first quarter (very poor)
Apr. 6th, 2026 01:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fwcuhi it's me again. I read couple of books in the past couple months... i would've read More except possession litr killed me and sucked my soul out etc etc which, it was literally good, it was a good book, i enjoyed it and enjoyed reading it and did always want to keep reading so don't ask me what/why/who/where/when like i don't knowww i don't knowwww ... wow so it's march 30th rn... sorry it's april 6th now so literally fuck my life... and i cannot say anything except that I am a bad person (which we knew) and I don't get around the block (which we also knew) ... but also i planned so well bc my reading stats lowkey look inflated as fuck bc i was cramming tf out of those books in january...
hey guys. welcome to my post. today I will be updating you on a variety of topics and items and such, such as: books_i_read (#Literacy_Yayyyy!), games_I_Played (who up silking they song? anyone want to silk my song? hey gender-averse bug, i saw you silking your song from that conveniently placed ledge over there), and BL_I_Ran_Through (yeah it's a ran through joke idk i'm not coming up with something better) (i could make a 'ran through like that uke's hole' joke but that's crass and I also don't like my ukes ran through!!! both seme and uke should be monogamous and have lost their virginities to each other but still be really good at sex. those are my unrealistic expectations informed by pornography for the genre). I hope you enjoy. like comment and subscribe. and I am open to receiving private DMs about a vis-a-vis engagement exchange relationship... we can talk rates and word counts and prices in private. let me know if interested!
Q1 in real physically published/digitally acquired books
[ in custody ] anita desai
oh this book is so fucking good... anita desai is just really fucking good... it does a really incredible job of marrying it's characters with their environments and captures the dry season and choking dust of history as well as disrepair so well, the descriptions of the landscape are just really striking and I think there is something so noxious, pitiable and yet deeply engaging with how terrible the men this novel follows are. everytime you read anita desai it genuinely drives in how much of a hack kiran desai is and how the difference in their education/culture leads to a richness in anita desai's prose that kiran desai with all her attempts at emulation/musicality never manages... like truly our nepobookerslop author... there is a real verbose quality in anita desai's work that could be offputting in how it tends to interrupt the reading experience at times, but i find very charming. the other thing about anita desai is that she is so good at doing Real Subcontinental People/Real Subcontinental Situations. another win for small not classic caliber novels!
[ human acts ] han kang, trans deborah smith
this was genuinely very haunting, and i loved the way the narrative moved between narrators, especially when she begins to self-narrate as the author ... and I think one of the things that stayed with me was that these kids were buried in their school uniforms because those were their best clothes, that was how poor these families were. I think as a reconstruction of history, it aligns with the saidya hartman venus in adonis method of like, this attempt to restore dignity to those who were so cruelly stripped of it, while also just asking if it was worth it, to participate in an act of rebellion/revolution that led to such total destruction of a life. I really am not sure how to word this, but there is a strain to nobel laureate literature that asks about the things one as a human survives as well as the things that one as a human will do to survive and I think it's a much more raw and realer way of approaching existential questions and the general realm of compared to like, philosophy. because there is something very grounded and valuable and close and deeply touching about recounting the way a young woman works fourteen hours a day and ruins her body and still has a dream of going to med school and you know she does not survive this story and you know that nothing more happens or even would happen but still this is the life she clings to and wishes to live in.
[ possession ] a s byatt
one half of this book is really really good and the other half of this book is so stuck to a specific cultural moment within the Academy that it sort actively ruins the experience of the book. as it says on the cover, it is a romance so I genuinely can't even begrudge it for the super neatly sweetly tied up ending but holy shit is the victorian romance half SO SO GOOD and the 80s british academia half like, really not. byatt has some really beautiful musical prose at times, and I love the little details of misspelling in the 19C letters but found other details like the heritage black amethyst brooch soooooo cliche... but again it is a Romance... it's actually really confusing as to what byatt feels about 2nd wave feminism esp within the academy because she does satirise it so so much but she is also taking the piss out of everything else so in the end it just feels like she was saying nothing at all [especially with how her female characters have all their stories resolved via Reward of Romantic/Sexual Connection] ... like oh okay. it was fun though! long but fun and some of the poetry was nice.
[ love in a fallen city ] eileen chang, nyrb translation by karen kingsbury
one note: I do think eileen chang's own translations of her work were much better than kingsbury's which is soooo... but this truly was a collection about love and economics and FINALLY while being TRUE TO FORM, the story that this collection was named after was the best one. it was very very good and genuinely thrilling because the first half is them having a totally insulated romance in hong kong and then suddenly? bombs?! but the only reason that it feels sudden is that their wealth allows them to completely ignore the political world around them until it no longer can and even then!!! one of the greatest literary manuevers ever [left un?]written imo. it's such a incredible narrative choice. she has this very short story about two people meeting in a tram that is sooooo #Literature_of_the_City like it goes perfectly hand-in-hand with that baudelaire poem To A Passer-by... eileen chang is genuinely very witty and incisive and also just like, it is SO FUN to see the Origin(?) or Natural uses of all the classic trashy cn webnovel tropes like the third green tea bitch wife of so and so is soooooo fun and cute to read about in Serious Literature...
[ god dies by the nile, circling song ] nawal el sadaawi
I think maybe my sadaawi experience would be improved with better translations perhaps, but I didn't particularly like either. sort of too modernist in prose for me... it was really like, poor village women gets raped, rich village man does the raping and then colludes to fuck over a fellow poor village to frame him for the rape, he gets violently murdered, and also someone is getting brutally mind fucked by the military and also tons of honour/shame culture against women and religious psychosis/guilt and female genital mutilation... I like to read 'world literature' because I want to see how the other side lives/lived and i think she did do that for me. like yayyy i can say I understood a thing or two about rural egypt in the mid-late 20C... i enjoyed the depictions of how these villagers worked and mingled in the stench of the bulls and dry fields and their own fetid sweat, but I am not sure I could stomach that much more of the 'her pointy breasts under the cloth' and totally hallucinogenic nature of how one act of violence leads to another leads to solace in mixing up childhood fantasy with memory to cope et al et al... again, I think some of these things could just benefit from a better translation. I also think I don't actually enjoy reading about violence in women though I understand that is true and factual and the very real lived reality...
[ the wizard of earthsea ] ursula le k guin
now who was going to tell me ursula guin wasn't actually black... this is what i get for going to tumblr university.... anyway this is really the lowest of her low hits.... icb you would tell someone [who is not 10] [but even someone who is 10] to read this instead of her greats hits a la THE LATHE OF HEAVEN or the one that gay [and other types of] people love like LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS or even the equally didactic but genuinely just a better narrative of ANNALS OF THE WESTERN SHORE ... like maybe the other books in this series are better but genuinely this shit just fucking sucks!!! it's way worse than every other guin.... she's way better in other ones...
[ idol burning ] rin usami
bookclub for tw3... the other pick was bunny which i dnf'd after reading like 3 pages of because I could immediately tell it was going to be bad and accurately predicted [allegedly, according to eva] the ways it was going to be bad... if you know the flaws of mfa fiction you know them... not that this was that much better. the descriptions in this were more interesting and sometimes quite discomforting in a way that aided the sort of narrative goals... one of the books were the endnote is a thousand times better than the actual book but all the same it was fine... not anything in particular but not egregiously bad...
[ how fiction works ] james wood
this is really good at describing free indirect discourse in that it sort of parses and teases out the near indecipherable layers of like the [aperture, depth of field, iso] of narrative technique specifically. but at one point he literally loses steam and runs out of meaningful things to say and flaffing like 'fiction is Not Real... but can Resemble the Real... that's realism... and we like Realism because it reminds of us what is Real and Resembles Reality' like yeah buddy... it sure does.... the reading list of all the books he mentioned at the end is pretty fun though I enjoyed that... Also, I read this book because my THE NOVEL professor was like 'if u want theory of the novel stuff you should read this' because this was secretly a creative writing and mindfulness class instead of like, a real academically rigourous look into the novel. but as I've said. this quarter was about losing.
