THIS IS A REUPLOAD, DO NOT PANIC. The first upload was demonetized so I reworked the original video to be more compliant with YT. I very much appreciate the rewatches, the shares, the likes, the comments, etc. You guys are great and thanks for dealing with my nonsense as I attempt to figure all this stuff out 🤪
I thought I was going crazy last night when I saw this. I kept telling my husband I was sure I'd watched it and I definitely remembered the thumbnail. Glad to see I'm not doololly after all.
The fact that Seattle somehow has Christian Grey and Zade in the vicinity makes me cackle and wonder what the hell western Washington did to deserve these idiots being written there. 😂
Something's in the water here. I moved here almost 4 years ago, and while I don't live in Seattle, I'm pretty close to it. I haven't met a Christian Grey or a Zade, but I met...let's say a version of both of them.😬 It's why I'm moving back home this year. Seriously, idk what's up with this area lol (love how gay it is tho).
Is it the weather, like in Florida? Something about the weather makes people go crazy, or worse, get into addictive illegal substances. I remember reading a study about it and wondered if this is true.🤔
Even if the book didn’t contain all the problematic stuff, it‘s still soooo badly written and I don’t understand why people love it. It‘s literally giving bad wattpad fanfiction and I feel like the people who like this story never went trough their „reading questionable fanfics“ phase.
Adeline is def a self insert and the most unrealistic feature is the idea of self published authors being super rich and selling out book tours. I’ve found wonderful indie pub authors and they know how competitive the industry is
But HD Carlton is actually making a lot of money from these books lol she’s definitely richer than most indie published authors and she had a sold out book tour recently in her home town. Hundreds of people in attendance , over 600 actually
@@money1137 one book tour? Or she had more? Also I think the keyword was super. You can definitely make money from self published books but super rich is different
CNC would have had Adeline’s inner thoughts be positive and satisfied while outside she begged him to go away because she told him ahead of time that is what she will do. Dub con would have had her unsure at first, but eventually enjoying herself and glad it happened. Her thoughts being so close to what actual r-victims feel and think is so insulting. Why use that? Why not have her or him react in any other way that could be sexy or romantic?
Also, in addition to this and kind of piggy-backing off this, during the first scene- 1:02:43 - victims of SA and r@pe can still have a biological reaction to the stimuli, even if it's unwanted. A physical reaction is not an excuse to SA someone. Edit: she says this later on the video! I have to consume the video in pieces lol
Plus typically CNC is something that has to be agreed on by both parties prior to the event, and when done ethically requires allot of communication and ground work put in place before hand (think discussions on what people’s limits are, safe words, etc) like with all sane acts of BDSM kink the sub is still the one with power to say no… shit like this is why I could never do it because irresponsible people like this author are writing full blown rape scenes and calling in kink.
@Kay-wp8xf Yes! It can also be a stress reaction. The mix of anxiety and the physical adrenaline combined with the stimulation of those areas can result in a full on orgasm regardless if the person enjoying it or not. There's a documentary on Netflix about a teacher sexually molesting his elementary grade students and one of the girls felt guilt for her entire life because she orgasmed while it was happening. She explains how scared and confused she was while it was happening.. and felt that she couldn't tell anyone because of her body's reaction. Its absolutly ignorant and predatory for any author or anyone to imply that your body's physical reaction is some kind of consent to sex acts.. this book disgusts me.
And like even if the author wanted it to be full on horror, the rest of the book completely disproves the idea that the author wanted it to be seen as a horror situation. Like, ma'am thats not kink! thats straight up just assault! ive seen fics on a03 tagged better than that book-
@@elvingearmasterirma7241 exactly, and what is with these badly written not kink, abuse books all having conservative undertone… is that just a conservative American thing? Or just a common or garden sexual repression thing? Like I’m not saying everyone in the kink / BDSM community is a liberal (I mean allot are, respect of boundaries and what not), but it’s like all of these stories involving horrid abuse labeled as kink seem to either be raised by repressed straight conservative women who aren’t in the scene, or young women who grew up/ were indoctrinated into a post 50shades world and don’t realise they have rights and autonomy, especially in the kink scene… this just makes me feel old and bitter.
youre so right!!! literally at the very beginning when he sees her for the first time he describes her as being dainty with an innocent face and then immediately jumps into saying how her eyes are the kind that always look seductive without even trying….it just rubs me the wrong way it feels so gross
@@aliganderson i think the emphasis is only there because that’s the current beauty standard 💀 freckles are THE thing right now, so is cinnamon/auburn hair and those billie eilish eyes etc etc. she just made a flawless dream character that girls can insert themselves into
People online calling this man daddy and writing long ass reviews about how he’s the best stalker bf and no other compares because of how he treats her is insane to me 😂 he doesn’t even read hot like what do you meaaaaaan
You know what. I’ve always been of the mind ‘let people enjoy what they want, let people read problematic shit because it’s not hurting anyone (even thought it hurts my soul).’ But this is ACTIVELY harming people if they get into an abusive relationship because it looks like this book and haven’t yet realized that abusive relationships are some of the most soul crushing, life sucking, health sapping situations to find yourself in. I just hope these women are being hyperbolic and having fan girl moments and actually realize this is problematic and NOT looking for it irl.
RIGHT and the idiots calling him "morally gray" when hes just a hypocrite with no morals, i hate idiots who cant read or right and blow up crappy books/pieces of literature like this. (haunting adeline.)
I've had a similar theory that the people who write these books are people who at one time wrote/read fanfic and the people who enjoy them are younger readers who never really discovered fanfic. I spent a lot of time reading fanfic and you can find things like this written so much better and with proper tags. (also let's be real, jury's out on how much of these were originally fanfic and has just had the serial numbers filed off)
The author could have easily made that gun scene cnc instead of straight up non-con. Just a few tweaks, like Adeline texting her friend not to worry about her, showing she could've called for help and chose not to, or having her get found on purpose, or just the tiniest bit of aftercare, such as him checking to make sure she's okay after it's done. Like, the bar is in hell.
We should call it what it is just call it is Rape! I hate how some brainless part of the romance and fanfic community have dubbed the term non con it minimises and softens something pure evil.
RIGHT!! Consent in fiction doesn’t have to be extremely explicit. But the author is very clearly trying to make it SA so I don’t see the point in calling it cnc.
The author did everything in her power to make the reader know that Adeline was being raped by Zade, both characters acknowledge it multiple times. Then tried to convince the reader that this wasn’t the case. Calling it CNC is blatant manipulation of the reader. And it’s such a terrible thing to not only write it into the story but also the trigger warnings. The warnings that protect the reader, showing she doesn’t care about her readers mental health at all.
24:52 as a computer science student, you dont just “learn everything” because stuff changes ALL THE DAMN TIME. 90% of what programmers do is look stuff up
As someone who is apart of the kink community, thank you for making a clear distinction between CNC and Assault. When people don't care per say about the difference or clarifying a difference. Book sounds fucking awful, now on my DNR list. I was thinking about it due to the craze online but now nope. not at all. never.
Yes! I'm also part of it and I cringe so much with books like this! To my pleasant surprise, the Losers books was indeed CNC !! Not dark but they are usually mentioned in the spicy/kink/bdsm book recs. I was so relieved... So consensual! Safe words, communication, well rounded characters. 😊
Yes, this book tells on itself and the author that they did no research on this kind of kink and are just using it for shock value. its really frustrating.
@@weirdobookclub Yep!!! It's very clear to me that the author is in the community.. There were a few details that are difficult/unlikely to know if you're not! I was so relaxed the whole time that I was reading it hahaha I don't know, it's really cringy when there are no safe words (which is the bare minimum...) because it's confusing on what it is and that they say they enjoy it ! I mean: what. ?? You cannot really let go if you don't feel totally safe! So you cannot really explore it.... pfff The Dare is the first short novella which to my surprise was super cnc, they were playing a game at first. But when it turned to be actual bdsm it was super crystal clear that the bottom (the girl) was acting on her own free will and there was a clear way out discussed. And then the Losers is the continuation featuring a polyamorous relationship with bdsm elements and bisexuality and jt's equally totally consensual! The relationship among them is also so wholesome lol as it should be (and too sexy of course 🥵)!!
Very sad that the author marketed this as CNC instead of noncon (I assume?). I'm in the BDSM community and enjoy doing CNC, but I actually don't like reading it because it's too far removed from my fantasies. So I want accurate labels. Am I reading the fantasy directly or reading about people consensually acting out the fantasy? Authors should clearly label their work because Non/dubcon in books can be too intense for some people with these fantasies and CNC in books can be too light and distant for others.
I'm glad you mentioned ao3! It's the only place I've really ever seen Non-Con used and since it's grouped with rape I never realized people would read it as a term that *didn't* mean rape.
I think most if not all people familiar with the term use it interchangeably with rape, but also prefer to use "noncon" to discuss the act in a strictly fictional setting to differentiate it from accounts of someone's experience. I'm partial to that usage myself bc I think it's more comfortable to have a distinction between SA occurring IRL and the one that happens in a book like this
@@losj3020 the one critic of the term non-con i saw that i kinda agree with is that technicaly "non-con" doesn't exist, either there is consent and its sex either there is not and its grape ."non consensual sex" isnt really a thing. But i still think you make a good point about using it to disscuse fiction only
I remember trying to read this book and was really intrigued by the idea of her Adeline being a manipulator. I thought it could be a cool idea with two not great people having a horrible but fun to read romance unfortunately I quickly realized that Adeline couldn’t manipulate herself out of a paper bag and Zade is just a whole other can of worms.
I wish this was the case. like maybe after he sees her in the bookstore, she like gives him her address and we find out later they both orchestrated the whole thing.... literally anything
All I could think about their married life is the poor kids wondering where Dad went. “Mom? Where’s Dad?” “He’s lurking in the shrubbery again, sweetie, he’ll come in at some point.”
Going in to the tumblr tag for this book just to see what the general consensus was, only to immediately find a "Not all men/You're right, Zade Meadows would NEVER!" post felt like being violently beat about the face and head by his--[gunshot]. He wouldn't WHAT, op??? Bcs the list of things he did in fact do that other men wouldn't is QUITE extensive lmao
She describes the club being hot by saying 'Hades' ballsack', and she's obviously trying to use it as a replacement for 'Satan's ballsack' to sound even more edgy but it's just stupid. Hades is the god of the underworld and the dead and he is never described as being hot, red, or anything in a similar vein, so the whole thing is redundant and just makes her sound even less edgier. love mythology and this pissed me off so much, a better replacement would have been to choose either Helios, Apollo, Ares or Hephaestus since they're more closely associated with fire, the heat and the sun
Yes and I agree but THAT would’ve required her to actually care about what she’s writing and put some effort into said writing and we just can’t have that! 🤪
tbh that misconception is super common, at least here in the us, because of the way americans have a tendency to accidentally project christian concepts and imagery onto other religions and mythologies. a lot of people just automatically associate any sort of underworld with being hot and fire-y (as well as erroneously assuming that the heaven-purgatory-hell structure is is a thing in all afterlife myths). even the video game hades is sort of guilty of it because the fields of asphodel are portrayed as a big lava lake with a bunch of little islands that you traverse via boat. (although to be far to the hades devs, it's established in canon that asphodel did used to be a vast meadow like how it's described in real-life greek mythology, and it only became a lava lake after the river phlegathon flooded at some point before the events of the game)
When you said the little girl Zade saved wanted him to be her daddy, I recalled the scene he had where he was acting on that 'kink' earlier and immediately wanted to end all life in my vicinity.
