm totally not the Cassian/Aedion of this story."
"I found our love interest! He's always the tallest one." This makes me want to start writing something new where the love interest is the *shortest* man in the room. Short kings need more love.
My “favorite” type of female character is one who is street-smart, sharp, and clever- relying purely on her wit and fortitude to survive in a cruel world… then gets completely stumped by basic things like “There may be magic behind the Queen living 1000 years???” Edit: Also the whole thing about “omg, that’s magic?” is why setting up a solid foundation for world building is a must for fantasy stories. As readers, how are we supposed to know the difference between a human living for 1000 years vs an immortal race?
Wet looking black hair on a super tall muscly guy with lots of tattoos will never not make me picture a WWE wrestler. You can pick whichever one is funniest to you, but i pick the Undertaker
And they would actually work as characters if they did present the characters of WWE wrestlers. Larger than life, boastful, physically imposing, but with a healthy degree of self-deprecating humor.
Every time I think "My novel is the worst, this is dogshit," you upload a video about some popular booktok novel and I think "Ok, is not that bad, I just have work so it wont be like THIS."
That, and I mean this seriously, you actually THINK about how you want the plot to go. Trust me, I like spicy romance just as much as the next girlie. But some of these books just feel so empty of the connection. It might sound cringe, but I love tantric, soul level connections that aren’t for the vibe or aesthetic.
I always wonder if I'm focusing too much on world building but then I see these videos and realize that being a little too into world building is better than doing absolutely none 😂
Thanks to that name I can't stop picturing Jurassic Park's Jeff Goldblum as a fantasy vampire and it weirdly works until he tries to explain chaos theory in a bad East European accent. 😅
Another book in the "Omegaverse tropes should have NEVER become mainstream" case study. Why are we treating Fae like werewolves? Especially when their enemy this time are VAMPIRES?! Either write werewolves or write fairies or find a better way to do them both! This is like four different AU plots rolled into one man.
the thing that gets me about omegaverse becoming mainstream is how cishet they've managed to make it. i mean it was always very ciscentric of course but it's just kind of weird to me how het it's become too
@@kaijuhunting Can't even disagree with you there. Like at least give me some LGBT+ Omegaverse stuff if y'all are gonna keep using it outside fanfics. At least I can count on fanfics to keep it non-het.
Goddd Booktook is just a rotating series of totally alpha Timothee Chalamets saying the same porny/corny dialogue and leading the same porny/corny scenes as the other totally alpha Timothee Chalamets. Sometimes there's shifters or dragons instead of fae- wow! An absolute sea of indistinguishable "spicy" slop, haha. at this point the cheesy dudebro fantasy of the 80's & 90's literally feels less misogynist than this current crop of stories but that's a wholeass can of worms
for real, i wish more reviewers would be openly critical about the insane levels of misogyny permeating every level of these things- but also whenever that happens people in the comments always crawl out of the woodwork to cry Kinkshaming and You Just Hate Female Authors, so. i understand why somebody might be hesitant. it just always blindsides me when i come to one of these reviews and Musclebound Alpha Love Interest #56431 tells the main character nearly word for word that even if she says no he knows she actually wants it 😭
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌 “feels less misogynist than this current crop of stories” I can not express how much I feel so valid rn, because I’ve been screeching this since the rise of booktok!
Been dying for you to cover this because it’s written by the same person who wrote the “published Reylo fanfic” Jenny Nicholson did a reading of years ago and I stumbled on this knowledge by accident and it’s eating me alive
WHAT. That book with the scene where Not Kylo Ren is holding the ship together with Not the Force and Jenny points out how that particular scene is so much better than anything else in the book that it’s obviously the scene the author has held in her head the longest? The book where Not Luke kills Not Leia? That book?
@ SJM and this lady--the hell do you MEAN fae women just DIE in childbirth like regular humans?? There is nothing in the world to me more boring than otherworldly creatures--like fairies--who are basically humans and have a society that is also basically human. Susanna Clarke spoiled me on fairies fr😭💛
Maybe this is just me being aroace but I feel like if I found out that Fae were real and I had magic, I wouldn’t have time to thirst over a hot guy. My brain would be actively breaking apart, a guy’s partially silver iris would rank so low on my list of priorities i wouldn’t notice it for like a month
I know I’m not the target audience when the main character spends entire chapters going, “Ugh, he’s so aggravating but so hot! He’s so hot but infuriatingly so. I can’t stop THINKING ABOUT HIM and his SEXY LIPS.” And I’m just like… so stop it? You just found out you have magic metal powers and that your entire worldview got turned upside down. Shouldn’t you be doing… literally anything other than sniping at each other hornily?
i saw someone explain how within book prose, low key you shouldn't even mention the fine details of someone's eye unless you're super close to their face as part of the pov experience. so when she says she noticed the little silver in his eye when he comes out of the ground or whatever i'm like "okay this author doesn't know what they're doing"
RIGHT?? sometimes I wondered if it is really how allo people are when they can't stop thinking of someone but this level of tunnel vision is just damn baffling. You have fucking magic! Your life has been a lie! There's so much to discover! Nope, hot guy. Once again horniness claims the biggest part of the brain.😑
Yes! Please. I love spicy romance, don’t get it twisted. I mean, it’s literally my username. But like, no. I need the pacing to be right, otherwise I get so thrown off if all of a sudden the main male character starts getting all possessive the moment we’re introduced to him. Give me a fictional man that isn’t normally possessive and becomes possessive, or starts treating her like she’s special or different then how he usually acts…and make it a nice, good pacing of them looking at each other. Touching each other, little subtle glances…I’ll eat that up
So it's not only "how did they produce alcohol if they have no water", but also, if you don't have a sustainable source of clean drinking water, why would you drink alcohol, something that famously dehydrates you a lot?
if i had a nickel for every not-set-on-earth novel with a kylo ren-coded love interest where a character uses the term "cliff notes," i'd have two nickels. which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice
"Ewww, David!" does, in fact, summarize everything I'm feeling about this book. Your sacrifice in reading this dreck so we don't have to is greatly appreciated.
I have questions: 1- Does the author know that quicksilver is mercury? 2- Carrion!? Why name a character dead meat? 3- Rachel, where does Fox from Among the Beasts and Briars rank on your list of magical foxes?
I have quite a few issues with the ACOTAR series, and the popularisation of using ‘male’ and ‘female’ in romantasy is definitely up there. Like if a romantasy makes a big deal of biological essentialist language, it’s just a red flag to me that there’s gonna be some really shallow liberal feminism
Wait but the male and female thing makes sense to me when it’s fae. They’re usually depicted as quite animalistic and they aren’t human, so you wouldn’t use “man” or “woman.” And in those same books, they refer to humans as being a man or a woman, at least that I’ve seen. Though we could definitely do with more nonbinary and LGBT characters as these books tend to be written by straight cis women.