[ luster ] raven lallani
for class. an mfa novel that wasn't written like total shit. as in, had somewhat of a unique prose style. did that make the book good? no. but was if better than the usual mfa slop thus elevating the experience completely? Yes. it's like going to a tims and they've actually cleaned out their ice coffee machine. like no it's not good but yes also it is so good comparatively. i think the most enjoyable parts of this novel was were it was just doing low art / high octane absurdism and the bad parts were the realism 'meaning of life' type shit... like i don't want or need or wish another novel about [ young woman has sex with man realises that she is worth more than the sex she has with men ] it's none of my business... i don't care... i appreciated the weird sisterkinship she has with the guy's wife but genuinely this book was at it's best when it was like 'isn't life sometimes so crazy and weird and abrupt and full of strange coincidence?' instead of the other half of it...
[ no one is talking about this ] patricia lockwood
also for class. lin mentioned patricia lockwood ten million years ago and she is invoked often enough with elif batuman but what makes elif batuman good and genuine and funny and delightful in her errant moments are what I precisely dgaf about lockwood, which is that lockwood is a poet by training ! she's a poet and you can tell !!! and so there's this thing where the individual sentence has to be non homogenous or whatever ocean vuong was saying [completely ahistoric btw] and certain discord and tension within the section/paragraph because that it what you want a poem to do. you're always controlling for stops and pauses and abruptness but fundamentally, imo, that' s not what makes a novel's prose good. anyway this book was internetty, which is a quality i knew i would not enjoy and do not look for in books. it's also emotionally manipulative as a whole, which is not a bad thing but what ends up happening is that her end note, where she reveals the name of her baby niece, is on the whole way more emotional and way more deeply affecting than the whole damn book!
i guess this book had the same problem content wise as idol burning which is like, so this is my life and my lived experience [and other books Have been able to use these things to their benefit, #The_idiot] and i just don't care for the way you've described or experienced it because it's not telling me something new or illuminating it in a new way...
[ annihilation ] jeff vandermeer
also for class. okay so I read half of this and then the rest via wikipedia.... it was fine. I have known better scifi and honestly ... perhaps truly a book that amounts to the wikipedia summary of, to it's detriment or benefit. obviously it's better-written than most popular scifi [a la the newish stuff of brandon sanderson/andy weir] but also genuinely so disappointing to have the middle plot twist reveal be like 'i, a clear asexual aromantic in a very lesbianistic set up, have a husband who i am on this expedition to look for' also the prose is not accomplished enough to sell the cosmic/weird horror vibe it tries to go for... which it's literally more descriptive and rich in environment than most scifi so i guess that's part of it's success... but i should finish it properly before i say anything too definitively... it's literally that i was reading this and going 'omg... i love scifi.... i wish i could reread the sparrow right now...'
[ denison avenue ]
for class. genuinely a book that pissed me the fuck off because there's an entire century of literary tradition that it's trying to work off of/replicate/capture and if anyone involved had read a single modernist novel it would've been so much more successful in what it was trying to do. as it stands, the op was like 'this was originally an instagram project' and Yes, it does read entirely like instagram caption prose. congratulations for yet another successful rupi kaur rip off that doesn't even outdo rupi kaur!
[ this is going to hurt ] adam kay
ooooh. this one has been on my personal tbr foreverrrrr... or for a while, since an edit of ambika mod from the show goes viral every now and then... it was so painfully obvious this was meant to be funny and snarky in a british 2010s humour way and wasn't. but the parts that weren't him trying to be funny were very good and really worth reading i think. if anyone remembers the new yorker article that came out about the NICU baby 'murder' case where a nurse was essentially framed for failures of the system, this is just another look into that system and how much it punishes everyone involved and squanders itself. one thing that was so funny is obviously the egregious amounts of pussy jokes in this [the author was in ob gyn] so when I watched the show and litr within the first 10 minutes, I was like 'whoa... bespoke #woke choice of making yourself gay in your autofictional show about yourself' which genuinely could've been one of the funniest things anyone has ever done [since he wrote the show!!!] but no he's just gay in real life and he was cautiously straightbaiting in his memoir...
Q1 in motion media
>so the last real video game I played fr fr was hades 1 on my laptop when it released. before that, like the remains of edith finch on my friend's laptop in hs, and before that, infamous 2 when I was like 13/14. I am an avid enjoyer of watching games. which is why I will also make this the movie+tv show section because all of them are basically long form moving visual narratives to me. I just have not had a console [with video games i want to play] in like over 10 years. anyway so recently, i acquired a guy who bought a switch a couple years ago and never played it and was like, 'hey babe, do you want to play my forgotten never used switch since you are the Real Gamer between us' and i was like, Well... I shouldn't because I will forsake all of my academic responsibility to fuck that shit up for 14 hours a day. so dear reader, please guess what I did.
hollow knight: silksong
okay I have to preface this with (a) I don't care about spoilers, I hate not knowing more than I enjoy being delighted by a narrative twist; (b) I am not one of god's pure gamers. or maybe I am truly the only pure gamer because Idgaf about narrative i only care about gameplay if i'm playing a game. if you want me to ENJOY your story I am better off watching someone else do it on youtube, bc if I am playing the game I will be button mashing the shit out of the dialogue to get back to PLAYING THE GAME!!!... also. as someone who loves To Know, I love to watch a 100% speedrun of a game to know what to do/where to go, because to me the part that is important about playing a game is Do I Have the Skill To Do The Same? if a game litr is just someone pressing a button to go next, like someone else can do that for me that's none of my business...
as someone who loves Environments and Exploration as well as combat, would I say the metroidvania, say even, the dark souls of metroidvanias, are the genre for me? I don't know. results nonconclusive... currently I have 85 hours in the game, I have defeated the top2 most infuriating bosses a la: Groal the Great, and Savage Beastfly 2, both who I did not find *that bad* by the end of it. obviously I got through both the cogwork core and mount fay, and am currently failing the fuuuck out of the abyss climb section so yayyyyyy for that. inshallah she will succeed soon... the fights i've enjoyed the most are LACE, i LOVEEEEEE fighting lace SHOUTOUT TO LACE... she is so fun they overtuned the fuuuuck out of this boss. phantom was also really fun but I was definitely overpowered .... i liked widow obviously, and am saving the last sinner fight for no reason. okay my thing is that I lowkey have gotten to the point in the game where there's only boss battles left for me to do and that's like... Fine I Guess but I miss the exploringggg... so I keep not fighting bosses.... I enjoyed the platforming parts more than I thought I would.... I fucking love the music and the visuals of this game. I LOVE HORNET!!!!!!! whom I have loved since like 2020... so yeah ofc...
imo so much of my pleasure about this game comes from the fact that one of the most anticipated and biggest releases of all time is a game about WOMEN and MOTHERHOOD and in a serious and meaningful way and KINKEEPING and COMMUNAL CARE which is so so awesome especially for like mainstream [non indie] video game, which is a genre that is still in 2006 re: gender politics... anyway it's fucking awesome and has many awesome awesome characters one of which is kicking my ass, SECOND SENTINEL!!! anyway I'm content with the knowledge that I'm a gamer but I can't even be like 'this is my favourite game' because I don't have enough games under my belt to be making such definitive statements. there's no way that I'm not having fun but dangggg can it be rough.
no other choice
oh this movie was so fucking good park chanwook !!! i love that this genuinely is a black comedy and it makes such good very prescient commentary. fucking love that it ends with his daughter playing the cello for them as he loses his hearing for this job he's literally killed to afford. i love the final shot of their house/compound where you realise it's literally secluded from a very suburban row. GOD!!!!! also everyone in this movie does a killer performance, especially the two wives.
emma 2020
still one of the greatest and most perfect movies of all timeeeee IDC IDC if you disagree you are going to hell... yes this may be personal shade sorry I just don't get it NO ONE is allowed to dislike my favourite most perfect movie of all time...