The whole book made it feel like he had a thing for children tbh… the way he puts himself on moral high ground cause of his job meanwhile his job conveniently involves him watching hours of cp and saving young girls
@@Zy_int0you this might be a hot take, but I think all of qanon is basically that in disguise. I mean, qanon people share around these graphic, sensational stories of sexualized horrors that they imagine children are enduring at the hands of their political enemies. they'll describe every gory detail. I think that, on some level, it's salacious & titillating for them. it's a fantasy of violated/lost innocence. there's this combination of treating children as property & putting concepts like "innocence" and "virginity" on a pedestal that makes the whole thing feel like it's less about _saving_ children and more about returning them to their "rightful owners," their parents (the father especially). and I feel like that's not super out there - there's this hierarchy in most christian denominations that's god > husband > wife > children. marriage comes from these traditions involving dowries, the father giving his blessing, the father "giving away" the bride. idk, it's like two sides of the same coin - innocence, which is their impetus to (ostensibly) protect children, is also their impetus to violate them, if that makes sense? like, qanon is, in a sense, pornographic? I feel like there's more, too, but that I can't articulate fully - such as that pre-pubescent children are almost seen as a gender unto themselves, like they're pre-gendered in a way? and their boundaries are seen as more "permeable," children are seen as less autonomous, less deserving of privacy, things like that.
@@sydliminalno u are completely right!! This is extremely well said too! A lot of it has to do with purity culture & religious zealotry. There's also an undercurrent of.....political stuff, linking anti intellectualism with it all too, but....this is the wrong video for all that lol 😅
@@sydliminalwhile not all Qanoners are like that there is a huge percentage who are definitely PDFiles or otherwise abuse (usually their own) kids. There's been a bunch of really horrible murders of children associated with Qanon.
Zade is just the biggest hypocrite. Throughout the whole book he’s bashing r-word circles like “oh wow these people are HORRIBLE. How could they possibly force girls into doing things they don’t want to do. Anyways I’m going to go make a girl do something she doesn’t want to do.” And Adeline just comes to terms with it tf.
His conflicting actions are actually addressed a few times throughout the 2 books of the cat and mouse duet, but Zade brushes it off as “Oh I know I’ve done these horrible things to her but soon she’ll realize I’m the one for her and accept me,” or “I want her to fall in love with the darkest parts of me, I never claimed to be a good person.” These weird excuses that Zade uses to try and justify doing all these horrible things to are one of the things that ruined this whole series for me.
You and me both. I would sit and start reading at like 10% and I read what I thought to be a big chunk of this and then check my progress and it was only 12% somehow. It was torture!
Okay, there's dark romance, and then there's this. I heard this book was bad, but oh my god, I never expected it to be THIS AWFUL. The writing, the messaging, the plot, it's all just icky 😬
@colettejames9754 I'm not really dark romance reader, I personally find them to be off-putting, but that's just me. I tend to lean towards the transgressive fiction or extreme horror for dark topics.
Also I'm soooo glad that I haven't read this book. I feel.like it's one thing what adults do bu having the male lead be a p*hunter and then detail p*footage is absolutely disturbing. I just hate that so much! Be well on these internet streets- book friend🩷
There is a healthy way to enjoy it. Like how you enjoy horror. I enjoy Hannibal, and the romance between Hannibal and Will but I can still list all the reasons that romance is toxic and abusive and why it should NEVER happen in real life. Some people sadly do not understand that and definitely make me go: haha are you okay???
@@elvingearmasterirma7241Exactly! I ship a metric ton of relationships that absolutely should not happen in real life. I enjoy them but am fully able to acknowledge why they are fucked up and toxic
@@elvingearmasterirma7241 So true, Hannibal is incredible imo because it's actually well made and the metaphors are good, their relationship is complex. Stuff like Haunting Adeline is just simple and badly written with an innocent, stupid female mc and a creepy, gross male mc and somehow they fall inlove
@@MrKruger333 I think the other important thing is, Will and Hannibal dont stay on unequal ground We may joke Save Will, Oh he needs help! But that is the same man who commited like. So many crimes. After season 1.
2:04:49 fun fact from someone who’s come very close to drowning half a dozen times (including breathing in water three of those times), but drowning is usually silent. That’s how people can end up drowning in busy pools/lakes/the sea; even if you’re surrounded by people, part of the automatic response to starting to drown is to focus entirely on staying above water and breathing. People thrashing and screaming for help are (again, usually, there’s always exceptions) people who are in distress, but if they’ve got the energy to thrash and the air to yell they’ve still got some time yet. Lifeguards are trained to keep an eye out for someone who’s silently waving, or barely keeping their head above water. That’s where the idea about drowning being peaceful comes from - because from the outside, that’s how it looks. Anyway, given Adeline’s response to everything to do with Zadist seems to be on the ‘freeze’ point of the “fight, flight, freeze” triangle, and given she won’t tell anyone what he’s doing to her, her saying being with him is like drowning is weirdly apt. Like drowning victims she’s frozen and in silence, and nobody’s going to know she was in danger until she’s already a corpse. I’m 99% sure that’s not the author’s intention with that line, but 🤷🏻♀️
that would be an incredible analogy in a better book! And yeah drowning looks quiet from the outside, one time i saved a little girl who was drowning less than an arms length from the side of the pool, her brothers were playing next to her and didn't even notice. I saw her expression as i walked by (this was at a campground with no lifeguard) and it was totally blank, so i leaned over and pulled her out. She made no sound at all. It was eerie. The next time i saw her she was wearing waterwings in the pool
Can confirm Men like Zade do exist, my ex was one of them. He actually said some of the absolute nonsense Zade said. He was a narcissist! I needed a lot of therapy
Just a small note. While I’m glad you got away and I know it is tempting to group abusers together and name the enemy, armchair diagnosing people with a stigmatised disorder is not it. I won’t go into the details because it’s not the place for it, but this sort of misconception bugs me a lot. Still, I’m happy you aren’t around people who are verbally, emotionally and physically abusive
@@godscomplex13 I’m afraid I have to disagree and I don’t think this is fair. You have no idea whether he was formally diagnosed or not. You have leapt to a conclusion I’m an ‘armchair psychologist’. I’m not sure how you can do that based on my comment alone. My experience is not a jumping off point to comment about the recent rise of people labelling others “narcissists”. I find that to be not only invalidating but inappropriate and unnecessary. Your point absolutely has merit and I do actually agree, but I don’t think my comment is the place to make this case. X
1:36:20 "....this was on my terms, not his" is 100% another thing that victims of R and SA do and think, in an effort to regain the control of their own bodies that they had lost.
On a lighter note....here's me not realizing that what you mean by "PDF ring" until an hour and 48 minutes in😂 I was just imagining the p*doph*les were sending PDFs of kids 😂....you told us to turn off our brains and I guess I did
Zade acting like he has moral high ground when killing and torturing a “real psychopath” because he abuses women is INSANE. You know for a FACT he would kill him even if he wasn’t an abuser. This is literally just a cheap way to make Zade look like a hero, when he would probably kill a RANDOM INNOCENT NORMAL dude for going anywhere near addy
As a survivor of violent childhood sexual assault, through my childhood and teenhood, I really don't understand how someone could write this and portray it as some romance to aspire to??? Like, we're supposed to root for these two to end up together, and I just don't understand it. CNC is one thing, this is just rape.
@@battyb3080people who say that shit got lot of vanity even if not thin thats vanity for overtly describing your body part in a more reason that i say is kindly sexualizing with intent or something.
I picked this up because I liked the cover. It took me three weeks to force myself through about 70% of it before I gave up. And the entire time, i couldn't stop picking apart how it could have worked/been better. Like, if you want your MC to be SA'ed so badly, why not have the criminal do it after she takes him home, and then the stalker could save her, and boom you can still have your gross gun scene without leaving the readers wondering who the actual villain is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ my poor husband got so many rants about "if the author wants him to be such a good guy stop making him do horrific things to her!" I feel so bad for everyone whose only idea of "kink" is from books like this.
This is the toxic kind of fanfiction I would have loved when I was 12 because I didn't know what a toxic relationship was (until the sunroom scene in chapter 15! Even 12yr old me would know that is not okay!). Now I'm a book editor and I am cringing so hard. I have to, for my own sanity, believe an editor didn't touch this book
I think I would've gobbled this up as a kid and trotted my little ass to school being all elitist about it. "oh Judy Blume huh? PEASANTS" but as a grown up, I'm appalled
I know it might hurt your entire soul to read the prequel and the sequel...with that being said PLEASE do and make rant videos about them. I have not laughed and literally cackled out loud as hard as I have ever like I do when listening to your videos.
I have officially been commissioned to read the sequel, pray for me. I may consider doing the prequel too as a bonus for patreon or something. MAYBE. That would hinge on how devastating the sequel is.
yeah "non-con" is literally SA; it was one of the early ways to replace the word "rape" so that it could be warned about in summarries but not trigger anyone who had actually BEEN raped, slash people who are otherwise traumatised to the point of being harmed just by seeing the word "rape"
as someone who occasionally dabbles in fanfics, there is NOTHING in this book to indicate any form of consent. no verbal consent, no physical consent, no earlier talks about the kinks, no safe words or hell, even safe actions to indicate stopping. the author must’ve gotten the understanding of kinks from 50 shades cuz’ what level of writing is this? if such level of writing is being published and making millions, i could become a billionaire at this point
I read fic all the time and nothing is a bigger red flag to me than a fic titiled dub con when the lack of consent is anything but dubious same thing with CNC, its a red flag because it feels like the author is saying the character *should* be enjoying it and being ok with it, like, they think its hot therefore it cannot possibly be actual grape. And i'm very worried about the existence out there of people who cant even tell what is and isnt grape
Exactly! I have been recommending this channel to all of my friends and at first I get really bad reactions about how this dark content isn't funny. I just told them to watch the first few mins before making judgements and I have not had anyone so far that didn't agree with me and everyone so far has went and binged everything else!
I read the one the author suggests to read first, then I read about 25% of haunting. My brain can’t comprehend how the guy who’s supposed to be fighting against trafficking is now casually stalking someone and that’s supposed to be romantic.
1:29:22 Another thing that probably would’ve fixed the dual perspective is watching Zade start to put off his duties the more he got obsessed with Adeline. He losses his self-righteousness the more he brutalizes this poor girl, kinda like a fall for grace.
"my goal is to ruin it for you, so that you can satisfy your morbid curiosity without having to actually put yourself through it" thank you so much this is exactly what I came here for
I’ve seen a lot of tiktok posts recommending this book to the Dark Romance gorls. I recommend therapy in return, this whole book is just horrific and definitely shouldn’t be classed as a romance book in any capacity. Thank you for taking the time to review and also for taking the ‘serious cap’ breaks. I also hope you’re okay after reading through all this, it’s really messed up and I imagine it must’ve been hard to power through until the end. ❤
I have a bit of a fix: make Adeline a true crime author. Its kind of implied she writes fiction but if she was lets say looking into a missing child case, she would end up on Zade's radar. Like he can still see her from the crowd at the bookstore if that scene is necessary but if she was looking into a case involving a missing child, it'd make him sort of want to warn her of the pdf rings in the interest of "protecting" or keeping her from "knowing too much" I also kind of wish the book entertained the uncertainty that Zade stalking her might be a ghost. Like when Adeline finds the rose, she immediately thinks someone broke in and it would build tension with the happenings going on to the house. Like she doesn't want to tell Daya or anyone because her Mom is going to "i told you so" about moving into the house in the first place.
I would kind of love to see a fanfic trend of people rewriting Haunting Adeline but doing it well. I can’t imagine a better roast of this travesty than to see competent authors fixing it and opening it up to a free platform.
@@kaylahensley1581 ngl, its tempting. I can't really relate to having fantasies involving being stalked so in my case, I would probably downplay or excise completely Zade assaulting Adeline. And add more ghost action, lol 👻
@@applebonker141 I liked the idea of Adeline writing true crime, investigating the disappearance of a child, then getting caught up in Zade’s “work.” It could be an enemies to lovers situation where she believes he’s part of the pdf hierarchy only to eventually learn he’s a federal agent of some kind and the romance would evolve as they worked together for a common goal. Or if you were going the fandom route in could be a Deadpool AU. Zade would be Wade, a former gun for hire that became a pdf monster hunter following a disfiguring injury. Ajax/Francis would be the human trafficker he was targeting. Vanessa would be the successful attractive true crime writer with a background of child abuse and sex work. Her best friend would be a talented computer analyst that secretly catfishes predators under the screen name Negasonic Teenage Warhead- who plot twist actually works with Wade. I think it would be uproariously funny to write this fic with ZERO smut and maybe do a bonus short with smut but it would be titled International Women’s Day and it would be straight up pegging. I’m sorry if this is rambling but I read the first two chapters of this turd yesterday and my brain fails to comprehend how popular it is. It might be worse than 50 Shades, at least you could tell it was a middle aged woman’s fantasy. This seems to have been written by a teenage boy. Or Gaston. This is a self insert fic written by Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. Ugh. Why did I download the Amazon sample?! I have fallen into a rabbit hole of hate.