@@yessirdehaha, sorry, yeah, it’s a city from Final Fantasy 7. It’s a huge metal city in a dried out wasteland that is divided into 8 sectors. The wealthier folk live on plates elevated hundreds of feet above the slums that formed in the dust beneath them. Resources are scarce, a corporation distributes power at the cost of the planet (they’re the law of the land), and there are people who live there who have never seen the sky before. It’s a super fascinating setting! And I kinda hate that it cropped up in Quicksilver. :)
14:15 This is so incredibly lazy!!!! This author could have come up with a plant similar to tequila agave. Or even come up with a moonshine-like situation where they use "cactus juice" (insert ATLA joke here) to brew terrible liquor that can cause sickness, but because of the scarcity of water (and it's tendency to go bad if left untreated) they mix this liquor in to preserve it. People who like the buzz or are just really poor could also drink this bathtub brew on its own, since its not really legal and is risky it'd be cheaper. They could even be illegally processing sewage into irrigation and fertilizer for their secret cactus farms. Bonus points if they use this to hide corpses too and even nobles or rich city folk pay them for their "disposal" services.
@@TurdusRufiventris I would love to! unfortunately my mental health is in the toilet bowl and its hard just being alive right now, but thank you for the faith in my abilities! 💗💗
The fact that the blood pact is active even though this fey dude didn't actually hold up his end of the bargain. He didn't get her brother and yet she is still bound to her side of the deal. Thats not how deals work
I love when revolutionary protagonists give long-winded speeches laden with self important metaphor. Tell me you’ve never been around any activist or anarchist spaces without telling me etc. First rule is Don’t Talk To [Royal Guards] (ARGAB?)
I am surprised this didn't end with "Oh, and your new body is also now magically un-spayed." Because we can never have childfree rep in these books, either.
I know the beginning may as well be ignored for its total irrelevance to the rest of the book, but it has me so irritated. The Queen complains her land is barren, how on earth do they have whiskey (requiring irrigated crops), tempered metals with no sign of mining or quarrying, a sewer system (thats something that requires water), woven fabrics or animal based skins when they dont have enough water to feed the city... The list goes on. In fact, why are they settled in a fully built city at all in somewhere that provides nothing for any of the people? Even if the Queen had taken/bargained for the land from they Fae, why didn't the people just... Leave and become nomadic? Or find somewhere sustainable to actually settle?
I can't stand world building where everyone acts like The Big Catastrophy happened recently only for readers to find out that it's been like this for A MILLENNIA. Do you know how much we've developed since literal BIBLICAL TIMES? Hell, even 50 years ago? And you're telling there's literally NO INFRASTRUCTURE in place for water scarcity other than people bartering for it? Yet you have whiskey? Leather? Sewers??
4:17 N.B. stands for nota bene, which means note well. basically it means something you have to pay attention to, but its kind of old-fashioned, so i don't know why they would be using it here.
I learned about N.B. in a biography of Lord Byron. Publically infamous man-wh*re Byron signed papers as "N.B." ( i.e. Noel Byron), being well aware it also meant "nota bene." A total knee-slapper in 1816!
This author has used this anachronism before - look up Jenny Nicholson reading black moon rising, the author's knock-off reylo fanfic. She wrote it under a pen name, but it's her.
I love how they do a world building quirk (water is sparse!) and you can't let go of how LITERALLY EVERYTHING STILL NEEDS WATER. (because same, big same) how was this missed lol
I think we're all just tired of romantasy for the sake of smut. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against a smutty book but a smutty book without a plot, without connection and chemistry with the two leads is just a bad romance book. There are ways to create tension that isn't insta lovey and where people do dislike each other and then slowly start to like each other. There are also better names than Kingfisher 😒 I should have known I wasn't going to like this book though. It was exactly like ACOTAR and I regretted every second of reading that, too. 😮💨
I thought for a second the author might do something interesting with the name “Kingfisher” by having it turn out to be a misreading or mistranslation of “Fisher King,” the symbol from Arthurian myth of a disabled king whose persistent wound is a cause and mirror of a blight affecting the land. I thought maybe the mercury poisoning would be the wound, making him too volatile and cruel to assume the throne. It’s probably not going that way.
I can't lie when I hear carrion I think of warrior cats cause that's where I first learned the word. I can't take a character seriously with a name that not only means rotten flesh but also reminds me of warrior cats.
The queen is named Madra (sp?), which is Irish for dog? I'm exercising my right to imagine her as a decrepit immortal chihuahua then, since our love interest is a gangly bird
I'm like...are we really still doing this in 2024? Also it's not like women didn't work hard and wear dresses for...oh idk...thousands upon thousands of years?
i wanted to dnf this book at 5%, and 10%, 25%, almost threw my kindle at 45% when she referenced a "singularity" as if the concept of blackholes existed in her world. and then again at like 50% when she called fisher "the devil" because WHO IS THE DEVIL TO YOU??? i almost would have excused it all if it had been revealed that humans as a species had actually come from OUR real world thousands of years ago through the quicksilver and these were just lingering parts of the lexicon, but that would require authorial forethought. my last straw was when she revealed she'd been sterilized because it felt like it was a "plot thread" that came out of them having sex (to excuse the unprotected nature of it) and not an actual attempt at world building. Which made me realize a pattern that so much of this felt as if it were being built as it went, as if this were the skeleton draft where you just write it all out and she hadn't gone back to build out the flesh of the story before she decided to publish it.
About the river thing- it’s a part of the folklore that vampires can’t go through running water. Usually running water is clean compared to still water, so it repels them, the same way that garlic and silver would.
@@The_Distractinator Thank you. I may or may not be currently watching the LOTR movie trilogy for the first time right now, and the second she said that the MC didn't react to talking jewelry, I was like, What?!
When you explained how he can smell her lust or whatever, I immediately thought “what is she a cat? She got an estrus cycle?” Smelling lust is some furry shit 😂 Edit: oh my god not spayed!!! She is a cat!
💛 I think the “century years” thing was probably a find & replace mishap. Like it probably said a hundred years, but the author thought century sounded better. They just didn’t check to make sure they replaced it correctly. That’s my theory anyway.
Search and replace can be helpful, but you have to proofread after you use it. Otherwise you’ll try to change a character’s name from David to Steve and end up with someone riding a Harley Steveson motorcycle.
I think I know why they named this book Quicksilver. It's because reading it will make you lose your mind, like a hat maker sealing a brim with mercury.
@@TheseVioletDelitesmakes me so sad. i’m absolutely in love with the traditional fae myths and i’m working so hard to work to have a complex magic system where i can work some traditional fae lore into but i feel like these authors are poisoning the well for me by cursing the ‘fae’ archetype as being ‘alpha dude elves’ instead of ‘eldritch terrors you shouldn’t trifle with’
Deserts are freezing at night. Why’d you have to reference a rain… that one time? Omg I love how whenever Rachel reads the MC’s voice she sounds so whiny.
Can we for once, have a love interest who doesn't have Shadow magic, is of average height and who would support the plucky hero by baking a cake after finding out they had a bad day?
Not exactly this, but I found one of the love interests in Iron Widow really refreshing in a similar way. Beware though, that book is brutal (I mean literally, lots of violence)
The only romance men I know of that come close to that are in Regency romances by Georgette Heyer. It would be nice to have some in the Romantacy genre, or even in the romance genre in general that has been written in the past couple of decades.
also has blonde, strawberry blonde, red or normal brown hair? I’m so sick of the black haired 4th wing/shantel tessier/acotar copy paste of literally every single male mmc. blonde men are hot too especially in fantasy!!!!?