+clueless
completely massacres the entire point of emma by not having any of it be cher's fault... so actually it's terrible and i hate it...
the secret agent
really good acting and really great cinematography and SHOUTOUTTT TO THE GLOBAL SOUTH BELT this movie is sooo good at conveying humidity and heat through the choice of shots and the costumes, like the very thin translucent shirts and slobby shorts for everyone is such great costuming... I liked all the narrative choices and manuevers, but the future/present story is the weakest bit...
wuthering heights
this movie was so egregiously bad that I started reading real actual wuthering heights in the middle of my viewing. and it was genuinely so much better. and it wasn't even funny!!!! kind of the only hysterical part was genuinely when it become a charli xcx music video for a little bit and even then I just got so mad about all of the narrative choices being made...
hamnet
this movie has 1 good scene and it's when hamnet goes 'something's there in that corner, watching' and it changes so the audience is now watching from the corner and you realise you are the Predatory Vulture of Death feeding on the emotional pain/torture of these children and it's really really good... otherwise is genuinely total shite, I think I like joe alwyn as an actor, paul mescal's gay earring staying in was certainly A Choice, the cinematography is really good and beautiful but the movie is just awful as a whole. i like really was so ready to cry so much and I only cried 1 time. like the emotional manipulation movie can't make me cry more than once? be fucking forreal rn i cried at PROM 2011 which remains so stark in my mind as a aberrant occasion bc it really highlighted to me how i have the emotional integrity of 1-ply tissue paper.
zootopia 2
this is only making the list because I have to tell you guys that H's sister watched this movie 11 times. nicke wilde is a wwx variant btw.... his ukeism could be off the charts if they let it...
kal ho naa ho
genuinely a movie where srk is so handsome and stylish in all the dance sequences, but especially pretty woman like the little bit of belly was soooo chic! also like SLAYFUL SOUNDTRACK. and naina is sooo cuuuteee in looks and personality like i loved that she was so angry and annoying and stubborn and headstrong, like so sossososo cute moebomb. it was really an early innovation for polyamory/challengers-style trios but they didn't quite stick the landing and i was genuinely so baffled by the ending like Ok So what? like i just felt the emotional resolution was not resoluting...
rocky aur rani
this movie is genuinely such a good comedy it's unreal ... of the most unintentional is the totally shit bangla the bengali family speaks, but like rani having her own theme song that riffs whenever she has a #Girlboss moment is so crazy. and also: One of the wokest movies to ever come out of bollywood. ANDDDD the main couple not only have hella chemistry but you actually root for the competent smart girlboss x himbo with a heart of gold. the fucking dola re dola climax sequence entire sequence is SOOOOO GOOOD!!!! like genuinely emerald fennel fucking WISHES her total opulence and visual overindulgence looked like that. but genuinely why does rani have a gay stay at home dad and lesbian breadwinner mom and a grandmother who endorses cheating. I also really felt like the final emotional climax/fight was really well earned and the way rani defends herself + the eventual resolution is really well done because it's fucking true no matter how much you hate your boyfriend's sexist pig dad you can't be raising a hand against him!!! but also true he has to apologise first for you to apologise... also loved the respective grandmothers and rocky's mom and sister... this was a rewatch and I was lowkey playing skong the entire time but it genuinely was so good.....
the pitt
genuinely seeing the discourse about this show has been 10000000x times going 'is this everyone's first time watching a TV show?' my top3 to no ones surprise are: javadi, al-hashimi and mel.. also like insane that javadi is genuinely the most simple character to understand and lowkey genuinely the only person who has no real flaws other than nepotism [which she can't even control] and somehow we still get befuddling takes about her.... like... Ok..... I LOVE DR. AL-HASHIMI I BELIEVED IN HER AND WAS ON HER SIDE SINCE DAY 1!!!!!! like insane that you have spent an entire season with an extremely empathetic autistic woman who likes to follow rules and protocol [mel] but it's suddenly repulsive and terrible when it's coming from another woman in s2? like is it because she's in a position of power now? is it because she's brown? it's not the ai thing for sure because they whiteknighted the fuck out of that. i just think it's crazy that i've seen trinity santos getting read as autistic before al hashimi like.... okay let's all hate rigid rule followers for no reason.... they definitely gave her and trinity the most compelling stuff to work with this season, so shoutout to them ... and i also genuinely can't even be switzerland about trinity santos like i'm giving it her overeager defenders even if they ship garsantos and thinks she's a bottom like she genuinely has done nothing wrong and is always reacting to situations in a really normal and RIGHTEOUS way like of fucking course you want to see your MALE coworker get crucified for being a terrible sexist pig to you and instead you get to be culpable in letting him get away with STEALING DRUGS FROM HIS HOSPITAL ... like i litr don't know how people don't immediately clock the gender politics and feel sympathetic towards her reaction, even without knowing about her trauma or like anything else. like you would be mad as shit as just as vindictive and feeling terrible and unforgiving in that situation!!!! LIKE HAVE YOU NEVER FELT LIKE SHIT BECAUSE A MAN TREATS YOU LIKE SHIT FOR THE CRIME OF BEING A WOMAN SHAPED TARGET WHO FEELS THE RIGHT TO SPEAK NEAR HIM ? sorry.... anyway mohan's writing really has been so let's starve a horse, lead it to poison water, wait for it to slowly almost die, then shoot it 6 times. like oh okay! so i understand the frustration but her fans are lowkey as delusional as langdon fans... obviously because javadi has done nothing wrong and only been super competent and able to #handle it, no one gaf about her.... i also realised i do enjoy whitaker as the actual pathetic sopping meepy character he is on the show and not whatever fanon delusion is fuelling him. my request for fanon delusion is that we need trans girl denise whitaker in a will-they-wont-they bully-victim dynamic with her rooommate the prickly trinity santos PLEASE GOD IF YOU CAN HEAR ME..... genuinely that 'oh you like having me around' argument was SOOOOO.... i CAN SEE IT SO CLEARLY,... WHITAKER TAKE E RIGHT NOW YOU CAN BE SAVED.... obviously robby breaking down and causing damage destruction everyone by lashing out is really good tv and i enjoy seeing it, dana is lowkey whatever, but i really liked emma and also really liked the digby case and everything that happened there :) digby was genuinely so so sweet...which is why i liked it, i didn't care for the Nurses are good people for treating a homeless person like a real person like I sure hope you would!, mel and mckay were given Nothing to work with but it's okay i'm going to be riding that stud4butch parker ellis x mel king high until s3 when they become canon that's #MyTruth.... the thing about both characters is that people love to ship propagandize them and it really hurts because like mel and langdon are Fine on the show, I don't really care, it's nice that mel has a friend but we really could crack at it again with trinity like at one point i believe it can happen i really doooo...
this is going to hurt
I think this show is actually really really well written and i think the [talks to camera]-bit really really good and really works with it and i think it made a really good choice of adaptation to split his character traits/stories between multiple protagonists, and I think there is something so well done in showing unpleasant/unlikeable/uncharming people and the conditions that made them so and how much >That doesn't matter to anyone who doesn't know!!! idk, also it's like a british show so everyone's a good actor. ambika mod really is good in this role... idk for a show that's about showing how much the system wears down on the most noble and heroic tasks/people to eventually make everything they are and do unheroic and unnoble is really really good... it's just really really good. but maybe it has a terrible second half idk haven't gotten there yet
Q1 in BL
I did lapse into a depressive episode for the feb-march period where at one point I was scouring through mgg for a reason to live... that happens to Us All... i loved to show off my insane reading/already read stats on mgg as proof of my #Real_Fujo card but um ... so they nuked that shit... rip </3 stuff I've been enjoying lately:
Tatsuki to Tamaki yoshida yuma
I saw the cover and I was like 'this is definitely pseudo-BL bc i haven't seen it in the yaoi tag, and lo and behold! it was. it has decent art and I think it's funny and charming and enjoy all the dynamics being presented and i think it's really self-aware in a good way, bc at one point one of the characters does an aside about enjoying the SL and wanting that to be the main cp over the actual cp and I was like >OH! So you do mean to write this in a way where, I, the susceptible reader would also be doing that!!!.... also i loooove the editor character at one point there's a panel where she holds out her own nui doll to take a picture of at a tourist spot and i'm like OP YOU GET EVERYTHINGGGG... i also think they have a really strong grasp on what their characters are and what they do and that sort of stability/direction is really nice to see.... ig it's kind of the rocky aur rani of this batch...
