I really hate that romantasy has turned fae into brooding hot vaguely magical guys with massive schlongs. Fae have such interesting mythologies and it gives writers a chance to explore elements of different European folklores, but it’s just a shortcut to make love interests Hot and Mysterious
i was just saying this! to me it just seems like they’ve “de-twinkified” fairies from old childhood cartoons and have done little to no research on the history that is the fae. like at this point they’re not even in the same realm, just uncanny hot men with wings and sharp teeth….
Her having never brushed her hair in her life is such a ‘rich person writing poor people’ thing oh my god. Like I’d get if she hadn’t brushed in a while because she didn’t have a chance but never? No way, it would be so matted she would pull it out in chunks Like when I had long hair as a kid I couldn’t get all the way through with a brush and after a couple weeks the parts I didn’t get to was so matted it took hours to untangle. And I was just a little kid who went to school all day, I wasn’t fighting and climbing all the time
@@AliciaRobinson. there's a book called Iron Gland? I've never heard of it, so Idk if it was somewhere else (I swear it feels like it was from a book I was beta reading for, but I can't remember the name)
when you said the author is an English literature major and then mentioned that love interest dude is named King Fisher, for a split second, i hoped that (1) he dressed flamboyantly with the colours of a kingfisher bird, and (2) his name was a reference to the Fisher King, the owner of the Holy Grail in Arthurian legends. then i remembered what kind of book we are talking about.
'If you liked Fourth Wing, you will likw this' So I will hate it 😂 Honestly, everything booktok recomends these days just feels like Barbie Dolls: same face, same body, different clothes...
That's exactly why books today are so... bad. At least the ones that are trending. Because lately people don't write for story and characters, they just write based off of tropes we've seen a million times. So every new author fears straying from that. Now every book that comes out is exactly the same because authors aren't pushed to make something new. What's trending is just the same tropes over and over with no story and new authors don't get any attention with a genuinely good and unique book anymore. It absolutely sucks.
Colloquial is a good word for it, I guess this style could be considered unprofessional, lazy, or using a lot of modern slang. Even like, beige prose but it sounds like she tries to add big words to feel smart like purple prose but it doesn’t give that
It's so strange to me that she uses "hydrogen" "oxygen" "solar plexus" etc, all these words that don't seem to fit her setting (like, they have corsets, which would place it after the middle ages, but they have braziers would would be more medieval) but then she called mercury "quicksilver" the whole time, like... what fucking time period is this supposed to emulate?
@@halfwen4575 btw there is a book called Metalworking Through History, and that and a little bit of research could really help all these light fantasy/romantacy writers pick a time period and stick with it (or, mix time periods with purpose like not needing smelting or something because they have magic)
It’s still bothering me that his name is King Fisher like that’s literally a bird. It’s a little bird with a goofy ass big head and beak and it eats fish. It’s pretty but it’s not badass it’s a very weird thing to name him
I think it's a reference to the Fisher King from Arthurian mythology. A poorly executed reference if so, but there's a chance that's what the author was going for.
@@QueenSiv i do find it very weird that she had been writing most of the book in this super modern way, and then used "awesome" closer to it's original meaning, so idk if like... she *wants* to write in a more High Fantasy way, but also, is unwilling to commit to it for some reason (probably because a lot of romantasy readers are Light Fantasy readers, and would find it stuffy)
Oh my gosh, this truly makes it feel like tis genre has three different plot points, four varieties of character and two and a half types of powers. Notes from Le me: "How could you even kill a fae?" woulldn't be incorrect of anything but it just does not feel right for the genre. One is so much more common in literature, especially stuff that is supposed to sound fantasy or fancy. Also, "he's not a man, he is a male" made me think about how ususally, with animals, we translate male and female as Männchen and Weibchen, and I gotta say, "Er ist kein Mann, er ist ein Fae Männchen" really does not pack the punch it (allegely) has in English
38:55 This is the problem I have with so many popular books. The main character has no internality. She (because, let's be honest, it's usually she) never reflects on what happens to her, never questions anything, or even uses basic logic to draw conclusions. These MC's just roll with the plot. And yet we're supposed to believe they're super smart, talented, special, or whatever.