@@kaylahensley1581 (sorry I did reply right away but the idea of a Deadpool AU had me LOLing in Giant and I almost want to just go that route and keep the superpower aspect so Vanessa can try to fight Wade off with a knife and accidentally cut him and his healing factor makes his finger grow back and freak her out 😂) I did start plotting out the first few chapters out in my head but WOOF the middle of the story is going to need some work. I almost want to split Stalker!Zade and regular Zade into two different characters and Adeline finds Zade has killed the guy who was stalking her/sending her creepy texts/etc. Trying to rework Zade's character into someone that would be less pig-headed and gross, I was thinking about making him and Adeline are both in very emotionally draining/dark lines of work and have people in their lives who find it weird that they're "into" that but for different reasons, they feel called to do it so they have common ground in that way. Maybe initially Zade thinks Adeline is just an ambulance chaser or something but yeah he does try to 'warn' away from getting too close to the pdf rings because he doesn't think she can handle it. (Also I might make Zade kind of introverted and Adeline more extroverted and she's way more excited by being in the middle of this and he's just like "UH...can you calm down, please? 😒"
@@applebonker141 I like the introvert vs extrovert idea! She’s a true crime enthusiast so she gets excited about things without being burdened by horrible firsthand knowledge. Plus you can replace the disgusting possessiveness with a desire to protect her relative innocence about the reality of taking down real criminals.
The only way it would make sense for Adeline to be a "manipulator" outside of being an author (and even then, doesn't really count imo) is if she was purposefully luring gross/evil men to her place just for Zade to kill them, especially if they were men that had wronged her in some way or if she had found out the kind of stuff they get up to and wanted to make them pay. Since she's renovating her mansion, why not take initiative to be like H.H. Holmes and make a murder mansion and have Zade dispose of the bodies of their victims? Plus she could also set up traps for Zade when he gets comfortable and take him out once she'd done using his sick desire for her to her advantage. Maybe even torture him first for everything he did to her (preferably with a lot less SA because she would have manipulated him into waiting or something but still torturing him because he tried to assault her, idk) before finishing him off for being as bad as the other men that have targeted her.
i think if the author had gone with this idea and done a bunch of research on real life serial killer couples as inspiration for the dynamic between adeline and zade this book might have actually been interesting. im picturing sort of a karla homolka/paul bernardo situation (obviously with a lot of differences in the details of the crimes and stuff but i'm talking about the dynamic and the overall vibe) where adeline is already pretty disturbed before meeting zade but she's keeping it together and functioning as an outwardly normal person, and then she meets this guy and they're immediately unhealthily obsessed with each other so much so that when he reveals to her that he's a murderer she realizes "wait i think i might be into that actually". and like he's very much still an abusive piece of shit to her and all her friends are like "you need to get the fuck away from him" but in her mind she justifies all the shit he does to her and tells herself it's fine bc they just have this twisted darkly romantic natural born killers-esque love story that nobody else could possibly understand. and over time it goes from her helping him lure in victims to her being involved in picking targets and planning the murders to eventually actively participating in the killings, until the two of them have fully morphed into this sexually charged two-person killing machine, all the while justifying their crimes to themselves because "well we are killing pedophiles after all". but as it goes on they start going sort of berserker mode and getting lazy about who they target, and their justifications for killing become increasingly flimsy. meanwhile daya this whole time is trying to be a good friend to adeline, thinking that she's just a simple victim of an abusive boyfriend, so shes just trying constantly to drive wedges between them in the hope that once adeline is away from zade she'll realize what a monster he is. but of course at this point adeline's fully gone off the deep end with zade so one day she's like "hey babe i think we need to get rid of daya so she can't get in the way of our love anymore". except once they actually have daya in their clutches adeline realizes "hang on now that we're about to murder a person who i actually care about i actually don't wanna do this anymore" (bc this version of adeline is self-centered at her core and only cares about other people bc of what she gets out of having them in her life, which is why she didn't have a problem offing people she felt had wronged her but does have a problem killing someone she considers her friend) but zade refuses to let daya go because the police are already starting to close in on them and they both know that no matter what daya says while begging for her life, she's 100% gonna turn them over to the cops if she gets out of there alive. so zade kills her and the whole thing is a total hot mess because their initial plan went out the window when adeline tried to back out so they have to do a really rushed panicked cleanup job. and the whole time they're covering their tracks and getting rid of the body adeline's playing like she's still completely loyal to zade but she's actually just waiting for zade to let his guard down. and that night while zade's trawling the internet for the next target (because he's thinking things will go right back to how they'd always been between them) adeline grabs the biggest kitchen knife zade owns, sneaks up behind him, and stabs the ever loving fuck out of him. and then maybe there's an epilogue that's like a transcript of her being interrogated by the cops and she paints herself as a battered woman who was forced to participate in all these murders against her will whole we as readers know that she's putting on an act. in this hypothetical book it would be made clear that adeline was very much a victim of zade but she herself is also a manipulative and bloodthirsty murderer in her own right. and like maybe she would never have escalated to murder if she'd never met zade but she was never a /good/ person and being with zade was like being handed permission to act on all the fucked up desires she'd always had. lol sorry for the wall of text your comment just got me thinking about how much better this book would be if it were actually a ~dark romance~ told by two killers who think they're telling you a love story instead of just a book about an edgelord rapist and his victim.
I'm glad for the re-upload because I had never seen this before & you were on my recs tonight! This book was one of the worst things that I ever attempted to read. You absolutely get my subscription for actually reading the whole thing. I noped out at Chapter 8. The stupid biology writing was a reason I could not with this. The torture scene in "The Shadow's" first chapter was trying so hard to be edgy but did 2 things that absolutely took me out of the story. First he makes some comment about already ripping off 10 of his victim's fingernails...like there's more than that? Is this the 6 fingered man??? If you've pulled 10 fingernails, you're done. You have ripped them all off. If you continue to pull off nails they would have to come from the guy's feet & would therefore be TOEnails. The fingers are done at 10. Second, in the same line as the fingernails, he mentions how he "severed both Achilles heels.". As you say, Google is free, so I was literally willing to give the author the benefit of some doubt. Maybe English wasn't their native language or there is a region somewhere where an Achilles heel is a thing. It's not. Google & I both know it is the Achilles TENDON. It was an arrow through the tendon at the back of Achilles' leg, just above the ankle, that brought the mighty warrior down & though his heel was his only weak spot, "Achilles heel" applies only to him specifically & everyone else has what is known as an Achilles tendon. The tendon is what you sever to disable the feet. It's concerning to hear via you that the impossible, incorrect or just bad descriptions of physiology continued throughout the book. I won't even get into how much I hated that that house was built in the 1940s when the Victorian gothic style of architecture was really only in the late 1800s with some revival through the years, but the likelihood of the 1940s being among those years with WWII taking manpower & building materials? Nah. If she had put as being built before the Great Depression & made her great-grandma a flapper then that would have been a little better for the history nerd in me, but the idea of her great-grandma demanding a Victorian gothic mansion & wasting red lipstick on stupid diary page kisses during the almost notoriously conservative & frugal 40s was a hard pass for me. I'm sorry. I massively failed at not going into that. I read what I read of this book back in Oct 2022 & I still hate every bit of it stuck in my brain & it's like therapy to listen to others rant about it because I know some fraction of your pain. Last thing I wanted to say. The freckles obsession is a purity thing. 1) The fact that she has freckles is cute & wholesome & so innocent girl next door, but more importantly, 2) the fact that he could see her freckles meant she didn't have them hidden under make-up so she's a "natural beauty" & not a painted up hoor. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he fixated on her as a good little girl, an innocent lil mouse, & sought only to corrupt, ruin, debase & destroy her because he obviously got off on having seen that done to all the victims he "heroically" saves & readers are supposed to find this ok because he chose a victim over the age of 18. Not that that would matter to some into a character like Zade, because he's willing to marry Addie so that would have made it ok if he picked her while she was younger. I'm sorry, but if your yum is a literal crime against another person, I will yuck it & everything I have seen & heard about this book is YUCK. Stanning a character because he saves other people from the crimes he then commits upon Addie & not seeing the hypocrisy? We really are in a mental health crisis in this time. This was a great video. I agree with all you said. I thank the Gods that I did not push myself to read more of the book. And now I have to put on some bird videos to entertain myself watching my cat attack my tablet to get this book out of my head again. Put yourself first & do not subject your mind to anything else from this series. You know it won't be worth it.
People should consult you before writing anything. You crushed this critique and noticed things that even I missed! The Achilles heel has me like 🫡, the fingernails was also so stupid. The crime masquerading as spice... I hate this book so thoroughly and can't believe it's popular but then again, I was there when 50 Shades came out. Enjoy your bird videos! The worst is over for you :P
@@weirdobookclub I don't think authors would like me because my mom proved too great an influence upon me. She almost became an English teacher & I grew up always giving her things I wrote for her to read & give her opinion. I wanted her to just say if it was good or bad or had potential, but instead, every time, I got a red ink marked return of my papers with grammar, punctuation & structure notes. So now, try as I might to just focus on vibes of what I read, I'm always seeing content issues like an editor would/should. I would have told this author, we need to take all of this out because you don't have a clear grasp of what you're talking about & it's just unnecessary detail that does nothing to progress the plot. Let's trim down all of this vigilante stuff & just make Zade a Robin Hood kind of hacker, because you can't have him both being a "savior" of some & doing what he does to Addie. Or, maybe, keep him as the "hero" your heart palpitates for & just make him a decent, normal person toward Addie who asks her out to dinner that first night & safely, sanely, consensually plans out all of their spicy scenes to satisfy both character's kinks. Mostly, though, I would ask shouldn't there be more haunting in this Haunting Adeline? Otherwise, if the title is implying that Zade's stalking is "haunting" her, rather than misleading readers into thinking it's a gothic ghosty story to go with the ridiculous gothic home, maybe we can retitle it to reflect what he’s really doing, like Hating Adeline.
@missmishka8379 one time, a guy I liked told me he was writing a novel and I was like “omg this will impress him” so I printed his draft out and red penned it to death! He - thankfully - did appreciate it so much 😂 it is definitely a labor of love to help people instead of just saying “wow omg it is incredible. So great. So perfect. No issues.”
I bet you anything that the author considers herself a master manipulator and if I am correct, the one thing I have to say is: couldn't manipulate us into liking this absolute unit of an alpha male podcast host.
I just feel bad for people who have actually been sa’d I can’t imagine reading this book knowing it is popular and then being so triggered by the “cnc” that is implied. Like Adeline literally thinks things that someone who has been SA’d has thought like the inner dialogue is just so horribly disturbing. And like I’m not judging certain kinks but I do think that there are some that shouldn’t be normalized because of what it does to the mind when that person is actually in danger. I just think it is so unhealthy and horrible to be romanticing this kind of stuff and what it does to teen girls or even woman reading this. Zane is absolutely horrible and the fact that people ignore every horrible thing he has done is just disappointing.
1:48:52 Ugh, I hate the way human trafficking is described in this book. It’s not some shady underground market. Most victims of it are sold by people they know-friends and family.
This mf book DOES. NOT. END. like oh my god it feels like the author fell in love with her own love interest and couldn't leave the damn book ALOOOONE. like "and then that was it. BUT THEN he does this shit, and i had enough of him. BUT THEN i realized he was sooo cool. BUT THEN he did something that-" LIKE GIVE IT A REST LADY
I feel uncomfortable that the author is romanticizing sexual violence. I get the kinks and that is when people both sides say very adamantly that they agree with things especially with CNC. It’s none in this book says about consent, the “love interest” let alone being an abuser and stalker but sexist and a narcissist, the response of people who like this book, “OMG king behavior✨✨” is very concerning. MC also being portrayed as a child-like character where she is twenty-six year old acting like a 16 year old which is very strange.