you are my world bbong
I love buff uke, I love pathetic sopping wet pretty boy seme, op definitely understands what is erotic and sexy about a built male body, it's fulfilling most of my conditions even though i lowkey despite tsundere uke. however we did just get to the rape plot which i really didn't think was going to happen but it is omegaverse bl i guess.... anyway i really like it so far and op has created a dynamic i think is soooo delicious [mostly in part due to how the seme is acting] so yayyyy yiippeeeee.
courtside courtship samjang shaman
MY GOAT 1PICK OF THIS BATCH. i love the art i love the way it's coloured i think the expressions op draws for the seme and his siblings are so fucking funny as are their interactions, i love my ukes and plots a little absurd with it AND I LOVE A TENDERHEARTED SEME!!!!! this is literally so so delicious and good for me and i really have been waiting on this official trans stockpile for a while and I am excited for me!!!!
golden light for you baetodi
oh i really can't say that much about it bc i am knocking against the concept and older uke and stupid young puppy seme, but the uke is litr so handsome and my type so it's good for me because of that... and i do like yakuza mafia plot like ofc i love dumb mindless violent dog uke like that's catnip to a guy like meeee ... i also do love a mentally fragile delicate suicidal seme [coming up later] but this guy does not stay in that state for long enough... i also love a young girl side character soooo cuuute to meeee
family liver registry soru
speaking of cute little babie girl children... i'm sorry i'm easy i litr love a co-parenting bl it's so funny to meeee... litr the little sister is so facking cuuute and i love her gag with the made up mascot character of choice ... nice dynamics nice set up nice art im enjoying everything. it's randomly supernatural and it did feel like Well? What Ok peggles but i like when the seme is a victim to Ploys and Schemes and Susceptible to Evil Influence better than when the uke is so that's a plus... also i love the exact kind of idiot the seme is so that's also enjoyable to me...
the taming chada
just put the buff handsome black hair uke and delicate frail prettyboy seme in the bag. just put the fries in the bag bruh. we all know what i like and this is fulfilling the base requirements. i actually don't like size difference that much but it's fine.. it's not like Bad i also love the class difference/servant-master cosplay so it's going to be sooo sad when it ends but let me enjoy it while i can...
the 11th school trip do haneul
i like the art and character design. pretty regular webnovel mystery solving bl set up... another one to the bag of emotionally fragile delicate semes that have to be treated with care and handled carefully... i will not be reading this again until the extras come out so like, see you in 100390404 years... I'll be here.. enjoying bl for ever...
office hero LattePanda
shoutout to LattePanda my goattttt.... beautiful textures and lines and always understanding plain/handsome black hair uke and prettyboy seme ... and this time he's psychologically tortured and cold and distant and ill of health.... LITERALLY WHAT MORE COULD I ASK FOR!!! i also love the one-sided reincarnation love trope i love when a guy suffers romantically it's always good for me....
sorry that these reviews were so scant in detail but like most of these are only 20-ish chapters rn I don't have much to say!!!
so hopefully there was something for everyone... that's my q1 wrap-up. did personal things happen to me also? probably. actually can everyone please please please go look at my alhaitham plate rn!!! if that attachment does not work LMK i will move it onto gdocs. not only is that an image my mother has received [to which she replied: why didn't you make me anything?] but she has been told a few other harmless facts, so everyone take bets on what she's doing with that information.
hey guys. welcome to my post. today I will be updating you on a variety of topics and items and such, such as: books_i_read (#Literacy_Yayyyy!), games_I_Played (who up silking they song? anyone want to silk my song? hey gender-averse bug, i saw you silking your song from that conveniently placed ledge over there), and BL_I_Ran_Through (yeah it's a ran through joke idk i'm not coming up with something better) (i could make a 'ran through like that uke's hole' joke but that's crass and I also don't like my ukes ran through!!! both seme and uke should be monogamous and have lost their virginities to each other but still be really good at sex. those are my unrealistic expectations informed by pornography for the genre). I hope you enjoy. like comment and subscribe. and I am open to receiving private DMs about a vis-a-vis engagement exchange relationship... we can talk rates and word counts and prices in private. let me know if interested!
Q1 in real physically published/digitally acquired books
the stuff I read: in custody, human acts, possession, love in a fallen city, circling song, god dies by the nile, the wizard of earthsea, idol burning, how fiction works, annihilation (incompletely), denison avenue, luster, no one is talking about this, this is going to hurt. most of these were by women! so wait YAY SLAYYY...
[ in custody ] anita desai
oh this book is so fucking good... anita desai is just really fucking good... it does a really incredible job of marrying it's characters with their environments and captures the dry season and choking dust of history as well as disrepair so well, the descriptions of the landscape are just really striking and I think there is something so noxious, pitiable and yet deeply engaging with how terrible the men this novel follows are. everytime you read anita desai it genuinely drives in how much of a hack kiran desai is and how the difference in their education/culture leads to a richness in anita desai's prose that kiran desai with all her attempts at emulation/musicality never manages... like truly our nepobookerslop author... there is a real verbose quality in anita desai's work that could be offputting in how it tends to interrupt the reading experience at times, but i find very charming. the other thing about anita desai is that she is so good at doing Real Subcontinental People/Real Subcontinental Situations. another win for small not classic caliber novels!
[ human acts ] han kang, trans deborah smith
this was genuinely very haunting, and i loved the way the narrative moved between narrators, especially when she begins to self-narrate as the author ... and I think one of the things that stayed with me was that these kids were buried in their school uniforms because those were their best clothes, that was how poor these families were. I think as a reconstruction of history, it aligns with the saidya hartman venus in adonis method of like, this attempt to restore dignity to those who were so cruelly stripped of it, while also just asking if it was worth it, to participate in an act of rebellion/revolution that led to such total destruction of a life. I really am not sure how to word this, but there is a strain to nobel laureate literature that asks about the things one as a human survives as well as the things that one as a human will do to survive and I think it's a much more raw and realer way of approaching existential questions and the general realm of compared to like, philosophy. because there is something very grounded and valuable and close and deeply touching about recounting the way a young woman works fourteen hours a day and ruins her body and still has a dream of going to med school and you know she does not survive this story and you know that nothing more happens or even would happen but still this is the life she clings to and wishes to live in.
[ possession ] a s byatt
one half of this book is really really good and the other half of this book is so stuck to a specific cultural moment within the Academy that it sort actively ruins the experience of the book. as it says on the cover, it is a romance so I genuinely can't even begrudge it for the super neatly sweetly tied up ending but holy shit is the victorian romance half SO SO GOOD and the 80s british academia half like, really not. byatt has some really beautiful musical prose at times, and I love the little details of misspelling in the 19C letters but found other details like the heritage black amethyst brooch soooooo cliche... but again it is a Romance... it's actually really confusing as to what byatt feels about 2nd wave feminism esp within the academy because she does satirise it so so much but she is also taking the piss out of everything else so in the end it just feels like she was saying nothing at all [especially with how her female characters have all their stories resolved via Reward of Romantic/Sexual Connection] ... like oh okay. it was fun though! long but fun and some of the poetry was nice.
[ love in a fallen city ] eileen chang, nyrb translation by karen kingsbury
one note: I do think eileen chang's own translations of her work were much better than kingsbury's which is soooo... but this truly was a collection about love and economics and FINALLY while being TRUE TO FORM, the story that this collection was named after was the best one. it was very very good and genuinely thrilling because the first half is them having a totally insulated romance in hong kong and then suddenly? bombs?! but the only reason that it feels sudden is that their wealth allows them to completely ignore the political world around them until it no longer can and even then!!! one of the greatest literary manuevers ever [left un?]written imo. it's such a incredible narrative choice. she has this very short story about two people meeting in a tram that is sooooo #Literature_of_the_City like it goes perfectly hand-in-hand with that baudelaire poem To A Passer-by... eileen chang is genuinely very witty and incisive and also just like, it is SO FUN to see the Origin(?) or Natural uses of all the classic trashy cn webnovel tropes like the third green tea bitch wife of so and so is soooooo fun and cute to read about in Serious Literature...