If I ever write a book I will be questioning every couple of paragraphs if I just wrote anything Rachel would say once, look at the camera and emphasize it's stupidity by saying it a second time slightly louder 😂
Huhh? She's only been cold once? First - cold is variable, she would have a relative cold based on normal temperatures but also. She lives in a desert and has notably incredibly low humidity - temperatures should absolutely plummet when those suns go down Edit: Got to the part where you mention they don't have night in her realm. Soooo, how does the physics do the physics? But also if it's a sometimes one, sometimes both sun system, it should still get slightly colder when one sun is gone
@ I'm glad you enjoyed lol. I love when authors alter the world like that, but they have to take it into account. I do presume there must be an ocean somewhere if the people still require water to live so tides, but also, the two stars this planet has and any moons do affect the wobble of the planet and rotational speeds and such. There are also several effects beyond physics that would have been so fun to look into that might've made this book a bit more interesting
„I ate in fisher’s bed, slept in fisher’s bed” - damn girl, are you Blondie Locks? What else did you do? Sat in fisher’s chair? Ate from his bowl? Romantasy seriously brings bad name to fantasy genre 😂
I was also constantly grossed out by the love of huge numbers with no meaning by the author. The constant weirdness with the numbers of armies and enemies: - how did Saeris alone fight 30 armoured guards, and even managed to defeat three while others watched? - 15,000 fairies couldn't defeat a hundred, a thousand vampires they've been fighting for 1,000 years? - why were only 5 of the 15,000 involved in the fight at the river? - there were 200,000 fairies with super strength and magic in the burned city and they couldn't defend themselves against vampires? - why make 1400-1700-year-old characters that act like pretentious teenagers? we can't even comprehend what kind of state of mind and behaviour a creature that old should have.
The whole “centuries years” thing is absolutely from when the author was writing her first draft and either didn’t have a set timeline in her mind yet, or did and changed her mind later. It was probably originally an actual number, ‘300 hundred years’ or a placeholder word, ‘ELEPHANT years’ and she f5’d for the placeholder and changed it to centuries without noticing that she left behind years. This book was for sure not edited well or at all
One of my favorite quotes in this video, “oh yes, a forest at midnight smells differently than the forest at 11:30 pm”. Still can’t stop laughing at this. Your sarcasm and humor makes these books a delight.
Okay but I actually have a student (grad student TA) named Osha and on my second quarter of teaching them I am finally getting desensitized to the name
I think it's because these books seem to mainly focus on the romance aspect only... instead of actually working on literally anything else. It's too bad because it's such a good idea on paper
It's because nothing works, not the fantasy or the romance, you have people entirely unskilled in both trying to blend them while also ripping off the latest slop
It’s what some kid’s sixth grade math teacher says to his little league coach knowing coach has the power to make him run laps and potentially bench him for a game if he can’t stop cutting up and talking back in class.
As someone who reads and writes books with fae, I hate this trend so much. Show me pixies, banshees, dullahans, black hounds, all of it!! Or else they're just sexy vampire analogues!!
Ikr!! Fae are not ‘sexy elves’. Fair, there’s like 4 different regional interpretations of fae depending on what European region you based them off, but like… sexy elf is not one of them?? I’m at least on my 7th iteration of a magic system trying to get a world in which they are more like: ‘eldritch horrors that can take any form’ rather than just 🌽-y pointy eared humans with no power limitations at all.
The pronunciation guide is making me laugh way too hard lmao it reminds of when my kindergarten teacher would make us clap each syllable of a word to understand what it is
15:29 id like to also point out that water is commonly used in smithing metals 🤣 so how can they have a world that has all these metals and no water lol the metals get dunked in water after smithing to rapidly cool them and that’s what makes them durable soooo this world makes even less sense 😂
Decorated a cake for my daughter's fifth bday while listening to this. I'm exhausted but it was a good distraction, thank you! Also this book is very silly.
I know that I'm overthinking this on so many levels, but.... if these people are all living on a planet with two suns and scarce water, why haven't they evolved to deal with that the way life in actual extreme deserts do? I haven't finished the video yet so it's entirely possible it's a sloppy "we were in a secret space colony the whole time!" thing but if that's the case, why wouldn't a system be set up that allows access to the most basic necessity for every single living thing so that their workers can, y'know, work? Did Nestle found this place?
EXACTLY! Like, they should have those water recycling suits they have in Dune to extract fresh water from sweat/urine, have water extraction setups (maybe underground caves to attract condensation?), use clothes that don’t require a lot of water to dye, etc etc.
25:15 No! Don't do these things! curse my monologuing, why do i always explain exactly what I don't want my enemies to do?! i need to stop giving people the exact description of things they need to do to defeat me!
💛I found my self saying "Ew" and "STOP at pretty much ever Fisher sex scene line but I think I finally felt something break inside at "Tell us what it's like, sex with fisher?". I screamed like... God.
This may be a hot take, but I find it really annoying that authors make someone go to a website for trigger warnings. If your story is spoiled by trigger warnings, imo, it's probably not very well written. Just let readers know what sort of experience they're getting into, like damn 😭
saaaaame like how hard is it to just take a page or two at the front of the book to list them??? i've seen trigger warning lists be decently done in books, IMO it doesn't "spoil" any of the events - cause it's just a matter of 'graphic'/'non-graphic' & 'on-page'/'off-page' - so authors who claim it does are relying on pure shock value 😮💨 as you say, not very well written
I think Jenny Nicholson read a Reylo book that also mentioned Cliff Notes. Why do so many scifi/fantasy writers keep adding cliff notes into their world? Is Clifton Hillegass a dimension walker????
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Big thanks to Ridge for sponsoring! Here’s the site to check them out & get a gift that’ll last a lifetime - ridge.com/readswithrachel
Your smile is beautiful!
Who is the hot guy you used for Kingfisher
@ariel9217
I don't think she cares and honestly "you spayed my mate" is a cursed line regardless and doesn't really mean much until you get into the story.
Without context of who the line is talking about I don’t really consider it a spoiler
I am BEGGING, can we stop with characters being able to smell arousal??? No more.
Fr like... please stop it sounds like an infection or that the character would be put to better use for sniffing out drugs or something.
Like is the main character a cat??
It's a super common fanfic smut trope, I highly doubt it's ever going to stop.. All these slop novels sound like what you read in a/b/o fanfic.. Same editing level too: none 😢
Like only you can smell your own arousal if you have a sensitive enough nose (I have autism so I can smell mine since my nose is a bit sensitive)
anyone sexuality active can tell you its not the best smell in the world lol
"Do not touch the sword. Do not turn the key. Do not open the gate. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200."
"Do not buy this book"
"Do not yes."
"Do not let the pigeon drive the bus."
Go Straight To Jail.
AHAHAHA
The 'Secrets are like a knot' analogy really shows that somebody wasn't a Boy Scout. Good knots are NOT bound to come undone. My badge says so.
Literally there are so many things knots do that you could compare to secrets. Instead we have a terrible knot maker
Need secrets like a pasta strainer metaphors fr
Right? The Gordian Knot would like a word 🤣
Oh that type of knot
@@mewt5358 No **sprays water** bad commenter
I’m getting reallllll tired of the Dollar General ACOTAR’s 😑 especially because ACOTAR itself is already Five Below, at best.
@@awkwardhandmovements PREACH 🫶
I’m at that point that the moment I even smell a _hint_ of Fae I will toss a book to the “Do Not Read” pile. It’s not fair, but I also cannot take any more omegaverse nonsense with the fur shaved off.
Smelling arousal and spaying??? Please 😭
bruh, lmao
@@TheNumnutRandomness I hate what's been done to fae, because in mythology they're really interesting and no authors ever do anything creative with them. In mythology fae are like Dryads and made of trees and shit, but all these authors just make annoying elves.