I actually read a fanfic (i know) a while back where the author actually was well versed and heavily researched the bdsm community to make sure the fic was as accurate as possible. And they were brilliant. The “dom” was always in control, knew the steps, and planned ahead, as well as had plans for aftercare that included often a shower/bath, blanket, tea, etc. even when it sometimes focused on the pov of the “sub”, he was stunned at the planning and care that went into it, when he previously thought that bdsm was more of the vicious side. they had safewords at every point in the process, and the “dom” would often check in to see if he was okay. The main climax of the series happened when during a scene, the sub felt like he couldn’t say the safeword because he wanted to make the dom happy, and it led to despair before they finally made up and blah blah. but even then, the dom comes and says “hey. you know if we do this again, i need to trust you to say what you need and not be afraid to say yellow or red.” one of the big things to me (i’m not saying in real life, i have no actual experience, just reading it) is that one of the big things about bdsm is the sub is truly the one in control, since they should be able to stop the scene whenever they need. none of that is in this book, and i genuinely think calling the sa in this book “kinky” or “bdsm” contributes to a bad name. because omg there is no consent and the protag never had a chance to say “no, i’m uncomfortable with this.” smh.
1:27:45 as a trans guy, yes, that is a passively transphobic idea that unfortunately is not at all surprising. if i still got pressed over every insinuation that a man isn't a man without his anatomy, i don't think i would still be on the internet. it's not shocking that ideas like that make it into published novels when the amount of trans representation within the medium remains staggeringly low. it's honestly very refreshing to see so many content creators i follow bring attention to passive transphobia when a lot of the internet doesn't seem to notice or care, so thank you. :)
As a writer, I want to say a deep thank you. Between you and the youtuber commenting on it, this has me making sure that my book is doing things in a way that is not going to hurt others. Thank you, seriously, for giving this comment. You've opened my eyes to a whole different point of review that I'm going to make sure I pay attention to.
I'm still at the beginning of the video but this was 100000% a fanfiction, or was written by someone who hasn't left their fanfiction habits behind. Listing 'kinks' at the front like that is a fanfiction thing, specifically on the Archive Of Our Own (AO3) where tagging works with these types of details is important in helping people find (or avoid) your work. I've only ever seen noncon and dubcon used towards fanfiction, again especially on AO3 where they're the highest priority archive warnings. The excerpts you read sound like every fanfiction writing pattern, trope, and cliche ever done to death. There is fanfiction out there that read like novels, and there are traditionally published authors on AO3 writing fanfiction in between original work. Fanfiction can be really really good, but for some reason only the worst of them end up getting printed.
46:05 😂 yes because when you get severed hands in the mail, you take a couple of shots to be just drunk..tipsy enough to get killed easier. This is the kind of "best friend" that will get you killed and would most likely just jump over your body if you trip and fall in the woods while being chased by the said killer that the bff egged on and started the entire chase to begin with.
the thing I love about heavy bdsm kink comics is theres an opening page with all the characters joking in a green room about the messed up story theyre about to play out. this would not have been saved with something like that. such edge. its a jr high education fanfic by a very sheltered....omg it's EL James all over again.
Omg yup. Just finished reading yesterday, and i was mentally yelling at this woman Adeline to just act like a sensible person and get tf out of tht place if people can enter it so easily , clearly the safety is compromised. She has a knack for getting herself in dangerous situations. She could have checked out n have a stronger security for the entire house or move in with a friend, but nope. And Zade was clearly just assaulting her, and guven the fact he works for woman and children, to save them from tht very thing, the entire plot is very contradictory. He left each time after assaulting her, no aftercare , no expression of any care at all. Basically found the entire thing very disturbing and creepy. Had he not been described hotly and with so called hacking skills, he’d be taken as exactly what he is , a narcissist, elitist and a freaking psychopath
Considering the author doesn't understand the concept of show not tell you'd think we wouldn't get any figurative language in this book and it's so unfortunate that we do because each metaphor is more nonsensical than the ones before it.
a classmate recommended me this book, I couldn't get into it and felt really put off. She showed me one of the sex scenes to try and get a reaction or something and I was like "okay, so you like dubcon, idc" and she was surprised I didn't act shocked, but this has more wild shit than I imagined lmao. Thank you for your service (reading it)
He keeps repeating that he's sooooo terrifying, he's sooooo powerful, that it sounds like he's trying to convince himself that he is. Like idk, the excessive swearing, the moody demeanor, I just can't take him seriously; he reminds me of my past classmates minus the wierdo emo abuser part he's got going on. Plus, I know my classmates are definitely funnier so at least I can excuse their swearing and demeanor.
just because i do have the expertise having almost drowned several times, myself: drowning sounds mostly muffled, and if you're being submerged, you mostly hear your own movement through the water, much like diving. it's largely silent, and she could have written this whole exchange leaning into how it feels very insular, and the world on the surface is very loud once you break the water. she didn't really even describe sounds.
11:00 Thank you for bringing this up! It was so wild to me that they called it Consensual Non-Consent… and then it's just actual assault?! LIKE THERE'S A PRETTY BIG DIFFERENCE
As a fan of the Dark Romance genre, I really think we need a new term. Because Dark really doesnt prepare you for what some writers write. Horror, should be in the title somewhere. be it for the writing style or the content-
I just found your channel and I'm tired of BookTok throwing this around. I'm glad you mentioned the QAnon fanfic thing. This is ONE HUNDRED percent QAnon storyline. Also... QAnon was officially founded/widespread in 2017. It's TOTALLY plausible the author saw it and, even if she doesnt subscribe to it, was inspired by it. Aaaaaaaaa. Aaaaaaaaaaaa.
Slightly off topic: The dub-con thing is so useful and I’m glad that the fanfic community made it popular. Stuff like sex pollen or accidental (not someone drugged someone) potion ingestion, etc. fit perfectly in that window. I think it shows a growing understanding of consent, something that used to make me feel optimistic. But then I watched this video and now… much less optimistic 😂
As someone with trauma relating to non-con stuff in fiction (I was a child getting into dangerous topics in my own writing), the dub-con stuff can still tend to trigger me at times, but I never fully realized that implied consent also fell under dub-con (implied consent in fiction is where characters don't really have to go through all the planning motions because the narrative shows through the writing that both are, in fact, consenting/enjoying it.) in many situations. I think that fictional "two characters are both super high and have sex" is also technically dub-con purely because unlike irl, the writer can very much show and say that both are still okay with it even beneath being high as fuck (it's a trope I kinda like admittedly, guy shares his stuff with another guy going through a rough spot, they both fuck around, they fall asleep together, then wake up and sober up and end up going to one of their places and it slowly evolved into them both helping the other get outta their depressive spots. Is it cliche? Maybe. But it's one of the more self-indulgent romances I enjoy). I really wish people would stop trying to present what is very CLEARLY SA as dub-con, because it can seriously hurt people who either are too young to understand separation of fiction and reality, or seriously twist how people view a genuine medium of displaying consent in fictional media
@@exist4046its such a red flag for me when the fic taged dub con is just straight up non-con with no room to argue otherwise because like ? Are they telling me they think thats that's * somewhat * ok ? Sometimes it feels like they think its hot and therefore cannot possibly be truly SA and thats such an awful narrative
I’m puzzled by Adeline’s remark at the book signing that she doesn’t want to get into a conversation about skin conditions. Does she think freckles are a disease?
Adeline's 'books' seem like the books you would get commissioned to review here on this channel I can't believe I didn't think of that all the times I watched the first video
I get the ick when someone praises this book tbh. Im not gonna tell people what to do with their lives but if I hear someone say they love this book I'm gonna be dying on the inside. Also thanks for some of the educating about SA trauma. Always happy to be more understanding of the struggles of others in case they need a friend who's got their back.
brought this book last year after seeing all the "good" reviews and thought i will be getting a well written dark romance. What i received in turn was an abomination and an intense desire to bleach my eyes
"Subject/verb agreement? Why bothers!" I literally laughed until I cried. I listened to the first.... I dunno, 1/3 of the audiobook, but then I just realized I didn't care what happened to the characters, so....why bothers? Thank you for this freaking AMAZING review/rant.
Thanks for reviewing this book I’m a avid reader and very picky about which books I read I’ve been hearing about this book all over saying how amazing it was my friend told me to read it saying it’s so good and spicy! When I did a little research about it without spoilers I was totally turned off to read it thinking how can someone read this trash This “book” is so problematic and I agree with another comment I saw on here saying the type of people that like this book are the ones that didn’t grow up reading and don’t know real literature 100%!!!!!!!! And praise it because they saw it on booktok just to jump on the bandwagon Me a HUGE fanfic girlie holy F this read like a poorly written one when the “author” didn’t know anything about what dubcon is or how SA is just a fun quirk I’ve read so many fanfics that were 100x better than this I feel like that author didn’t know how to write these types of situations in the right context to make it “okay” if that makes sense Anyway sorry I’m ranting but I’m glad I found someone like you that agreed with my feelings about this book and how awful it was Looking forward to watching more of you :)
The parts you take it is literally in chronological order and I struggle to not cringe and be confused by the transitions. It feels all over the place and just wattpad fantasy ideas that doesn’t really care for character depth.
1:38:38 Adeline’s social anxiety means nothing in this book omg. If she was agoraphobic and stuck in her house, it would *heighten* the stalker narrative and explain why she decides to stay in her house instead of seeking out help. Her safe space slowly getting more and more violated. Instead, it just serves to be a throwaway line in all the scenes of her talking to other characters (and not even TO ZANE???)
from my understanding, noncon and sa really are the same thing. the word 'noncon' was only coined bc the fanfic community was iffy about using sa or the actual r word since they feared it might help desensitize people to it. that being said, i see people using them interchangeably when talking abt fiction
I will say what I said on the original upload. Thank you so much for this review. I was this close to getting this book on audible for a 'fun trash listen'. You saved me from a horrible fate whilst giving me a good laugh!
1:23:30 Not that I think this book can be redeemed but what’s the point of dark romance if the love interest is going to be sanitized? I probably would’ve liked if Nana did die because her stalker because it would linger as a cautionary tale for Adeline throughout the series. Would Zane kill her? Could he be pushed to that point? That’s another reason why I hate the dual perspective
THIS IS A REUPLOAD, DO NOT PANIC. The first upload was demonetized so I reworked the original video to be more compliant with YT. I very much appreciate the rewatches, the shares, the likes, the comments, etc. You guys are great and thanks for dealing with my nonsense as I attempt to figure all this stuff out 🤪
😂 When you pulled out the pasta I definitely thought I'd seen this before but it was so entertaining I had to watch it again.
I will say, I did panic for a second
I watched it again 😁
I thought I was going crazy last night when I saw this. I kept telling my husband I was sure I'd watched it and I definitely remembered the thumbnail. Glad to see I'm not doololly after all.
Bro I thought I was tweaking when I saw this again lol, much love, stupid TH-cam
any time the MC is a writer i immediately know its a self-insert
Main character or male character??
@@ll2323 MC always refers to main character, yes
What's a self-insert?
@@VillainessAO When an author or something similar basically puts themselves in their story
@@PixelHeroViish OHH lmao it's self explanatory why am I so dumb 😭😭
“I can manipulate the emotions of anyone who lets me.”
No shit? So can I!
Thats literally exactly how manipulation works 😂
That's also a quality
The fact that Seattle somehow has Christian Grey and Zade in the vicinity makes me cackle and wonder what the hell western Washington did to deserve these idiots being written there. 😂
Something's in the water here. I moved here almost 4 years ago, and while I don't live in Seattle, I'm pretty close to it. I haven't met a Christian Grey or a Zade, but I met...let's say a version of both of them.😬 It's why I'm moving back home this year. Seriously, idk what's up with this area lol (love how gay it is tho).
@@zombieedrea I grew up in Eastern Washington but moved over to Bellingham for college and visited Seattle often and…you’re not wrong. 😂
Is it the weather, like in Florida? Something about the weather makes people go crazy, or worse, get into addictive illegal substances. I remember reading a study about it and wondered if this is true.🤔
@@erinlee5936 the fact that there’s a goddamn study about this is crazy in the first place lmao 😭💀
We do have a weird thing with serial killers... 🤔
"That is self awareness we can't afford...like an editor." LMFAO I'M DEAD
the budget was tight
@@weirdobookclubyou’re even prettier in glasses
Even if the book didn’t contain all the problematic stuff, it‘s still soooo badly written and I don’t understand why people love it. It‘s literally giving bad wattpad fanfiction and I feel like the people who like this story never went trough their „reading questionable fanfics“ phase.