[ god dies by the nile, circling song ] nawal el sadaawi
I think maybe my sadaawi experience would be improved with better translations perhaps, but I didn't particularly like either. sort of too modernist in prose for me... it was really like, poor village women gets raped, rich village man does the raping and then colludes to fuck over a fellow poor village to frame him for the rape, he gets violently murdered, and also someone is getting brutally mind fucked by the military and also tons of honour/shame culture against women and religious psychosis/guilt and female genital mutilation... I like to read 'world literature' because I want to see how the other side lives/lived and i think she did do that for me. like yayyy i can say I understood a thing or two about rural egypt in the mid-late 20C... i enjoyed the depictions of how these villagers worked and mingled in the stench of the bulls and dry fields and their own fetid sweat, but I am not sure I could stomach that much more of the 'her pointy breasts under the cloth' and totally hallucinogenic nature of how one act of violence leads to another leads to solace in mixing up childhood fantasy with memory to cope et al et al... again, I think some of these things could just benefit from a better translation. I also think I don't actually enjoy reading about violence in women though I understand that is true and factual and the very real lived reality...
[ the wizard of earthsea ] ursula le k guin
now who was going to tell me ursula guin wasn't actually black... this is what i get for going to tumblr university.... anyway this is really the lowest of her low hits.... icb you would tell someone [who is not 10] [but even someone who is 10] to read this instead of her greats hits a la THE LATHE OF HEAVEN or the one that gay [and other types of] people love like LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS or even the equally didactic but genuinely just a better narrative of ANNALS OF THE WESTERN SHORE ... like maybe the other books in this series are better but genuinely this shit just fucking sucks!!! it's way worse than every other guin.... she's way better in other ones...
[ idol burning ] rin usami
bookclub for tw3... the other pick was bunny which i dnf'd after reading like 3 pages of because I could immediately tell it was going to be bad and accurately predicted [allegedly, according to eva] the ways it was going to be bad... if you know the flaws of mfa fiction you know them... not that this was that much better. the descriptions in this were more interesting and sometimes quite discomforting in a way that aided the sort of narrative goals... one of the books were the endnote is a thousand times better than the actual book but all the same it was fine... not anything in particular but not egregiously bad...
[ how fiction works ] james wood
this is really good at describing free indirect discourse in that it sort of parses and teases out the near indecipherable layers of like the [aperture, depth of field, iso] of narrative technique specifically. but at one point he literally loses steam and runs out of meaningful things to say and flaffing like 'fiction is Not Real... but can Resemble the Real... that's realism... and we like Realism because it reminds of us what is Real and Resembles Reality' like yeah buddy... it sure does.... the reading list of all the books he mentioned at the end is pretty fun though I enjoyed that... Also, I read this book because my THE NOVEL professor was like 'if u want theory of the novel stuff you should read this' because this was secretly a creative writing and mindfulness class instead of like, a real academically rigourous look into the novel. but as I've said. this quarter was about losing.
[ luster ] raven lallani
for class. an mfa novel that wasn't written like total shit. as in, had somewhat of a unique prose style. did that make the book good? no. but was if better than the usual mfa slop thus elevating the experience completely? Yes. it's like going to a tims and they've actually cleaned out their ice coffee machine. like no it's not good but yes also it is so good comparatively. i think the most enjoyable parts of this novel was were it was just doing low art / high octane absurdism and the bad parts were the realism 'meaning of life' type shit... like i don't want or need or wish another novel about [ young woman has sex with man realises that she is worth more than the sex she has with men ] it's none of my business... i don't care... i appreciated the weird sisterkinship she has with the guy's wife but genuinely this book was at it's best when it was like 'isn't life sometimes so crazy and weird and abrupt and full of strange coincidence?' instead of the other half of it...
[ no one is talking about this ] patricia lockwood
also for class. lin mentioned patricia lockwood ten million years ago and she is invoked often enough with elif batuman but what makes elif batuman good and genuine and funny and delightful in her errant moments are what I precisely dgaf about lockwood, which is that lockwood is a poet by training ! she's a poet and you can tell !!! and so there's this thing where the individual sentence has to be non homogenous or whatever ocean vuong was saying [completely ahistoric btw] and certain discord and tension within the section/paragraph because that it what you want a poem to do. you're always controlling for stops and pauses and abruptness but fundamentally, imo, that' s not what makes a novel's prose good. anyway this book was internetty, which is a quality i knew i would not enjoy and do not look for in books. it's also emotionally manipulative as a whole, which is not a bad thing but what ends up happening is that her end note, where she reveals the name of her baby niece, is on the whole way more emotional and way more deeply affecting than the whole damn book!
i guess this book had the same problem content wise as idol burning which is like, so this is my life and my lived experience [and other books Have been able to use these things to their benefit, #The_idiot] and i just don't care for the way you've described or experienced it because it's not telling me something new or illuminating it in a new way...
[ annihilation ] jeff vandermeer
also for class. okay so I read half of this and then the rest via wikipedia.... it was fine. I have known better scifi and honestly ... perhaps truly a book that amounts to the wikipedia summary of, to it's detriment or benefit. obviously it's better-written than most popular scifi [a la the newish stuff of brandon sanderson/andy weir] but also genuinely so disappointing to have the middle plot twist reveal be like 'i, a clear asexual aromantic in a very lesbianistic set up, have a husband who i am on this expedition to look for' also the prose is not accomplished enough to sell the cosmic/weird horror vibe it tries to go for... which it's literally more descriptive and rich in environment than most scifi so i guess that's part of it's success... but i should finish it properly before i say anything too definitively... it's literally that i was reading this and going 'omg... i love scifi.... i wish i could reread the sparrow right now...'
[ denison avenue ]
for class. genuinely a book that pissed me the fuck off because there's an entire century of literary tradition that it's trying to work off of/replicate/capture and if anyone involved had read a single modernist novel it would've been so much more successful in what it was trying to do. as it stands, the op was like 'this was originally an instagram project' and Yes, it does read entirely like instagram caption prose. congratulations for yet another successful rupi kaur rip off that doesn't even outdo rupi kaur!
[ this is going to hurt ] adam kay
ooooh. this one has been on my personal tbr foreverrrrr... or for a while, since an edit of ambika mod from the show goes viral every now and then... it was so painfully obvious this was meant to be funny and snarky in a british 2010s humour way and wasn't. but the parts that weren't him trying to be funny were very good and really worth reading i think. if anyone remembers the new yorker article that came out about the NICU baby 'murder' case where a nurse was essentially framed for failures of the system, this is just another look into that system and how much it punishes everyone involved and squanders itself. one thing that was so funny is obviously the egregious amounts of pussy jokes in this [the author was in ob gyn] so when I watched the show and litr within the first 10 minutes, I was like 'whoa... bespoke #woke choice of making yourself gay in your autofictional show about yourself' which genuinely could've been one of the funniest things anyone has ever done [since he wrote the show!!!] but no he's just gay in real life and he was cautiously straightbaiting in his memoir...
