fwcu: (Default)
hi 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
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. 
fwcu: (renjuns<3)
everytime I say this I really am stealing valour from the subaltern who really can't read and haven't been reading but my god, like, Bruh... uh a very lackluster or normal af reading year for me... 2025 was a year that had a lot going on or maybe not that much going on or maybe I really did become a newer better person or something idk, hard to tell, who knows! who knows! I'm bad at actually making my reading_lists posts and also I've documented my reading and opinions of elsewhere this year... so should I do it again? I don't know... I'm having the reverse of my usual crisis where I don't want to waste time writing because I want to be reading... sorry I have A List to get through... I have a normal sized list....                    and a scary ...         and a real and normal-small amount of books at home... which I bought quite a few books in 2025 [and some within the last week] [and obviously to commemorate nothing, I did a meaning-and-secret-and-impromptu exchange with H where she got me YOUR NAME HERE and I got her the complete cavafy].

Read more... )
fwcu: (gojo)
okay I've been wanting to make this post for like last 5?6? ship tags I've gone through but it's difficult to sit here and be like 'ahhh let me leave my thoughts on fics that i thought were mostly insignificant' but if anyone's keeping track i have gone through the haikavetham tag, the sirus/remus tag, i think I did just a generic read through of fandom big names atp, and I did a lot of the phaidei tag. today's tag is not any of those, and I'm sort of still actively reading through whatever getogojo fic i can find so... I just want to call it at this arbritrary point, because I've stopped filtering for rated E fic only, and have found people with BOOKMARKS who actually BOOKMARK FIC and this is an exciting development that lead to understand, once again, the reason I write so much character study is actually because character study is my favourite thing to read Also, and I really dgaf about porn... sorry... but it is so nice when it's there, i just don't want it to be there in fic i think is serious isn't that CRAZY...

however, before we get this started, I did do a mini-side quest into fe3h mediest land midway through, and came being no.1 sylvain fan because he was really was always being depicted in a situation and without sympathy in a way I wish would happen to gojo all the time... thank you mediest... ANYWAY... that aside, there's going to be actual weight and heft and Real Things to #Talk About in this fic[lit] review because it's no longer just bad or good porn....

some notes on things I like and don't like:
  1. we all know that ship order has a nonzero effect on characterisation because of how we've internalised certain hang-ups about pederasty/romance/wtv ... here are my things that I believe are canon and that fic should respect whether or not I like the ship order they do it about, and tend to respect about fics whether or not i like the ship order: [socially inept and emotionally unintelligent gojo satoru] this is my big one, which goes hand-in-hand kinda with [gojo is stuck at the restaurant] which mostly just means [gojo fell harder and pined harder and loves more], this i think is simply true because [geto cares more about his ideals than he does satoru] which I think is really important to understand how agency affects his moral/psychological transformation. like c'mon guys... so those are my big ones that I believe preserve sort-of the important aspects of what makes their relationship appealing To Me, and thus is what I want to see depicted in fic... 
  2. we all know I hate woobification... literally I don't want poor angsty victim babygirl who is so insecure and needs love and big fat cock and is sooo sad and hurt ... i cannot stand ittttt    like I barely enjoy this kind of suffering and it does not make this character more erotic or sexualisable or enjoyable to me in any way...  moral argument alert! but Geto Suguru is, in canon, a genocidal murderer cult leader. like I don't need to nor do i particularly want to feel sorry for him, or think he didn't actually deserve it and was misunderstood the whole time, which I know is not always the objective of woobifying fics, but is nonetheless the effect. in the different way, I think you fundamentally misunderstand gojo and how he suffers if he is cognisant of his own suffering. like gojo satoru is the single character I want whump of* real bad because he does not actually understand why or how he is in this situation, he doesn't know what he's done to deserve it, and he does not put actual value into his own suffering. [*case 0 is mydei who i wanted Waterboarded] like he absolutely deserves the sylvain_fe3h treatment because he is both at fault for everything he's done and is incapable of understanding how his nurture has shaped him and because he can't even articulate that, no one else will/should feel sorry for him either!!! he's one of the skinner pidgeons! if geto's great tragedy revolves around the way he seeks agency, gojo's great tragedy is that he never even realises he lacks it and therefore lacks the ability to grasp at it...
  3. 夏五. geto/gojo. summer5. that is my chosen ship order. I don't want any other food. I'm picky, that's my molly tea order with no matcha foam please. like I don't think rev order is innately bad or mischaracterised or anything, I just like it better this way because i have gojo_prion_disease. it happens to the best and worst of us. my two bones are here: sugusato order tends to ... just elide geto's psychological hang-ups/issues/problems ... like hello? I want my man depressed and struggling and on the brink? like he's a great caring loving responsible indulgent leash-holding boyfriend. at least tell me he takes antidepressants? whatever...        satosugu order, on the other hand... literally Crimes of Woobification and everyone is like 'he's sooo depressed and sad and struggling and overworked and insecure and self-hating bbygrl' girl what about his superiority complex? hello? that was the best part. that was literally beautiful and NECESSARY representation for depressed guys who think they're better than everyone else and hate themselves for it. that's where you get the self-hating part from!!!! also no one believes in exploring his image gap. like alright man. let's not even take this seriously. gojo is probably a harder character to mischaracterise on the surface if you keep all his shallow notes, but geto literally suffers soooooo much on both sides. ACCORDING TO MY INTERPRETATIONS. shoko also suffers but everyone is excused for that because she has like 10 lines in canon.
  4. back to my aforementioned, most general bone: Why does everyone think Geto is the pining, more in-love half? [...] like there's one thing in thinking Gojo doesn't realise he's in love at all, point-blank, and therefore can't be pining about it ... but he does realise at some point... and even if he doesn't in whatever point your fic is taking place in, well who left who, and who broke up with who, and who chides who about holding on until the very end, is very apparent. as is, gege akutami saying gojo's single complex is being unable to change geto's mind. as is, i don't know... the shibuya incident? ... a plan that only works because Gojo Satoru, if not stuck at the restaurant, Returns To It? ... anyway, I feel like this problem would not occur if fandom collectively fixated on the 'At least curse me a little at the very end' line instead of the 'We're the Strongest duo' line... because one is far more romantic and torturous than the other. TO ME.  and wayyyy more revealing of gojo's character/naivete/morals... AT HIS BIG AGE OF 28 TOO!!!! 
  5. I don't like aus. I like the jjk universe, I like canon divergence, I like this ship because this ship cannot be reasonably extricated from the universe it was written within. there is no such thing as Gojo Satoru unless he is the Strongest, and the mess of that title comes up with all the things wrong with Jujutsu society... everything wrong with gojo works Best and Most Perfectly in jjkverse... anyway. I approach aus with extreme prejudice, that's all. 
  6. I don't like internalised homophobia and I just don't think it would be real for  this ship, where BOTH , TWO , BOTH parties reject social conventions and norms with extreme prejudice. like yeah they know the rules. fuck the rules though. 
  7. like okay I have categorised approaches to geto whump/angst/psychoanalysis/character study fics into two modes, and it's either, and often more commonly (and I think, incorrectly): [geto hates himself for meaning too little to gojo]  OR  [geto hates himself for meaning too much to gojo]   ... which, look, I personally don't see or particularly care for the self-hating aspect, I think there's a lot self-burden, and I think there is a lot of repulsion/disgust caught up in there, but i don't think all of it is necessarily directed at himself. and I think a lot of fic reaches for like Guilt/Shame as like guiding emotions that lead you, the reader, to [want to] sympathise with him. again, this is neither here nor there for me as a reader, but I think what really turns off me is how these things intersect with Gojo as character/concept. I really don't think that geto would be cold/cruel or hateful as some gojo_angst tries to ascribe, but by trying to convince me/your reader, that geto cares more about gojo and meaning something to him and his hatred of his own weakness is because he's not gojo's equal, very directly undercuts his choice to break away from jujutsu society, and how he does that to escape his own weakness. not because he's beholden to gojo's morals or gojo's strength, but because he himself feels powerless and used outside of that, and he feels this way not because of gojo but because of how his fellow sorcerers are treated. like, my reading of XX village massacre + KFC break-up is reliant on the line: "Kill me if you want, there's meaning in that." Geto has not only chosen to grasp and give himself agency through becoming a curse user, but he's encouraging Gojo to do the same, to follow the path he finds for himself. anyway. we may come back to this later when I review some fic... 
  8. sort-of my white whale of fic I have yet to find is like gojo-navel-gazing fic? not that exactly but... it should ideally be outsider pov pitying gojo for being so arrested development and stuck at the restaurant and barely even understanding those things about himself and never knowing or even realising there Could Be something outside being a weapon... all while he is still hated in the nation and perpetuating all the things that make it impossible to pity him/be nice to him/etc... like AUUUGHHH it would taste so good... it tastes so good in my mind... sorry I just really want delicious rich meal of gojo_nonwhump_whump... gojo being painfully unaware of himself My Favourite Flavour I will say that shit forever and ever and ever.... 
  9. 'parental gojo satoru' really pisses me off. the attachment he could have to megumi/tsumiki and the responsibility he assumes over them is not analogous to geto<>mimiko/nanako... like it could not be more obvious or clear but whatever... and, not to touch on recent jjk twt discourse, but gojo satoru is an extremely middling muddied figure where his morals/affections/attachments/teaching abilities are very confused. because he! is! a! confused! unactualised! unrealised! guy!!! if his character seems underdeveloped and contradictory, that's actually, and I hate to say it, on purpose! that's gege akutami being a good writer! he has his shit IN THE BAG when he wrote gojo satoru. you have to accept and write him as the half-baked impulsive, mostly personally motivated guy that he is!!! 
  10. i don't have a 10th point. YET. i'm sure I'll find one. well some smaller nitpicks that people are culpable of ... first of all: 1st year trio are not gojo's favourites. gojo's favourites are the 2nd years. what? that can't be true. WHO IS HE TEXTING ABOUT MEGUMI GETTING ALL BEAT UP? + I will agree that itadori is kind of up there if not There as his student 1pick, but that's sort of like, protag privileges ngl... anyway... but saying this also, I find it really hard to believe that people like gojo in general and are allied with him For His Personality, like In Fic... like if it's double teachers au/no defection esp, like, be honest with me... let's all be honest with one another... 
anyway. onto the actual review portion of this.

Carry Me Home
+this is like, The Fic? to me? in that it really made me appreciate geto's moral journey, was a really good piece of fiction on top of being a good character study fic, and literally had famous famous line of [geto to gojo]: "I care about my ideals more than I care about you." WHILEEE spending the entire fic throwing up over how much he loves gojo... which is so beautiful to me because it really highlights that you cannot save people and gojo himself saying he can only save those that want to be saved...like the only person who can change geto's mind is geto himself + just the way it highlighted the difference in maturity between 17sg 17st 28gt 28gj ... like BRUHHH... i think i just generally really like 17x28 as a subgenre in jjk, and I think this one really did such a good job in showing the relative Lack of development between the two gojos [like one has just seen more death now] and the backslide of older geto where he is maybe a far more curated person who is pre-occupied with Performance [perfect, no notes] but his morality and fanaticism has degraded him... it was just reallyy good and really understood so many things about jjk canon and what i felt about it INCLUDING my ult thesis of [gojo is always collateral] because even in this fic, like so much of it happens with 17st being offscreen and or BEING LEFT BEHIND, while 28yr gojo can barely say anything that matters and honestly, in a DIVINE, STROKE OF GENIUS-like choice, 17yr geto hates him. like i think that's also sooooooo **__** because of course he does! the carelessness and ineptitude doesn't look as good at 28 as it did at 17!!! but i think there was also something soooo moving and perfect about 28yr old gojo being described as 'awkward' and Noted to be Bad At This ... idk there's so much to noting how much he's been left behind in so many different ways, no? DOWN TO ALWAYS HAVING TO BE THE ONE TO FIND GETO!!!  and I think this was especially sooo potent when compared to geto's relative sociability and the ease with which, as a 17 ON THE BRINK is able to handle similar situations... like genuinely the wide chasm between them TT like idk it was also so affecting because there's such a potent emphasis then on who gets to be/remain a child and who is forced to 'grow up' ... AUGH...
+ch10 has this pill bottle moment, which to me was THE most satisfying reading experiences i've gotten from ao3 ever. like I was shocked and gagged and so deeply impressed and affected, and impressed by the character first and foremost! and then by the author for coming up with this. like the experience was so diegetic, which on ao3, at least for me, i am always so aware this is OP's understanding of:, but this was just like HYPE MOMENTS and AURAAAA x69000 I wasn't even like 'how did op come up with this' i was just super fucking impressed with this character and his own understanding of his situation... like it felt so good watching him outsmart himself. 
+in the end, I really enjoyed everything this fic promised me, it put a lot of beautiful images in my mind and made me #ponder and #think... and I read some of op's other stuff, which we'll cover but i love the chaste aroasexuality they write adult getogojo like yeah. it is so fucking complicated it's unreal.. 

sediment
+this is literally a fic that is so famous to me in my mind because the concept of like >being in love with a guy who hates that you're in love with him so much that he'll barely admit to it> like yeah. it happens. LIKE HOLY FUUUUCK... in execution i really don't know how i feel about it but I do want gojo to be yelled at and unfairly victimised and I like the conceit of everything that's happening here probably more so than the execution, 'as if you haven't made an emotionally comprised decision' was SUCHHH a good line but idk if the comeback was deserved but literally... op does this thing where clearly they really understand gojo's narrative role in both the jjk story and the story they're telling, but he is also so genuinely inscrutable On-Screen in fic ... where you can INTUIT that he is in love and he's being unfairly treated and he is making the active decision to let this happen to him but at the same time, you're just Not Allowed to Know this. esp not from his own mouth. like these are all the logical and natural conclusions to what's happening and because it's a fic that's been tagged accordingly, You Know, but you're still denied the Certainty of it. GOD DAMNNN... what a crazy way to preserve the agency/dignity/etc that has been stripped from him.. bc again, he is so often Forced to play such a passive role in a story he wants to be in... AUGHHH. gojo satoru my beloved.
+so like in many ways, i am the guy being edged and ruined orgasm'd and dickmatized and etc by valleykeys but they also know that is litr what i want... so... 