The writing alone is so freaking bad. “She said lowly” is absolutely something you read on AO3 from a teenager lol
Yes. There is absolutely a place for this kind of stuff and it's fanfiction...
Hey now that’s an insult to Wattpad fanfic
I've read wattpad fanfic leagues better than whatever this trainwreck was
@@mistywindow16 yes, me too!
Sex and kink are like boxing: if both parties are up for it, it's a sport-- if only one party is up for it, it's assault!
THIS
and if none is up for it, it will not happen
I love that analogy!
Adeline is def a self insert and the most unrealistic feature is the idea of self published authors being super rich and selling out book tours. I’ve found wonderful indie pub authors and they know how competitive the industry is
Drop your indie author recs babes! Don't leave us empty
But HD Carlton is actually making a lot of money from these books lol she’s definitely richer than most indie published authors and she had a sold out book tour recently in her home town. Hundreds of people in attendance , over 600 actually
@@money1137 trash sells at times ig
@@money1137yea because people don’t realize humans are more complicated and nuanced than people want to acknowledge.
@@money1137 one book tour? Or she had more? Also I think the keyword was super. You can definitely make money from self published books but super rich is different
CNC would have had Adeline’s inner thoughts be positive and satisfied while outside she begged him to go away because she told him ahead of time that is what she will do. Dub con would have had her unsure at first, but eventually enjoying herself and glad it happened. Her thoughts being so close to what actual r-victims feel and think is so insulting. Why use that? Why not have her or him react in any other way that could be sexy or romantic?
Also, in addition to this and kind of piggy-backing off this, during the first scene- 1:02:43 - victims of SA and r@pe can still have a biological reaction to the stimuli, even if it's unwanted. A physical reaction is not an excuse to SA someone.
Edit: she says this later on the video! I have to consume the video in pieces lol
Plus typically CNC is something that has to be agreed on by both parties prior to the event, and when done ethically requires allot of communication and ground work put in place before hand (think discussions on what people’s limits are, safe words, etc) like with all sane acts of BDSM kink the sub is still the one with power to say no… shit like this is why I could never do it because irresponsible people like this author are writing full blown rape scenes and calling in kink.
@Kay-wp8xf Yes! It can also be a stress reaction. The mix of anxiety and the physical adrenaline combined with the stimulation of those areas can result in a full on orgasm regardless if the person enjoying it or not. There's a documentary on Netflix about a teacher sexually molesting his elementary grade students and one of the girls felt guilt for her entire life because she orgasmed while it was happening. She explains how scared and confused she was while it was happening.. and felt that she couldn't tell anyone because of her body's reaction. Its absolutly ignorant and predatory for any author or anyone to imply that your body's physical reaction is some kind of consent to sex acts.. this book disgusts me.
And like even if the author wanted it to be full on horror, the rest of the book completely disproves the idea that the author wanted it to be seen as a horror situation. Like, ma'am thats not kink! thats straight up just
assault!
ive seen fics on a03 tagged better than that book-
@@elvingearmasterirma7241 exactly, and what is with these badly written not kink, abuse books all having conservative undertone… is that just a conservative American thing? Or just a common or garden sexual repression thing?
Like I’m not saying everyone in the kink / BDSM community is a liberal (I mean allot are, respect of boundaries and what not), but it’s like all of these stories involving horrid abuse labeled as kink seem to either be raised by repressed straight conservative women who aren’t in the scene, or young women who grew up/ were indoctrinated into a post 50shades world and don’t realise they have rights and autonomy, especially in the kink scene… this just makes me feel old and bitter.
the obsession with the freckles, which we need to emphasize how innocent she is, is so creepy considering he's a pedo ring serial killer
youre so right!!! literally at the very beginning when he sees her for the first time he describes her as being dainty with an innocent face and then immediately jumps into saying how her eyes are the kind that always look seductive without even trying….it just rubs me the wrong way it feels so gross
since when were freckles a sign of innocence?
@@Anon-rt3fx Since forever? Freckles have always been a symbol of childishness and "innocence", even if you don't personally agree with that
@@Q5444_ so true..and I still don’t know why.
@@aliganderson i think the emphasis is only there because that’s the current beauty standard 💀 freckles are THE thing right now, so is cinnamon/auburn hair and those billie eilish eyes etc etc. she just made a flawless dream character that girls can insert themselves into
People online calling this man daddy and writing long ass reviews about how he’s the best stalker bf and no other compares because of how he treats her is insane to me 😂 he doesn’t even read hot like what do you meaaaaaan
I physically don’t allow myself to read these reviews. My brain can’t take that 💀
You know what. I’ve always been of the mind ‘let people enjoy what they want, let people read problematic shit because it’s not hurting anyone (even thought it hurts my soul).’ But this is ACTIVELY harming people if they get into an abusive relationship because it looks like this book and haven’t yet realized that abusive relationships are some of the most soul crushing, life sucking, health sapping situations to find yourself in. I just hope these women are being hyperbolic and having fan girl moments and actually realize this is problematic and NOT looking for it irl.
RIGHT and the idiots calling him "morally gray" when hes just a hypocrite with no morals, i hate idiots who cant read or right and blow up crappy books/pieces of literature like this. (haunting adeline.)
I think too many people didn't have enough time reading fanfiction... so now it's getting published and people are going wild over it 😅
This is a great theory tbh
I've never read any fanfiction but I would still never read this.
I've had a similar theory that the people who write these books are people who at one time wrote/read fanfic and the people who enjoy them are younger readers who never really discovered fanfic.
I spent a lot of time reading fanfic and you can find things like this written so much better and with proper tags.
(also let's be real, jury's out on how much of these were originally fanfic and has just had the serial numbers filed off)
I’ve read fanfics that read like Shakespeare compared to whatever the hell this is.
@@lgparker4263 exactly!
I'm a little worried for the author. This seems rooted in something I, personally, wouldn't wanna touch.
The author could have easily made that gun scene cnc instead of straight up non-con. Just a few tweaks, like Adeline texting her friend not to worry about her, showing she could've called for help and chose not to, or having her get found on purpose, or just the tiniest bit of aftercare, such as him checking to make sure she's okay after it's done. Like, the bar is in hell.
Literally this!
We should call it what it is just call it is Rape!
I hate how some brainless part of the romance and fanfic community have dubbed the term non con it minimises and softens something pure evil.
RIGHT!! Consent in fiction doesn’t have to be extremely explicit. But the author is very clearly trying to make it SA so I don’t see the point in calling it cnc.
The author did everything in her power to make the reader know that Adeline was being raped by Zade, both characters acknowledge it multiple times. Then tried to convince the reader that this wasn’t the case. Calling it CNC is blatant manipulation of the reader. And it’s such a terrible thing to not only write it into the story but also the trigger warnings. The warnings that protect the reader, showing she doesn’t care about her readers mental health at all.
@@elizabethgrey6040like we do not need a big red sign to indicate it, but the author obviously railroaded that
1:52:07 none of these writers seem to realize that Erotica isn't synonymous with pornography. it can be artful.... not just blatant porn
The best fanfic I read was so great. No sex. And that's all I was there for initially
24:52 as a computer science student, you dont just “learn everything” because stuff changes ALL THE DAMN TIME. 90% of what programmers do is look stuff up
But this is Zade we’re talking about ok! The rule don’t apply 😋
@@weirdobookclub of course
@@weirdobookclub only he and Chuck Norris can shoot hundreds of bullets out of the same gun without reloading
As someone who is apart of the kink community, thank you for making a clear distinction between CNC and Assault. When people don't care per say about the difference or clarifying a difference. Book sounds fucking awful, now on my DNR list. I was thinking about it due to the craze online but now nope. not at all. never.
Yes! I'm also part of it and I cringe so much with books like this! To my pleasant surprise, the Losers books was indeed CNC !! Not dark but they are usually mentioned in the spicy/kink/bdsm book recs. I was so relieved... So consensual! Safe words, communication, well rounded characters. 😊
Yes, this book tells on itself and the author that they did no research on this kind of kink and are just using it for shock value. its really frustrating.
safe words and communication?! I can't believe it!
@@weirdobookclub Yep!!! It's very clear to me that the author is in the community.. There were a few details that are difficult/unlikely to know if you're not! I was so relaxed the whole time that I was reading it hahaha I don't know, it's really cringy when there are no safe words (which is the bare minimum...) because it's confusing on what it is and that they say they enjoy it ! I mean: what. ?? You cannot really let go if you don't feel totally safe! So you cannot really explore it.... pfff
The Dare is the first short novella which to my surprise was super cnc, they were playing a game at first. But when it turned to be actual bdsm it was super crystal clear that the bottom (the girl) was acting on her own free will and there was a clear way out discussed. And then the Losers is the continuation featuring a polyamorous relationship with bdsm elements and bisexuality and jt's equally totally consensual! The relationship among them is also so wholesome lol as it should be (and too sexy of course 🥵)!!
Very sad that the author marketed this as CNC instead of noncon (I assume?). I'm in the BDSM community and enjoy doing CNC, but I actually don't like reading it because it's too far removed from my fantasies. So I want accurate labels. Am I reading the fantasy directly or reading about people consensually acting out the fantasy? Authors should clearly label their work because Non/dubcon in books can be too intense for some people with these fantasies and CNC in books can be too light and distant for others.
as a fanfiction girlie, yes, non-con means non consensual. on ao3 the tag is actually grouped as 'rape/non-con', so yeah it does mean sa.
I'm glad you mentioned ao3! It's the only place I've really ever seen Non-Con used and since it's grouped with rape I never realized people would read it as a term that *didn't* mean rape.
I think most if not all people familiar with the term use it interchangeably with rape, but also prefer to use "noncon" to discuss the act in a strictly fictional setting to differentiate it from accounts of someone's experience. I'm partial to that usage myself bc I think it's more comfortable to have a distinction between SA occurring IRL and the one that happens in a book like this
@losj3020 that makes a lot of sense.
@@losj3020 the one critic of the term non-con i saw that i kinda agree with is that technicaly "non-con" doesn't exist, either there is consent and its sex either there is not and its grape ."non consensual sex" isnt really a thing. But i still think you make a good point about using it to disscuse fiction only
I remember trying to read this book and was really intrigued by the idea of her Adeline being a manipulator. I thought it could be a cool idea with two not great people having a horrible but fun to read romance unfortunately I quickly realized that Adeline couldn’t manipulate herself out of a paper bag and Zade is just a whole other can of worms.
anyone using the word of manipulator, or psychopath is pure cringe in this day and age
I wish this was the case. like maybe after he sees her in the bookstore, she like gives him her address and we find out later they both orchestrated the whole thing.... literally anything
😭😭🤣
All I could think about their married life is the poor kids wondering where Dad went. “Mom? Where’s Dad?” “He’s lurking in the shrubbery again, sweetie, he’ll come in at some point.”
Sandra! Go outside and tell your father to come in for dinner! He's probably hiding in the bushes again!
Damn gurl, 😂😂😂
Going in to the tumblr tag for this book just to see what the general consensus was, only to immediately find a "Not all men/You're right, Zade Meadows would NEVER!" post felt like being violently beat about the face and head by his--[gunshot]. He wouldn't WHAT, op??? Bcs the list of things he did in fact do that other men wouldn't is QUITE extensive lmao
It’s giving delusional
I wont go but i can already tell its full of those god awfull ×reader fanfics with a black and white gif of an unrelated movie.
"Zade would never!" HE DID???