Q1 in motion media
>so the last real video game I played fr fr was hades 1 on my laptop when it released. before that, like the remains of edith finch on my friend's laptop in hs, and before that, infamous 2 when I was like 13/14. I am an avid enjoyer of watching games. which is why I will also make this the movie+tv show section because all of them are basically long form moving visual narratives to me. I just have not had a console [with video games i want to play] in like over 10 years. anyway so recently, i acquired a guy who bought a switch a couple years ago and never played it and was like, 'hey babe, do you want to play my forgotten never used switch since you are the Real Gamer between us' and i was like, Well... I shouldn't because I will forsake all of my academic responsibility to fuck that shit up for 14 hours a day. so dear reader, please guess what I did.
spoilers for: hollow knight silksong, da pitt, this is going to hurt, kal ho naa ho, rocky aur rani, wuthering heights the movie [i was held hostage], the secret agent, hamnet, emma 2020 (again!)
hollow knight: silksong
okay I have to preface this with (a) I don't care about spoilers, I hate not knowing more than I enjoy being delighted by a narrative twist; (b) I am not one of god's pure gamers. or maybe I am truly the only pure gamer because Idgaf about narrative i only care about gameplay if i'm playing a game. if you want me to ENJOY your story I am better off watching someone else do it on youtube, bc if I am playing the game I will be button mashing the shit out of the dialogue to get back to PLAYING THE GAME!!!... also. as someone who loves To Know, I love to watch a 100% speedrun of a game to know what to do/where to go, because to me the part that is important about playing a game is Do I Have the Skill To Do The Same? if a game litr is just someone pressing a button to go next, like someone else can do that for me that's none of my business...
as someone who loves Environments and Exploration as well as combat, would I say the metroidvania, say even, the dark souls of metroidvanias, are the genre for me? I don't know. results nonconclusive... currently I have 85 hours in the game, I have defeated the top2 most infuriating bosses a la: Groal the Great, and Savage Beastfly 2, both who I did not find *that bad* by the end of it. obviously I got through both the cogwork core and mount fay, and am currently failing the fuuuck out of the abyss climb section so yayyyyyy for that. inshallah she will succeed soon... the fights i've enjoyed the most are LACE, i LOVEEEEEE fighting lace SHOUTOUT TO LACE... she is so fun they overtuned the fuuuuck out of this boss. phantom was also really fun but I was definitely overpowered .... i liked widow obviously, and am saving the last sinner fight for no reason. okay my thing is that I lowkey have gotten to the point in the game where there's only boss battles left for me to do and that's like... Fine I Guess but I miss the exploringggg... so I keep not fighting bosses.... I enjoyed the platforming parts more than I thought I would.... I fucking love the music and the visuals of this game. I LOVE HORNET!!!!!!! whom I have loved since like 2020... so yeah ofc...
imo so much of my pleasure about this game comes from the fact that one of the most anticipated and biggest releases of all time is a game about WOMEN and MOTHERHOOD and in a serious and meaningful way and KINKEEPING and COMMUNAL CARE which is so so awesome especially for like mainstream [non indie] video game, which is a genre that is still in 2006 re: gender politics... anyway it's fucking awesome and has many awesome awesome characters one of which is kicking my ass, SECOND SENTINEL!!! anyway I'm content with the knowledge that I'm a gamer but I can't even be like 'this is my favourite game' because I don't have enough games under my belt to be making such definitive statements. there's no way that I'm not having fun but dangggg can it be rough.
no other choice
oh this movie was so fucking good park chanwook !!! i love that this genuinely is a black comedy and it makes such good very prescient commentary. fucking love that it ends with his daughter playing the cello for them as he loses his hearing for this job he's literally killed to afford. i love the final shot of their house/compound where you realise it's literally secluded from a very suburban row. GOD!!!!! also everyone in this movie does a killer performance, especially the two wives.
emma 2020
still one of the greatest and most perfect movies of all timeeeee IDC IDC if you disagree you are going to hell... yes this may be personal shade sorry I just don't get it NO ONE is allowed to dislike my favourite most perfect movie of all time...
+clueless
completely massacres the entire point of emma by not having any of it be cher's fault... so actually it's terrible and i hate it...
the secret agent
really good acting and really great cinematography and SHOUTOUTTT TO THE GLOBAL SOUTH BELT this movie is sooo good at conveying humidity and heat through the choice of shots and the costumes, like the very thin translucent shirts and slobby shorts for everyone is such great costuming... I liked all the narrative choices and manuevers, but the future/present story is the weakest bit...
wuthering heights
this movie was so egregiously bad that I started reading real actual wuthering heights in the middle of my viewing. and it was genuinely so much better. and it wasn't even funny!!!! kind of the only hysterical part was genuinely when it become a charli xcx music video for a little bit and even then I just got so mad about all of the narrative choices being made...
hamnet
this movie has 1 good scene and it's when hamnet goes 'something's there in that corner, watching' and it changes so the audience is now watching from the corner and you realise you are the Predatory Vulture of Death feeding on the emotional pain/torture of these children and it's really really good... otherwise is genuinely total shite, I think I like joe alwyn as an actor, paul mescal's gay earring staying in was certainly A Choice, the cinematography is really good and beautiful but the movie is just awful as a whole. i like really was so ready to cry so much and I only cried 1 time. like the emotional manipulation movie can't make me cry more than once? be fucking forreal rn i cried at PROM 2011 which remains so stark in my mind as a aberrant occasion bc it really highlighted to me how i have the emotional integrity of 1-ply tissue paper.
zootopia 2
this is only making the list because I have to tell you guys that H's sister watched this movie 11 times. nicke wilde is a wwx variant btw.... his ukeism could be off the charts if they let it...
kal ho naa ho
genuinely a movie where srk is so handsome and stylish in all the dance sequences, but especially pretty woman like the little bit of belly was soooo chic! also like SLAYFUL SOUNDTRACK. and naina is sooo cuuuteee in looks and personality like i loved that she was so angry and annoying and stubborn and headstrong, like so sossososo cute moebomb. it was really an early innovation for polyamory/challengers-style trios but they didn't quite stick the landing and i was genuinely so baffled by the ending like Ok So what? like i just felt the emotional resolution was not resoluting...
rocky aur rani
this movie is genuinely such a good comedy it's unreal ... of the most unintentional is the totally shit bangla the bengali family speaks, but like rani having her own theme song that riffs whenever she has a #Girlboss moment is so crazy. and also: One of the wokest movies to ever come out of bollywood. ANDDDD the main couple not only have hella chemistry but you actually root for the competent smart girlboss x himbo with a heart of gold. the fucking dola re dola climax sequence entire sequence is SOOOOO GOOOD!!!! like genuinely emerald fennel fucking WISHES her total opulence and visual overindulgence looked like that. but genuinely why does rani have a gay stay at home dad and lesbian breadwinner mom and a grandmother who endorses cheating. I also really felt like the final emotional climax/fight was really well earned and the way rani defends herself + the eventual resolution is really well done because it's fucking true no matter how much you hate your boyfriend's sexist pig dad you can't be raising a hand against him!!! but also true he has to apologise first for you to apologise... also loved the respective grandmothers and rocky's mom and sister... this was a rewatch and I was lowkey playing skong the entire time but it genuinely was so good.....
the pitt
genuinely seeing the discourse about this show has been 10000000x times going 'is this everyone's first time watching a TV show?' my top3 to no ones surprise are: javadi, al-hashimi and mel.. also like insane that javadi is genuinely the most simple character to understand and lowkey genuinely the only person who has no real flaws other than nepotism [which she can't even control] and somehow we still get befuddling takes about her.... like... Ok..... I LOVE DR. AL-HASHIMI I BELIEVED IN HER AND WAS ON HER SIDE SINCE DAY 1!!!!!! like insane that you have spent an entire season with an extremely empathetic autistic woman who likes to follow rules and protocol [mel] but it's suddenly repulsive and terrible when it's coming from another woman in s2? like is it because she's in a position of power now? is it because she's brown? it's not the ai thing for sure because they whiteknighted the fuck out of that. i just think it's crazy that i've seen trinity santos getting read as autistic before al hashimi like.... okay let's all hate rigid rule followers for no reason.... they definitely gave her and trinity the most compelling stuff to work with this season, so shoutout to them ... and i also genuinely can't even be switzerland about trinity santos like i'm giving it her overeager defenders even if they ship garsantos and thinks she's a bottom like she genuinely has done nothing wrong and is always reacting to situations in a really normal and RIGHTEOUS way like of fucking course you want to see your MALE coworker get crucified for being a terrible sexist pig to you and instead you get to be culpable in letting him get away with STEALING DRUGS FROM HIS HOSPITAL ... like i litr don't know how people don't immediately clock the gender politics and feel sympathetic towards her reaction, even without knowing about her trauma or like anything else. like you would be mad as shit as just as vindictive and feeling terrible and unforgiving in that situation!!!! LIKE HAVE YOU NEVER FELT LIKE SHIT BECAUSE A MAN TREATS YOU LIKE SHIT FOR THE CRIME OF BEING A WOMAN SHAPED TARGET WHO FEELS THE RIGHT TO SPEAK NEAR HIM ? sorry.... anyway mohan's writing really has been so let's starve a horse, lead it to poison water, wait for it to slowly almost die, then shoot it 6 times. like oh okay! so i understand the frustration but her fans are lowkey as delusional as langdon fans... obviously because javadi has done nothing wrong and only been super competent and able to #handle it, no one gaf about her.... i also realised i do enjoy whitaker as the actual pathetic sopping meepy character he is on the show and not whatever fanon delusion is fuelling him. my request for fanon delusion is that we need trans girl denise whitaker in a will-they-wont-they bully-victim dynamic with her rooommate the prickly trinity santos PLEASE GOD IF YOU CAN HEAR ME..... genuinely that 'oh you like having me around' argument was SOOOOO.... i CAN SEE IT SO CLEARLY,... WHITAKER TAKE E RIGHT NOW YOU CAN BE SAVED.... obviously robby breaking down and causing damage destruction everyone by lashing out is really good tv and i enjoy seeing it, dana is lowkey whatever, but i really liked emma and also really liked the digby case and everything that happened there :) digby was genuinely so so sweet...which is why i liked it, i didn't care for the Nurses are good people for treating a homeless person like a real person like I sure hope you would!, mel and mckay were given Nothing to work with but it's okay i'm going to be riding that stud4butch parker ellis x mel king high until s3 when they become canon that's #MyTruth.... the thing about both characters is that people love to ship propagandize them and it really hurts because like mel and langdon are Fine on the show, I don't really care, it's nice that mel has a friend but we really could crack at it again with trinity like at one point i believe it can happen i really doooo...