Anchor
+I should be making a valleykeys tab but it's FINEEE...this was the other one of their fics I quite liked and also the fic where I was really convinced that they were charmed and affected by gojo satoru's innocent naive shining heart fr fr fr because they do really think he is a teenage girl and geto is a     delicate victorian     gender neutral something   ? I DON'T KNOWWW... but I did like this fic like yayyyy everyone let's take a break from the doom and gloom and #angst... everyday we suffer because of the ships we choose? 

a decade's worth of days with you
+this was in valleykeys bookmarks, and valleykeys bookmarks, they've led me well okay... except for this and 1 other thing, because this was a DNF... combination of  'I wouldn't want him to say that' and 'you're not convincing me that he would say that' AND like a lot of inconsistency with Geto vs Suguru vs Gojo vs Satoru ... it did start out decently funny, but ultimately I found that I did not care for the geto characterisation and if it was better, then I would've been way more open-hearted about the Vaguely Mature and Understanding gojo ... or maybe not. and I did go in, having crtl+f'd for cock to make sure the switch tag would not landmine me, but ultimately I just don't believe[/am not really interested in a] Gojo is capable of the sort of delicate and emotionally attuned actions he takes in this fic... 
+this is the fic that made me realise the thing about [geto hates himself for not meaning more to gojo], because that is it's approach. like I really don't understand what and where and when in the timeline geto would be like 'whoa he fucking hates me and finds me sick and disgusting' which is not an unreasonable thing, given like psychosis and depression et al, but he didn't even have that much psychosis or depression in this!!! so, like HELLO?
+also like, gojo was making breakfast for geto and I was like really shocked and gagged by the allegation that he would be so nice and wifely and attentive and caring...ANDDD he wanted to go out of his way to meet the twins... so Who do you think gojo satoru is and what have you replaced him with? litr a fic about giving gojo a lobotomy a year earlier than expected?

bodily fluids
>read this litr while writing this post and it was kind-of scary because of the switching references... ummm... it was fine.. it was normal... the only thing I have to say is that I didn't like the lack of contractions, especially in dialogue because it just felt quite unnatural [...] i think I liked the gojo, but again, really easy to hit the shallow gojo notes imo [esp bc a lot of that shallowness is the brunt of his character] ... the other thing I have to say, is that like I really like it when people just tell me in fic straight up that X character doesn't like bottoming. like yayyyyy. it's okay to admit that. i think it's very brave and the easiest most satisfying way to justify fixed order :)
>I read the other zofgk fic and I just don't think they're for meee style-wise even if the characterisation is decent... but it's OK... 

the swipe of a scythe
+oof... theoretically everything I want from postcanon everyone!lives fix-it fic where it is actually really hard to fix-it... and actually nothing can be fixed and having people alive is way more complicated and fucked up than having them die!!
+I really liked the gojo in this... i genuinely think I would care/like so much 'Good' sugusato fic more than I do if they tended to be as attentive and caring about gojo's [1000000000 psychological problems and issues and things he has wrong with him but is literally too much of an idiot to even understand or know himself!!!] as much as geto's... like this is literally tagged 'Gojo gets to be mad!' which i think is a beautiful valiant tag and I wanted to see it bc, in an unpublished post I lambast over how gojo is literally so bad at being mad in general [why does he have to be told to curse geto!!!!] so it actually would've been really nice if that tag was not as subtle as it was... maybe I wasn't reading attentively or generously enough bc i felt like a lot of what must've been op's intent to showcase anger came off more as awkwardness, and maybe it is one and the same for gojo, bc i litr just said he was bad at being mad and so maybe it does manifest like that.
+but I think ultimately really enjoyed the awkwardness as key to the re-adjustment... I do think gojo being awkward when faced with any non-jujutsu vaguely vulnerable/delicate situation is SOOOOO...literally gapmoe charm trait to every degree possible MY HONEYPLUMMM... like and YES i do think it would only happen with geto actually. like i think he's very capable of bulldozing and doing his thing any other time bc it Does Not Reallyyy Matter [to him] ... [I KILLED YOUR DADDY] .... 
+so in the end, like you, the reader, expected me to say: Really a fic I would've enjoyed more from gojo pov and actually just if it was about gojo instead full stop... 

The Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom
+kind-of wanted I wanted on the tin... but I didn't love it... I was thinking 'oh this is so american...' and then op lampshaded it two lines later, being like 'wow gojo you watched too many american movies' like damn okayy...  idk didn't love the prose or the resolution but conceptually it was everything to me... like i do love the idea of gojo going crazy in prison realm by mashing together memories that happened/didn't happen/he wanted them to happen and his own brain fucking that up for him... but birdginia already did that and better....

A Change of Masters
+just really funny in premise and concept TwT but I literally do hate uncritical capitalist young master heir ascendant gojo... like... cmon now... AND ALSO, ANOTHER THING, they gave him daddy issues for nooooo reason it... like he literally doesn't have those. like his parents are a non-issue thing because he was spawned on earth fully formed? i don't know...
+just. uh imagine getting the best dicking of your life by the hottest guy you've ever met and then he starts ranting about the class war near the end... end it all bruh,... 

the void behind my face
+great fic. birdginia gets it. they have the twine box fic, which is nice and really really good [probably better?] than this one, but this one really scratches the itch of like Needing Evil Things To Be Done With Gojo Who Barely Has The Facility To Handle It... like genuinely, brushing off his own rape into >litr deluding himself because he wants it to be suguru so bad like he needs this one thing so so bad... like it really was a Moment of All Time, how awful and romantic and terrible that kenjaku/gojo scene was... like my poor guy reduced to a teenager in love once again TT ... so good because of how it indulges in gojo’s delusions while also ripping them into shreds + gojo having never been hurt like that in his lifeeeee and also unable to be imagined being hurt like that ever like it scratches a spot so good…

covered in false images (just like God)
+literally such a scary fic... because it truly makes you feel like catwhoatethelemon but also like, there is such a scary landmine that happens in this fic... WHICH IS FINEEEE... anyway it is soooooooooooooo   YAYYY interactive fiction YAYYY i literally am experiencing being in prison realm, but I also just love the fucking IMMEDIACY? of how much love there is and how much love he feels, like I think that's genuinely the most fucked up thing about both birdginia fics, is that there isn't a 'there was love' or 'i did love him' it is just, STILL LOVE, ACTIVE PRESENT IN LOVE, like he is once again and still forevermore a giddy lovesick teenage overblown by the feeling... aughhhh it is so fucked up how romantic it is...
+the 'you're going to think about something else right now, thanks!' into 'you're a goddamn idiot' into 'you can't do this you can't do this you did this' is always so sos osososososooso good, like #yasss the total flippant desperation that gojo always approaches any sign of a problem with... ;rainbowjokebear; ;tearyeyes; 
+ALSO. insanely good writing all across the board and insanely good use of twine as a format AUGHHHH

A Light Touch
+this was suuuuch a good episodic fic... like all over the place, the teen insecurity, the >Just Kids of it all..., really good voice/story/character and extended cast... the river of nostalgia that runs through it, like you, the reader, are seeing it is as a memory even though it happens in present tense for the characters... Idk mood/atmosphere/writing was all there and all real good.
+I also liked their other fic, Ignore the Greek Chorus, a little less but I think they do such a good job of showing the way that gojo's careless consideration/affection manifests in... I think I told hannah i don't care about hidden inventory era fic, or that I was sickkkk of the high school nostalgia of it all but that really isn't true because I LOVE INNOCENCE!!! and I think there is sooo much terror and sickness and doom that you feel read any fic set at that point in the timeline bc you, as the reader, are like 'THEY DONT FUCKING KNOW!!!' and you, as the reader, are like 'THEY WERE HAPPY ONCE!!! THEY WERE HAPPY HERE!!!' ... idk it just scratches that itch that you want fanwork to scratch sooo bad so well... 

inbetween
+I really liked this fic, ummm... there were just such a good scattering of moments [ramen on the stove], [not hugging itadori], the general Not A Sane or Okay Guy but whatever we ball attitude of it all... like this is my nickel of fic found that is taking gojo's general unwellness seriously and observing how it manifests, and I think it does quite a good job, I just ... don't think he gave that much of a fuck about nobara/tsumiki/megumi ... like I think, in concept, he is not someone haunted by his dead... 
+on the other hand, I really didn't like op's ten years fic, but I did like their grapes fic, which I really do love time-travel where nothing changes and nothing is fixed... I LOVEEEE FUTILITY AND DOOM and also it was so so scary to read while listening to charli xcx john cale House, like yeah. you are going to die in this house. like transformation irt to haunted man carrying his dead [geto suguru] ... LIKE LOOK. i think gojo cares about his living, and he cares about his future, but it's also true that his emotional core has been warped by the existence of geto... anyway. GOOD author! would reread both inbetween and grapes.

The Genealogy of Morals
+THE BEST/WORST FIX-IT FIC IN THE WORLD!!!! really like the tag 'fix-it' is doing so much skulduggery and trickery and lechery and honestly just being really mean to the unsuspecting reader and setting an expectation that is then... i can't even describe it. come back to my review after you've read it... you're kind of like 'i guess. i guess it is. no like... it is what is said on the tin? like? yeah?'     one of the best fics in the tag TO ME ... that kind of says every single thing that I want to be told about X Y Z character, but specifically, gojo satoru. 
+"Gojo doesn't think anything at all. He's waiting for you to tell him." which is literally canon and exactly where the hidden inventory/plasma vessel arc ends. so like. i wish everyone else in the tag a very >Let's Internalise This... Let's Put A Pin In This... Let's Meditate... I don't knowww just such a good fic about >Suguru's actions were always going to be set in stone, >Gojo is an idiot baby ... I also really liked the presence of Shoko in this fic, I was just busy getting blown the fuck up by the perfect gojo and the perfect gojo dialogue... how indelicate he is and how awful he is but also so much like bad glue and so fixated on the single star in his orbit/radar.... what do you guys know about MY baby? he really is a kirihara... 
+a lot of fic does a lot of heavylifting work on like geto's morals and psychology et al, and leaves gojo as perpetually unaffected, but this fic is so like OH MY GODDD... it's just two lines but gojo saying psychological evaluations are impossible to pass, and then later, he stopped doing them because they were useless... like such a clean devastating cut about how gojo's mental state/psychology/etc certainly does not matter, not to him and not to those around him eitherrr... and not even to this fic!!! JUST SO GOOD!!! 
+also the sparseness of the style is sooo appreciable to me and it is such a beautiful exercise of 'less is more' in how disaffected and detached it could be as well as the few tangible sensations that op chose to describe... probably my top jjk fic. no way, is that crazy? the feeling of it is soooo... 

i thought i had to swallow them before they swallowed me
another timeloop fic... I really liked the last chapter of this, which was the only chapter i read... so rip to ch1-5, but i loved the twist and the characterisation and authorial decisions i saw... like yayyyy
+this was also one of those fics that were like 'yeah gojo is also fucked the fuck up but that matters less cuz he's not doing Murder but He Is Fucked Up and barely cognisant of it' which i think is part of the struggle? or the ideal of writing gojo because how do you even broach the mental state of a guy who doesn't self-reflect and doesn't care about it and no one around him cares either... WHICH OBVIOUSLY. IS WHY I WANT DELICIOUS BEAUTIFUL NAVEL-GAZING WHUMP ABOUT IT!!! but even in this fic geto's like, I acknowledge this but I need to focus on myself moreee... so delicious and beautiful and good... 
+maybe I need to read the full thing through once and maybe I will someday but I've lowkey had ENOUGHHH of geto psychology deep dive like WHAT ABOUT GOJO SATORUUUU!!! whatever... whatever... im the greediest person on earth and i keep shopping at the wrong stores fine fineeee... fine... 

fool me once (shame on who?)
+okay I have to talk about this fic in conjunction with the way better version of this fic HANG ON... 

HASTUR
+THIS WAS LITERALLY THE SCARY BODYSNATCHING HORROR FIC THAT I ASKED FOR!!!
+genuinely a fic I found so offputting and visceral that really did such a good job of taking seriously and portraying kenjaku as the scary grabber bodysnatcher that will be psychologically torturing both parties but in a sexy scary way... like I literally love, as evidenced by my choice of this ship, THE MONSTER YOU LOVE trope but this made it really really scary  because it was actually [Monster you love.... WHO DOESNT HAVE YOUR BEST INTENTIONS IN MIND]  ... idk it's true the things I find scary are >old houses, the cold, medical horror... + THE UNCANNY, and this had all of that perfectly balanced esp the ending which was soooooo... MY POOR GOJO MEOWMEOW??? really a fic that reminded me of one of my favourite tma statements of all time AKA 'MAG101: Another Twist' like sooo Sannikov Land-y.... 
+op's prose-writing is not really my favourite but it suits the tone/atmosphere of their works soooo well... idk what a treat! how good! how scary! 

back to fool me once (shame on who?)
+I reallyyyy wanted to like this more than I did… I did like the psychological horror/unnerving domestic terror notes I loveeee >the monster you love fics I really do… uh the concept of gojo living with bodysnatched geto just to be close with geto… yayyyy but I think I would’ve enjoyed more of a focus on how twisted gojo is to go along with this rather than having him play uncritical victim… also lowkey a fic where I was kind of feeling like the sex scene should’ve been rev order but it wasn’t and so in the end... no one won….
+idk in the end it just didn't have the right tone or the right amount of horror/uncanny/dread unfortunately :(    but ... pseudocitrus does have a pretty similar geto_bodysnatching fic that's quite similar to this in how it treats kenjaku's violation of ...mundaneity?  it's trueee...  + the iamsomebody post-canon fic also hits similar notes... so I think ultimately this is a theme/concept I really like and do want explored, bc it's also just an inversion of what geto does to the curses he collects in general no? the karmic aspects of that would probably be really fun to deliberate on... 

pressure
+this one was quite good, i liked it, another timeloop fic for the road... I think this is better than their other fic Just Personally to me, but both are quite ambitious in concept and really well done because of it!!! 

YOU CANNOT SAVE PEOPLE
+kind of such a great fic becauseeee of how correctly voice was assigned... like yasss perfect in character gojo satoru pov...!!! 

telephone syndrome
+this is an orphaned pseudocitrus fic that is SO SO GOOD once again because the tag it's tagged with is literally perfect in concept rather than me gaf'ing about the actual fic... IT HAPPENS TO ALL OF US!!!  the 'shoko and suguru using each other to burn off stress while satoru is oblivious to it all' like... IM GOING TO THROW UPPPPPPPPP... IM GOING TO THROW UPPPPPPP... i literally love fucked up triangulation and i am a big fan of sugu/shoko in general and how they're, at least, the 'real' adults of the trio... it's sooooooo... AUGH. the apathy v the degradation v the teenage god of it all... hang on I'm literally about to start making a gojo<>furina venn diagram... 

ruche
+this is my ruche corner and I have some things to say... I think I innately disagree with some of the character explorations they do, but they did write the best 17x28 fic in the tag with 'let's climb the cliff and jump again' like perfect characterisation, perfect amount of regret and Bruh_fuck_this_shit and patheticness and gojo ignoring all his problems in until they're non-issues to him + perfect PERFECT 17x28 gojo x gojo interaction where ofc the teenage god wastes his fucking question by being an impudent asshole jealous girlfriend... SO CUUUTEEE... and I really do think teen suguru is so perfectly described... as is their other 17x28 fic with the roles reversed, where adult geto really is sooo conniving and manipulative that bastard...  
+also CLIFF fic is literally so good because gojo says I love you and thinks it and is trying so so hard to believe in it and geto does not respond or reciprocate that desire in any way and IT'S LITERALLY SO GOOD THAT IT'S SCARY!!! wow the porn is nothing to me but i would've hated it if geto had been bottoming so there's that... isn't that fuuuckeedddddd... it's because penetration is an entirely semiotic act in fic[tion] and therefore Means/Implies something about these characters in a way it doesn't have to in real life... yep yep... 
+see literally their fic is only bad when they start doing all the geto whump/glaze/angst/insecurity wombo'est of combos... 

anyway, the allegations really looked like a fic that started off so strong and so good and then I was reading some of their endnotes in fear of The Landmines that were going to Landmine Me and instead I felt  the most >Huh? What?  I have ever felt when reading the thoughts of a writer I otherwise deeply admired and felt like I was likely to agree with

click more clickhole read more [...hole?]
“I do not like to woobify Suguru but at the same time I do believe he is a sick puppy and if he was exposed too much to Gojo drama, plus rough violating sex, plus the emotional instability he usually hides, plus the innate sense of guilt and anxiety, plus degradation carried out by the love of his life who's actually angry at him bc Suguru pushed him, this does seem like smth that could happen . Like he just sub drops hard and then is also uncomfortable with being so sensitive and touchy and emotional around Gojo, because being Gojo's enemy is better than being a weakling when Gojo expects an equal from him!!!!