Women? Having personhood? The only good woman to these kinds of authors is a self-insert or a token cheerleader to the self-insert. They’re there to allow the author access to the fantasy of the male lead, and have a few traits slapped on top to make them feel ‘cool’ to self insert on. But the actual center of the character is just to believe or act in a way that excitingly fascilitates the male lead. Fawning when that’s the author’s thing, like in the ‘lady doll’ book, bickering and ~spunky when that’s the authors thing. Like don’t get me wrong all writing does that to some extent (building characters and events to guide the story and characters where authors want them to go) but when it’s really poorly executed any underlying problems of the author’s mindset get VERY exposed.
yeah i've also been calling this genre / vibe of books 'aging millennial cringe'-which i say with love, as an aging millennial. i do think there's something kind of sweet about it conceptually, in the 'your older gen x disney wine cousin who posts too many minion memes on facebook' kind of way. like, at least in its most sincere form, we're just looking at a repressed 30-40 year old woman who hadn't read anything since twilight until they found SJM and were like, "wait.........i ALSO want to write about my hot fantasy boyfriend with kinkified tropes......." but at this point 'rOmAnTaSy' has gotten so much traction in the publishing industry that they're just soullessly milking it for all its worth and it doesn't even have the joy of shamelessness or sincerity anymore. its just an unsexy cash grab
It's just another wave of young adult genre like the dystopian or paranormal craze. But even now even those trends produced some good works, I can't genuinely find actual quality in romantasy😭
@@lilybartgremlin I know, I just really hate gender deterministic language, and these acotar ripoffs are so obsessed with really describing how ‘males’ are absurdly masculine and ‘females’ are so feminine except for the NLOG protagonist. It never seems to be an interesting commentary on gender and sex being social constructs, it just feels like a way for the author to emphasise how masculine but Different our Totally Male love interest is As someone who is trans and also studies critical social theory, it’s just an automatic red flag for me, especially in romance. Plus from a worldbuilding perspective it’s just lazy imo. If she wanted to make the difference between their concepts of gender a prominent aspect of the plot, i think it’d be more interesting if fae had a completely different concept of gender and highlighted the MC’s pretty shallow version of feminism
@@tyler-df3wyyou said it so perfectly. Despite fae supposedly having their own culture, their ideology surrounding gender is too eerily similar to human trad gender norms. It’s kinda of disappointing
@@rizzobeloved literally, like the gender binary isn’t even a ‘human’ thing, it’s a white supremacist thing that’s been forced on people to enact societal control. Many cultures historically had different standards for gender and sexuality, and it wasn’t until colonialism that they were made to take on the gender binary. What is the reason for a magical race of people to use ‘male’ and ‘female’ when they have presumably never suffered cultural genocide and don’t seem to have extreme divisions of roles between them? Because in my mind the only reasons are that it’s a lazy ACOTAR ripoff and that the author has no knowledge of gender theory
@@rizzobelovedmy biggest complaint in so many of these ‘dark romance’ stories or whatever involving the supernatural is that they ALWAYS feel exactly like human society and human mentality, usually ‘alpha’ podcasters on even more steroids lmao. So frustrating. You can still indulge in ur idfic sub fantasy without being so BORING, authors.
Jenny Nicholson reviewed Black Moon Rising by this author. It was just published Reylo fanfic with the names changed. It sounds like this book is exactly the same. Two suns, like really girl? She needs to try something new.
Feels like it's been down hill since 50 shades. Self publishing is not doing anyone any actual good, it's just allowing unedited slop to steal money from people when you can get better writing free in fanfiction online. (And that's saying a lot)
"Her eyes darted to King Fisher." I wasn't paying attention and thought she was actually looking at a bird and I was very confused. That name is so dumb.
Someone suggested reading quicksilver and I almost did but then I remembered ‘ wait, what does Sophie think about this?’ 😂. A friend gave it a 5 star and I was like really?
The queen is called "Madra".........like "dog" in irish 😭 ETA: "Iseabail" is the Scottish form of the name "Isabel" and it is indeed pronounced like "ish eh bal" (or "ishbel" or "ishabael" lol). It's a real name, but it seems out of place here bc none of the other names seem to be from the same origins?? Idk if i were the author, I'd have the fae have names from one source language & humans from another, just to reflect the fact that they live in completely separate worlds. Obviously real life is more complicated than that, but we can use short hand in media to get a point across 😅
11:09 pirates drank rum bc they often didn’t have clean water, the process to make alcohol (of various types) is different and typically doesn’t include water so it’s a way to attempt to stay hydrated without water but it’s not really sustainable, just historically what some people did
Straight alcohol is actually pretty dehydrating, it can be added to water to disinfect it which I think is what you're thinking of. Rum would be mixed with water and fruit juice (mainly lemon juice) to make grog, which was consumed to prevent scurvy
@@platedlizard fr fr I could have specified that more but I’m lazy tbh thankyou for adding to this cuz I didn’t really know all that and I had no idea that’s what made grog different
@@archienoyce2453found the alcoholic!! I’m just kidding yeah I’m not exactly a professional I’ve been to a few distilleries and wine tastings and at no point did they mention adding water but I DID go to a brewery and they DID mention adding water but I FORGOT
@@QueenSiv nah it’s all good I’m just correcting, I’m hardly an expert but I’m a chemistry student and we’ve had many the joke made in class about drinking straight ethanol lol
I've had a whole world in my head for over a decade. I haven't even used it for a gaming thing, let alone writing. How can people just put a thin veneer over their smut and call it world building? I don't read smut nor do I denigrate those who do? But, if you're going to write fantasy, MAKE THE WORLD MAKE SENSE. Sheesh.