@@TheNumnutRandomness Me with anything involving "mates." Keep that shit in the animal world where it belongs and far, far, far away from me.
Every time he said "Little Osha" I thought of a tiny OSHA rep
Little OSHA violation ❤
@@scapegoat13 😂😂
@@scapegoat13wish OSHA would violate meeeee 😂
(In the tune of Pure Imagination)
~come with me
~and you'll be
~in a world of OSHA violations!
(Video of a man swinging from the shovel of an excavator)
@@platedlizard😂😂
They’re dehydrating themselves with whiskey and they have no water
Like at least when that happens in Pitch Black the character sardonically mention it to each other and are then like ‘well, f*ck it, we crash landed on an alien planet with little hope and might as well go down with a nice buzz’
Seeing poorly written novels like this succed fills my amateur writers heart with optimism.
Genuinely so real. If they can get published, so can I.
Same here. I've written better screenplays in the span of like 5-10 weeks than stuff like this book (which I assume took some months or years).
SAME! Nothing stopped them from achieving their dreams. Apparently without good editors. Because apparently those are lacking, too.
You can be a bad writer, but at least you’ll never be Penelope Douglas
I now refuse to feel shame.
no way the sexy love interest's nickname for the protagonist is the US Occupational Safety & Health Administration
😂😂😂
This was all I could think of too LMAOOOO
It is a real name, though.
Happened in The Acolyte too.
@ I remember that, it gave me a giggle the first time I heard it there too.
“Five long days I ate in fisher’s bed, slept in fisher’s bed” why did my brain continue that sentence into “shat in fisher’s bed”
LMAOOO
@@Im.A1ex I actually laughed out loud at this.
He deserves it for pointing out that he followed her vag stank to her ex lover.
Logical conclusions?
He did say "unless you have to relieve yourself" (I assume this is that part being discussed), but by fey ambiguity rules he never said "unless you have to piss or shit" soooooooooo . . . . . . . . .
Quicksilver is another name for Mercury, everyone who has it just has mercury poisoning lol
Oh so no wonder they all act like they have brain damage!
I just think of the true Quicksilver, the x men character 😂
@@Air_Serpent I try not too because this book slanders Pietro's name 😭
But see it's okay cause you get mercury poisoning, not quicksilver poisoning so it's obvious completely safe
😂
romantasy as a genre frustrates me because as a concept it should be 100% for me but all of the books in the genre feel... iffy, to put it mildly
I feel the same way 😭 it's so hard to find ones that actually fit my expectations of such genre
If you're looking for a recommendation, I'm a huge fan of the Saint of Steel series by T. Kingfisher: they don't fall into a lot of the typical romantasy tropes and they're really charming and cozy
Because T Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) is a REALLY good writer, who knows how to write relatable protagonists that don't feed into cliches, and her love interests are sexy without being just broody and mysterious. I feel she comes in with a sort of tongue-in-cheek, let's subvert the cliches, kind of attitude.
@@lemurkat Oh for SURE! I've loved everything I've read from her (Digger has what may be my favorite creation/fall myth ever)
I think it's because in theory, good romantasy is somewhat balanced 50-50, maybe variable to 25-75 either direction for taste, with focus shifting in different parts of the story. In practice, it's 85-90% romance with a bad fantasy background 95% of the time
1:08:45 The smell of her (months old????) *arousal* can be mistaken for the smell of her brother? What do arousal and siblings ever have to do with one another? Is that you, Cassandra Clare?
We need to blame both Sarah j Maas and Cassie Clare
Oh, thank god, I'm just getting to that part and I was getting worried she was going to find out she'd been sleeping with a guy that turned out to be her half brother or something
@@elle8786 THAT WAS MY WORRY TOO
Authors, I am begging you... if you must write long-winded proselytizing dialogue, PLEASE practice saying it out loud so you can at least attempt to make your characters sound like real people. That whole "the people in our ward DO deserve basic human rights actually" speech in the beginning was exhausting to listen to, which is not how I should be feeling about your underdog protagonist!
Also, I am so sorry to the author, but I keep expecting that cover to come alive like a blingee.
yes exactly! how people actually talk is much different from the written version of it.
i was waiting for the guard to shut her up. kudos to him for sitting through that weird ass rant
Ooooh my god, this.
I was reading Vampyria by Victor Dixen (a book that got me hooked with "Sun King Louis XIV becomes a vampire and has ruled Europe for 300 years" and lost me with "fem protag goes to high school") and the book has TWO major scenes where the pacing is telling us that the characters are in a hurry, but the characters themselves take their sweet fucking time explaining backstory to each other.
The first scene was literally the beginning of the book!
honest to god, my eyes started to glass over at that whole bit. Ma'am, this isn't the venue for your shower monologues
@@Ellisephalmao 😂😂😂😔💀
He's looking for her brother, so naturally he grabs the guy who smells like her lover. Right. Okay. I don't like that.
Apparently his whole knowledge of humanity comes from too many 'sweet home Alabama' jokes and 'what are you doing stepbro' adult films
THAT'S WHAT I SAID WHEN I HEARD THAT. He genuinely thought she was banging her brother?? So he grabbed the man who smelled of her coochie juice?? Plus, the conversations these two are having would make me die of humiliation if I were there. Within one week of meeting each other they're trying to crawl into each other's laps, this is beyond insta-lust. This is the opposite of slowburn. Plus, the fact that "arousal" is such a strong pheromone KILLS me. I can't imagine everybody knowing I'm in the mood or who I slept with, that's horrifying.
exactly
tbh i thought this was going to have some weird ass incest thing
I’m not a big reader so I enjoyed it. I laughed and cringed quite a lot lol but I spent like half of the book worried that she was gonna do a “ ha ha he’s actually your brother and you f*d him “. I had the worry 🤮
Not even 5 minutes in but that cover…. We have Timothee Chalamet at home
@@chatswithvivi it looks like an AI yassified onision
@@laceys5353 DONT SAY THAT. DONT REMIND THE WORLD OF THE ONION.
20:07 Should she... Be telling her oppressors that there's any kind of rebellion brewing? Throwing this out there, Katniss never would have told the Peacekeepers anything.
So apparently ‘brand new’ isn’t about commercial brands, it’s about something being fresh out of a furnace. So I’d say for a story about metal it’s actually pretty appropriate. It’s also from the 1500s, but the phrase ‘brand spanking new’ is from the 1860s as a combination of ‘brand new’ and ‘spick and span’. Technically it would only be anachronistic if it’s set before the mid 19th century
(If you can’t tell I’m procrastinating)
Is it procrastination if we all learned something new today?
@readswithrachel exactly! I for one am glad for this little factoid, may actually help my own writing efforts!
This is the good kind of procrastinating! Just gotta remember to get back on track after (that’s the step I usually stumble at 🤣)
12:27 CARRION?! Like rotting flesh?! "Hey, how're you doin'? My name is Rotting Flesh and I'm great in bed. I'm totally not the Cassian/Aedion of this story."
mmm the smell of decomp .. 😂
“Hey baby.”
“Omg, Pustule Van Stinkhole! What are you doing here?”
@@TheNumnutRandomness of the Boston Van Stinkholes??