+So I just don’t think that would happen.

“fuck idk yeah I wanted pissed gojo and miserable Suguru but isn’t this kind of the better representation of their relationship. Suguru at his worst and Gojo still loving him, Gojo guilty about his emotional shortcomings, Suguru getting away with shit because he’s unhinged but in a strong, tragic lovable way. x("

+I just don’t think that’s true!!! Like, maybe this is my own problem and my own fault cus I really do not spend a lot of time justifying or thinking thru the genocidal mass murderer guy’s emotional and philosophical and cognitive state that causes him to do all that. Murdering. but I think it’s really strange that this the most obvious case of >you can love your unrepentant monsters< everrr [famously also gojo’s Most consistent trait. He’s like pleaseeeee I need a serial murderer to love so bad] yet it's being treated like a surprising fact?
+and I agree that geto is a guy who loves fronting and puts up so much fronts but the things that we know about geto and gojo:
 (1) geto is actually very attached to and does believe really hard in his convictions. He’s probably a foil for yuki in that sense. Like I don’t really know how you watch or read jjk0 and also the kfc breakup and come away with the geto does not really believe in his mission and suffers from the cognitive dissonance of it all. Like I think he probably embraces it actually. Like I think the line, “Kill me if you want. There’s meaning in that,” is really emblematic of him choosing his path was an act of agency and an exercise of Free Will, like gojo is going to be forever behold to jujutsu society and what it means to be the strongest and also what it means to kill geto, whereas geto is making this active choice to excise himself from this system he sees as causing only suffering for the people he cares about. the cognitive dissonance comes from like, a right-wing nationalist party seeking self-determination re/the taliban… so essentially the concept of nationalism itself. But ultimately, geto finds his actions more meaningful than he finds the sense of self-hate/helplessness/depression he gets from being the ‘right’ kind of sorcerer. And that’s ultimately what he wants, that sense of meaning, not only for himself but for all sorcerers. Again, you can Um Actually me all you want, what do I know about this guy.
+I just really don’t get like. Yk, it’s like the concept of >Lots of people get depressed. That does not make them become genocidal mass murderers. Like Nanami also suffered burn out. And he was way nicer about it. It’s okay to admit that geto has a similar twisted sense of self that gojo does and that’s why he’s the only person gojo has, however briefly, felt understood by.
(2) gojo is not good at being mad. !!!  Gojo is like, really bad at being mad actually. “at least curse me a little at the very end” / “sorry Megumi, I’m just enjoying this now.” / “I wish I could’ve given sukuna a good fight in return” … like he’s just not a guy who gets mad! This is part and parcel of his [lack of] morality and emotional shortcomings!!! He has a very weak sense of justice because he lacks a strong concept of human dignity!! For both himself and Society at large!! He says over and over that kids should have a youth, and he follows through with that in shallow gestures, but also ultimately, he does endanger and manipulate them!!! Yes he kills geto, yes he kills the higher ups, but these all ultimately symbolic actions that are undermined by [whatever sentimental way he handles geto’s body that allows kenjaku to hijack it/that he never ever ever Gets Over geto for real despite it all, Again, no need to read all of jjk, but vol0 does cover all of that!!! ‘oh people can change’ the whole point of gojo is that he is in a perpetual state of arrested development. Infinity is both a superpower and a diegetic metaphor about how nothing can pierce beneath the shallow surface!!! He is untouchable both emotionally and physically!!! Whatever… whatever man. I mean I guess he got mad about kenjaku body hacking but…. Like I do agree that if gojo ever gets mad at anyone, it would be at/about geto but I think it’s probably fair to point out, and what my end argument is, is that anger is not a productive emotion that leads to anything for him.

+Herein lies the problem with ‘humanising’ gojo is that he is simply a character whose actual flaws people don’t find all that interesting, I think. Or, they don’t make for straightforward angsty emotional whump or typical fanfic tropes. Like similarly to yuta, there’s a want for a secret dark side or like with maki, a secret fragile side … but that’s just nottt how it works. Like the story iterates for you over and over again that love is his curse, and that’s the thing that makes him fallible and that’s the thing he wants to return to and ends up returning to over and over, but it’s not a straightforward or easily digestible conception/expression of love!!! Again, this is all my reading and my sensibilities, and I really don’t want to be accused of anything but wanting gojo objectified and sexualized. Like I’m not arguing for gojo sensitive soft delicate victim coding. I am arguing for gojo whump though but only because he really is the perfect guy for it. But ONLY the in-character kind. Litr like >guy who has never had anything of this kind happen to him and is in the ride of his life rn.


Till Death Do Us--
+another valleykeys rec that uhhh.. is really funny that part is true. idk how i feel about their geto suguru... not very strongly or agreeably... but maybe I just lowkey hate adult geto and only want my sickly teenage son with mental problems... i don't know... i was really on-board and I found it really funny and then the lack of endgame and multiship kind of scared me and then the nanami bottom REALLY scared me mom i was so scared... but i do think it's perfect no notes gojo pov... I really do<3

in Victory, in Defeat
+sukugo... you think I would've enjoyed this but I don't like bloodplay I think... must be why I'll never find vampires sexy.... like ideally I want masochist painslut gojo all the time but this wasn't very fun to me even though i like all edging and ruined orgasm and overstimulation...AND bondage.. AND CHOKING!! so wow i must really not fuck with blood/knife play... yeah that checks out. i only like impact play and real violence...

voxofthevoid
+my yujigo dealer... who we're just going to do a full pseud review because their fics are not that different to me since I'm reading mostly and only for the porn because the choice of ship for the dynamic they write is genuinely baffling to me... but hey... we're ALL doing transformative fiction here no judgement just a normal amount of judgement...
+ultimately there are so many things about this choice of ship that make me go ‘Huh? Sure peggles I guess’ but I do have respect someone who has the same delusion of yuji as sukuna2.0 the way I have delusions [that are canonically supported and encouraged even] about maki being toji2 …
+I think they sort of write one of the best “Gojo Satoru is his own warning” tags. like, I think probably a lot of the psychologically/morally scrutinising gojo fic I would want occurs in the teacher/student groomer fic half/side of the fandom but the way I read it, it’s p much canon that gojo’s greatest fantasy is to be dominated and stripped of his status/pedestal [ch236 anyone?]… so I don’t really find it interesting when fic is sort of concerned with him stratifying that position and using it to revel in it, or whumpify a different guy. Which is like, sure probably within the realm of suspendable disbelief, I’m just not interested in it. BUT I do think gojo is someone who is very flippant with how his position/power affects his relationships [as in, he really doesn’t seem to understand or care about this other than it’s Useful, probably] … I just don’t think it’s appealing... anyway all this to say, I think op does a really good job of exploring that nonchalance and lax morality aspect of him even when I need to suspend an insane amount of disbelief to accept that he would feel this way about itadori yuji... 
+I think out of all the guys I listed, this is sort of the sexiest iteration of painslut!gojo… op’s fics were quite appealing because gojo was being so ‘let me sexually piss you off so bad you start doing violent revenge sex on Me’ which was Hmm, quite an image in my mind being presented here, and I do think it’s a good concept to have gojo dangling and abusing his power so blatantly for the sake of wanting someone to strip it away from him bc that’s like, Cathartic and Gratifying and Fulfilling and checks out for him [ch 236 anyone?!] …  in the end litr like fics i would like so much better and take so much more seriously if they happened with Any Other Ship... or if op literally cared and respected the canon text of gojo's actual endgame true love[s] at all... 
+I also deeply appreciate that they’re the guy who writes adult!gojo as a guy who incessantly uses petnames because, Yeah, he fucking would. It’s the most basic annoying guy trait in the world. have you guys heard of Michael reeves? 

amyritter
+i think I did enjoy both of op's jjk fics, like not that they left much of an impact but they captured the sort-of tired/sad/wistful/regretful atmosphere that gojo is often denied i think... i think i enjoyed Theoretical Ambitions more especially bc the title is soooo beautiful and affecting.....

saturday night live
+I DNF'd this but this fic is in sooooo many people's bookmarks but I just don't care for mixed-media [but it's all formatted into text] fics orrr no powers au though I was valiantly holding on because I really do want friends to lovers to exes to enemies to lovers fic so baddddd but then op was like 'geto was actually still in love with satoru and only did this bc he had mental health and money problems' LIKE THE FALLING OUT OF LOVE IS THE APPEAL. THE FUCK? why would gojo have a terrible personality and be hard to be around if he's NOT HARD TO LOVE??? hello??????????? that's literally the point that's literally the pointttt....
+like you may love and like gojo satoru and acknowledge his flaws but i love gojo satoru BECAUSE OF HIS FLAWS!!! like lowkey this is truly my uh, other?white whale? where i need gojo to be the worst version of himself possible... like i actually so badly am giving him the relationshipcrimes treatment where i need him to be terrible and bad and wretched and then like suffer erotically and emotionally about it... MY FEELINGS ARE SO PURE AND HEARTFELT IT'S UNREAL!!!!
 
 On The Edge And Scared Of Heights
+okay no one is going to believe me when I say this but this is legitimately a really good fic. like unserious pwp about a/a rutsex? and yet.
+the more I read this the better this gets… which is scary because I really did frown the first time, but seriously every single time I’m like ‘wait op like actually really got it and her understanding of these guys really resembles my own’ AT LEAST IN THIS FIC!! bc her other fics are kinda… not doing all of the wonderful >gojo is an selfish impulsive idiot demon baby .. like litr this line: “Truthfully, Satoru hasn’t thought much about the execution. He hasn’t thought much at all. His ideas are usually good, so he doesn’t bother dissecting them before he acts.” Does OP know? Does She Know? She must… I also reallyyy liked the geto characterisation because perfect amount of guy who’s a pushover and a people pleaser with the slight edge of steel underneath veryyyy nice I think…

law of effect
+this I think is literally the other best fic in the tag. if not THEEE other GOAT of the tag. i think it seriously just so sosososoososoooo perfectly captures  just how unaware of himself gojo is... pseudocitrus is literally my goat of the tag and my holygrail jjk writer, which, lol, YEAH.
+it is literally SO GOOD!!!! The skinner box experiment being used to allude to what’s happening in this fic plus pseudocitrus my GOAT op who came up with ‘emotionally unintelligent and socially inept gojo satoru’ tag, which, all I can say: ACCURATE. and I think this fic is so good at being bittersweet and showing how they’re growing apart despite the want never-ending, and it’s just sooo tight and so good and so so good at showing how shortsighted and unaware of himself gojo is. Perfect fic No Notes. 

uhhh... let me do juuchan<>sardinejar comparison corner and then do quickflash notes on irreverance and then i'll c+p my unfinished porn reviews.... 

sardinejar
 / juuchan
+sardine jar is like the hentai mindless porn dealer super unapologetic pervert, literally fine and respectable as a vocation, I like their hypno fic. but I have to say theyre basically juuchan but without caring about plot, like the dynamic of >[horny insatiable slut] and >[in control providing dom] is litr the same And I really do think that’s sort of more real to alternative sex dynamics, but also not exactly it… but also idgaf about geto outside of being a device to torture gojo with so i really cant say… ...look idk if that's true bc i really do respect geto as his own character and really like him without really gaf'ing about his rs with gojo, but iiiii probably love gojo to the extent i do because he is so emotionally bludgeoned by geto... like.... i do need that man with the wrench of geto suguru lodged into his heart/soul/psyche [and toji. LOL]  
+look, Juuchan would have me crucified for this but genuinely she and sardinejar write the same getogojo they do….and this is like mostly because of the problems i have wrt to their geto, who is literally like Not That Guy [aka my beloved mentally ill son from canon] and not at all tortured enough like hello like that’s Theee Psychologically Tormented Guy please put some respect and interiority onto his name pleaseee hes not meant to be an alpha domtop, he’s meant to be repulsed and pathetic and stuck in his own head [and I do mean repulsed I dont mean repulsive i mean repulsed]
+but they have a really charming geto/gojo overall which I enjoy … i do like that geto is the one in rational control v gojo is driven by id/libido/passion and that’s a weird stalemate bc I think people sort of latch onto geto’s insecurities as a src of his complicated fucked up incel mental state, but I also enjoy the unevenness of guy you would pick over everyone v guy who never chose youuu     which is sometimes what juuchan really is able to get at, but she cares more about sexual satiation than like, trying to kill me emotionally with knives... 
+LOOK, and I am saying all this as a real juuchan fan, I love her fics, I am really supportive of and attached to their understanding of gojo as a guy who is all id and nothing elseeee, but there are a couple of notes/points of comparison to pseudocitrus [aka my gojo dealer] who really understands that gojo isn’t even aware of his own selfishness/himself [whereas juuchan does just attribute/represent that as id/innate hedonism] but also, pseudocitrus, esp re 17gj also really understands that he’s also ultimately just an immature kid, whereas juuchan is trying to convince you of him convincing himself that he’s a god ... which no doubt we could argue about to no end, but it [which point in the timeline] does become a really important aspect here... 