all the things you point out make sense and this is yet another incident of lazy world building and writing and the fact that it's popular somehow makes me question humanity fr 😩 edit: also tats and mates, acotar much?? they're giving rhys and feyre. ew. and the unnecessary tension/hate and dumb sex scenes are giving fourth wing.
That bandana looks so slay on you 💅 Also that cover looks not only ai generated but also like someone busted on his face. Dear God these books are inbreeding now
Fun review as always, but I think I will continue to be confused and baffled as long as people continue to keep attributing tropes, creatures, magic systems, and terms of phrase that have been around for YEARS in both fanfiction and in the romantasy/fairy ya-adult fiction for much longer than SJM has been writing as being inspired by her/ripping her off, when she herself was literally pulling from genres and writing styles and fae lore that was already around and definitely did not invent. Like sure, some authors may be inspired by her, but its honestly a lot more likely for both SJM and many other authors of the same generation to just largely be inspired from the stuff they read in their youth + fanfic and the like (so much complaints of romance "spice" or smut scenes nowadays are so funny cause if you are in any fandom space where you end up reading a lot of fanfiction, you realize a lot of these authors probably started out with writing fanfic and are probably just pulling from common/popular fanfic smut tropes & terminology), that happen to have a lot of overlap due to being of the same generation/s.
Definitely agree that this author should have been a bit more consistent with time period/word choices to indicate the time period better. Also absolutely tired of the surface level feminism of "I'm not a girly girl, I do BOY stuff which makes me DIFFERENT" which you are absolutely right , should have been left behind in early 2010s YA fiction. And of course, yet another example of demonizing the non-specific "corsets" (are they bodies? Staies/stays? S-bend corsets?? Etc? There's so many different styles !) without any real research or understanding of what they actually do and how the shapes were actually achieved. Not surprising though along with all the other inconsistencies with what era of fashion and literally everything else they were even drawing from for world building.
I’m having my tin foil hat on here BUT! isn’t it weird that the author of fourth wing was writing only (military) contemporary romance and all of a sudden had a romantasy (that was release in May) that went mega popular out of nowhere last year, and this year we have an author who was only writing (dark romance) contemporary romance and all of a sudden had a romantasy (that was released in June, which is so close to May lol) that went mega viral out of nowhere as well? Is it now a thing with romantasy that’s gonna happen every year and we’ll have to pretend that it’s not forced on audience?
12:37 the ubiquity of the "her parents are 💀" book trope is hilarious to me, as someone whose parents are 💀. Like I do not know anyone who is my age with no parents, but it's such a ridiculously common mc backstory???
Dead parents backstory is so common because it is a utilitarian trope. It allows the MC to go on adventures without needing to ask "Why aren't their parents stopping them", and it means you have fewer characters to keep track of.
@@daevious_not to forget how it’s a cheap and easy tool to create sympathy for the mc. Also there’s this Disney thinking about how it will make the mc mature faster. As if trauma could facilitate character development!
Well there’s plenty of books in the romance genre with a fantasy/supernatural subgenre, or fantasy books with a strong romance secondary plot…no titles popping to my mind immediately other than War For The Oaks by Emma Bull, about an out of work indie rock musician getting threatened into being a human agent of a Sidhe court
Hi! Just shooting my shot. I’m an indie author and I just released my debut novel An Oath Broken (YA Fantasy) and I was wondering if you’d be interested in getting a copy. It has BIPOC characters, a magic system based on stars, coming of age story, and a journey to find world changing secrets. Just let me know! I’m just looking for more readers to get my work out there.
What am I doing here? I'm an epic fantasy reader but so here for gossip about romantasy. I wanna open my mind to it, any recommendations? I think your videos are really interesting, so critical of popular books I've never read but I'm kinda worried that romantasy might be not for me 😅
Du bust fuckin lustig alter 😆😆😆😆 (excuse my informality!) and so many good points. I love your reviews so much. also eigentlich auf Englisch sagt man “you” as the German “man”, it’s called the “general ‘you’”, it’s very common. As a German American, it’s so fun to hear you slip into German sometimes. I’m tickled!