this is going to hurt
I think this show is actually really really well written and i think the [talks to camera]-bit really really good and really works with it and i think it made a really good choice of adaptation to split his character traits/stories between multiple protagonists, and I think there is something so well done in showing unpleasant/unlikeable/uncharming people and the conditions that made them so and how much >That doesn't matter to anyone who doesn't know!!! idk, also it's like a british show so everyone's a good actor. ambika mod really is good in this role... idk for a show that's about showing how much the system wears down on the most noble and heroic tasks/people to eventually make everything they are and do unheroic and unnoble is really really good... it's just really really good. but maybe it has a terrible second half idk haven't gotten there yet
Q1 in BL
I did lapse into a depressive episode for the feb-march period where at one point I was scouring through mgg for a reason to live... that happens to Us All... i loved to show off my insane reading/already read stats on mgg as proof of my #Real_Fujo card but um ... so they nuked that shit... rip </3 stuff I've been enjoying lately:
Tatsuki to Tamaki yoshida yuma
I saw the cover and I was like 'this is definitely pseudo-BL bc i haven't seen it in the yaoi tag, and lo and behold! it was. it has decent art and I think it's funny and charming and enjoy all the dynamics being presented and i think it's really self-aware in a good way, bc at one point one of the characters does an aside about enjoying the SL and wanting that to be the main cp over the actual cp and I was like >OH! So you do mean to write this in a way where, I, the susceptible reader would also be doing that!!!.... also i loooove the editor character at one point there's a panel where she holds out her own nui doll to take a picture of at a tourist spot and i'm like OP YOU GET EVERYTHINGGGG... i also think they have a really strong grasp on what their characters are and what they do and that sort of stability/direction is really nice to see.... ig it's kind of the rocky aur rani of this batch...
you are my world bbong
I love buff uke, I love pathetic sopping wet pretty boy seme, op definitely understands what is erotic and sexy about a built male body, it's fulfilling most of my conditions even though i lowkey despite tsundere uke. however we did just get to the rape plot which i really didn't think was going to happen but it is omegaverse bl i guess.... anyway i really like it so far and op has created a dynamic i think is soooo delicious [mostly in part due to how the seme is acting] so yayyyy yiippeeeee.
courtside courtship samjang shaman
MY GOAT 1PICK OF THIS BATCH. i love the art i love the way it's coloured i think the expressions op draws for the seme and his siblings are so fucking funny as are their interactions, i love my ukes and plots a little absurd with it AND I LOVE A TENDERHEARTED SEME!!!!! this is literally so so delicious and good for me and i really have been waiting on this official trans stockpile for a while and I am excited for me!!!!
golden light for you baetodi
oh i really can't say that much about it bc i am knocking against the concept and older uke and stupid young puppy seme, but the uke is litr so handsome and my type so it's good for me because of that... and i do like yakuza mafia plot like ofc i love dumb mindless violent dog uke like that's catnip to a guy like meeee ... i also do love a mentally fragile delicate suicidal seme [coming up later] but this guy does not stay in that state for long enough... i also love a young girl side character soooo cuuute to meeee
family liver registry soru
speaking of cute little babie girl children... i'm sorry i'm easy i litr love a co-parenting bl it's so funny to meeee... litr the little sister is so facking cuuute and i love her gag with the made up mascot character of choice ... nice dynamics nice set up nice art im enjoying everything. it's randomly supernatural and it did feel like Well? What Ok peggles but i like when the seme is a victim to Ploys and Schemes and Susceptible to Evil Influence better than when the uke is so that's a plus... also i love the exact kind of idiot the seme is so that's also enjoyable to me...
the taming chada
just put the buff handsome black hair uke and delicate frail prettyboy seme in the bag. just put the fries in the bag bruh. we all know what i like and this is fulfilling the base requirements. i actually don't like size difference that much but it's fine.. it's not like Bad i also love the class difference/servant-master cosplay so it's going to be sooo sad when it ends but let me enjoy it while i can...
the 11th school trip do haneul
i like the art and character design. pretty regular webnovel mystery solving bl set up... another one to the bag of emotionally fragile delicate semes that have to be treated with care and handled carefully... i will not be reading this again until the extras come out so like, see you in 100390404 years... I'll be here.. enjoying bl for ever...
office hero LattePanda
shoutout to LattePanda my goattttt.... beautiful textures and lines and always understanding plain/handsome black hair uke and prettyboy seme ... and this time he's psychologically tortured and cold and distant and ill of health.... LITERALLY WHAT MORE COULD I ASK FOR!!! i also love the one-sided reincarnation love trope i love when a guy suffers romantically it's always good for me....
sorry that these reviews were so scant in detail but like most of these are only 20-ish chapters rn I don't have much to say!!!
so hopefully there was something for everyone... that's my q1 wrap-up. did personal things happen to me also? probably. actually can everyone please please please go look at my alhaitham plate rn!!! if that attachment does not work LMK i will move it onto gdocs. not only is that an image my mother has received [to which she replied: why didn't you make me anything?] but she has been told a few other harmless facts, so everyone take bets on what she's doing with that information.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-07 12:24 pm (UTC)okay can you nominate these for book club? or if not these then other books that are actually good and literary to beat out my 10000 genre (non-derogatory) slop nominations bc why are you gatekeeping literature from us and then making us look bad when you're like ok so for book club this month we read idol burning which was shit and bunny which was shit and for book club next month we will be reading shit yet again
> the wizard of earthsea
okay truly something in the water bc for the longest time i also thought uklg was black but maybe that's just bc the cultural imaginary is conflating her with octavia butler? anyway sad to hear wizard of earthsea is not good but like it literally is a children's book, like it literally is her harry potter, it's her doing the most basic groundwork setting fantasy of all time... idk i've never actually read it but shelved by genre did a unit on the whole series... which i haven't listened to, maybe i will now tho, but just the fact that they have done a unit on it suggests that it's a fundamental enough work in the genre fiction space that there's interesting stuff to be said
> annihilation
nooooooo also haven't read but was really hoping/hearing it was soooo good and always thought i would get to it eventually noooooooo i mean maybe i still will, i love mid... lowkey this also should have been a book club nom tho. well i guess it was for class so that couldn't be helped
> bl section
looked around for stuff to ask you to add to my list for me but i fear nothing here spoke to me... btw you are currently coming in last quantity-wise out of all of my rec list guys and yes you are in an unspoken competition in my mind. it's possible you can still come out on top in the quality assessment though so let's stay tuned for when i actually clock into those lists
re: all that
Date: 2026-04-09 02:15 am (UTC)yk what's crazy is that I didn't even know octavia butler until the post-tumblr era like they were NOTTTT getting grouped together not for me at leasttt.... and yes the wizard of earthsea is for children but so is annals of the western shore and annals is the much better middle grade novel!!!! guin was lowkey obsessed with jung and buddhism while writing earthsea and it manifests welllllll exactly as you think it does in the novel/world system....