+mostly I am so charmed and endeared by her word choice and some of the specific terms/metaphors she chooses… and the aphotic zone was really good for all the psychological aspects, and she is sooo careful wrt to narration and viewpoint and et al, but-and like,  I love grooming but op is like ‘well geto/gojo is true love and not grooming but others/gojo Was grooming’ like hello? HELLO?     .... which is again because she is so tuned into what Gojo would think but also this was a getogojo fic so... you're meant to believe that anyway... 
+my favourite fic is lost and found and otherwise I really like the abo one… like juuchan is so fucking real for being ‘gojo would never want kids and cannot even entertain the idea of babytrapping geto’ like he would abort that thing. He literally would.
+anyway, sometimesss her stuff is a little too technical/real bdsm for me sometimes but I appreciate it nonetheless... I think ultimately also i wish they were better at writing porn in that the porn is technically fine its just not that sexy Which is crazy bc its so detailed and so kinky and she has clearly had sex before but I’m also like danggggggg How can masochism be made So Boring? but I think it’s because I lowkey don’t care for bdsm tools like flog/whip/etc and I feel like if your canon has built in casual violence Well Why not utilise that… why do we have to … anyway she also loves the concept of someone with a pussy loving/prefering anal and I did think that was also kind of sexy and vaguely illuminating like I enjoy wrong hole

notorphanedaccount
+I actually think op is reallyyyy good, and I hate no powers au but they do a good job, I liked wrong number fic, I liked the camboy one and I unfortunately read the micropenis one and was shocked and gagged by how it was so perfectly in character like ohhhh my god.... I have to read micropenis fic to enjoy great gojo characterisation? the gojo who I firmly believe should have a big dick, that's size proportionate? i'm so sadddd...  anyway I am subscribed to op and Checking In... 

uninspired porn fic findings category
39k no powers roomates au, e
+DNF’d because it made gojo into a cuteified bl uke and geto was just Some Guy… like I don’t like stsg porn bc of the aesthetics I would like some of my Guys in there for real instead of just face-claims [as opposed to phd where I can uncritically consume r18 fic because I do like the aesthetics of it]

4.6k canon divergence, e
+this was not… characterised in a way I necessarily agree with, and I think there is one line that lampshades it like ‘gojo would never philosophize but now he Is’ and in theory it was a little sexy, but I felt lowkey nothing reading it because I actually have become so sensitive about geto suguru characterisation like I need your notes and proof and abstract as to why we’re here and he’s Like That… which again, I don’t think it was out of the realm of possibility, this was written in jjk0 era so he was psychologically at his worst probably but… still… hmm… I don’t know. I do love that op made a point of gojo embarking on vows of chastity and celibacy post geto like yayyyyy… 

6.5k canonverse, t
+I DNF’d this because I began to suspect halfway through that op liked sato/sugu ship order and it just wasn’t good enough to keep reading but I actually really liked the gojo characterisation, presumably because op wrote him like the annoying canon shoujo love interest, but the geto was soooo ;side-eye; also no one in the world wants to write shoko with the laissez faire and whimsical attitude she has in canon?

Mahbeck yakuza fic
+I DNF’d this because mahbeck does not write things that are compelling to me and I wanted to give it a try because there are so many fanarts I like that this fic was working off the visuals for but uhhh, writing and characterisation both being weak made the overall reading experience sooooo mediocre that I decided it was not worth my time…

Magswrite college au fic
+DNF’d Uh this always looks kind of funny in the tag but it’s not good on the inside and I really just don’t get the point of writing gojo as a … wimpy cutieface bl uke like that’s not the appeallll that’s not the appeallll

Magswrite camboy au fic
+This one is kind of popular recently on gego twitter and … look there’s a way better gojo camboy fic… just trust me on that one we’ll get there… well we won’t be the notanorphanaccount gojo camboy fic is litr so much better ESPECIALLYYYY because when geto finds out that gojo’s a camboy, gojo’s like… having the most Not-A-Real-Person reaction to it that was legitimately so perfect I was like oh! Okay! … anyway this guy has the same problem as with mahbeck where both writing and characterisation is weak that the overall effect is just mediocre…

7.7 no powers au, e
+DNF’d … uh literally just facecast fic with bare bones characterisation

24k no powers au, e
+This was good as generic fic… good is kind-of an interesting term to use here but it promised me lowkey toxic codependent possessive homoerotic friendship and it delievered all of those notes. And I was like ‘those are pretty good notes. I enjoyed that’ and therefore it’s pretty good fic. good sgst fic? it’s fine. Like yeah sure.

persimmonsandcats onlyfans fic
+This was really not that different from any other of op’s fics, but it’s good because it’s good sex and it does not really try to be anything other than good fwb fic… I think this was like mildlyyyy funnier but a little less hot to me just because her other fic was just sexier in general to me…

persimmonsandcats bartender fic
+this was a different version of ^ fic, so the conceit was basically the same and hit all the same notes… op loves super fluffy loving sex and Banter and guys saying they love you and specifically geto calling gojo ‘baby’ which… by my doctrine, I want everyone to know that I think GOJO would be the one using the annoying petnames all the time like that’s just my heart and headcanon…

permissionnadncats pussy fic
+this one is the best of the fwb plots because it has / kink … like YAYYYYYYY I love a guy who’s inexperienced and a virgin and wants to do everything sooo bad :D :D :D

18k canonverse fic, e
+this is like a miscommunication/jealousy fic and it’s Fine… I didn’t hate or love it… it’s 18k but it really did not feel like that… I remember basically enjoying it while I reading it because there was nothing too objectionable happening on page but… idk I just don’t remember anything in the end…

8.2k abo fic
+I don’t think I believe in sgst abo unless it’s just for the sex pollen part… like yeah it checks out when you want them to fuck or die but don’t expect me to take omega gojo as a premise seriously.

3k canonverse fic
+I really don’t remember this outside of it’s named after the Mitski that I’ve been playing onrepeat writing my own sgst fic... and also I enjoy the liberty taken by op in making gojo enjoy the menial domestic task of laundry like yayyyy let’s all give him 1 normal passing trait

5.6k abo fic
+another fic that wants me to take the omega gojo satoru tag seriously… and worse even because it wants me to take the Parental Gojo Satoru tag seriously… oh my god please, please take this seriously. 

10k no powers au, e
+I was in the degradation tag and this wasn’t anything… sort of scratched my dv itch but not enough…

36.8k, geto/gojo no powers fwb au
+trans!gojo … this was really good porn… I love tdick and I’m kinda sad there was no tdick action at all but I’ll live…
+I don’t like no powers au so I really wasn’t expecting to like or love the characterisation because I think you have to do uncomfortable and outrageous things to make gojo’s character work outside of the jjkverse and op didn’t do those, and gego ship order ‘fluff’ au sort-of requisites that geto has none of the great complexity that makes him so fucked up and moving in canon … though it is retained that he’s a incomparable people pleaser super wifeguy type because he is… why not… I wish they did anal but in the end it was a good read

OKAYYYY... well in the end we've learnt that I've been spending wayyy too much time on ao3, i have gojobraindisease and I am wasting away my already waning youth on fictional characters. wow that's quite pessimistic... hmm... well... idk. well my life really has not been fulfilling lately so...

ulysses

Jan. 22nd, 2025 10:42 pm
fwcu: (cat)
So, there’s this famous modernist novel that takes place over the course of a day and is written in a fragmentary stream of consciousness and is a re-telling of The Odyssey, with both stories being named after the titular character… and it’s… Mrs. Dalloway?

Read more... )
fwcu: (namesake)
because i um... have yet to read a single damn thing in october... so... i need to get back on this pretentious grindset neowww... and also stop flopping at keeping up with classwork >///<

well...on with it
boy parts
  • I hated this so much every single moment of it I wanted to kill myself and every person who was putting me through this trial…so NOURA... it did have like mid/mediocre story effect where the entire time I was like ‘and this is what I would’ve done or preferred with the narrative etc etc’ made a really good feudal lord/handmaiden dynamic joke at some point and got laugh reacts in the discord server so... overall some days of my life wasted on this endeavour
  • ok essentially noura's parasocial figure of interest ISSS eliza clarke, and someone on dw wrote about this book ages ago in a way that had me convinced I would hate it for whatever reason despiteee the fact that they were ostensibly praising it so hard and i litr loved all the other books they recommended... so i assumed I was going in closehearted and it would surprise me, and so I was like 'ok i will read this alongside the idiot' (which is another book i was going to be approaching closehearted with hatred and preconceived notions) bc they were both noura recs... well the idiot was allegedly a rec by noura's sister who said it was her favourite book (later we would find out, in real time, the both of us That this was not true, and she hadn't even read it... so LOL)... as you know, i loved the idiot. and so reading this was genuinely painful
  • my problem was the entire time that eliza clarke was very good at the tumblr parts and very mid/boring/basic regarding every other part like we get it, irina is supposed to be annoying and an asshole and insufferable etc etc etc... and so the way the plot progressed and how things unfolded were both predictable and not aided or made up for by either some kind-of depth afforded to irina, or by the writing itself which i didn't care for, or like, a more regressive/reactionary plot... it just fell flat for me, esp since like... i think there was a version of this book that was a lot more interesting or at least, Committed to a lot of it's contours, and this felt like the lukewarm execution made to please both The Public (nebulous, not really what i mean) and the freaks who wanted the weirder more fucked story ... whatever it was fine.
  • also can someone tell me if penance is good
the late americans
  • i was like >do I have a biased image of mfas and iww orrrrr are neither really not as bad as I think… and then I read this and it confirmed everything i believed about the iww and mfas… and once again I am stewing in my lofty palace of hate and arrogance because i am vindicated and right about it
  • Kind of like ummm other than in the dream house literally iww has produced nothing or note or value and also rt amy hugerford the yale lecture series 2003 THE IWW SERIOUSLY HAS INSTITUTIONALISED THE NOVEL🤧
  • in the end my beef with the iww as well as with 'american' lit. is that americans hate to be american and so they refuse any kind of nationhood or identity and always resist picking any sides or any stances and this entire novellll was about guys who did not want to be 'anything' because they thought it would place them above all the things they looked down at and were looked down for... i should start c_p'ing my discord live-reads/twt livereaccs to these but ... it's very frustrating to watch american's staunch backing and bombing of palestine and lebanon, and then to see that very attitude that makes it possible for it to act upon these politics and make shallow concessions and do all the doublespeak and media play and bureacratic nonsense, and you know, see that it's a problem at all levels and in all facets of american society and culture, including the Big Mechanical Institution That Makes All Their Novelists, and then know that this IS the point of their books and their status and their celebrity or vague fame or wh

portrait of the artist as a young man (1.5x)
  • well… i thought I would be rolling my eyes the entire time but at least james joyce was a tortured artist deep cut loser FOR REAL… my problem isnt with pretentious githeads or holier than thou (LOL) artists its with guys who DONT COMMIT. and james was committing.
  • um seriously so funny that this book is entirely and only about religious guilt and trauma the entire time i was like oh james joyce u would love my lesbian roommate... you are the same person even. ok not true but seriously so funny...
  • genuinely beautiful writing and turns of phrase and joyce is eclectic and pretentious in all the ways i like and support and can forgive men about... idk i also read sally rooney's treatise on joyce/ulysses so that was also making me feel sooo open-hearted and i am litr guy who is in (and always will be) my irishboo era and am deeply committed to the beautiful and proud nation of ireland... dublin wait for meee wait for me dublin
  • i was thinking i was going to do my final essay on this x disco elysium but actually this is so little about dublin imo... but i think actually maybe the way language progresses and comes back/through both of them is pretty good treatment but again idk... 
  • this also inspired (alongside the idiot et all, rooney) a lot of my autofiction rants... where in the end I THINK AUTOFICTION IS GOOD. and i think autofiction is good, and always superior to the memoir because you care about the Narrative/the Story more than you care about 'the truth' (...) i think autofiction is doing this funny paradox where the author is trying to cover up their arrogance by pretending it's not about them all while finding themselves and important enough to talk about and make other people read about ALL WHILE assuming they are a very small author and a very small person and cannot write about anything beyond the little things they have experienced/achieved/accomplished and in fictionalising it, are adding the glitz and glam and Structure that literature provides in order to make this life that could have been theirs More Worthy and Interesting in being a story.... ISN'T THAT GREAT? I think autofiction is so funny and I also have to mention here I think I have a much broader bound of autofiction than what it is traditionally considered so.
resurrection
  • kind of the funniest novel in the world for the majority of its run because tolstoy is making fun of nikhudryev of being a liberal the entire time and then it ends in the worst way a novel has ever ended in the world and im like THIS IS WHAT MY MOM’S FAVOURITE NOVEL?
  • so i did read this bc it is no.1 novel my mom loves (and my dad too) and it took me a while and i was like i see what the hype about tolstoy is more or less... like in the end russians will be soooo good at painting pictures of men and women who exist within contradiction and therefore are perfect depictions of what PEOPLE are like. on the other hand they are kind of ass at doing interpersonal relationships between people while perfectly adept at understanding the relationships with authority so in the end... what can u say...
  • truly theee book that highlighted to me the obvious fallacy of the 'impartial systems of bureaucracy' like if ancillary justice approached it the opposite way where it started with TRUE STATEMENT: ALL DECISIONS MUST BE EMOTIONAL. this entire book, or parts of it at least, was about dissecting how no decision can be made without an emotional or personal aspect despiteee how structures like law and judgement and punishment want u to approach... the trial scene is genuinely sooo crazy...
  • also a funny personal story is that the translator (either american or british GOOGLE IS NOT HELPING ME HERE AT ALL...) was like yesss resurrection is considered 'bad' bc it is so moralistic (like...ctfu... books can't have morals?) but it is not as bad as tolstoy's worst short story, ivan ivanich. cue me turning to my mom and going 'hey,' and her saying yes resurrection is good (which i realised she liked, approximated 40 pages in bc it was so moralistic) and her going 'oh but tolstoy's best is --' dear reader, can you guess what she said? 
  • ANYWAY. seriously worst flop ending in the world I can't fucking do it anymore ICB TOLSTOY WROTE MULTIPLE ENDINGS AND THEN HE WAS LIKE.... let me bestow upon my readers... the truth... which is that in the end the liberal becomes An American. FUCK YOUUU. like very true. BUT FUCK YOUUU. mfw u stop reading american novels to escape americans and even then...
either/or
  • and when I say i hate americans and the american novel i would never mean YOUUUU, ELIF BATUMANNN… selin my beloved🥹🫶okay i need to say more about these books than that but seriously ummmmmm nothing so beloved as myyy delightful smart and witty darling selin... I think I mostly read 'Literary Novels' (whatever that means LOL) because I love the narrative or the style, so unlike franchises or series, I'm never so attached to the specific characters... so like to finally have A CHARACTER from literature who is sooo alive and beloved by MEEEE who will live on in my heart and head forever and be myyyy stephen dedalus or anna karina or whomever... this is kind of linalenu mybrilliantfriend erasure but it's DIFFERENCEEE... selin my meowmeow of all time....
  • i was so scared this book was going to be about sex and then it was about sex... but in a defeatist way where right after selin is like 'sveltena don't u want to be in homoerotic perfect girl companionship with me' and then sveltena answers that by getting a boyfriend so selin now has to get with the program and start dating men... still truly truly not as bad as i thought it would be... i think i liked that it was a very analytical thing for her still, and so sex was An Act You Do bc once again this is another ritual she has to go through to seem Like A Normal Person rather than something that has bearing on her worth or attractiveness or lack thereof, which is what women having sex seems to become.... in general  i love the complete disregard re/body&looks that both books have, which is part of what makes it so refreshing... TO MEEE... obviously there's mentions of clothes or hair or the whole episode with the ugly shoes but it's never in a way where you're made to feel like this is somehow such a vital or crucial aspect of Being A Woman/Girl...
  • anyway very relevant to this, or somewhat relevant, was elif batuman's article about empire and reading russians while they are waging war on ukraine, which did not necessarily come to a conclusion about anything but again - is a discussion about how we read things, how we could read things, how we are 'meant' to read things... something something mcluhan can always be applied to any crime scene but also i need to read frederic jameson ideology soongeee... in the end