@@jonweman6128 it means the cat had satisfied its curiosity, and that satisfaction brought the cat back. The downside of the Pet Sematary scenario is the cat being even more murdery than before, but I suppose that could be a plus for some people?
I stop watching at 7 minutes. Get to the point plz. I may have agreed with your points but there was so many unnecessary commentary. Have a great day. Sorry if this sounds like hate but it is just my opinion.
You are a hater by choice. You hate because you want to have a voice in the maelstrom of shouting voices. You are allowed to put a book down, or stop listening. Many, many views, though, this video will bring. Or you just wanted to make a video and express your opinion, that's fine. You have yours and I have mine. Haven't read it, won't read it. Thanks for your time.
I hope you write comments like these under KrimsonRogue's and James Tullos' videos too. If not, I'd recommend you check your sexism and need to mansplain. It's also Sophie's choice to read books she hates and upload videos where she voices her opinion. If you don't like her content, why are you even here?
When someone calls me a hater, I tell them "I'm not a hater, I'm a concerned citizen."
😂😂😂😂
I really hate that romantasy has turned fae into brooding hot vaguely magical guys with massive schlongs. Fae have such interesting mythologies and it gives writers a chance to explore elements of different European folklores, but it’s just a shortcut to make love interests Hot and Mysterious
i was just saying this! to me it just seems like they’ve “de-twinkified” fairies from old childhood cartoons and have done little to no research on the history that is the fae. like at this point they’re not even in the same realm, just uncanny hot men with wings and sharp teeth….
Fae are scary, they should be scary!
Fae are weird assholes, they should be weird assholes.
They got turned into twilight vampires.
That's why I loved Holly Black's take in it with The Cruel Prince and the Modern Faerie Tale series.
Her having never brushed her hair in her life is such a ‘rich person writing poor people’ thing oh my god. Like I’d get if she hadn’t brushed in a while because she didn’t have a chance but never? No way, it would be so matted she would pull it out in chunks
Like when I had long hair as a kid I couldn’t get all the way through with a brush and after a couple weeks the parts I didn’t get to was so matted it took hours to untangle. And I was just a little kid who went to school all day, I wasn’t fighting and climbing all the time
this book sounds like a bunch of generic tropes and plot points from 20 popular romantasies randomized to create a new story
I swear to god, I feel like I read the gauntlet thing somewhere before lol
@@ragingdevithat’s in iron gland I think😂😂
@@AliciaRobinson. there's a book called Iron Gland? I've never heard of it, so Idk if it was somewhere else (I swear it feels like it was from a book I was beta reading for, but I can't remember the name)
sophie your background sign is truly inspirational today
*F I S H*
when you said the author is an English literature major and then mentioned that love interest dude is named King Fisher, for a split second, i hoped that (1) he dressed flamboyantly with the colours of a kingfisher bird, and (2) his name was a reference to the Fisher King, the owner of the Holy Grail in Arthurian legends. then i remembered what kind of book we are talking about.
I also thought both of those for a second, and either would be a massive improvement 😔
Omg me too!!
maybe she wanted to but then got caught up with his magical schlong
@@honestlysophie the magical romantasy schlong is inescapable, it seems 😔
@@honestlysophie she could have made his dick be the holy grail tho
'If you liked Fourth Wing, you will likw this'
So I will hate it 😂 Honestly, everything booktok recomends these days just feels like Barbie Dolls: same face, same body, different clothes...
I just looked at Barbie she a lot diverse then these booktok people she come in wheelchair it funny really 😅
@@Breadhmm3840 TRUE 🤣 Even Barbie has different bodies, colors and stories. Booktok really is at its lowest...
That's exactly why books today are so... bad. At least the ones that are trending. Because lately people don't write for story and characters, they just write based off of tropes we've seen a million times. So every new author fears straying from that. Now every book that comes out is exactly the same because authors aren't pushed to make something new. What's trending is just the same tropes over and over with no story and new authors don't get any attention with a genuinely good and unique book anymore. It absolutely sucks.
If you like Fourth Wing-
You mean a mix of modern words, instagram clothing, and basic fanfic s÷x than yeah.
Colloquial is a good word for it, I guess this style could be considered unprofessional, lazy, or using a lot of modern slang. Even like, beige prose but it sounds like she tries to add big words to feel smart like purple prose but it doesn’t give that
i tried reading this book yesterday and it felt like being hit with a frying pan. word salad ass book
Did it come with the cartoonish "bonk" sound effect?