And this is my lover ✨ mr Rotting flesh✨🕳️
@@TheNumnutRandomnessnow I desperately want a TikTok dark romance novel where the love interest is a greater unclean one of Nurgle
"I found our love interest! He's always the tallest one." This makes me want to start writing something new where the love interest is the *shortest* man in the room. Short kings need more love.
please yes!!
Do it!
In the new Dragon Age game one of the romancable male characters is a total short king, like I don’t think he’s even 5’4”, it’s awesome
@nooneofnote8453 lol, yes he is ❤️
Spell for a Smith, it's a romance comic on Webtoons...it's absolutely amazing.
My “favorite” type of female character is one who is street-smart, sharp, and clever- relying purely on her wit and fortitude to survive in a cruel world… then gets completely stumped by basic things like “There may be magic behind the Queen living 1000 years???”
Edit: Also the whole thing about “omg, that’s magic?” is why setting up a solid foundation for world building is a must for fantasy stories. As readers, how are we supposed to know the difference between a human living for 1000 years vs an immortal race?
Yeah like we in any Romantasy or fantasy worlds we need to know what the rules of this world are and we need lore and background
that is literally my foxgirl oc
also the difference in an immortal and a human is you ask them to speak an old language like old english, middle english or idk
MY LITTLE WORKPLACE SAFETY 😍
My thoughts exactly! You just know she was pulling out a "Caution: Wet Floor" sign every time she got horny.
I cannot believe I didn’t make this joke in the video
@@ReadswithRachel I can't believe the author didn't work in a line where the MC calls a condom personal protective equipment.
Lmao!!!!! This comment got me dying😂
Wet looking black hair on a super tall muscly guy with lots of tattoos will never not make me picture a WWE wrestler.
You can pick whichever one is funniest to you, but i pick the Undertaker
And they would actually work as characters if they did present the characters of WWE wrestlers.
Larger than life, boastful, physically imposing, but with a healthy degree of self-deprecating humor.
Every time I think "My novel is the worst, this is dogshit," you upload a video about some popular booktok novel and I think "Ok, is not that bad, I just have work so it wont be like THIS."
literally, abd it gives me ideas of what NOT to include, or how to make things better
omg same!
That, and I mean this seriously, you actually THINK about how you want the plot to go. Trust me, I like spicy romance just as much as the next girlie. But some of these books just feel so empty of the connection. It might sound cringe, but I love tantric, soul level connections that aren’t for the vibe or aesthetic.
I always wonder if I'm focusing too much on world building but then I see these videos and realize that being a little too into world building is better than doing absolutely none 😂
Never forget. If Colleen Hoover can write Horror and marked it as Romance you can publish a book!
Malcolm has got to be the least intimidating name choice for an immortal super powerful mega-vampire.
Thanks to that name I can't stop picturing Jurassic Park's Jeff Goldblum as a fantasy vampire and it weirdly works until he tries to explain chaos theory in a bad East European accent. 😅
It’s my ex’s name and he was a pretty pathetic guy so I’m even LESS intimidated
The only Malcolm I can immediately think of is a minor character from Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
My rottweiler was called Malcom and he was intimidating af. He's the only intimidating Malcom I've met, though 😂
When I hear the name Malcolm, my brain jumps to Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly-a captain who’s often gruff and tactless, but has a good heart.
Another book in the "Omegaverse tropes should have NEVER become mainstream" case study. Why are we treating Fae like werewolves? Especially when their enemy this time are VAMPIRES?! Either write werewolves or write fairies or find a better way to do them both! This is like four different AU plots rolled into one man.
the thing that gets me about omegaverse becoming mainstream is how cishet they've managed to make it. i mean it was always very ciscentric of course but it's just kind of weird to me how het it's become too
@@kaijuhunting Can't even disagree with you there. Like at least give me some LGBT+ Omegaverse stuff if y'all are gonna keep using it outside fanfics. At least I can count on fanfics to keep it non-het.
everytime he uses the nickname for her i just think OSHA like occupational safety and health administration
Goddd Booktook is just a rotating series of totally alpha Timothee Chalamets saying the same porny/corny dialogue and leading the same porny/corny scenes as the other totally alpha Timothee Chalamets. Sometimes there's shifters or dragons instead of fae- wow! An absolute sea of indistinguishable "spicy" slop, haha.
at this point the cheesy dudebro fantasy of the 80's & 90's literally feels less misogynist than this current crop of stories but that's a wholeass can of worms
for real, i wish more reviewers would be openly critical about the insane levels of misogyny permeating every level of these things- but also whenever that happens people in the comments always crawl out of the woodwork to cry Kinkshaming and You Just Hate Female Authors, so. i understand why somebody might be hesitant. it just always blindsides me when i come to one of these reviews and Musclebound Alpha Love Interest #56431 tells the main character nearly word for word that even if she says no he knows she actually wants it 😭
I’m now stuck trying to picture Timothée Chalamet as Willy Wonka dominating someone, and it is NOT WORKING
@mst3kharris Thank you so much for that image. 😐
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌🙌 “feels less misogynist than this current crop of stories”
I can not express how much I feel so valid rn, because I’ve been screeching this since the rise of booktok!
@@mst3kharris if it helps, i saw someone else describe the Stock Romantasy Guy as yassified Onision and-- wait no that's so much worse aaaa
Been dying for you to cover this because it’s written by the same person who wrote the “published Reylo fanfic” Jenny Nicholson did a reading of years ago and I stumbled on this knowledge by accident and it’s eating me alive
@@chellyfishingnoooo that’s crazy!!!! The world really is small
the same person???? oh my god 😂
Nooooooo has ACoTaR been Reylo fanfic this wole time????
How deep does this rabbit hole go???????
OMG when I made my daughter look at the cover she said it gives Adam Driver and I joked how this may be a fantasy Reylo but I was just kidding!
WHAT. That book with the scene where Not Kylo Ren is holding the ship together with Not the Force and Jenny points out how that particular scene is so much better than anything else in the book that it’s obviously the scene the author has held in her head the longest? The book where Not Luke kills Not Leia? That book?
I've seen multiple videos on this book and I still can't believe we're supposed to simp for a guy called Kingfisher.
literally one of the reasons why I dnf'd this shit (apart from horrible writing ofc)
@ SJM and this lady--the hell do you MEAN fae women just DIE in childbirth like regular humans?? There is nothing in the world to me more boring than otherworldly creatures--like fairies--who are basically humans and have a society that is also basically human. Susanna Clarke spoiled me on fairies fr😭💛
Yes!!! The fae in JSaMN were delightfully inhuman, like they're supposed to be!
Maybe this is just me being aroace but I feel like if I found out that Fae were real and I had magic, I wouldn’t have time to thirst over a hot guy. My brain would be actively breaking apart, a guy’s partially silver iris would rank so low on my list of priorities i wouldn’t notice it for like a month
I know I’m not the target audience when the main character spends entire chapters going, “Ugh, he’s so aggravating but so hot! He’s so hot but infuriatingly so. I can’t stop THINKING ABOUT HIM and his SEXY LIPS.”
And I’m just like… so stop it? You just found out you have magic metal powers and that your entire worldview got turned upside down. Shouldn’t you be doing… literally anything other than sniping at each other hornily?
I feel the same way! I would be spending my time using, and getting used to, my powers rather than focusing on some random guy I find "attractive"
i saw someone explain how within book prose, low key you shouldn't even mention the fine details of someone's eye unless you're super close to their face as part of the pov experience. so when she says she noticed the little silver in his eye when he comes out of the ground or whatever i'm like "okay this author doesn't know what they're doing"
RIGHT?? sometimes I wondered if it is really how allo people are when they can't stop thinking of someone but this level of tunnel vision is just damn baffling.