females, totem/taboo (not well)
  • we were calling alc a visionary and a legend and a truly new novel awesome thinker and i was like she is myyyy philosopher king and i read this and felt that even more deeplyyy... i noted this in tw3, but alc has that very punchy style where every paragraph is set up like a joke, where you have bewildering premise, buid-up/explanation, punchline... it's a very recognisable and specific school of essay writing/writing treatment, that is very entertaining and it works really well for her obviously... 
  • i think i didn't expect how personal she got with it, down to the porn addiction reveal et all, but I also think it was refreshing to read something that was a personal piece more so than any vague academic theory or whatever... I LIKED IT I HAD FUNNNN... i agreed with a lot of her ideas, and even when I don't agree with her, I still think she has a lot of interesting things to say or rotate around ur mind as a cube or wme... she's just fun!!!
  • reading freud was an experience because everytime you'd be like, wait... Is this a bar? he'd be like AND THAT'S WHY MEN WANT TO FUCK THEIR MOTHERS. like bro! shut up about the oedpius complex! shut up! (...) ok but my reading of this truly was so bad um the copy that was at my school library was 50 yrs old so i really distracted by pinching holes into the paper with my nails and the textural sensation of that and it was so... anyway. i will try again at some point bc oomr kind-of does laud it as one of her holy grail religious criticism texts...
fasting, feasting
  • SOOOO GOOD. miss desai you are everythingggggggg
  • it took me approximately 10000 yrs to read this, but i am really glad I DID!! aris essentially is doing their thesis on it and  I Want To Be There... so obviously next on my list is kieran desai the inheritance of loss (...) and then i can fully synthesis All Themes and Ideas...
  • in the end I really liked both ends of the narrative, the claustrophobic experience of Living In A Family Society with uma and the bleakness of American Life with arun... that neither of them are very happy or satisfied with where they are and what they have done and will do... i think there's something to be said that 'happiness' has never really been the goal, especially not within the subcontinent or even the continent probably. there's always been some pressure of survival, and it's just that the upper bounds of How Successful that survival could be are now broader... in some senses yes in some senses no... like esp with my parents generation, why they did the things they did why they immigrated this and that, it was not so much in search for 'happiness' or 'success' but 'better' and 'easier'? in some ways.. IDK... really heart-shattering book in many ways esp for how it tries to make the best out of this minute miserable existence and experience...
  • i think that is the hardest part of writing 'the subaltern' or historically/actively oppressed is both representing the smallness and forced indignities of their lives and also communicating that this person does still have dignity, is still capable of joy and deserves to live... like i'll only say it a million times but there is almost a notion of 'this life is not worth living' to some stories or experiences that undermines that a person has still lived that kind of life... there is so much unfairness in undue harm and tragedy, even ones that seem so small, and yet.
  • prose somehow managed to be rich but simple... genuinely you are so easily able to inhabit the world and landscapes these characters are in... desai was soooo good... and her observations were both sooo cutting and clever and at times offered with humour, both in the sense that she was making a joke out of the situation at hand but also because the pain of there being nothing to do other than laugh about it...
  • ON THAT NOTE: it's been discussed a little specifically wrt to indigenous practices of handling trauma, but i think a lot of subcontinental writers rely on satire and sarcasm irony, esp in the period of partition/post partition, to deal with these huge persisting generational issues and traumatic structures... maybe i will go try and do some reading on that.
intermezzo
  • kind of the power of reading intermezzo and joyce so closely together was that it made me like both better…okay so I only did like the joycean sections of intermezzo (AKA the peter pov and peter's story in general) and I felt extremely /neg about all the other parts though i did think margaret got some of the best observations/lines in general...
  • as always sally rooney prose or story is nothing to write home about and the single thing she does so well she literally didn't do the entire time bc she was too busy crafting a different kind of narrative and I wasn't enjoying it...the reason i liked the peter sections is because she experiements so minutely, and she does very subtle shifts from book to book, so it was really exciting even LOL to see her jump deep into fragmentation and being more sparse with language in terms of sentence structures but more vivid in terms of stream of consciosness/general atmosphere and description... i also really loved that she was doing DUBLIN... i cheered i yayed i enjoyed it... finallyyyy PLACE MATTERS... and it really does peter was so much about not having identity or anything beyond the material to under himself or his worth by lol....
  • IN SAYING THAT... peter is kind of like kendall roy to me. very clearly toxic sigma alpha male pathetic man type.... but also.... Miserable Pathetic Eldest Daughter of all time. within him he holds both extremes. so in the end he is also beth's spectre of Bang Chan From Eldest Daughter Twitter... idk i thought it was so funny everyone was kind-of missing that he was the Sally Rooney Girl, you know, sharp intelligent easy to dislike, very cool and chic on the outside, a total fucking self-hating mess on the inside who is insecure and believes himself incapable of being loved/wanted and is desperate for any pearls of affection offered to him... because, i feel like you're always looking for this girl when you read rooney, and it was so funny to be midway through the book and go Oh! PETER is MARIANNE. because he is.
  • in the end it was one of those 400 pages books where one moment of perfect understanding between two people justified the slog and uphill battle of it all... when peter and margaret see each other for the first time outside of ivan's chess tournament and recognse who the other is immediately and both are so cautious and careful and want to understand and be understood by the other TwwwT ahhh the sally rooneyism of all time coming through ONCE just ONCE... the most romantic moment in the book TO ME down to how neither of them could bring themselves to actually enter the room to watch ivan's match.... ooooh... what a moment...
  • i also liked, and this seemed to be overlooked by some critics, how naomi's dialogue was so genz or memey or overused humour in that it really conveyed a lot of about her and what kind of person she was, and this appearance of wit and intelligence in a way that was appealing to peter, but as ivan says, neither of them really, you know... idk i think it captured the youth and triteness of her ability to communicate quite well.. like she knows the baseline thing she has to say to be seen as 'funny' or 'charming' without really conceiving of the witticism herself... anyway that's whyyy her best line of dialogue and the only time she really says something worth is that last conversation 'we were both playing games / we both wanted to win' etc etc... i actually don't know that I believe this take myself but here it is...
  • i also. liked the extremely accurate and real portrayal of trying to have a relationship with a brother u hate who looks down on you and who u can't stand but is the better speaker between the both of u. like... sorry to that brown girl who said that sally rooney is not writing books for her, but i personally can't relate. she's writing books about ME. genuinely could do nothing but :wechatcrylaugh: everytime they had a fight or we were in ivan's head about it like... it do be like that.
the giver
  • truly 1984/Brave New World for kids. like, baby’s first Utopia/Dystopia dialectic (…) literally reading the part where jonas lies down shirtless on the bed to ‘receive’ the memories the giver ‘gives’ to him and i was like lois lowry what did u know about the grecian tradition of pederasty and pedagogy…. easily yhe gayest shit in the world im so sorry i was shocked and awed and gagged.
  • also id read this like fioddndioedn 12 years ago(????) for school so i didnt remember the end and then i read it again and was shocked and awed even like Uuhhhhh How beautiful was it to end on a note of Hope… On the promise of a dream… literally how beautiful is it to have Hope🥹

my list for next time: the inheritance of loss, hard to be a god, my laundry list of theory probably lol, the god of small things (for the second time!),  the autobiography of alice b toklas, untouchable, mrs.dalloway... yes i am doing a class on modernism how could u tell.
fwcu: (namesake)
kind-of. anyway in august I was like >I need to become a better or smarter or more well-read person, and since I was not getting a job, despite, needing to get a job, and resigning myself to joblessness, I decided to read 100pages a day. I had also decided, earlier in the summer, to learn bangla and french. neither of which i did. anyway now we are in september, and I have added spanish to that list. just for fun. in any case the french is because when I made a different reading list in the beginning of summer, again, for the quest of intellectualism or whatever it is when you know you're stupid but not as stupid as the next person down the line and you need to at least do the reading to allow u to think like that, that list contained quite a lot of french. actually, I was glancing though a wikipedia article of scholars from martinique, and i realised many of the greatest post-colonialists are from small countries annexed by the french, and so these intellectuals all wrote in french, as did the actual french such as foucault and sartre and d'beauvoir, though I can't say I ever added the second sex to my reading list due to, Being A Woman, camus, et all, and some guys, who weren't even french, wrote in french anyway because it was the thing. marx. i'm referring specifically to marx. anyway. and then I also saw that spivak taught herself french by translating derrida, so I'm trying to do that with les damnes de la terre. oh and how could i forget. I WATCHED ANATOMIE, which really did settle it for me. the bangla because I really should know bangla, obviously. the spanish because there's this spanish short story class that I wanted to take that required lvl600 proficiency. because. presumably. we would have to read the stories in spanish. well, anyway. here we are now. my bangla is not any better. my french is... lacking, and every other second i regret not paying more attention during my mandatory schooling, how the fuck was I supposed to know this would become a necessary interest of mine. my spanish is coming in form of a spanish<>eng dictionary i picked up in perth, ON, at a little library. and my books! some read.

so august was women in translation month. I read, three? women in translation. one helen dewitt. fortysomething pages of clarice lispector that I gave up, perhaps I was not meant to start with a novel but instead the thing she was actually known for. a dostoevksy. a woman who was a fan of dosotoevsky. um. probably one other thing that's slipping my mind idk. ANYWAY. mostly I have learnt that I hate modernism. which anyone could've said. 

the list: lolita, minor detail, the gambler, the idiot, notes of a crocodile, crooked line, kim jiyoung born 1982, brick lane, the last samurai


LOLITA

I will start by cheating. I read lolita in like.... april...? i actually have yet to finish it, but that's how you know it's GOATED. litr one of theeee greatest novels of all time to me ever, was feeling so many feelings that I had only previously felt about my brilliant friend, ummm isn't it so amazing in the end that you don't even need to finish this book to know it's just That Good. well that's how I'm looking at it. I did read it to understand the 3 lectures in the yale amy hugerford the american novel since 1945 series, and they were good lectures kindof sort of she is such a nabakov head which is FINEEE... it's fineee... but since then I have realised I facking hate the american novel (and obviously this doesn't count since nabakov is RUSSIAN and writing as a 'tourist' and it is not so much about america but observing america) and also that I hate when art is not autonomous and we give so much importance to the history of the author in the making and meaning of the novel but obviously hugerford was also making an argument about artists and institutionalisation and public attitudes and how all things converge into making such a thing that we know as 'the novel' (in the american sense) ... also I hate modernism. which can't be true because there is some modernism that I enjoy. but i think on the whole i hate it's resistance and lack of commitment and self-pitying attitude towards 'identity' and it's love for senselessness... anyway. 

do you want me to actually talk about the novel. I think nabakov is the writer of the century, he achieved something with his prose that possibly literally no one else on this earth ever will. when I say i don't have to finish this book to know that it's one of the greatest novels of all time, i just mean stylistically. i just mean because of his prose. it's kinda ctfu because this novel drags so much but the prose goes so crazy, and also it really really made me realise how much of a disservice we do to art and also life to look at it moralistically... like pleaseeeee... I really do think the themes of pedophillia are by far the least interesting thing this novel does. in any case, one of the novels of all time ever that u read and then go drive on the highway for hours and go 'WOW! This is Just Like Lolita' <very real experience I just had. it's so gorgeous and the greatest and worst reading experience and just entertaining (...) IDK It's literally such a good read, I loved it, I was, exactly as hugerford predicted... captivated....

MINOR DETAIL
the book that we have all been talking about since october last year. I don't know how to describe what has happened, what has been happening, and what is happening right now in palestine in a way that can encompass all her sorrows and struggles and suffering and offer any kind of well-meaning sentiment and nuance about it. it's just awful, and I think, you can never really understand how this judgement of 'awful' can be so much worse than just the newest terrifying headline you've read or clip you've seen or indignity a Palestinian has suffered. this is also what sitting with minor detail was like, because after I had read it, I watched adania shibli's interview with fatima bhutto about it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TJ1jpTYQcU) and, she reveals that while she was doing research for this novel and going to the very museum it describes, she had been arrested and detained. and that was simply a detail that hadn't been reflected into the text, that made it somewhat, hopeful even. the fantasy that she had gotten away with her deceptions somehow.

otherwise, as a novel, i think it was so aptly named and so well formed, and it's encompassed with the section where she tells you the story of how you can recreate a whole picture with only minor details, as in the story of the three brothers and the camel. what she does for you, of course, is allow you to recreate this whole picture of occupation and israeli violence as her two characters go about, what is to them, a normal day. it's very precise and very concise. easy to read, but hard to sit with.

THE GAMBLER
kind-of the funniest read of this list ctfuuu... huge tonal change from minor detail which perhaps was not what i needed but what happened anyway. also during I was re-entering the sally rooney mines due to writing fic inspired by sally rooney so I was like, creating parallels in my mind et all et all,  like sally rooney is only good at writing one thing and that is the interpersonal and the inability of people to understand one another and her characters are always doing some pantomime of communication and never quite succeeding due to class/gender/etc while dostoevsky is only good at writing psychological profiles and his characters never talk to each other so much so as they talk At each other, anyway this was a translation done by a woman who time has sort of forgotten about in comparison to all the other very well translators/translations of dostoevsky, but according to some random website and a reddit post, it was a decent translation and the one on the library shelf (...) mostly, there was a preamble about dostoevksy's personal life and history and it was genuinely sooo entertaining i was going 'he really is just like me FR FR' and he was truly living a very third world life, i guess, and obviously, was addicted to gambling and a woman who was decades younger than him that he'd only met once. and that was what the story was about. genuinely reading it like ...IF NOT FOR THE LAWS OF TIME FYODOR U WOULD LOOOOVEEEE MOBILE GACHA... he would be a yae miko stannie or whatever.

anyway. two accessory things of note, (1) allegedly dostoevksy was more or less conservative re/his views et all, because he believed in russian orthodoxy, but obviously to the west, due to his criticisms of the catholic?church he comes off less conservative but idk, this is again from a reddit comment i will have to read more to know but also idk if i'm interested like that. he was also living an amazing life where he would simply just um be writing from deadline to deadline and he never had enough money and he was juggling eight different mouths and he was emotionally or spiritually cheating on his wife and his dreams and motions were huge flops but at least he was a slayful novelist! which did not matter because he was always gambling away any and all money he had and therefore he could write this story where everyone falls into destitution and delusion because all they have is gambling. the second note is that everyone thinks dostoevsky is more or less sexist, which is so funny, to me, because yah obviously none of his women are agents in a story so much as objects of infatuation or more commonly irritation, but also: he writes women the exact same way he writes men, which makes me laugh and doesn't make me despair at how he hates women because he doesn't really. he's just ... a man.