It's so strange to me that she uses "hydrogen" "oxygen" "solar plexus" etc, all these words that don't seem to fit her setting (like, they have corsets, which would place it after the middle ages, but they have braziers would would be more medieval) but then she called mercury "quicksilver" the whole time, like... what fucking time period is this supposed to emulate?
Yes. :x
@@halfwen4575 btw there is a book called Metalworking Through History, and that and a little bit of research could really help all these light fantasy/romantacy writers pick a time period and stick with it (or, mix time periods with purpose like not needing smelting or something because they have magic)
@@ragingdevi This book's sounds neat, I'm not a writer but will definitely check this out. Thank you so much
i feel like this is the book that killed any hope for romantasy
What are you hoping for in future Romantasy books
honestly there’s probably much worse coming still
Fantasy with romance >>>> romance with fantasy.
Also there's like 30 trained guards there but don't worry they all wait their turn to fight the almighty Sarah one at a time lol
It’s still bothering me that his name is King Fisher like that’s literally a bird. It’s a little bird with a goofy ass big head and beak and it eats fish. It’s pretty but it’s not badass it’s a very weird thing to name him
I think it's a reference to the Fisher King from Arthurian mythology. A poorly executed reference if so, but there's a chance that's what the author was going for.
@@GhostsMcGee how much you wanna bet she thought she was being so deep she didn’t know about the bird
@@QueenSivomg stopppp, you're probably right 😂
@@ragingdevilmao there’s NO WAY this girl writes this and touches grass so I’m like so sure
@@QueenSiv i do find it very weird that she had been writing most of the book in this super modern way, and then used "awesome" closer to it's original meaning, so idk if like... she *wants* to write in a more High Fantasy way, but also, is unwilling to commit to it for some reason (probably because a lot of romantasy readers are Light Fantasy readers, and would find it stuffy)
Oh my gosh, this truly makes it feel like tis genre has three different plot points, four varieties of character and two and a half types of powers.
Notes from Le me: "How could you even kill a fae?" woulldn't be incorrect of anything but it just does not feel right for the genre. One is so much more common in literature, especially stuff that is supposed to sound fantasy or fancy. Also, "he's not a man, he is a male" made me think about how ususally, with animals, we translate male and female as Männchen and Weibchen, and I gotta say, "Er ist kein Mann, er ist ein Fae Männchen" really does not pack the punch it (allegely) has in English
These books are becoming a copy of a copy so it’s only getting worse lmao
literally bro💀 actual book incest, every generation gets dumber and frailer
As an American living in Germany, I also wonder why there are so many English words in German sentences. Good to know yall are confused too.
Because of the American cultural hegemony in the world. Hope this helps!
It's honestly depressing
38:55 This is the problem I have with so many popular books. The main character has no internality. She (because, let's be honest, it's usually she) never reflects on what happens to her, never questions anything, or even uses basic logic to draw conclusions. These MC's just roll with the plot. And yet we're supposed to believe they're super smart, talented, special, or whatever.
Women? Having personhood? The only good woman to these kinds of authors is a self-insert or a token cheerleader to the self-insert. They’re there to allow the author access to the fantasy of the male lead, and have a few traits slapped on top to make them feel ‘cool’ to self insert on. But the actual center of the character is just to believe or act in a way that excitingly fascilitates the male lead. Fawning when that’s the author’s thing, like in the ‘lady doll’ book, bickering and ~spunky when that’s the authors thing.
Like don’t get me wrong all writing does that to some extent (building characters and events to guide the story and characters where authors want them to go) but when it’s really poorly executed any underlying problems of the author’s mindset get VERY exposed.