I THINK I WAS ENJOYING ANNIHILATION MORE THAN I LET ON IN THIS REVIEW!!! but that could have been because I have the
yk what's crazy is that I didn't even know octavia butler until the post-tumblr era like they were NOTTTT getting grouped together not for me at leasttt.... and yes the wizard of earthsea is for children but so is annals of the western shore and annals is the much better middle grade novel!!!! guin was lowkey obsessed with jung and buddhism while writing earthsea and it manifests welllllll exactly as you think it does in the novel/world system....
I THINK I WAS ENJOYING ANNIHILATION MORE THAN I LET ON IN THIS REVIEW!!! but that could have been because I have the <I love sci-fi and it's always so good> gene [inherited from my father] but also because all of the other books were so unstraightforwardly unenjoyable ++ i was going in way more open-minded and excited than i was for any other book it was just like i don't think uhhhhh lovecraftian?/cosmic horror is for me at all like damn if it's so scary just explain it in an intelligible way... +++ when I read the wiki summaries for the other two books in the series i was like.... wow it really seems like a book that didn't need a sequel but got a sequel and that ruined the mystique and appeal of the whole set-up of the first book... but once again those wikipedia summaries hit like crack also so maybe it is worth experiencing fully...
>noura can I be honest... to me BL is not a thing where someone 'recommends' you something... it's literally the grocery store... it's like you hear your oomf say 'i've been enjoying asparagus lately...' and the next time you go there you look at the asparagus and are like 'hmm maybe I could enjoy that too...' like I'm always going to be like 'i liked this restaurant and this food and this item' but in the end YOUR PREFERENCES re: art/seme/uke/plot/trope/etc should decide whether or not you want to go/eat........... but noted... ummm.... i guess I'll think more about you whenever I go onto mgg but i genuinely think most bl has nothing for you.... you're not a bl reader you're not a bl trope enjoyer you're literally at the seafood section with a crippling shellfish allergy being like 'ok so which fish hasn't come into contact with the shrimp' ....
Re: all that
Date: 2026-04-09 12:51 pm (UTC)AND CAN YOU STOP TELLING ME I DON'T LIKE BL AND I'M NOT A BL READER, LET ME DECIDE THAT FOR MYSELFFFFFF YOU'RE INTERPOLATING MEEEEEEE like i'm genuinely asking for beginner groceries for someone who is new to shopping and you're like "idk you're not really the type of person who groceries are for" like just give me the shopping list and let me come to my own conclusions whether i want to get that stuff or not omg... people can't even investigate anymore, we don't let people look into things anymore?? what's going on bruh. like idk man somehow ciel has come up with 24 recs for me, so i really think you could stand to think about me more, it's true
Re: all that
Date: 2026-04-09 01:36 pm (UTC)sorry for systematically discriminating against you but to me you are a [bean soup bl person] like me and you have opposite types of snobbery re/books versus manga where you’re always like ‘i enjoyed this book for what it was’ and im like ‘but i wish it did this this and this instead’ and you’re like ‘that’s not what the book is about’ except with bl im like ‘i like this i think it has these tropes that are good’ and you’re like ‘my 6 bajillion hang ups about wanting switchOK world and semeukely-derived role that the seme/uke has to play is making me neg on it and not enjoy it and wish it was something else actually…’ like idk what to tell you im the common sjm/colleen hoover enjoyer and you’re looking for quality recommendations out of a slop, everything is midgood to me reader type reader !
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Date: 2026-04-08 05:09 am (UTC)many of ur reads r on my tbr which actually is a good thing bcs seeing ppl read stuff i intend to read spurs me on more #GoodPeerPressure !! im excited to read in custody & human acts n slightly apprhensive for denison avenue bcs a total of 3 ppl have recced it [positively] n i never was a fan of rupi kaur :crylaughing:but it's ok.
funnily enough i too had a bl Moment in february n ugh bbong-nim truly gets it...bonafide pervert #yay. i think tsundere uke is kind of a beautiful thing n im partial to it, n it hasits place in the world. plus i like him somewhat mean to the seme. v amusing how he returns like a dog to uke every time....where's ur dignity brother. i agree that the art is insanely good n i love the lack of color bcs it makes things sm more stark. #imo dynamix great too. i have unsolicited recs for u if u get back into bl-scrolling: our sunny days (co-parenting, buff uke & seme, darling baby antics, enjoyable slice of life motions, mindless reading in a way due to the no stakes of it all) the dangerous convenience store (stereotpical rugged mafia seme n poor dainty tender-hearted uke but w a 'twist': seme is down bad which i respect n tbh i didn't read this too long ago but the details r fuzzy fjkfjkdkjdjsh but i DO remember enjoying it generally....there's a moment near the end that's annoying but it's Fine) n checkmate (kind of bl of all time to me.....bullying romance...sorry....uh uke is like severely repressed n during hs was always 2nd place to seme's 1st place in grades n seme is like the perf golden-haired guy who never knew abt this one-sided rivalry when it affected the uke so freaking bad u have to like, js shake ur head. n it's js so compelling to Me....the intimacy of hatered n all....u hate him so bad u want him gone/want to be him/r upset at the thought of anyone else harming him....IDk....i found many deity/worshipper themes but im also crasy) lowkey these might all be yaoislop but it's 2026 n i had to shoot my shot.
another unsolicted rec but it's a book this time. im trudging thru this autotheory/memoir/genre-mix work rn n it's like, good, but also im not making progress #rip: the argonuats by maggie nelson. unforch a class read but oh well....
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Date: 2026-04-08 06:29 pm (UTC)well at least we are so agreed about the pitt. it's kind of interesting only accessing average stupid guy fandom takes via you & liv hateposting bc ive been perceiving the show writing itself as being quite hostile to al hashimi, or at least generously allowing for a hostile reading of her (i suppose to let people pick sides between her and robby, and empathize with robby's leaving anxiety... whatever bro) but hopefully s3 actually is like moderately robbyless and she gets to be the starrr instead of relegated to foil. plus they are clearly banking on giving her tragic backstory points with this damn baby thing, Then what will the haters say
AND THANK YOU For validating the problematic sexual tension I perceived in the whittaker santos convo, robby and the ipad woman had 2% of the chemistry on display :weibocrylaugh: but im also problematically enjoying whittaker coming into his true cis masc identity via gender affirming farm labor, can we transition someone else? can langdon can do it, then her scenes wont be a waste of my damn timee
and are all those for class books for the same class im ctfu that professor in the syllabus like i_just_made_some_bullshit.jpg
HIII EBBA<3 <3 <3
Date: 2026-04-09 02:30 am (UTC)uh yeah sure langdon can transition but that's not that high priority for me... it's also true whitaker coming into his cis mascness via farm labour subplot is kind of deeply funny and the exact tension i would want to rub against his omegabottom fan truthers on twitter but again i cannae deny the trinity/whitaker chemistry it's there the dynamic is so beautiful santos deserves a willing bully victim sooo badddddd she needs a chewtoy it would be so good for her !!!!
ig you are right about alhashimi being written kind of as robby's enemy and the writer's room, being on robby's side, were like Yes We Cooked Slay with all that but as a person with A Brain and Empathy watching this show it's like 'ok so baran al hashimi has made No Wrong Moves this entire season other than the greatest social ill of all, which is trying to exercise her newly appointed authority in an environment where the social hierarchy is already established and set and unwilling to change...' so yeah she was probably written to be evil since to the oldguard heads the new guards always will be. FINGERS CROSSED FOR THAT S3 MAIN LEAD ROLE THO!!!!