NOTES OF A CROCODILE
so the very first page has an author biography and I read it and then I made my roommate read it and then we both like, laughed, in an uncomfortable and pained way because um, of course. anyway, it very much set the tone of the book. nico said that they liked it but it was a little painful and depressing! and I think i liked it too, mostly. a lot of it reads like someone has made a novel about all the assorted east asian movie still/frames/quotes tumblr posts you see, which makes sense due to it being a 80s/90s literary relic from taiwan. some of it was moving, I particularly enjoyed the main rhetorical device, which was the crocodile metaphor as outsiderism/genderfuckery/et all, and the section where the narrator describes the woman they are living with...and she describes all the pitfalls and weaknesses of her character and provides the full psychological profile... it was very gripping I'M SO SORRY THE NAME IS FAILING TO COME TO ME... otherwise very quotable book, I'm not sure I got anything out of it other than it being very moody and trying to encompass a certain kind of depth of thought and aimlessness of having to live a life that you don't want and don't know what to do with. idk i think it's books like this that make you understand the want/importance to be 'one's most authentic self' more so than any pride pin or what have you.... also the writing is a mix of very contemporary but also sometimes lyrical but also easy to read... this is more or less my first taiwanese novel, and anything else I read that's been translated from chinese has been danmei LOL so in many ways it was much more accessible for the american psyche than other stuff. sorry i really did not have a lot to say about this one ;-; 

NORMAL PEOPLE
it must be said I knew I would like this and it also must be said that while I like sally rooney on a personal level, I do not respect the regard and popularity and celebrity she's garnered. like ummm... how to say... kind of made me realise in many ways one truly has to be a little mediocre in order to be popular. and while i don't like that, this is the stage of worldwide reading comprehension we are at rn. in any case, everything i liked about normal people the book is better represented in the show, and i really do think sally rooney is better at script writing than prose writing, but every now and then she'll have a moment in her book where she'll meander and describe a road or room or something about the setting rather than her characters internals/externals, and it'll be, idk, oddly fanfiction-y almost in how out-of-place it is. like an afterthought where she's been reminded that she shouldn't have empty room syndrome lol. which is not a real thing btw. 

anyway I do not think I can get into my extended sally rooney rant rn, but it's umm soo crazy, because I went back to read some of the sex scenes of beautiful world bc i remember them making me so uncomfortable the first time around but this time around, i realised they were a lot softer? than i thought. like literally.... i was kindof promised D/s and there wasn't even D/s for babies... which is fine. i don't care that much. anyway I would never recommend anyone read any sally rooney unless u can truly appreciate the one thing she does really well because u will just hate her and not like it and assign her as one of the many milennial white women writing about whiteness which is not fair. at least I don't think so. like, real white women writing whiteness is much more annoying. i know because I'm reading boy parts rn. 

CROOKED LINE
literally uhhh imagine me discovering ismat chungtai in my partition literature search and then learning about the blanket, and then aris tells me about this being a book that changed my life, and then THIS BEING LIKE EVEN MOREEEE CRAZY THAN THE BLANKET X100000000... anyway. she suffers from short story writing disease like many authors, due to some of her chapters reading like a collection of different stories/happenings from the life of one woman rather than an actual novel, at points, but it was still soooo enjoyable, chughtai was obviously so modern but obviously sooo of her time, and more importantly she was sooooooooo coy... and you can read it so clearly in her writing, like she's known for her satire and also, like this deadpan sort of sarcasm or whatever. where you know, she's never going to tell you what she actually thinks, but also you're dumb as shit to take her at face value, which u will do, because she is a woman. kind-of a terrible thought, but this was doing normal people in the 1940s way before sally rooney was even decided to exist, in that, you have a narrator who is convinced she is unloveable and there is something fundamentally wrong with her except obviously this is coming from an indian muslim woman from the subcontinent. but also literally so faaaacking funny that the book ends with her romance with an irishman. and then her decision to get an abortion. which was the only righteous way for it to end, imo. though uh, the ending is very open-ended. anyway the foreword was literally so beautiful in that the book was describing shamman as a crooked line herself, refusing to bend the way society dictates her too. LITERALLY SUCH A GOOD BOOK... it sort of makes me giddy just to think about, due to how groundbreaking it is in my mind likeeee sooo much homoerotic sexual exploration happening between women, and then they're expected to hang out with men and make lives with them, and they do, but the men never even matter, not really, IDK.... LITERALLY BEAUTIFUL GROUNDBREAKING NOVEL OF ALL TIME TO PROVE THAT EVEN IN A SOCIETY WHERE THEY ARE DEEPLY SUBJUGATED BY MEN WOMEN STILL HAVE AGENCY AND IF NOTHING ELSE CONTROL OVER THEIR OWN THOUGHTS... lovely incredible wonderful showstopping book. 

THE LAST SAMURAI
sorry lin for only reading the last samurai ummmm .... so many years after u first told me about it. HOWEVER. it was so good it was so worth it helen dewitt U SLAYEDDD... i love sitting down to write these reviews because I forget literally everything i could ever think or say. ummm literally incredible novel about loving ur mom and both of u being bored geniuses, and the book of ADHD personified ever like wow.... the moment where you're in the middle of a section and ludo breaks it, wonderful lovely book. incredible amazing moment. probably will live in my mind forever. I think there's some fair criticism about why is the novel trying to imitate film/audiovisual medium/etcka etcka but I was reading the back cover, where a critic describes it as a 'new kind of novel. a breakthrough in the genre' and I don't know that I agree still, but I think, obviously what makes a good novel so different from a normal novel is when the structure can imitate the content, like this is a book that is constantly interrupting itself and that in and of itself, is soooo good!!! anyway i really dk if it's never been done before, but I think it's good at capturing the scattered mind... someone wrote something about it being about the male father figure and masculinity or whatever, but I don't know if i agree with that at all, like obviously half the book is him searching for a father, or rather, screening men as possible fathers, but it's not for the sake of Having A Dad, it's to the end of relieving his mother some of this burden of parenting. i genuinely did find some of the commentary on how children are one of the classes that have the least rights/freedoms really interesting. as well as, just the thing in the beginning about how constraining writing to one language is to strip it of all further dimensions, bc obviously reading is so much of a mental thing, but the most important thing about a sentence is how it sounds or how it Reads and english is soooo limited with syllables and context and meaning... not a beautiful or conveying language at all... anyway. one of the books about everything ever. and I really did think I would hate it once it became about the little boy! 

KIM JIYOUNG, BORN 1982
the end of this where you realise this is case notes from a male psychologist and he speaks a little of his wife and then his colleague who is leaving work, and it just ends in that very note of dismissal and ignorance that precipitates kim jiyoung's breakdown. i read this just as the nth room 2 news was breaking, and it was genuinely horrific to be so constantly and persistently reminded about how awful it is for women. idk. again this sounds so trite but I don't know what else to say. i think i live in such a bubble, really. i don't think i've ever been against sexism in such a sharp hard way as this. anyway, the rate of sex crimes and sexual harassment/related incidents are so high in korea, and it just got me thinking about the american influence versus the developing social stigma, and so you have conservatism regarding gender roles and roles of women et all, but also, this complete looseness of sexual degeneracy. like attitudes towards women are very similar in the south/islamic countries, but sexual abuse/crimes are obviously a lot more hidden and happen more in the marital sphere? i would garner. like, the very controversial bangla law where if a man rapes a village girl, he has to marry her. there's some nuance to that one. but, generally, this cultural thing where the nature of sexual degeneracy changes depending on the social conditions of the country right. anyway, this is sort of baby's first book on feminism, and it covers a lot of things in various realms with a pointblankness that makes it both easier and harder to swallow.

THE IDIOT
this is the elif batuman novel. anyway, noura was begging me to read boy parts due to her own parasocial rs with eliza clarke and i was like, ok, well since i hate the idea of reading it and have prejudice against it i will read it along with this other novel i also hate the idea of reading and have prejudice against (...) anyway, neither were available at my uni library so i resigned myself to reading them on my phone, and then I read the first page of both and realised I would immediately like the idiot so much more. so i read it first, to stave off the misery from boy parts. AND IT WAS SO GOOD. kind of the girlautism novel written with ME in mind... im sure many other young women have said that but truly due to the sexless nature of the romance and the asexual representation and the >Nothing Happens They Both Leave ... i was so gagged... bc everyone mentions this along with normal people as a Campus novel, and ig a lot of campus novels are so about sex so for something to be so popular and focus so much on the absence of sex as well as just, the narrator herself, selin, always being like 'why does he hate meee' and then giving him the one word answers. and being like 'i love him so much' but you can't even tell from her actions until u read her write it out... it's soooo... LITERALLY SO PERFECT TO MEEE!!!

I was telling oomirl about this, and obviously I described it as a campus novel, due to that being it's principle setting, and she was like, 'you know i think i've matured out of those, i'm no longer in that period of my life' and i didn't say anything, but I didn't think the point was the campus or the romance, but i think it is very much about this search of/loss of identity.language and u could say, well that's literally every modernist/post modern novel everrrr... and Yes but no, obviously the campus/first yr harvard student thing comes in here because it is so painfully youthful and awkward in how selin is beginning to stumble on her very first legs, and I think, i don't know I just thought it was so good!!! i was so endeared!!! i have to say like 90% of my enjoyment of this book was her fixation on social convention and how much she disliked/could not understand it and then would say or do those things anyway, trying to seem 'normal' like it was soooo.... there was such a funny line where she's like 'i was lying about being unable to resist chocolate like everyone else does' and then a couple sections later, she wakes up in the middle of the night to sneak the chocolate she brought for other people. she was very endearing to me. also, out of every single book, i think this had the most decisive and impactful ending line. that made it SOOOO GOOD. and in her acknowledgement elif batuman shoutouts dostoevksy so cutely for letting her borrow his title. 

BRICK LANE
book that MY MOM and MY BROTHER have both read but I had never heard of. i tried to watch the movie after I finished but i could not take the britishism seriouslyyy... after reading 10489952385300 books about how intelligent academic scholarly women who understood the world or something deeper and also understood the ways the world wounds them, this was startling. i was genuinely so impressed about how, books do not have to be about smart women. and monica ali truly did go out of her way to write a book about a very simple woman, plucked from the village, who does not question any part of her life. it was painful at times, because of her passivity. her always eating by the sink in the dark, the way she doesn't protect her daughters. there is this one scene, where she and her youngest are in the kitchen, eating at the sink together, and pretending not to look at each other because they both can't bear it. INSANEEEE... my brother's criticism of this book was that 'it was written for white people' which i think is so patently ridiculous because i think half of this book is incomprehensible unless you're bengali and you've seen these living situations. especially, hasina's letters from bangladesh, like i don't think you can understand her situation at all and what's really happening beyond her descriptions unless you have had house help like that. you're like 'is this the sixpeenceee child maid situation' and I'm like yeah a little bit, but it is worse for an older woman. AND SHE WAS BARELY THIRTY. anyway. incredible book. really really really worth the read. also one of the best ending scenes possible.



uhhh...anyway, so I'm currently suffering through boy parts, am really trying to find the copy of the idiot my school library is convinced is on the shelf bc it seems like mandatory follow up reading for batuman, resurrection which is my parent's joint favourite book, am obviously tuned in for intermazzo, i will be trying to read some russian women, obviously i am also on the hunt for more subcontinental literature, ummm and I'm also thinking of raking through the kincaid archives. no i do not want to read anything published after 2005, thank u for understanding my endless disappointment with contemporary lit. sally rooney is literally my version of vaping or whatever.
fwcu: (Default)
ok I will genuinely try to be brief and like speedrun thru everything I've read the past 6months~ . by which I mean two books I read in december and like everything I've read in the last month. and no one say anythingggg about how this entire list is scavenged from braintransplant.dreamwidth.org/tag/books like it's my fault I'm unoriginal.

list: olondria, the foundation series + prequels, the imperial radach, the sparrow, drive your plow over the bones of the dead, a memory called empire
to read: my name is red(60%), a little life, foundation sequels, left hand of darkness, deathless, asimov's short stories, maxmin gorky's short stories, nemesis, a desolation called peace.

(...)
THE WINGED HISTORIES sofia samatar
this ruined my life when I read it. which is really funny because both DURING reading and after I was like Wowwwww.... 60% of this book sucks major ass, but the 30% that was good literally killed u dead and the other 10% was just pretty writing for the sake of pretty writing. I will be honest literally everything this book was supposed to be about went over my head because I tend to focus on personal narratives opposed to the bigger picture sofia samatar painted... the reviews I read of this book that got me to read this book, all like were like 'it's about the pieces left after War' well I thought it was about the pretty writing. definitely top10 books ever that rip your heart out though.
some lines:
  • In the desert there are empty places, but once we were not afraid. We rode through noon. You sang, my heart is white with love.
  • Sometimes she made herself eat the charcoal as a sort of penance and vomited ecstatically over the balcony.

A STRANGER IN OLONDRIA sofia samatar
the problem with this book is that it's travel vlogging, but also trying to set a religious war and show it's machinations From The Perspective of A Dude Who Doesn't Know Shit and is Only Cataclysmically Involved and keeps Promising u the most heart-wrenching love story ever and then only delivers for about <30 pages out of it's 300 page runtime. that love story, when you finally reach it, is very worth it. or, jessivet's story is worth wading through the whole book for. ALSO. the folktales invented for olondria lore are so beautiful and worth reading for... I do think the story of the cousins's should've been in TWH to set up for siski/dasaya and warm the reader's heart towards cousincest, because reading this After just makes u realize Ah. or made me realize Ah. IDK in general all the folklore introduced and written was so seamlessly and thoughtfully placed and weaved through with the narrative. like terrible book, but as it is with sofia samatar, worth reading for the 20 pages of unbearably beautiful writing.

some lines:
  • I am the last thing you will see, I said in my heart. I am the last, I have carried you in my arms, I have brought you home.
  • Life comes back, the shadows of leaves.