She describes the club being hot by saying 'Hades' ballsack', and she's obviously trying to use it as a replacement for 'Satan's ballsack' to sound even more edgy but it's just stupid. Hades is the god of the underworld and the dead and he is never described as being hot, red, or anything in a similar vein, so the whole thing is redundant and just makes her sound even less edgier.
love mythology and this pissed me off so much, a better replacement would have been to choose either Helios, Apollo, Ares or Hephaestus since they're more closely associated with fire, the heat and the sun
Yes and I agree but THAT would’ve required her to actually care about what she’s writing and put some effort into said writing and we just can’t have that! 🤪
@@weirdobookclub You're right, you're right, my bad. forgot the standard of writing for this book for a moment ❤
tbh that misconception is super common, at least here in the us, because of the way americans have a tendency to accidentally project christian concepts and imagery onto other religions and mythologies. a lot of people just automatically associate any sort of underworld with being hot and fire-y (as well as erroneously assuming that the heaven-purgatory-hell structure is is a thing in all afterlife myths). even the video game hades is sort of guilty of it because the fields of asphodel are portrayed as a big lava lake with a bunch of little islands that you traverse via boat. (although to be far to the hades devs, it's established in canon that asphodel did used to be a vast meadow like how it's described in real-life greek mythology, and it only became a lava lake after the river phlegathon flooded at some point before the events of the game)
He has underworld money!
This! She also says "ass cheek" like way too much. It takes me out of the fantasy a bit. Lol
You know, it’d be fun if Zane was a straight up villain and the book ended with him trying to kill Adeline only to be killed by the manor’s ghost
Agreed
When you said the little girl Zade saved wanted him to be her daddy, I recalled the scene he had where he was acting on that 'kink' earlier and immediately wanted to end all life in my vicinity.
The whole book made it feel like he had a thing for children tbh… the way he puts himself on moral high ground cause of his job meanwhile his job conveniently involves him watching hours of cp and saving young girls
@@Zy_int0you Yeah, to say the least, it ain't great.
@@Zy_int0you this might be a hot take, but I think all of qanon is basically that in disguise. I mean, qanon people share around these graphic, sensational stories of sexualized horrors that they imagine children are enduring at the hands of their political enemies. they'll describe every gory detail. I think that, on some level, it's salacious & titillating for them. it's a fantasy of violated/lost innocence.
there's this combination of treating children as property & putting concepts like "innocence" and "virginity" on a pedestal that makes the whole thing feel like it's less about _saving_ children and more about returning them to their "rightful owners," their parents (the father especially). and I feel like that's not super out there - there's this hierarchy in most christian denominations that's god > husband > wife > children. marriage comes from these traditions involving dowries, the father giving his blessing, the father "giving away" the bride.
idk, it's like two sides of the same coin - innocence, which is their impetus to (ostensibly) protect children, is also their impetus to violate them, if that makes sense? like, qanon is, in a sense, pornographic?
I feel like there's more, too, but that I can't articulate fully - such as that pre-pubescent children are almost seen as a gender unto themselves, like they're pre-gendered in a way? and their boundaries are seen as more "permeable," children are seen as less autonomous, less deserving of privacy, things like that.
@@sydliminalno u are completely right!! This is extremely well said too! A lot of it has to do with purity culture & religious zealotry. There's also an undercurrent of.....political stuff, linking anti intellectualism with it all too, but....this is the wrong video for all that lol 😅
@@sydliminalwhile not all Qanoners are like that there is a huge percentage who are definitely PDFiles or otherwise abuse (usually their own) kids. There's been a bunch of really horrible murders of children associated with Qanon.
Zade is just the biggest hypocrite. Throughout the whole book he’s bashing r-word circles like “oh wow these people are HORRIBLE. How could they possibly force girls into doing things they don’t want to do. Anyways I’m going to go make a girl do something she doesn’t want to do.” And Adeline just comes to terms with it tf.
LITERALLY "hes so morally gray coded!!" HES A HYPOCRITICAL POORLY WRITTEN MORALLESS PSYCHOPATH ARGHH
I think it's supposed to be a conflict with his character, but it's never addressed. He's never conflicted by it.
His conflicting actions are actually addressed a few times throughout the 2 books of the cat and mouse duet, but Zade brushes it off as “Oh I know I’ve done these horrible things to her but soon she’ll realize I’m the one for her and accept me,” or “I want her to fall in love with the darkest parts of me, I never claimed to be a good person.” These weird excuses that Zade uses to try and justify doing all these horrible things to are one of the things that ruined this whole series for me.
I just couldn't believe how long this book is. It just wasn't ending, I kept hoping you were done and then there was another chapter.
You and me both. I would sit and start reading at like 10% and I read what I thought to be a big chunk of this and then check my progress and it was only 12% somehow. It was torture!
Yeah this book was so long due to how edgy is was trying to be. I was skimming so much
12:16 you are absolutely right, non-con is just a fancy smokescreen term for assault. it's literally just assault.
Okay, there's dark romance, and then there's this. I heard this book was bad, but oh my god, I never expected it to be THIS AWFUL. The writing, the messaging, the plot, it's all just icky 😬
dark subject matter aside, it was so terribly done. Disappointing in every way!
What are your favorite dark romances? I don't know really where to start...
@colettejames9754 I'm not really dark romance reader, I personally find them to be off-putting, but that's just me. I tend to lean towards the transgressive fiction or extreme horror for dark topics.
Hi thanks for responding. Transgressive fictions sounds interesting...I'll be checking that out, thanks!
Also I'm soooo glad that I haven't read this book. I feel.like it's one thing what adults do bu having the male lead be a p*hunter and then detail p*footage is absolutely disturbing. I just hate that so much! Be well on these internet streets- book friend🩷
Your Zade voice had me in literal tears .
"mean ass burger" absolutely killed me 😂
Dark romance girlies actually worry me
The ones who act like there’s something wrong with reading anything else for sure.
There is a healthy way to enjoy it. Like how you enjoy horror.
I enjoy Hannibal, and the romance between Hannibal and Will but I can still list all the reasons that romance is toxic and abusive and why it should NEVER happen in real life.
Some people sadly do not understand that and definitely make me go: haha are you okay???
@@elvingearmasterirma7241Exactly! I ship a metric ton of relationships that absolutely should not happen in real life. I enjoy them but am fully able to acknowledge why they are fucked up and toxic
@@elvingearmasterirma7241 So true, Hannibal is incredible imo because it's actually well made and the metaphors are good, their relationship is complex. Stuff like Haunting Adeline is just simple and badly written with an innocent, stupid female mc and a creepy, gross male mc and somehow they fall inlove
@@MrKruger333 I think the other important thing is, Will and Hannibal dont stay on unequal ground
We may joke Save Will, Oh he needs help! But that is the same man who commited like. So many crimes. After season 1.
2:04:49 fun fact from someone who’s come very close to drowning half a dozen times (including breathing in water three of those times), but drowning is usually silent. That’s how people can end up drowning in busy pools/lakes/the sea; even if you’re surrounded by people, part of the automatic response to starting to drown is to focus entirely on staying above water and breathing.
People thrashing and screaming for help are (again, usually, there’s always exceptions) people who are in distress, but if they’ve got the energy to thrash and the air to yell they’ve still got some time yet. Lifeguards are trained to keep an eye out for someone who’s silently waving, or barely keeping their head above water. That’s where the idea about drowning being peaceful comes from - because from the outside, that’s how it looks.
Anyway, given Adeline’s response to everything to do with Zadist seems to be on the ‘freeze’ point of the “fight, flight, freeze” triangle, and given she won’t tell anyone what he’s doing to her, her saying being with him is like drowning is weirdly apt. Like drowning victims she’s frozen and in silence, and nobody’s going to know she was in danger until she’s already a corpse. I’m 99% sure that’s not the author’s intention with that line, but 🤷🏻♀️
that would be an incredible analogy in a better book! And yeah drowning looks quiet from the outside, one time i saved a little girl who was drowning less than an arms length from the side of the pool, her brothers were playing next to her and didn't even notice. I saw her expression as i walked by (this was at a campground with no lifeguard) and it was totally blank, so i leaned over and pulled her out. She made no sound at all. It was eerie. The next time i saw her she was wearing waterwings in the pool
When Arch walks out and Zade jumps out from behind a bush with a rose clenched between his teeth! 🤣🤣🤣😭
silly goosery
I couldn’t stop picturing Gomez Adams with the knife in his teeth
@@alicethemad1613 😂😂😂
@@alicethemad1613lmao 😂😂😂
Can confirm Men like Zade do exist, my ex was one of them. He actually said some of the absolute nonsense Zade said. He was a narcissist! I needed a lot of therapy
Glad to hear you're away from him now!
I hope you're getting the help you need! Those people suck
i hope you’re doing way better now! i’m sorry u had to experience that
Just a small note. While I’m glad you got away and I know it is tempting to group abusers together and name the enemy, armchair diagnosing people with a stigmatised disorder is not it. I won’t go into the details because it’s not the place for it, but this sort of misconception bugs me a lot. Still, I’m happy you aren’t around people who are verbally, emotionally and physically abusive
@@godscomplex13 I’m afraid I have to disagree and I don’t think this is fair. You have no idea whether he was formally diagnosed or not. You have leapt to a conclusion I’m an ‘armchair psychologist’. I’m not sure how you can do that based on my comment alone. My experience is not a jumping off point to comment about the recent rise of people labelling others “narcissists”. I find that to be not only invalidating but inappropriate and unnecessary. Your point absolutely has merit and I do actually agree, but I don’t think my comment is the place to make this case. X
1:36:20 "....this was on my terms, not his" is 100% another thing that victims of R and SA do and think, in an effort to regain the control of their own bodies that they had lost.
On a lighter note....here's me not realizing that what you mean by "PDF ring" until an hour and 48 minutes in😂 I was just imagining the p*doph*les were sending PDFs of kids 😂....you told us to turn off our brains and I guess I did
Zade acting like he has moral high ground when killing and torturing a “real psychopath” because he abuses women is INSANE. You know for a FACT he would kill him even if he wasn’t an abuser. This is literally just a cheap way to make Zade look like a hero, when he would probably kill a RANDOM INNOCENT NORMAL dude for going anywhere near addy
As a survivor of violent childhood sexual assault, through my childhood and teenhood, I really don't understand how someone could write this and portray it as some romance to aspire to??? Like, we're supposed to root for these two to end up together, and I just don't understand it. CNC is one thing, this is just rape.
I’m so sorry!!!
new party game- read this book but take a shot every time they say “little mouse” “he growls” “freckles” or “my flat stomach”
Ickkk I get the ick when it says he growls.. like... what does that even mean!?
Also I'm not thin,but I can't imagine thin people think * flat stomach* "stop tickling my flat stomach!"
@@battyb3080people who say that shit got lot of vanity even if not thin thats vanity for overtly describing your body part in a more reason that i say is kindly sexualizing with intent or something.
I feel like we would get alcohol poisoning..
@@battyb3080 legit its so eughhhh brother eugh....
I will gladly rewatch. I enjoy the suffering of booktubers too much and sincerely hope you get your bag. You have certainly earned it.
You are the real MVP
I picked this up because I liked the cover. It took me three weeks to force myself through about 70% of it before I gave up. And the entire time, i couldn't stop picking apart how it could have worked/been better. Like, if you want your MC to be SA'ed so badly, why not have the criminal do it after she takes him home, and then the stalker could save her, and boom you can still have your gross gun scene without leaving the readers wondering who the actual villain is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ my poor husband got so many rants about "if the author wants him to be such a good guy stop making him do horrific things to her!" I feel so bad for everyone whose only idea of "kink" is from books like this.
"little mouse" and "pretty bird".... Omg this is a dabi and hawks fanfic from my hero academia 💀
yagami yato survivor spotted 🫵🏼
yagami yato survivor spotted 🫵🏼
@@inaepink I was in the trenches 😔✊
omg you've cracked the code. no WONDER this is reminding me of those dark times 😭
The two coloured eyes and the scar made me go “Shoto????” LMAOOOO
This is the toxic kind of fanfiction I would have loved when I was 12 because I didn't know what a toxic relationship was (until the sunroom scene in chapter 15! Even 12yr old me would know that is not okay!). Now I'm a book editor and I am cringing so hard.