You have fucking magic! Your life has been a lie!
There's so much to discover!
Nope, hot guy. Once again horniness claims the biggest part of the brain.😑
Yes! Please. I love spicy romance, don’t get it twisted. I mean, it’s literally my username. But like, no. I need the pacing to be right, otherwise I get so thrown off if all of a sudden the main male character starts getting all possessive the moment we’re introduced to him. Give me a fictional man that isn’t normally possessive and becomes possessive, or starts treating her like she’s special or different then how he usually acts…and make it a nice, good pacing of them looking at each other. Touching each other, little subtle glances…I’ll eat that up
So it's not only "how did they produce alcohol if they have no water", but also, if you don't have a sustainable source of clean drinking water, why would you drink alcohol, something that famously dehydrates you a lot?
if i had a nickel for every not-set-on-earth novel with a kylo ren-coded love interest where a character uses the term "cliff notes," i'd have two nickels. which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice
It's the same author I think lol
@ingamarrays i'm gonna cry i looked it up and it's NOT. THERE ARE MORE OF THESE!?!?!?!?!
It's the same author
@@parkpiggy I'm gonna cry I looked it up and it's NOT. THERE ARE MORE OF THESE?!?!?!?!!
@@Kveldred it is the same author- the reylo book was under a pen name but it's the same person
"Ewww, David!" does, in fact, summarize everything I'm feeling about this book. Your sacrifice in reading this dreck so we don't have to is greatly appreciated.
I have questions:
1- Does the author know that quicksilver is mercury?
2- Carrion!? Why name a character dead meat?
3- Rachel, where does Fox from Among the Beasts and Briars rank on your list of magical foxes?
I loved Among the Beasts and Briars so much
@DarwinRoger893 it's one of my favourite books
I think this author may not know a lot of things
I have quite a few issues with the ACOTAR series, and the popularisation of using ‘male’ and ‘female’ in romantasy is definitely up there. Like if a romantasy makes a big deal of biological essentialist language, it’s just a red flag to me that there’s gonna be some really shallow liberal feminism
I totally agree. Like omegaverse has potential for interesting gender stuff but the whole male female fae thing is just weird
plus it’s usually used in a grammatically incorrect way!! that’s what pisses me off even more lmao
i can't hear "male" and "female" without thinking of cybertruck owners. do you know what i mean
@@harlankian LMAO I know exactly what you mean😂
Wait but the male and female thing makes sense to me when it’s fae. They’re usually depicted as quite animalistic and they aren’t human, so you wouldn’t use “man” or “woman.” And in those same books, they refer to humans as being a man or a woman, at least that I’ve seen. Though we could definitely do with more nonbinary and LGBT characters as these books tend to be written by straight cis women.
Isn't a knots job to literally not come undone? In fact, it's very hard to undo a knot especially one that's been there forever 😆
6 minutes in and hearing that the city is shaped like a wheel with elevated plates covering up the slums below…Midgar. This is just Midgar.
What's midgar? Sorry😭
@@yessirde
A city from Final Fantasy I think.
@@imaginarylivingbody7154Final Fantasy 7 😊
@@yessirdehaha, sorry, yeah, it’s a city from Final Fantasy 7. It’s a huge metal city in a dried out wasteland that is divided into 8 sectors. The wealthier folk live on plates elevated hundreds of feet above the slums that formed in the dust beneath them. Resources are scarce, a corporation distributes power at the cost of the planet (they’re the law of the land), and there are people who live there who have never seen the sky before. It’s a super fascinating setting! And I kinda hate that it cropped up in Quicksilver. :)
I was hoping that was just me noticing that connection. Whelp xD
14:15 This is so incredibly lazy!!!! This author could have come up with a plant similar to tequila agave. Or even come up with a moonshine-like situation where they use "cactus juice" (insert ATLA joke here) to brew terrible liquor that can cause sickness, but because of the scarcity of water (and it's tendency to go bad if left untreated) they mix this liquor in to preserve it. People who like the buzz or are just really poor could also drink this bathtub brew on its own, since its not really legal and is risky it'd be cheaper. They could even be illegally processing sewage into irrigation and fertilizer for their secret cactus farms. Bonus points if they use this to hide corpses too and even nobles or rich city folk pay them for their "disposal" services.
Can you please write this book but good
@@TurdusRufiventris I would love to! unfortunately my mental health is in the toilet bowl and its hard just being alive right now, but thank you for the faith in my abilities! 💗💗
The fact that the blood pact is active even though this fey dude didn't actually hold up his end of the bargain.
He didn't get her brother and yet she is still bound to her side of the deal. Thats not how deals work
🤦♀️
I love when revolutionary protagonists give long-winded speeches laden with self important metaphor. Tell me you’ve never been around any activist or anarchist spaces without telling me etc. First rule is Don’t Talk To [Royal Guards] (ARGAB?)
Oh my gosh liitterally
ARGAB
I am surprised this didn't end with "Oh, and your new body is also now magically un-spayed." Because we can never have childfree rep in these books, either.
well i did not expect the 'predatory gay' trope to rear its head im gonna be real
EDIT OH GOD IS THIS GETTING A FUCKING SHOWWWWW
Please, PLEASE tell me you're joking💀
NOOOOOOO
NOOOOOO
It's okay yall, it's netflix. It wont go past 8 episodes
I know the beginning may as well be ignored for its total irrelevance to the rest of the book, but it has me so irritated. The Queen complains her land is barren, how on earth do they have whiskey (requiring irrigated crops), tempered metals with no sign of mining or quarrying, a sewer system (thats something that requires water), woven fabrics or animal based skins when they dont have enough water to feed the city... The list goes on. In fact, why are they settled in a fully built city at all in somewhere that provides nothing for any of the people? Even if the Queen had taken/bargained for the land from they Fae, why didn't the people just... Leave and become nomadic? Or find somewhere sustainable to actually settle?
I can't stand world building where everyone acts like The Big Catastrophy happened recently only for readers to find out that it's been like this for A MILLENNIA.
Do you know how much we've developed since literal BIBLICAL TIMES? Hell, even 50 years ago?
And you're telling there's literally NO INFRASTRUCTURE in place for water scarcity other than people bartering for it? Yet you have whiskey? Leather? Sewers??
The only way it kind of makes sense is if their water supply only recently dried up, but that's not what it sounds like
4:17 N.B. stands for nota bene, which means note well. basically it means something you have to pay attention to, but its kind of old-fashioned, so i don't know why they would be using it here.
Everyone who's had an ancient college professor learns what N.B. stands for. It does seem out of place here
@@queencharleneancient professors and Italians hahaha you’re right
I learned about N.B. in a biography of Lord Byron. Publically infamous man-wh*re Byron signed papers as "N.B." ( i.e. Noel Byron), being well aware it also meant "nota bene." A total knee-slapper in 1816!
Sorry but the Cliff Notes is unforgivable
This author has used this anachronism before - look up Jenny Nicholson reading black moon rising, the author's knock-off reylo fanfic. She wrote it under a pen name, but it's her.
CALLIE HART AND FRANKIE ROSE ARE THE SAME PERSON?!!!!!!!!