THE FOUNDATION TRILOGY isaac asimov
my mom was obsessed with me reading these books and so I read them. it WAS fun reading old classic scifi by the Inventor of the genre interspersed with modern sci-fi written by women who know Women and Gay People Also Exist. and that ethnic ambiguity is the name of the game now. these books + a discussion with my dad made me realize like Wow...Wait ...YEAHHHHHH scifi is about sociology/anthropology not robots and tech. it's interesting because I read these after Mempire and between Imperial Radach so the difference in what subjects the respective authors focused on and cared about was a fun comparison. I think the charm of the foundation series is that Asimov locked himself into a short story anthology format, and as the trilogy progresses you see him try to break it by making longer and more closely related [both in time and characters] and ... honestly I think it makes the books less and less effective as you read, but still good. I think some of these books are clever, and I think it's hilarious that you can see his switch into Feminism and Second Wife Making Him Realize Women Are People And Therefore Book Characters Too.... Arcady Darell forever in my heart as she is THEEEEE HORRIBLE NIGHTMARE LITTLE GIRL OF THE WORLDDDD....

PRELUDE TO / FORWARD THE isaac asimov
these books suck so much ass compared to the original series. and are too obsessed with robots. which #yasss continuity etc etc #TheIACU [Isaac Asimov Cinematic Universe] but like genuinely, I think you can tell how much more of a short fiction writer Asimov is and how he always returns to this short-split form rather than a true chaptered format. but seriously, these books drag and while some of the exposition about how trantor functions and is bound to fall is interesting, it's like nowhere near interesting enough to make up for a painfully boring protagonist and a forgone conclusion about ROBOTS. I think had it really focused more on how this journey added to Seldon's creation of psychohistory, then it would've been much more worth the read, but Asimov didn't even TRYYYYY on that front. whatever.



ANCILLARY JUSTICE
ann leckie
(original thread)
can I just say. gt9? flop. Mempire? flop. any other gay progressive scifi I might be inclined to read? Pre-emptively, Flop. THE IMPERIAL RADACH? INVENTED. I need to dedicate another reread to these books and an entire three essays about these books but GOD. please please please if you read anything from this list ... ANCILLARY JUSTICE!!!! ANCILLARY JUSTICE!!!! first of all I think this book is perfect even as a standalone, and then is perfect as not a first book, but a prequel of sorts. I think when you read mercy/sword, they read as 'Main Plot' and justice then feels like the expositionary pre-show that sets up for explaining all about Breq and how they got here and so forth. in saying that. AGAIN. this book is the perfect standalone, and I think, in more of an objective way than my personal opinion way, this is probably the best Book of the 3. It's literally space adventure. that's it. it's like.... the perfect literary equivalent of 'It's about the Journey, not the Destination' ... also the first and only book where like there are Stakes of some sort and Breq isn't like omnipotent, OP, has everything figured out, hemlock shlomes-esque... I loved this book because it genuinely just feels like you're --- IDK this is about to sound sooooo stupid but it's like The Essene of Reading where you're learning more as the book progresses and you really are like On This Journey with Breq and dealing with Seivarden and trying to kill Emperor of the Galaxy and realizing over and over it's Grief, you're feeling Grief, this is all about Grief this is -- Breq is the last remaining fragment of a grief-crazed AI, which has just managed to trigger a civil war.

lines:
  • The omen Stillness had flipped, become Movement. And Justice was about to land before me, clear and unambiguous.
  • She was never one of my favourites.

ANCILLARY SWORD / ANCILLARY MERCY
ann leckie
I think these books are just One Book. in terms of books, they are a duology and ancillary justice is the prequel ... but like. spiritually. this is just one book. Again, Justice was for people who wanted Journeys and Epics Lows and Highs ... sword/mercy are for people who love to watch sherlock episodes and nod as everything is fixed and Breq always has a contingency plan and everything always works out perfectly. I would almost say feel-good in terms of Plot. BUT LIKE. THE PLOT IS A FLIMSY EXCUSE TO HAVE SOMETHING TO BUILD THE CONCEPTION OF
ANCILLARIES. SHIPS. THEIR CAPTAINS. THEIR OFFICERS.
ONNNN... people will be like X media Invented a New Form of Love. and X media is never Ancillary Mercy. and therefore that statement is untrue. I think these last two books are sooooo charming, not because the plot is particularly moving or interesting as it was in justice; but because of the way the cast interacts with each other and all the little subplots and subpolitics like.... the intricate rituals between two ships....one ancillaryless one shipless..... the teaseat politics haptics .... whatever the fuck was happening with the translator.... IDKKKK it's kind of a very charming 'workplace' setting ... and then like randomly near the end of the series you get the most fucked up conversation of all time ever between Breq, Ship, while like Seivarden and also a bunch of other officers Are Right THEREEE....... T-TT-T-T-T-T--T-T-T

lines:
  • ...but back at Omaugh Palace, weeks ago, the Lord of the Radch tried to assign me a new captain and I told her I didn't want anyone but you. Which was foolish, because of course she could always force me to accept her choice. There was no point in my protesting, nothing I could say or do would make any difference. But I did it anyway, and she sent me you.
  • And I like Lieutenant Seivarden well enough, but mostly because she loves you.
THE CAT THAT ATE THE LEMON.JPEG THAT I AM TODAY.... I think it's soooo fucked up because this directly goes back to Once Again being about Lieutenant Awn and how she was doomed no matter what, but had she known, she would've refused earlier. IDKKKKKKKK this books were so good and changed my life forever maybe even. I think it was crazy that it was set in book1 that this was all because of and For Lieutenant Awn and that held true through the end. SO GOOD.



THE SPARROW mary doria russell
imagine my surprise when I read this book and assume it was published in 2019 and it was actually published in 1996. that's how woke it is. but surely I have more feelings about this book besides how modern it reads.... and to answer that... I think that very few authors are willing to make their characters devout, but it's just True that religiosity adds layers to a character and a narrative that makes it Fuck ... the only other example in my mind is Daredevil really. but ummm... seriously this book settled my views on the intersection of characters and their beliefs, and I think a character who is devout is always more compelling than a fuckall athiest/agnostic.
aside from that, I cannot say anything about this book that is not constantly referenced through out it - which is - 'Not comedy. Not tragedy. Perhaps, farce?' (...) not to plagiarize braintransplant's review wholly but this book makes it very clear what happens, and what will happen and what it's about and You Know. You are an omniscient reader! you know!!! and it's still like being slapped in the face. like. really. COMEDY? TRAEGDY? FARCE? I think it handles some of it's emotional punches far better than others, and I think for the sake of readability, it chooses to deafen some of the more tragic moments but like, the waves those leave still ripple later into the narrative. one of the moments that broke me most most retroactively, was when Emilio speaks of how his rape was transcribed into poetry and songs and how everyone on earth surely had heard those broadcasts and I ended up thinking of how both Sofia's physical prostitution and intellectual prostitution were in complete privacy and that No One Knew and No one would have ever known and how it was both a perfect crime and her secret to bear completely alone for the end of her life. and how Emilio's is the complete opposite because it's sexual slavery, and it was so publicized, not only to Eden, but to Earth and confesses to an Audience of it. IDKKKKKKKK. IT JUST BROKE ME SO BAD. LIKE I WAS JUST GENUINELY SHATTERED AT THEIR RESPECTIVE TRAGEDIES.

lines: sorry that these are 1:1 to the lines braintransplant choose but it . LIKE THOSE REALLY WERE THE PARTS.
  • “But it was my body. It was my blood," he said, choking with fury. "And it was my love”
  • “Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.” / “But still, the sparrow falls,” Felipe said.
  • “The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances," he continued with academic exactitude, each word etched on the air with acid, "is that I have no one to despise but myself. If, however, I choose to believe that God is vicious, then at least I have the solace of hating God.

DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones
this book is funny as a comedy. mid as a book. I enjoyed it far less than I thought it would. it's not the crazy old woman-ism got old, but everything that Detracted from that got old. the letters to the police were the highest parts. and then everything else moved soooo slowly like I think it was the constraint of linear timeline that made this book kind-of a pain to get through like it would've been very fun if it was just stream of consciousness narrative voice allowed to do Fuck All and Also Murders are happening in the background. IDKKKK. anyway I 100% think this book should be read as a comedy.

lines
  • "I know, I know I'm neurotic and oversensitive, and I should go and get treatment." She glanced at me with sudden hope, as if expecting me to contradict her, but meanwhile I was noting mentally that there are still normal people in this world.
  • I find this division of people into three groups – skiers, allergy sufferers and drivers – very convincing. It is a good, straightforward typology. Skiers are hedonists. They are carried down the slopes. Whereas drivers prefer to take their fate in their hands, although their spines often suffer as a result; we all know life is hard. Whereas the allergy sufferers are always at war. I must surely be an allergy sufferer.
  • This is a very rare configuration of the planets, and thus I have great confidence in commending it to the attention of the Police. I am taking the liberty of enclosing both Horoscopes, in the expectation that the police Astrologer will consult them, and then support my Hypothesis
  • It’s strange how the Night erases all colours, as if it didn’t give a damn about such worldly extravagance.


A MEMORY CALLED EMPIRE arkady martine
isn't it fucked up that all the most interesting shit in this book happens like. in the preludes of each section. Fucked up. terrible plot. interesting linguistics. HORRIBLE HORRIBLE ROMANCE FUCK THREE SEAGRASS. huge L for old man yaoi. ummmmmmm..... not bad overall. sorry this was 10 million years ago and I remember not liking it enough to immediately read the sequel but it still being vaguely interesting enough to make me at least think about reading the sequel. literally like, the sparrow did the linguisitics better, and imperial radach did Everything Else better. STILL imago-tech was a very very veryyyyy cool innovation


BE FUCKING FREE!!!! sorry that these 'reviews' are in noooo way helpful or communicate anything At All about any of these books at all. if it helps, my recommendations are ancillary justice and the sparrow. 

+++ ash's review of twh, which is super super insightful + director's cut of beautiful lines  Anddddd   noura's imperial radach posts  which goes wayyy more into depth about the books 

fwcu: (namesake)
guess who finished all 4 neapolitan novels? me. it was me. 

I thought I was going to rank book 1 as the best book for shallower reasons, but I think having read book 2, 3 and 4, it was the one I enjoyed the most and the one that stuck with me more than the others. arbitrary ranking: 1, 3, 2, 4. I skimmed and skipped the last 100 pages of book 4. though had it ended at tina, at that brilliant chapter, it probably would've been the best book. 

if you haven't already [unlikely, given the crowd] omg, go read them!!! 

anyway these are just. v messy, v shallow thoughts. 

overall thoughtsdamn these books are crazy. damn. daaaaaaaaaaaamn. I was thinking of telling my parents what I was reading, and then I thought, well I think there's value in reading the 'trivialities' of a woman's life, the daily, the mundane of their story. I think what I loved about it is that Lina is always promised and presented as this magical, mystical story, and even when she is dragged through the mud, and her life simple and boring as any other person's, it isn't. it's in her existence, or the reverence of it, or more specifically, the reverence that elena has of her, that she exists so unlike any and every other woman. the craziest books about some random woman's daily life you'll ever read.

before reading these books, which I picked up because I vaguely remembered wanting to read them and I had an eight hour flight, I was explaining to lin what I want from girls in novels, and particularly about girls and their relationships to other girls. that yes, I wanted them to be consumed by each other, I wanted them to be the most important person to each other, I wanted them to love each other - be in love with each other - it's the same to me, but I did not want them to be romantic. damn bitch I should've just read my brilliant friend and been sated. WELL NOW. now I'm sated. this genuinely was the book for me. TO ME. it's like Holy Fuck Holy Fuuuuck. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. it just has everything. wretched girls. MEAN TERRIBLE WRETCHED GIRLS. ugly girls. the toxic female friendship, the contradictory shallowness and deepness of the female friendship. the way it's just. how do I even explain it? The Girl Best Friendism.

my brilliant friendI think I liked this best for the reasons that anyone in my demographic would like this the best. the girls who like girls ism of this book is far more potent than any of the books that follow. because well it's repressed later on, and also, elena doesn't think she hates lina yet and also doesn't hate lina yet. 
the two high points of this book: 
(1) thrilling moment no.1: elena the moment before lina takes her vows, thinks about how she wishes to run away with her and leave all the men behind and have it only be lina and lenu. which me recounting it is deriving it of all it's romance, but IN THE READING. 
(2) thrilling moment no.2: elena wanting to take lina as a man would just before her wedding, so she can ruin lina before lena is ruined by her husband. LIKE. LIKE>>> on the first eve of seeing her naked also. this moment actually goes crazy it goes insane and YES I do like my repressed homosexuality attempting to express itself using heterosexual notions because I don't know it just slaps. [can't explain myself] LISTEN. 
(3) bonus thrilling moment no.3: the title drop moment. 

the other reason this stands out as the best book, I feel like you need to read the other books to understand. the potential of children. in this book, and this book only, you feel like the story of elena and lina could go anywhere. that anything could happen to them, that the book could dip into any genre, given the strokes of fate and the whim of the characters. this book, in retrospect made me understand why heroes who save the world in their respective genres, are always so young. why the stories of ya can only exist within the confines of ya with only young adult characters. you really just can't have a 30 year old woman be spirited away into the magical realm of faerie or so, and expect similar results. that character really does have to be a kid. 