"I'm a hater not by choice but by force" facts!! 💯
yeah i've also been calling this genre / vibe of books 'aging millennial cringe'-which i say with love, as an aging millennial. i do think there's something kind of sweet about it conceptually, in the 'your older gen x disney wine cousin who posts too many minion memes on facebook' kind of way. like, at least in its most sincere form, we're just looking at a repressed 30-40 year old woman who hadn't read anything since twilight until they found SJM and were like, "wait.........i ALSO want to write about my hot fantasy boyfriend with kinkified tropes......." but at this point 'rOmAnTaSy' has gotten so much traction in the publishing industry that they're just soullessly milking it for all its worth and it doesn't even have the joy of shamelessness or sincerity anymore. its just an unsexy cash grab
It's just another wave of young adult genre like the dystopian or paranormal craze. But even now even those trends produced some good works, I can't genuinely find actual quality in romantasy😭
Yet another booktok book that continues to affirm my correct opinion that anything booktok says is the best ever is terrible
As a trans guy, that ‘a man.’ ‘No, a male*.’ line literally made me give the hardest side eye ever. Like what in the biological essentialism
the point is that it's not a man because it's not a human lol
@@lilybartgremlin I know, I just really hate gender deterministic language, and these acotar ripoffs are so obsessed with really describing how ‘males’ are absurdly masculine and ‘females’ are so feminine except for the NLOG protagonist. It never seems to be an interesting commentary on gender and sex being social constructs, it just feels like a way for the author to emphasise how masculine but Different our Totally Male love interest is
As someone who is trans and also studies critical social theory, it’s just an automatic red flag for me, especially in romance. Plus from a worldbuilding perspective it’s just lazy imo. If she wanted to make the difference between their concepts of gender a prominent aspect of the plot, i think it’d be more interesting if fae had a completely different concept of gender and highlighted the MC’s pretty shallow version of feminism
@@tyler-df3wyyou said it so perfectly. Despite fae supposedly having their own culture, their ideology surrounding gender is too eerily similar to human trad gender norms. It’s kinda of disappointing
@@rizzobeloved literally, like the gender binary isn’t even a ‘human’ thing, it’s a white supremacist thing that’s been forced on people to enact societal control. Many cultures historically had different standards for gender and sexuality, and it wasn’t until colonialism that they were made to take on the gender binary. What is the reason for a magical race of people to use ‘male’ and ‘female’ when they have presumably never suffered cultural genocide and don’t seem to have extreme divisions of roles between them? Because in my mind the only reasons are that it’s a lazy ACOTAR ripoff and that the author has no knowledge of gender theory
@@rizzobelovedmy biggest complaint in so many of these ‘dark romance’ stories or whatever involving the supernatural is that they ALWAYS feel exactly like human society and human mentality, usually ‘alpha’ podcasters on even more steroids lmao. So frustrating. You can still indulge in ur idfic sub fantasy without being so BORING, authors.
Jenny Nicholson reviewed Black Moon Rising by this author. It was just published Reylo fanfic with the names changed. It sounds like this book is exactly the same. Two suns, like really girl? She needs to try something new.
you mean to tell me she kept writing after that????
Noooo this explains so much lmao
Feels like it's been down hill since 50 shades.
Self publishing is not doing anyone any actual good, it's just allowing unedited slop to steal money from people when you can get better writing free in fanfiction online. (And that's saying a lot)
Fr i can find so many better fics than this and they're FREE! why the fuck should I be paying money for this garbage again?
"Her eyes darted to King Fisher." I wasn't paying attention and thought she was actually looking at a bird and I was very confused. That name is so dumb.
STOP THIS SOUND LIKE AN ANIME FANFIC (and I would know cause I've written them 😭)!!!!
Whatever lip product you have on at the beginning of the video is very slay for you
Right? Such a cute shade!
I DNFd this one early. Thank you for the rundown so I can confirm that I made the right decision. Loved the video!
Hello, I also DNF'd this dang book. I got the audiobook version to read along. Saeris character and the narration was ANNOYING!!!
I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU TO ROAST THIS BOOK. Because truly, how am I suppose to find a man named Kingfisher attractive ??
Or Fish😭
In uni I wrote my thesis on the history of alchemy. this book is physically painful
Someone suggested reading quicksilver and I almost did but then I remembered ‘ wait, what does Sophie think about this?’ 😂. A friend gave it a 5 star and I was like really?
The queen is called "Madra".........like "dog" in irish 😭
ETA: "Iseabail" is the Scottish form of the name "Isabel" and it is indeed pronounced like "ish eh bal" (or "ishbel" or "ishabael" lol). It's a real name, but it seems out of place here bc none of the other names seem to be from the same origins?? Idk if i were the author, I'd have the fae have names from one source language & humans from another, just to reflect the fact that they live in completely separate worlds. Obviously real life is more complicated than that, but we can use short hand in media to get a point across 😅
11:09 pirates drank rum bc they often didn’t have clean water, the process to make alcohol (of various types) is different and typically doesn’t include water so it’s a way to attempt to stay hydrated without water but it’s not really sustainable, just historically what some people did
Straight alcohol is actually pretty dehydrating, it can be added to water to disinfect it which I think is what you're thinking of. Rum would be mixed with water and fruit juice (mainly lemon juice) to make grog, which was consumed to prevent scurvy
@@platedlizard fr fr I could have specified that more but I’m lazy tbh thankyou for adding to this cuz I didn’t really know all that and I had no idea that’s what made grog different
it still has water though, alcohol is just used to sterelise it. if you drank straight ethanol you'd be in big trouble lmao
@@archienoyce2453found the alcoholic!! I’m just kidding yeah I’m not exactly a professional I’ve been to a few distilleries and wine tastings and at no point did they mention adding water but I DID go to a brewery and they DID mention adding water but I FORGOT
@@QueenSiv nah it’s all good I’m just correcting, I’m hardly an expert but I’m a chemistry student and we’ve had many the joke made in class about drinking straight ethanol lol
I've had a whole world in my head for over a decade. I haven't even used it for a gaming thing, let alone writing. How can people just put a thin veneer over their smut and call it world building? I don't read smut nor do I denigrate those who do? But, if you're going to write fantasy, MAKE THE WORLD MAKE SENSE. Sheesh.