I have to, for my own sanity, believe an editor didn't touch this book
I think I would've gobbled this up as a kid and trotted my little ass to school being all elitist about it. "oh Judy Blume huh? PEASANTS" but as a grown up, I'm appalled
I thought the same like how did an editor look at this book and think ah yes let's say "ass cheeks" one more time
“Subject/Verb agreement? Why bothers? “
Iconic
I know it might hurt your entire soul to read the prequel and the sequel...with that being said PLEASE do and make rant videos about them. I have not laughed and literally cackled out loud as hard as I have ever like I do when listening to your videos.
I have officially been commissioned to read the sequel, pray for me. I may consider doing the prequel too as a bonus for patreon or something. MAYBE. That would hinge on how devastating the sequel is.
@@weirdobookclub the second book is so much worse, if you can believe such a thing is possible
yeah "non-con" is literally SA; it was one of the early ways to replace the word "rape" so that it could be warned about in summarries but not trigger anyone who had actually BEEN raped, slash people who are otherwise traumatised to the point of being harmed just by seeing the word "rape"
I can't get over the "Sneaking off with random men" like HE IS a random man
as someone who occasionally dabbles in fanfics, there is NOTHING in this book to indicate any form of consent. no verbal consent, no physical consent, no earlier talks about the kinks, no safe words or hell, even safe actions to indicate stopping. the author must’ve gotten the understanding of kinks from 50 shades cuz’ what level of writing is this? if such level of writing is being published and making millions, i could become a billionaire at this point
I read fic all the time and nothing is a bigger red flag to me than a fic titiled dub con when the lack of consent is anything but dubious same thing with CNC, its a red flag because it feels like the author is saying the character *should* be enjoying it and being ok with it, like, they think its hot therefore it cannot possibly be actual grape. And i'm very worried about the existence out there of people who cant even tell what is and isnt grape
I'm sorry, "plant *two* of my hands on his chest". *TWO* of her hands... where is the editor? Was there an editor?
Lol she's clearly an alien don't you know?
You are saying you don’t have 7 hands?
4 arms like Goro from Mk
I’ve lost count of how many times I have watched this. Will never ever ever read the book, but I will keep watching and loving this video ❤️
Wow, thank you, thank you, thank you! I am learning the ropes of YT still and Im so thankful for your support.
Exactly! I have been recommending this channel to all of my friends and at first I get really bad reactions about how this dark content isn't funny. I just told them to watch the first few mins before making judgements and I have not had anyone so far that didn't agree with me and everyone so far has went and binged everything else!
@@weirdobookclub I'm not going to read it either, but can you clarify what a house of mirrors is? Is it a house full of mirrors?
I read the one the author suggests to read first, then I read about 25% of haunting. My brain can’t comprehend how the guy who’s supposed to be fighting against trafficking is now casually stalking someone and that’s supposed to be romantic.
1:29:22 Another thing that probably would’ve fixed the dual perspective is watching Zade start to put off his duties the more he got obsessed with Adeline. He losses his self-righteousness the more he brutalizes this poor girl, kinda like a fall for grace.
"my goal is to ruin it for you, so that you can satisfy your morbid curiosity without having to actually put yourself through it" thank you so much this is exactly what I came here for
I’ve seen a lot of tiktok posts recommending this book to the Dark Romance gorls. I recommend therapy in return, this whole book is just horrific and definitely shouldn’t be classed as a romance book in any capacity.
Thank you for taking the time to review and also for taking the ‘serious cap’ breaks. I also hope you’re okay after reading through all this, it’s really messed up and I imagine it must’ve been hard to power through until the end. ❤
I have a bit of a fix: make Adeline a true crime author. Its kind of implied she writes fiction but if she was lets say looking into a missing child case, she would end up on Zade's radar. Like he can still see her from the crowd at the bookstore if that scene is necessary but if she was looking into a case involving a missing child, it'd make him sort of want to warn her of the pdf rings in the interest of "protecting" or keeping her from "knowing too much"
I also kind of wish the book entertained the uncertainty that Zade stalking her might be a ghost. Like when Adeline finds the rose, she immediately thinks someone broke in and it would build tension with the happenings going on to the house. Like she doesn't want to tell Daya or anyone because her Mom is going to "i told you so" about moving into the house in the first place.
I would kind of love to see a fanfic trend of people rewriting Haunting Adeline but doing it well. I can’t imagine a better roast of this travesty than to see competent authors fixing it and opening it up to a free platform.
@@kaylahensley1581 ngl, its tempting. I can't really relate to having fantasies involving being stalked so in my case, I would probably downplay or excise completely Zade assaulting Adeline. And add more ghost action, lol 👻
@@applebonker141 I liked the idea of Adeline writing true crime, investigating the disappearance of a child, then getting caught up in Zade’s “work.” It could be an enemies to lovers situation where she believes he’s part of the pdf hierarchy only to eventually learn he’s a federal agent of some kind and the romance would evolve as they worked together for a common goal. Or if you were going the fandom route in could be a Deadpool AU. Zade would be Wade, a former gun for hire that became a pdf monster hunter following a disfiguring injury. Ajax/Francis would be the human trafficker he was targeting. Vanessa would be the successful attractive true crime writer with a background of child abuse and sex work. Her best friend would be a talented computer analyst that secretly catfishes predators under the screen name Negasonic Teenage Warhead- who plot twist actually works with Wade. I think it would be uproariously funny to write this fic with ZERO smut and maybe do a bonus short with smut but it would be titled International Women’s Day and it would be straight up pegging. I’m sorry if this is rambling but I read the first two chapters of this turd yesterday and my brain fails to comprehend how popular it is. It might be worse than 50 Shades, at least you could tell it was a middle aged woman’s fantasy. This seems to have been written by a teenage boy. Or Gaston. This is a self insert fic written by Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. Ugh. Why did I download the Amazon sample?! I have fallen into a rabbit hole of hate.
@@kaylahensley1581 (sorry I did reply right away but the idea of a Deadpool AU had me LOLing in Giant and I almost want to just go that route and keep the superpower aspect so Vanessa can try to fight Wade off with a knife and accidentally cut him and his healing factor makes his finger grow back and freak her out 😂)
I did start plotting out the first few chapters out in my head but WOOF the middle of the story is going to need some work. I almost want to split Stalker!Zade and regular Zade into two different characters and Adeline finds Zade has killed the guy who was stalking her/sending her creepy texts/etc. Trying to rework Zade's character into someone that would be less pig-headed and gross, I was thinking about making him and Adeline are both in very emotionally draining/dark lines of work and have people in their lives who find it weird that they're "into" that but for different reasons, they feel called to do it so they have common ground in that way. Maybe initially Zade thinks Adeline is just an ambulance chaser or something but yeah he does try to 'warn' away from getting too close to the pdf rings because he doesn't think she can handle it. (Also I might make Zade kind of introverted and Adeline more extroverted and she's way more excited by being in the middle of this and he's just like "UH...can you calm down, please? 😒"
@@applebonker141 I like the introvert vs extrovert idea! She’s a true crime enthusiast so she gets excited about things without being burdened by horrible firsthand knowledge. Plus you can replace the disgusting possessiveness with a desire to protect her relative innocence about the reality of taking down real criminals.
When you said “chapter 8” I was like HUHUUHHHH how is this not the end??? 😂 I’m over it lol
With all the crimes being committed in this book, it’s amazing how the quality of writing is the biggest crime
The only way it would make sense for Adeline to be a "manipulator" outside of being an author (and even then, doesn't really count imo) is if she was purposefully luring gross/evil men to her place just for Zade to kill them, especially if they were men that had wronged her in some way or if she had found out the kind of stuff they get up to and wanted to make them pay. Since she's renovating her mansion, why not take initiative to be like H.H. Holmes and make a murder mansion and have Zade dispose of the bodies of their victims? Plus she could also set up traps for Zade when he gets comfortable and take him out once she'd done using his sick desire for her to her advantage. Maybe even torture him first for everything he did to her (preferably with a lot less SA because she would have manipulated him into waiting or something but still torturing him because he tried to assault her, idk) before finishing him off for being as bad as the other men that have targeted her.
i think if the author had gone with this idea and done a bunch of research on real life serial killer couples as inspiration for the dynamic between adeline and zade this book might have actually been interesting. im picturing sort of a karla homolka/paul bernardo situation (obviously with a lot of differences in the details of the crimes and stuff but i'm talking about the dynamic and the overall vibe) where adeline is already pretty disturbed before meeting zade but she's keeping it together and functioning as an outwardly normal person, and then she meets this guy and they're immediately unhealthily obsessed with each other so much so that when he reveals to her that he's a murderer she realizes "wait i think i might be into that actually". and like he's very much still an abusive piece of shit to her and all her friends are like "you need to get the fuck away from him" but in her mind she justifies all the shit he does to her and tells herself it's fine bc they just have this twisted darkly romantic natural born killers-esque love story that nobody else could possibly understand. and over time it goes from her helping him lure in victims to her being involved in picking targets and planning the murders to eventually actively participating in the killings, until the two of them have fully morphed into this sexually charged two-person killing machine, all the while justifying their crimes to themselves because "well we are killing pedophiles after all". but as it goes on they start going sort of berserker mode and getting lazy about who they target, and their justifications for killing become increasingly flimsy.
meanwhile daya this whole time is trying to be a good friend to adeline, thinking that she's just a simple victim of an abusive boyfriend, so shes just trying constantly to drive wedges between them in the hope that once adeline is away from zade she'll realize what a monster he is. but of course at this point adeline's fully gone off the deep end with zade so one day she's like "hey babe i think we need to get rid of daya so she can't get in the way of our love anymore". except once they actually have daya in their clutches adeline realizes "hang on now that we're about to murder a person who i actually care about i actually don't wanna do this anymore" (bc this version of adeline is self-centered at her core and only cares about other people bc of what she gets out of having them in her life, which is why she didn't have a problem offing people she felt had wronged her but does have a problem killing someone she considers her friend) but zade refuses to let daya go because the police are already starting to close in on them and they both know that no matter what daya says while begging for her life, she's 100% gonna turn them over to the cops if she gets out of there alive. so zade kills her and the whole thing is a total hot mess because their initial plan went out the window when adeline tried to back out so they have to do a really rushed panicked cleanup job. and the whole time they're covering their tracks and getting rid of the body adeline's playing like she's still completely loyal to zade but she's actually just waiting for zade to let his guard down. and that night while zade's trawling the internet for the next target (because he's thinking things will go right back to how they'd always been between them) adeline grabs the biggest kitchen knife zade owns, sneaks up behind him, and stabs the ever loving fuck out of him.
and then maybe there's an epilogue that's like a transcript of her being interrogated by the cops and she paints herself as a battered woman who was forced to participate in all these murders against her will whole we as readers know that she's putting on an act. in this hypothetical book it would be made clear that adeline was very much a victim of zade but she herself is also a manipulative and bloodthirsty murderer in her own right. and like maybe she would never have escalated to murder if she'd never met zade but she was never a /good/ person and being with zade was like being handed permission to act on all the fucked up desires she'd always had.
lol sorry for the wall of text your comment just got me thinking about how much better this book would be if it were actually a ~dark romance~ told by two killers who think they're telling you a love story instead of just a book about an edgelord rapist and his victim.
I'm glad for the re-upload because I had never seen this before & you were on my recs tonight! This book was one of the worst things that I ever attempted to read. You absolutely get my subscription for actually reading the whole thing. I noped out at Chapter 8. The stupid biology writing was a reason I could not with this.
The torture scene in "The Shadow's" first chapter was trying so hard to be edgy but did 2 things that absolutely took me out of the story. First he makes some comment about already ripping off 10 of his victim's fingernails...like there's more than that? Is this the 6 fingered man??? If you've pulled 10 fingernails, you're done. You have ripped them all off. If you continue to pull off nails they would have to come from the guy's feet & would therefore be TOEnails. The fingers are done at 10. Second, in the same line as the fingernails, he mentions how he "severed both Achilles heels.". As you say, Google is free, so I was literally willing to give the author the benefit of some doubt. Maybe English wasn't their native language or there is a region somewhere where an Achilles heel is a thing. It's not. Google & I both know it is the Achilles TENDON. It was an arrow through the tendon at the back of Achilles' leg, just above the ankle, that brought the mighty warrior down & though his heel was his only weak spot, "Achilles heel" applies only to him specifically & everyone else has what is known as an Achilles tendon. The tendon is what you sever to disable the feet. It's concerning to hear via you that the impossible, incorrect or just bad descriptions of physiology continued throughout the book.