@ReadswithRachel I'm so sorry Rachel.
Also thank you for all you do.
I love how they do a world building quirk (water is sparse!) and you can't let go of how LITERALLY EVERYTHING STILL NEEDS WATER. (because same, big same)
how was this missed lol
Because what's world building?
*it worked in Dune so why wouldn't it here*:tm:
It's like the author saw Dune, thought it looked cool but didn't think about the world for more than... 5 seconds.
I think we're all just tired of romantasy for the sake of smut. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against a smutty book but a smutty book without a plot, without connection and chemistry with the two leads is just a bad romance book. There are ways to create tension that isn't insta lovey and where people do dislike each other and then slowly start to like each other. There are also better names than Kingfisher 😒
I should have known I wasn't going to like this book though. It was exactly like ACOTAR and I regretted every second of reading that, too. 😮💨
I thought for a second the author might do something interesting with the name “Kingfisher” by having it turn out to be a misreading or mistranslation of “Fisher King,” the symbol from Arthurian myth of a disabled king whose persistent wound is a cause and mirror of a blight affecting the land. I thought maybe the mercury poisoning would be the wound, making him too volatile and cruel to assume the throne. It’s probably not going that way.
This book being titled "Quicksilver" is like blasphemy for an X-Men fan like me. Put some respect on my boy Pietro Maximoff's name.
The guy on the cover even looks like the discount "Fietro" from WandaVision, played by Evan Peters, lol
I knowww 😭
🤔 Ok. Low key didn’t think of that but now I can’t unthink it lmao 😔😔😢😒😒
@@serenaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa DISCOUNT PIETRO
literally what i thought 😭
Once you rain in a horse, it's reined in forever. It'll let you ride it even in the reign.
I can't lie when I hear carrion I think of warrior cats cause that's where I first learned the word. I can't take a character seriously with a name that not only means rotten flesh but also reminds me of warrior cats.
@@ChaosSolEternal at least a cat in warrior cats being named carrion makes slightly more sense than a whole human
The queen is named Madra (sp?), which is Irish for dog? I'm exercising my right to imagine her as a decrepit immortal chihuahua then, since our love interest is a gangly bird
"I'm not like other girls, I wear pants!"
"I'm not like other girls, I wear skirts!"
And everyone else will have to make do with shorts and leggins 💛
Just shorts, Feyre from ACOTAR called dibs on the leggings lol
@@kaytoomuchsalt5100 oh no )
I am like other girls; I like shorts! They’re comfy and easy to wear! (Yes, that is a Pokémon reference.)
@@tsifirakiehl4250 I’m glad someone else had this thought 😂
I'm like...are we really still doing this in 2024? Also it's not like women didn't work hard and wear dresses for...oh idk...thousands upon thousands of years?
Everyone, remember to support your local TNR programs! Kittens are adorable, but we don't need more of them living on the streets!
listening to this while playing fortnite and i’m literally hiding to comment on the “smells her arousal” thing BROTHER EUGH
Every time I hear Fisher call her "Osha," I just think he's being grossly inappropriate with a workplace safety official.
I hate it. I hate all of it.
i wanted to dnf this book at 5%, and 10%, 25%, almost threw my kindle at 45% when she referenced a "singularity" as if the concept of blackholes existed in her world. and then again at like 50% when she called fisher "the devil" because WHO IS THE DEVIL TO YOU??? i almost would have excused it all if it had been revealed that humans as a species had actually come from OUR real world thousands of years ago through the quicksilver and these were just lingering parts of the lexicon, but that would require authorial forethought.
my last straw was when she revealed she'd been sterilized because it felt like it was a "plot thread" that came out of them having sex (to excuse the unprotected nature of it) and not an actual attempt at world building. Which made me realize a pattern that so much of this felt as if it were being built as it went, as if this were the skeleton draft where you just write it all out and she hadn't gone back to build out the flesh of the story before she decided to publish it.
About the river thing- it’s a part of the folklore that vampires can’t go through running water. Usually running water is clean compared to still water, so it repels them, the same way that garlic and silver would.
I am so beyond sick of edgy mmcs in books like this.
The horse was already dead but booktok resurrected it so they could beat it some more.
the zombie horse is swiftly turning to paste at this point 😮💨 give me more sincerely kind/supportive/etc MMCs, i *beg*
The people eating these books up must be reading them with their eyes closed, because how did we get here??? 🤦🏾♀️
I think Bilbo and Frodo have a few things to say about talking jewelry...
Hahahaha, if no one’s told you today, you’re amazing 😂😂
@@The_Distractinator Thank you. I may or may not be currently watching the LOTR movie trilogy for the first time right now, and the second she said that the MC didn't react to talking jewelry, I was like, What?!
When you explained how he can smell her lust or whatever, I immediately thought “what is she a cat? She got an estrus cycle?” Smelling lust is some furry shit 😂
Edit: oh my god not spayed!!! She is a cat!
💛 I think the “century years” thing was probably a find & replace mishap. Like it probably said a hundred years, but the author thought century sounded better. They just didn’t check to make sure they replaced it correctly. That’s my theory anyway.
Search and replace can be helpful, but you have to proofread after you use it. Otherwise you’ll try to change a character’s name from David to Steve and end up with someone riding a Harley Steveson motorcycle.
I think I know why they named this book Quicksilver. It's because reading it will make you lose your mind, like a hat maker sealing a brim with mercury.
Don't worry about not knowing "fae" lore. Very little of it has anything to do with traditional folklore.
"fae" being used at all is a red flag for me :D
@@TheseVioletDelitesmakes me so sad. i’m absolutely in love with the traditional fae myths and i’m working so hard to work to have a complex magic system where i can work some traditional fae lore into but i feel like these authors are poisoning the well for me by cursing the ‘fae’ archetype as being ‘alpha dude elves’ instead of ‘eldritch terrors you shouldn’t trifle with’
Deserts are freezing at night. Why’d you have to reference a rain… that one time?
Omg I love how whenever Rachel reads the MC’s voice she sounds so whiny.
Nooooo, not the “you spayed my mate”!!! Omg, I’m dying, this can’t be real. What is this clownery? 🤡😭
Can we for once, have a love interest who doesn't have Shadow magic, is of average height and who would support the plucky hero by baking a cake after finding out they had a bad day?
Peeta enters the chat 😂
Not exactly this, but I found one of the love interests in Iron Widow really refreshing in a similar way. Beware though, that book is brutal (I mean literally, lots of violence)
@@Link-dx1lx I've read Iron Widow and enjoyed it.
😃
The only romance men I know of that come close to that are in Regency romances by Georgette Heyer. It would be nice to have some in the Romantacy genre, or even in the romance genre in general that has been written in the past couple of decades.
also has blonde, strawberry blonde, red or normal brown hair? I’m so sick of the black haired 4th wing/shantel tessier/acotar copy paste of literally every single male mmc. blonde men are hot too especially in fantasy!!!!?
If I ever write a book I will be questioning every couple of paragraphs if I just wrote anything Rachel would say once, look at the camera and emphasize it's stupidity by saying it a second time slightly louder 😂
Always good to read your stuff out loud to help avoid this!
I cant believe the main character gets to meet two gods, and the only thing they say is asking about sex with the love interest. Wow.