I also loved how it was elena who was blonde and pretty and curvy, and lina was skinny and brunnette and sharp-edged, that lina had it worse and was better (...) I think my only grapple is that later on, lina gets beautiful but like, it was vaguely plot relevant......

the story of a new namethis book is delicious because it begins the fun exercise of spotting when lenu speaks of lina's partners, how she means it's herself that is being mistreated. the highlight is this passage where she shares lina's vacation house bed for the first time of the whole stay, and she thinks of how lina spends every night cheating on stefano by sleeping with nino, stefano whom she abandoned and betrayed, stefano, who's side of the bed elena is laying on. BPBGPERIHDFJKLGVPAHBKJSNLDGLV HASKDNXV\. RIGHT????? RIGHT?!?!??!?!?!! the passage is much more delicious in the text  but oh my god. 

nino somehow solidifies himself as a main character [negative] however lina is basically confirmed asexual lesbian or something. or just a lesbian. whatever. WHAT MATTERS is that actually elena-nino-lina is basically my tennis middle school mating rituals thesis but like worse. the POINT is that nino plays the same role for elena that lina plays HOWEVER with nino it's much easier to attribute the emotion to Love the way it cannot with lina. and ALSO the reason lina gets involved with nino is because elena loves nino. also of note, the way men fall in love with lina is by realizing all the traits that elena had loved and noted and known about lina since they were children. none of that love then, ever feels truly like love, just a hollow insincere echo, and you're left knowing that the one person who would have loved lina correctly and done by her correctly, and seen and loved her truly, is the only one who is not allowed to play the role of suitor. 

those who leave and those who stayI ranked this as number 2? on my ranking list. I'm not sure why. rethinking about it. it's probably 1, 2, 4, 3. BUT ALSO. I think the reason I loved it was because finally the satisfaction of elena being to revel in love. yes it's with nino yes sure it's not ideal but sometimes we are girls who enjoy romance. I think what feels very good about the romance, is that all the flaws of nino as a teenager that elena narrated but did not acknowledge, are no longer present, and instead he feels like a worthier partner for her, and it makes you feel good. reading like 'oh he really truly is a better man' [LOL]. I don't even know. I do think that this was one of the easier books to slog through of the series because of the romance. it was like, the mediocre payoff to all the build-up. like there was a better option [LINA MAKING IT CLEAR TO ELENA ABOUT WHAT ELENA MEANS TO HER], but like Alright. I'll Take It.

thrilling moment:
okay this is kind of weird, but ALSO, in a vacuum, when elena sees her kid[F] and lina's kid[M] going through infant sexuality together or whatever, and she thinks that she[F] and lina[F] would've never been allowed to do so. I DON'T KNOW. it's just the way she always makes these connections like why would she think that even.
thrilling moment: I think it's this book, might be book 4, but when they go to the professor's house and lina is coveted and adored and upstages elena, and elena spends the whole time stewing in rage and misery because lina does what she always has to her. and then they leave, and lina starts RAGING at the professor for her treatment of elena and what happened at the house and horrible it was and how she was a huge bitch. sorry it's the mixture of how everyone else in the world would prefer lina to elena, but lina will always prefer lenu to the world. the twisted psyche of how lina upstages elena and outdoes her at every turn because it's Elena she wants to impress, that it's elena who she wants to show that she can keep up, and she can do it all as well, and it's just.... YOU KNOWWWW

the story of the lost childthere's a line that elena's daughter says to her: "all you care about is your work and aunt lina" and that's ITTTT. it's because it's TRUE. also elena's work=lina, a thesis I will not explain and feel like I do not have to, something something about her work being the only space she has that is not lina's, that is not shareable with lina. something something. something. something that she only pursues BECAUSE of lina. I don't know. like I said, this book had it ended at TINA would've been the best book. there's this almost montage, of how lina and elena are pregnant at the same time, and have their daughters a month apart and it just. how did I explain it to lin. they make every relationship they have, regardless of whether it is their own DAUGHTERS, about their own relationship. it's just fucking crazy you guys SUCK. something about how imma and tina were going to be lina and elena all over again except they weren't because the cycle broke. IDK.

thrilling moment: elena thinking alfonso is more and more beautiful BECAUSE he looks more and more like lina.
thrilling moment: elena finally wins when tina disappears. and that's why the cycle breaks and why linalenu won't be any longer, why the dynamic and it's balance is shattered forever. except elena doesn't win because she has her daughter and lina doesn't, elena wins because the moment tina disappears, lina is holding imma.

I barely paid attention to this book after tina, it was pointless almost...well that and it leaned so heavily into politics and people who were not lina. I DON'T KNOW. something something about how when elena returned, not to naples, but to the apartment above lina in naples, was when everything fell back into place. sorry for not having thoughts it's just (...) every book is this exercise of how time without lina is a blur and merges together into a long montage of nothingness and misery, but time with lina is sharp and clear in every moment and feeling, and elena is miserable maybe, but it's in this lina-inflicted misery she revels in. liiiike.

final thoughtsthese books were so crazy and so good. like the parts that were good were soooo good and the parts that were boring and heterosexual were still very readable because it's 10000% like...No matter how you think about it, this is all LINA'S FAULT. 

my biggest hot take about these books is that it did not matter *who* elena was, not as a person nor how she ended up nor what her personality was, anyone could've been in the spot that elena was, and lina would have the same terrible hold and same terrible effect on them.

in saying so, the fact that it was elena made some parts so goddamn unbearable but for that same unbearability, made the whole book so goddamn good. I think because elena so deeply undervalues herself in regard to lina, therefore is unable to comprehend that lina might like her or think highly of her, and instead takes everything lina does as a negative, is SOOOOOOO. like you, the reader reading through lina's words, her actions, and then seeing it side by side to elena's narration. in a lot of books, it's either that the narrator is so undistinct, that everything that's written in their voice is the objective of the situation, or the narration is written so everything seems objective and the author can't ever seem to make it clear that it isn't. these books do such a brilliant job of making it clear to the reader that These are Elena's Thoughts, this is how Elena sees this, this is how She recounts this... and it's clever because it never reminds you in the middle of her thoughts, but only when she's recollecting facts or reminiscing about how she viewed something then, versus now. it's never that she says she interpreted lina's actions like this, but that her interpretation of lina's actions are written as the truth and the objective fact, but you the reader, have read those same actions, and know to question it. 

also. everyone in their life calling lina 'lila' and only elena calls her 'lina' and the similarity of lina>elena, lina>lenu... 

as a last note. I just loved how this truly captured the progression of how someone changes from how they were as a child to how they are as a teen and how they are as a young adult, an adult... that elena was so recognizable yet so different, that you could read something she does later in her life and think of how she would've reacted so differently as a child. that all the same, lina grew older, but still stayed almost exact to how she was as a child, only more jaded to the world. and how that was perfect to each respective character, because lenu will always change herself to be more liked, and lina will change the world to like it more.

these books were just so good.

in the end, I feel like all of linalenu is encompassed by this, something within the first 100 pages, and the biggest failure of their relationship is that this understanding is never reached again.

"Was it possible? She had taken me with her hoping that as a punishment my parents would not send me to middle school? Or had she brought me back in such a hurry so that I would avoid that punishment? Or—I wonder today—did she want at different moments both things?"
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honestly I feel like I'm in some kind of hell because my mind is simply just replying olivia rodigro's crooning parts in deja vu and it's like. god please. not this. anyway I've been reading some books, except I'm not capable of writing out my thoughts on them
some cuts. I'm not sure they make any sense out of context. sorry if they seem to have a recurring theme.

Pachinko - Min Jin Lee
Etsuko stood there, believing that if she could just listen and suffer, then maybe her daughter could be saved.

“I am terrible. Soo desu. Forgive me, Hana. Anything but this.”

Hana dropped her large tote bag from her shoulder, and the two wine bottles wrapped in a towel made a muffled clinking sound on the pavement. She wept openly, her arms hanging by her side, and Etsuko knelt on the ground and held her daughter’s knees, refusing to let her go.

Celestial Bodies - Jokha Alharthi (trans. Marilyn Booth)
I remembered her mother's wailing. He beats her? She said he beats her? The peasant's son beats my daughter, mine? And what kind of man beats his wife? In all of al-Awafi I have never heard of anyone beating his wife except for that old drunk Furayh. He used to come home soused and throw up on her, and then he would start hitting her. And so this educated 'dokhtoor' - as he calls himself, hah - is just another version of Furayh the drunk? He beats her? The peasant's son beats my girl? No one ever put his hand on me and no one put his hand on my mother or my sisters, and now this dog comes and beats my little girl? What a scandal we must look amongst all the tribes, every clan, our own, out in the open. The man our daughter is already legally married to, even if, thank the Lord, they haven't moved in together, and Furayh the drunk - they're cut from the same cloth? By God, if only he had never set eyes on her! By God, he's divorcing her today and he'd better do it fast.

I also read: Kafka on the Shore, Annals of the Western Shore, Emma, some of Genji.
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this is so late. this is so so soooo late. but I'll make attempts anyway. some of these have been read over a month ago ... so my recollections have had time to marinate and may be hazy. don't know if I've said it, but I stopped reading and instead started watching so ... like not a lot is going to be on this list but as always, I'm consumer of media.

also, as a sidenote: there are going to be a couple links to the new yorker magazine [I am making use of my $12 subscription!] but I hate Conde Nast. all my HOMIES hate conde nast. fuck conde nast. but if any of the articles look interesting but you're out of free articles for the month or something, I'd be willing to share my acc login or somehow grab the article for you!

I'm going to open with the best thing I read.
Read more... )
fwcu: (cat)
hi. it's friday. I was going to write about more than just...this really bad anthology but instead have this review of this really bad anthology. haha! 

Read more... )
fwcu: (namesake)
I guess sunday really is the day now. unfortunate but maybe we’ll get it back on track someday. I read like, two books, and have some stuff I missed in post #3 [a few poems, a few articles] HOWEVER. now that tennis has taken over....let's just talk about tennis. I need to disclaimer that my reading comprehension is 0 and that I am on So Many Levels of fanon that the words on the page don't mean the words on the page when they could simply mean the thoughts in my head as I see past the panels and tennis and onto my enhanced vision of the world. and also, okay I might not have an also. but I do get pelted with rocks every time I tweet something about tennis because I started reading a week ago and make statements that misunderstand characters, twist psyches, cause distaste, spread misinformation, commit defamation, etc etc.

so I've read a lot of tennis. it was fun, I have been enjoying it….it’s sports but….it’s not sports. I finished the original series, and am on shinteni… at the worlds arc just before any of the actual matches start. Atobe is embarrassed as hell and has to work to win back Tez’s hand in marriage :) I got so distracted by the prospective Atobe character growth and interiority (For Real This Time) that I forgot to continue reading. anyway, summary via list of faves? or maybe I'll just talk about it like normal.

Read more... )

in conclusion: I'm literally not a person who would ever write out an agenda in post form, rather it would be in fic form so hopefully I can realize my dreams and talents and spread my agendas in that way...however....uhm......uhhhmmmmmmmmmmmmm...........................Well to keep positive if I am writing out two words of Tezukatobe r63 Every Day well one day it will be eventually be finished. Yes?

on a non-tennis note, I think I'll commit all the other non-tennis I've read on a different post because well if something is Bad I need to reflect and Criticize to make the most of it's worth out of it. like u know. fuck u for wasting my time I will now tear u into pieces as a critical thinking exercise :D 
fwcu: (Default)
sorry for always updating on monday not-funday even though FRIDAY was spoken to be my funday of choice. whatever it is, anyway. I really did not read anything this week ..... I think it was the combination of being sucked into hades_hell again [haha do u see how reductive that is, it's like saying chai tea, cuz hades is ... hades is -] and uhm, good old kpop nostalgia. I did a very little amount of writing... uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. anyway, instead for you, I have highly coveted baru cormorant review that is very incoherennt and I apologize I did kind of give up at a point and you can tell.

this review is about 3k words but I'm sure it is not the most concise it could be ;;

Read more... )
fwcu: (cat)
it’s sunday so once again, i’m Late! this is both unfortunate and really sad since i was hyperaware of Friday for the days leading up to Friday, and then it was actually Friday and i was not aware it was Friday. I have a lot of ground to cover because we established a #library channel on the discord server and my life has been a fun zigzag of reading/tweeting/coding/archiving. notion databases are things that are so personal….To Me!

anyway, a lot of articles this week. 

Read more... )

i was going to talk about baru but i started reading baru on saturday, so it can't count for this week's roundup.

next week….hopefully i get through so much tennis because i was having fun and would like to have fun past the fifth episode; ken liu’s the paper menagerie has come in and some of my other library books are in transit [the little prince; a little history] … so physical books in my hands! 17776 and tim tebow are things i want to read, particularly jo's recs on the library channel backlog...<3 <3 <3 and jjk catch-up! i also do want to dig through the new yorker archives....so much to read in this world huh?
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fuck i was supposed to do this two days ago…......well i got so caught up in...[giving cousin art supplies so he has something to do while he's over] and [3 day overdue thing for dad] that i simply forgot. i also picked up hades on friday, and not only was my shoulder super fucked up but so was my wrist. worth it for the amount of fun i had on my 3heat poseidon sword run. TO ME. maybe not.

this week i reread [far from the tree], and i read a memoir [in the dream house] and then i read an extremely horrible and wretched book [the burning god] but it finally got fun and the things i wanted most to happen in the book happened... but they happened in a really bad way. and then i woke up and the post-book hangover set it. i also read, another incredible fic [you can come through]. and i think those are the only things i read this week. so the count is low, and perhaps very low in intellectual value ... i don't know please don't look at me. Anyway this will get long.

Read more... )

 ayo. that's what's up <3 

fwcu: (namesake)
i really managed not to read anything BUT drarry this whole week...which was both nightmarish and fun. but also proof my brain is melting and going to shit. the only non-drarry thing i've read this week was... )

now. ahhh....the drarry. unsure what order this will be in, i clicked into and closed the tabs of a lot more than i read, and i still have a ridiculous amount of unread, still open tabs.....i've been trying to exercise the ao3 mark for later function but LOL. some preliminary notes, that are not quite related to each other but ..
- I clicked out of a fic because harry said ‘jesus’ instead of ‘merlin’
everytime i go to read fic i also just go, what if i just reread far from the tree, because that fic has ruined me. nothing will ever be that fic.
- I clicked out of a fic because it was set in america and i was like ‘what the fuck. I wanna read about weird british people shit’
- I clicked out of a fic because draco was not sneer-y and horribly adjusted enough
- I keep clicking into gracerene fic while thinking ‘we need to stop recommending gracrene fic’ … all they do is write weird sex. why. like oh my god they’re such a freak. like i respect it, but i feel like i’m allowed to not respect it also. also on my explorations, i’ve discovered Writcraft who also writes insane weird sex fic. tbh none of it is like actually weird, it’s just weird when you consider the sex dynamics they are writing into the drarry dynamic. if that makes sense aha. though i will say Writcraft writes one of my fave dracos ever.
- like i really, can’t stand descriptions of malfoy’s pasty white ‘arse’........that is so disgusting to me personally. please don’t make me think of a skinny white man’s ass.
- I also hate the word ‘buttocks’ like what the fuck? What the actual fuck?
- i think i've said this before, but i really prefer when harry is the more sympathetic/focused on character because it's the pretense of relatability. like not everyone reads him as brown, but i like to read him as brown, and not everyone makes him bisexual - but most of the time he is. and also i'm a main character fucker so .... i am just geared to like him more and relate to him more, and want more for him/from him/etc. like i realllyyyyy, really don't give a fuck about draco. it's the dynamic that's sexy and the harry that's sexy, draco on his own is like horrible and pathetic and not even that interesting bc he's literally a blood purist supremacist. like......just the real world equivalent is gross as fuck but through the lens of not-as-serious fictional equivalencies, it's somewhat more palatable.

so to start us off... not that these are in any particular order. kind of just went through my ao3 history... )
fwcu: (Default)
yesss i know going by fridays is kind of a weird system, but for some reason [my mom sat me down on a friday and asked me to deliver her a week_in_advance plan] i will be going by fridays. if i keep this up. i actually read some stuff this week so i did want to document it - not that this is strictly about reviewing my readings, but maybe more about the 'experience' of them, whether or not that had anything to do with the actual content of the pages. in no particular order:

... )

anyway, so that was my week in reading materials. so here's a wrap-up list of what i'd like to get read next week: 
- what it is like to be a bat? (thomas nagel)
- the straight mind (monique wittig)
- drive your plow over the bones of the dead (olga tokarczuk)
- the housekeeper and the professor (yoko ogawa) (sorry lin ;;)
 
and that's kind of it! <333 

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