all the things you point out make sense and this is yet another incident of lazy world building and writing and the fact that it's popular somehow makes me question humanity fr 😩
edit: also tats and mates, acotar much?? they're giving rhys and feyre. ew. and the unnecessary tension/hate and dumb sex scenes are giving fourth wing.
sarahs are cool fr she doesn’t do us justice 😔
7:29 thankyou for clearing this up 💖👏
That bandana looks so slay on you 💅
Also that cover looks not only ai generated but also like someone busted on his face. Dear God these books are inbreeding now
Personally don't read a lot of popular or trad pub books but I had heard a few accounts talking about Quicksilver but not many.
My personality in winter is hating dresses and loving pants ( fleece one a must have)
in sophie we trust
I am not a hater by choice…but by force! 😂 Love it
Fun review as always, but I think I will continue to be confused and baffled as long as people continue to keep attributing tropes, creatures, magic systems, and terms of phrase that have been around for YEARS in both fanfiction and in the romantasy/fairy ya-adult fiction for much longer than SJM has been writing as being inspired by her/ripping her off, when she herself was literally pulling from genres and writing styles and fae lore that was already around and definitely did not invent. Like sure, some authors may be inspired by her, but its honestly a lot more likely for both SJM and many other authors of the same generation to just largely be inspired from the stuff they read in their youth + fanfic and the like (so much complaints of romance "spice" or smut scenes nowadays are so funny cause if you are in any fandom space where you end up reading a lot of fanfiction, you realize a lot of these authors probably started out with writing fanfic and are probably just pulling from common/popular fanfic smut tropes & terminology), that happen to have a lot of overlap due to being of the same generation/s.
Definitely agree that this author should have been a bit more consistent with time period/word choices to indicate the time period better. Also absolutely tired of the surface level feminism of "I'm not a girly girl, I do BOY stuff which makes me DIFFERENT" which you are absolutely right , should have been left behind in early 2010s YA fiction. And of course, yet another example of demonizing the non-specific "corsets" (are they bodies? Staies/stays? S-bend corsets?? Etc? There's so many different styles !) without any real research or understanding of what they actually do and how the shapes were actually achieved. Not surprising though along with all the other inconsistencies with what era of fashion and literally everything else they were even drawing from for world building.
I'm angry I have only now found your channel, you are my cup of tea, danke
🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻
Hearing you speak German scratches an itch in my brain
I’m having my tin foil hat on here BUT! isn’t it weird that the author of fourth wing was writing only (military) contemporary romance and all of a sudden had a romantasy (that was release in May) that went mega popular out of nowhere last year, and this year we have an author who was only writing (dark romance) contemporary romance and all of a sudden had a romantasy (that was released in June, which is so close to May lol) that went mega viral out of nowhere as well? Is it now a thing with romantasy that’s gonna happen every year and we’ll have to pretend that it’s not forced on audience?
Unrelated but Sophie looks so cute with the glasses
someone in my book club showed this was next in their tbr and I didn’t even know what to say 💀
That cover alone makes me hate it like wtf girlies if you actually think this is a hot guy 🤢
Well shit, I didn't think it could get any worse, that's quite tragic
I’m so happy you made this video! I’ve been waiting!😭
“Don’t you dare call him a ‘man’, he’s a mascoiiiiiiiiiiiiiid.”
12:37 the ubiquity of the "her parents are 💀" book trope is hilarious to me, as someone whose parents are 💀. Like I do not know anyone who is my age with no parents, but it's such a ridiculously common mc backstory???
Dead parents backstory is so common because it is a utilitarian trope. It allows the MC to go on adventures without needing to ask "Why aren't their parents stopping them", and it means you have fewer characters to keep track of.