Huhh? She's only been cold once? First - cold is variable, she would have a relative cold based on normal temperatures but also. She lives in a desert and has notably incredibly low humidity - temperatures should absolutely plummet when those suns go down
Edit: Got to the part where you mention they don't have night in her realm. Soooo, how does the physics do the physics? But also if it's a sometimes one, sometimes both sun system, it should still get slightly colder when one sun is gone
"How does the physics do the physics?" has me pissing myself. Thank you for the laughter.
@ I'm glad you enjoyed lol. I love when authors alter the world like that, but they have to take it into account. I do presume there must be an ocean somewhere if the people still require water to live so tides, but also, the two stars this planet has and any moons do affect the wobble of the planet and rotational speeds and such. There are also several effects beyond physics that would have been so fun to look into that might've made this book a bit more interesting
The “ew David’s” get me every time 😂
"blech, boring. Bad! You're lazy!" - Rachel screams
„I ate in fisher’s bed, slept in fisher’s bed” - damn girl, are you Blondie Locks? What else did you do? Sat in fisher’s chair? Ate from his bowl? Romantasy seriously brings bad name to fantasy genre 😂
"What are the turkeys drinking if there's no water?" :D perfect
The misogyny in all these "romantasy" books is SO EXHAUSTING.
The pornification of it all
at this point if I see a book with fae in it…. its an immediate no. like I cannot do it anymore ☠️☠️☠️
Fair enough
I was also constantly grossed out by the love of huge numbers with no meaning by the author.
The constant weirdness with the numbers of armies and enemies:
- how did Saeris alone fight 30 armoured guards, and even managed to defeat three while others watched?
- 15,000 fairies couldn't defeat a hundred, a thousand vampires they've been fighting for 1,000 years?
- why were only 5 of the 15,000 involved in the fight at the river?
- there were 200,000 fairies with super strength and magic in the burned city and they couldn't defend themselves against vampires?
- why make 1400-1700-year-old characters that act like pretentious teenagers? we can't even comprehend what kind of state of mind and behaviour a creature that old should have.
The whole “centuries years” thing is absolutely from when the author was writing her first draft and either didn’t have a set timeline in her mind yet, or did and changed her mind later.
It was probably originally an actual number, ‘300 hundred years’ or a placeholder word, ‘ELEPHANT years’ and she f5’d for the placeholder and changed it to centuries without noticing that she left behind years.
This book was for sure not edited well or at all
One of my favorite quotes in this video, “oh yes, a forest at midnight smells differently than the forest at 11:30 pm”.
Still can’t stop laughing at this.
Your sarcasm and humor makes these books a delight.
This book really is one big osha violation then huh?
I just got the part of the video where this joke makes sense and now I wish I didn’t know how to read😭
Okay but I actually have a student (grad student TA) named Osha and on my second quarter of teaching them I am finally getting desensitized to the name
im starting to believe its near impossible to make a good romantasy
oh it’s certainly possible. it seems that no one knows how to though 😭
I think it's because these books seem to mainly focus on the romance aspect only... instead of actually working on literally anything else. It's too bad because it's such a good idea on paper
It's because nothing works, not the fantasy or the romance, you have people entirely unskilled in both trying to blend them while also ripping off the latest slop
"His attitude stinks" sounds like a child's idea of swearing, not what should be on the synopsis of a dark romantasy...
It’s what some kid’s sixth grade math teacher says to his little league coach knowing coach has the power to make him run laps and potentially bench him for a game if he can’t stop cutting up and talking back in class.
As someone who reads and writes books with fae, I hate this trend so much. Show me pixies, banshees, dullahans, black hounds, all of it!! Or else they're just sexy vampire analogues!!
I got angry reading a series _set in Ireland_ involving the fae that used very little Irish lore.
Fae books that only show elf analogues is the equivalent of Batman media that only uses the Joker. Like PLEASE use literally ANYTHING else
dullahans are so cool, I wish they were in more fantasy books
Ikr!! Fae are not ‘sexy elves’. Fair, there’s like 4 different regional interpretations of fae depending on what European region you based them off, but like… sexy elf is not one of them??
I’m at least on my 7th iteration of a magic system trying to get a world in which they are more like: ‘eldritch horrors that can take any form’ rather than just 🌽-y pointy eared humans with no power limitations at all.
The pronunciation guide is making me laugh way too hard lmao it reminds of when my kindergarten teacher would make us clap each syllable of a word to understand what it is
I’m sorry but the queens name is wayyy to close to Madara and all I can think is “wow Naruto has gone downhill”
Madra is the Irish Gaelic word for "dog" so read from that what you will
That is really far-fetched
15:29 id like to also point out that water is commonly used in smithing metals 🤣 so how can they have a world that has all these metals and no water lol the metals get dunked in water after smithing to rapidly cool them and that’s what makes them durable soooo this world makes even less sense 😂
Decorated a cake for my daughter's fifth bday while listening to this. I'm exhausted but it was a good distraction, thank you! Also this book is very silly.
You were doing the real work today 🎂 ❤️
@@ReadswithRachel Thanks! It was a bluey cake 😂. I also laughed when you mentioned making the cake with everything in it! It was like you knew
I know that I'm overthinking this on so many levels, but.... if these people are all living on a planet with two suns and scarce water, why haven't they evolved to deal with that the way life in actual extreme deserts do? I haven't finished the video yet so it's entirely possible it's a sloppy "we were in a secret space colony the whole time!" thing but if that's the case, why wouldn't a system be set up that allows access to the most basic necessity for every single living thing so that their workers can, y'know, work? Did Nestle found this place?
I would beg the author to read _Dune_ but I shudder to think how that ends.
@mst3kharris sexy worm with shadow powers, of course.
EXACTLY! Like, they should have those water recycling suits they have in Dune to extract fresh water from sweat/urine, have water extraction setups (maybe underground caves to attract condensation?), use clothes that don’t require a lot of water to dye, etc etc.
I'm gonna need "how strange, a bench" merch
25:15 No! Don't do these things! curse my monologuing, why do i always explain exactly what I don't want my enemies to do?! i need to stop giving people the exact description of things they need to do to defeat me!
Wait so the love interest is crying out MERCURY???
He sure is
Gosh, I wish I could discard aches and pains in my body.
“It’s called sweat equity, David” I am deceased now 🤣🤣🤣
All these sub par romantasy books are gonna be this generation’s ya dystopian post Hunger Games cash grabs
It’s Divergent all the way down
💛I found my self saying "Ew" and "STOP at pretty much ever Fisher sex scene line but I think I finally felt something break inside at "Tell us what it's like, sex with fisher?". I screamed like... God.
This may be a hot take, but I find it really annoying that authors make someone go to a website for trigger warnings. If your story is spoiled by trigger warnings, imo, it's probably not very well written. Just let readers know what sort of experience they're getting into, like damn 😭
saaaaame like how hard is it to just take a page or two at the front of the book to list them??? i've seen trigger warning lists be decently done in books, IMO it doesn't "spoil" any of the events - cause it's just a matter of 'graphic'/'non-graphic' & 'on-page'/'off-page' - so authors who claim it does are relying on pure shock value 😮💨 as you say, not very well written
@@LorewithouttheEI AGREE COMPLETELY they're relying on shock value and honestly, it's unethical and poor craftsmanship
I think Jenny Nicholson read a Reylo book that also mentioned Cliff Notes. Why do so many scifi/fantasy writers keep adding cliff notes into their world? Is Clifton Hillegass a dimension walker????
It's bc it's the same author 😂😂