@@daevious_not to forget how it’s a cheap and easy tool to create sympathy for the mc. Also there’s this Disney thinking about how it will make the mc mature faster. As if trauma could facilitate character development!
10:17 victorious deep cut to when they were trapped in that trailer/ camper with no water on a hot day omg
I think you're shrinking of STI, not UTI. 😂 But this was hilarious.
haha as a Sara thank you for the shout out, I'm joining your army against this main character
A gauntlet like a glove?
Not Mariah Carey stop 🤣💀
Isn’t quicksilver a brand of credit card or am I tripping?
Why's she got to mess with redheads like this
my dog’s name is Fishy, and we often just call him Fish or Mr. Fish. 😭 😭 .
honestly cute name for a dog
This book is awful 😭
What the hell? I'm so glad I decided not to read it! 😭
0:59 😂 that cover is... something...
F I S H
Are there any actually good romantasy books out there?
Well there’s plenty of books in the romance genre with a fantasy/supernatural subgenre, or fantasy books with a strong romance secondary plot…no titles popping to my mind immediately other than War For The Oaks by Emma Bull, about an out of work indie rock musician getting threatened into being a human agent of a Sidhe court
Hi! Just shooting my shot. I’m an indie author and I just released my debut novel An Oath Broken (YA Fantasy) and I was wondering if you’d be interested in getting a copy. It has BIPOC characters, a magic system based on stars, coming of age story, and a journey to find world changing secrets. Just let me know! I’m just looking for more readers to get my work out there.
im sorry but king fisher really eating her up (not in the good way)
😭😭😭
What am I doing here? I'm an epic fantasy reader but so here for gossip about romantasy. I wanna open my mind to it, any recommendations? I think your videos are really interesting, so critical of popular books I've never read but I'm kinda worried that romantasy might be not for me 😅
Du bust fuckin lustig alter 😆😆😆😆 (excuse my informality!) and so many good points. I love your reviews so much.
also eigentlich auf Englisch sagt man “you” as the German “man”, it’s called the “general ‘you’”, it’s very common. As a German American, it’s so fun to hear you slip into German sometimes. I’m tickled!
I always liked the second part of that saying: “Curiosity killed the cat; satisfaction brought it back.”
What does that mean? (The second part)
I thought.the Pet Sematary brought the cat back.
@@jonweman6128 it means the cat had satisfied its curiosity, and that satisfaction brought the cat back. The downside of the Pet Sematary scenario is the cat being even more murdery than before, but I suppose that could be a plus for some people?
wonderful sign!!
Omg du bist so lustig! 😂 Super Video!🎉
I am scared💞🔥
Mariacarey :D
No because why did I kind of like Quicksilver? I cringed but I read on.
it’s so bad you can’t look away
why are you having an english accent while speaking german😂
I stop watching at 7 minutes. Get to the point plz. I may have agreed with your points but there was so many unnecessary commentary. Have a great day. Sorry if this sounds like hate but it is just my opinion.
Who cares about your opinion when you word it like that lol
Where is the person who cares?
This seems like the video that provides me with exposure therapy to help me stop getting irritated every time you pronounce "realm" as "relem" ^^'
it’s the accent 😔
@@honestlysophie Meinst du? Als Deutsche hatte ich noch nie das Bedürfnis, das so auszusprechen xD Aber ist ja voll okay! ^-^
@@EleiyaUmeiOh mein Gott 🙄
@@alyssum130 Ist was?
You are a hater by choice. You hate because you want to have a voice in the maelstrom of shouting voices. You are allowed to put a book down, or stop listening. Many, many views, though, this video will bring.
Or you just wanted to make a video and express your opinion, that's fine. You have yours and I have mine.
Haven't read it, won't read it. Thanks for your time.
I hope you write comments like these under KrimsonRogue's and James Tullos' videos too. If not, I'd recommend you check your sexism and need to mansplain.
It's also Sophie's choice to read books she hates and upload videos where she voices her opinion. If you don't like her content, why are you even here?
what lmfao
You don’t have to say anything. You can just leave. The rest of us really enjoy Sophie’s roasted books.
Are you a misogynist? There a tons of channels like hers... Do you comment under them too? If no, you have a lot of soul searching to do.
😂😂😂
20:06 Also using the word "thing" back to back.
10:20 my family still references that episode of victorious. iconic
7:03 NOOOO OMG NO I HATE HAVING SUCH A COMMON NAME MY SHIT IS OVER WHAYEVER SOPHIE SAYS IN THIS VIDEO ITS GONNA FEEL LIKE I DID SOMETHING NOOOOOO
🤭🤭🤭
F I S H