I won't even get into how much I hated that that house was built in the 1940s when the Victorian gothic style of architecture was really only in the late 1800s with some revival through the years, but the likelihood of the 1940s being among those years with WWII taking manpower & building materials? Nah. If she had put as being built before the Great Depression & made her great-grandma a flapper then that would have been a little better for the history nerd in me, but the idea of her great-grandma demanding a Victorian gothic mansion & wasting red lipstick on stupid diary page kisses during the almost notoriously conservative & frugal 40s was a hard pass for me.
I'm sorry. I massively failed at not going into that. I read what I read of this book back in Oct 2022 & I still hate every bit of it stuck in my brain & it's like therapy to listen to others rant about it because I know some fraction of your pain.
Last thing I wanted to say. The freckles obsession is a purity thing. 1) The fact that she has freckles is cute & wholesome & so innocent girl next door, but more importantly, 2) the fact that he could see her freckles meant she didn't have them hidden under make-up so she's a "natural beauty" & not a painted up hoor. Despite all evidence to the contrary, he fixated on her as a good little girl, an innocent lil mouse, & sought only to corrupt, ruin, debase & destroy her because he obviously got off on having seen that done to all the victims he "heroically" saves & readers are supposed to find this ok because he chose a victim over the age of 18. Not that that would matter to some into a character like Zade, because he's willing to marry Addie so that would have made it ok if he picked her while she was younger. I'm sorry, but if your yum is a literal crime against another person, I will yuck it & everything I have seen & heard about this book is YUCK. Stanning a character because he saves other people from the crimes he then commits upon Addie & not seeing the hypocrisy? We really are in a mental health crisis in this time.
This was a great video. I agree with all you said. I thank the Gods that I did not push myself to read more of the book. And now I have to put on some bird videos to entertain myself watching my cat attack my tablet to get this book out of my head again. Put yourself first & do not subject your mind to anything else from this series. You know it won't be worth it.
People should consult you before writing anything. You crushed this critique and noticed things that even I missed! The Achilles heel has me like 🫡, the fingernails was also so stupid. The crime masquerading as spice... I hate this book so thoroughly and can't believe it's popular but then again, I was there when 50 Shades came out. Enjoy your bird videos! The worst is over for you :P
@@weirdobookclub I don't think authors would like me because my mom proved too great an influence upon me. She almost became an English teacher & I grew up always giving her things I wrote for her to read & give her opinion. I wanted her to just say if it was good or bad or had potential, but instead, every time, I got a red ink marked return of my papers with grammar, punctuation & structure notes. So now, try as I might to just focus on vibes of what I read, I'm always seeing content issues like an editor would/should.
I would have told this author, we need to take all of this out because you don't have a clear grasp of what you're talking about & it's just unnecessary detail that does nothing to progress the plot. Let's trim down all of this vigilante stuff & just make Zade a Robin Hood kind of hacker, because you can't have him both being a "savior" of some & doing what he does to Addie. Or, maybe, keep him as the "hero" your heart palpitates for & just make him a decent, normal person toward Addie who asks her out to dinner that first night & safely, sanely, consensually plans out all of their spicy scenes to satisfy both character's kinks. Mostly, though, I would ask shouldn't there be more haunting in this Haunting Adeline? Otherwise, if the title is implying that Zade's stalking is "haunting" her, rather than misleading readers into thinking it's a gothic ghosty story to go with the ridiculous gothic home, maybe we can retitle it to reflect what he’s really doing, like Hating Adeline.
@missmishka8379 one time, a guy I liked told me he was writing a novel and I was like “omg this will impress him” so I printed his draft out and red penned it to death! He - thankfully - did appreciate it so much 😂 it is definitely a labor of love to help people instead of just saying “wow omg it is incredible. So great. So perfect. No issues.”
The sound that left my body when you said "the scream I scrumpt" was inhumane 😂😂😂😂
I bet you anything that the author considers herself a master manipulator and if I am correct, the one thing I have to say is: couldn't manipulate us into liking this absolute unit of an alpha male podcast host.
I just feel bad for people who have actually been sa’d I can’t imagine reading this book knowing it is popular and then being so triggered by the “cnc” that is implied. Like Adeline literally thinks things that someone who has been SA’d has thought like the inner dialogue is just so horribly disturbing. And like I’m not judging certain kinks but I do think that there are some that shouldn’t be normalized because of what it does to the mind when that person is actually in danger. I just think it is so unhealthy and horrible to be romanticing this kind of stuff and what it does to teen girls or even woman reading this. Zane is absolutely horrible and the fact that people ignore every horrible thing he has done is just disappointing.
The silly voices you're using when narrating the voice lines feel so cathartic 😌🙌✨
"I can manipulate others if they let me"
Yea...that's literally how manipulation works.
"If it rains it gets wet" type of revelation over here.
1:48:52 Ugh, I hate the way human trafficking is described in this book. It’s not some shady underground market. Most victims of it are sold by people they know-friends and family.
Books like these inspire me to write my own, because it proves truly anyone can write and publish a book apparently
This mf book DOES. NOT. END. like oh my god it feels like the author fell in love with her own love interest and couldn't leave the damn book ALOOOONE.
like "and then that was it. BUT THEN he does this shit, and i had enough of him. BUT THEN i realized he was sooo cool. BUT THEN he did something that-" LIKE GIVE IT A REST LADY
give it a REST i beg you
I feel uncomfortable that the author is romanticizing sexual violence. I get the kinks and that is when people both sides say very adamantly that they agree with things especially with CNC. It’s none in this book says about consent, the “love interest” let alone being an abuser and stalker but sexist and a narcissist, the response of people who like this book, “OMG king behavior✨✨” is very concerning. MC also being portrayed as a child-like character where she is twenty-six year old acting like a 16 year old which is very strange.
Found your account because of this video and I already love your content. Thanks for drawing attention to this.
I actually read a fanfic (i know) a while back where the author actually was well versed and heavily researched the bdsm community to make sure the fic was as accurate as possible. And they were brilliant. The “dom” was always in control, knew the steps, and planned ahead, as well as had plans for aftercare that included often a shower/bath, blanket, tea, etc. even when it sometimes focused on the pov of the “sub”, he was stunned at the planning and care that went into it, when he previously thought that bdsm was more of the vicious side. they had safewords at every point in the process, and the “dom” would often check in to see if he was okay. The main climax of the series happened when during a scene, the sub felt like he couldn’t say the safeword because he wanted to make the dom happy, and it led to despair before they finally made up and blah blah. but even then, the dom comes and says “hey. you know if we do this again, i need to trust you to say what you need and not be afraid to say yellow or red.” one of the big things to me (i’m not saying in real life, i have no actual experience, just reading it) is that one of the big things about bdsm is the sub is truly the one in control, since they should be able to stop the scene whenever they need. none of that is in this book, and i genuinely think calling the sa in this book “kinky” or “bdsm” contributes to a bad name. because omg there is no consent and the protag never had a chance to say “no, i’m uncomfortable with this.” smh.
Fic name pls ? 😅
1:27:45 as a trans guy, yes, that is a passively transphobic idea that unfortunately is not at all surprising. if i still got pressed over every insinuation that a man isn't a man without his anatomy, i don't think i would still be on the internet. it's not shocking that ideas like that make it into published novels when the amount of trans representation within the medium remains staggeringly low. it's honestly very refreshing to see so many content creators i follow bring attention to passive transphobia when a lot of the internet doesn't seem to notice or care, so thank you. :)
As a writer, I want to say a deep thank you. Between you and the youtuber commenting on it, this has me making sure that my book is doing things in a way that is not going to hurt others.
Thank you, seriously, for giving this comment. You've opened my eyes to a whole different point of review that I'm going to make sure I pay attention to.
I'm still at the beginning of the video but this was 100000% a fanfiction, or was written by someone who hasn't left their fanfiction habits behind. Listing 'kinks' at the front like that is a fanfiction thing, specifically on the Archive Of Our Own (AO3) where tagging works with these types of details is important in helping people find (or avoid) your work. I've only ever seen noncon and dubcon used towards fanfiction, again especially on AO3 where they're the highest priority archive warnings. The excerpts you read sound like every fanfiction writing pattern, trope, and cliche ever done to death.
There is fanfiction out there that read like novels, and there are traditionally published authors on AO3 writing fanfiction in between original work. Fanfiction can be really really good, but for some reason only the worst of them end up getting printed.
Clearly, there was no outline stage of this writing journey.
Finally somebody who isn’t scared to say when something is ASS
46:05 😂 yes because when you get severed hands in the mail, you take a couple of shots to be just drunk..tipsy enough to get killed easier. This is the kind of "best friend" that will get you killed and would most likely just jump over your body if you trip and fall in the woods while being chased by the said killer that the bff egged on and started the entire chase to begin with.
@@lacey_lace_edc1152 If that’s me I’m taking 2 adderall
the thing I love about heavy bdsm kink comics is theres an opening page with all the characters joking in a green room about the messed up story theyre about to play out. this would not have been saved with something like that. such edge. its a jr high education fanfic by a very sheltered....omg it's EL James all over again.
Yeah 😂... well the Dare/Losers books had the bdsm kink right from what I've read so far
Yeah EL James but somehow worse, I never thought that would be possible… serves me right.
@@The_Cloth_Surgeon 🤣🤣🤣
Omg yup. Just finished reading yesterday, and i was mentally yelling at this woman Adeline to just act like a sensible person and get tf out of tht place if people can enter it so easily , clearly the safety is compromised. She has a knack for getting herself in dangerous situations. She could have checked out n have a stronger security for the entire house or move in with a friend, but nope. And Zade was clearly just assaulting her, and guven the fact he works for woman and children, to save them from tht very thing, the entire plot is very contradictory. He left each time after assaulting her, no aftercare , no expression of any care at all. Basically found the entire thing very disturbing and creepy. Had he not been described hotly and with so called hacking skills, he’d be taken as exactly what he is , a narcissist, elitist and a freaking psychopath
Considering the author doesn't understand the concept of show not tell you'd think we wouldn't get any figurative language in this book and it's so unfortunate that we do because each metaphor is more nonsensical than the ones before it.
a classmate recommended me this book, I couldn't get into it and felt really put off. She showed me one of the sex scenes to try and get a reaction or something and I was like "okay, so you like dubcon, idc" and she was surprised I didn't act shocked, but this has more wild shit than I imagined lmao. Thank you for your service (reading it)
you had me at "ALL YOU DO IS GIVE ME BLUE BALLS AND I'M SICK OF IT!"
He keeps repeating that he's sooooo terrifying, he's sooooo powerful, that it sounds like he's trying to convince himself that he is. Like idk, the excessive swearing, the moody demeanor, I just can't take him seriously; he reminds me of my past classmates minus the wierdo emo abuser part he's got going on. Plus, I know my classmates are definitely funnier so at least I can excuse their swearing and demeanor.
just because i do have the expertise having almost drowned several times, myself: drowning sounds mostly muffled, and if you're being submerged, you mostly hear your own movement through the water, much like diving. it's largely silent, and she could have written this whole exchange leaning into how it feels very insular, and the world on the surface is very loud once you break the water. she didn't really even describe sounds.
11:00 Thank you for bringing this up! It was so wild to me that they called it Consensual Non-Consent… and then it's just actual assault?! LIKE THERE'S A PRETTY BIG DIFFERENCE
As a fan of the Dark Romance genre, I really think we need a new term. Because Dark really doesnt prepare you for what some writers write.
Horror, should be in the title somewhere.
be it for the writing style or the content-
maybe horrormance???
Holy shit! For a moment, i thought you suffered through the second book *nervous laugh* 😅
That will be coming in a few months actually. I was commissioned to read the second one for y'all. GET EXCITED
@@weirdobookclub I'm more worried about your health. Your sanity is not worth our entertainment!
I just found your channel and I'm tired of BookTok throwing this around. I'm glad you mentioned the QAnon fanfic thing. This is ONE HUNDRED percent QAnon storyline. Also... QAnon was officially founded/widespread in 2017. It's TOTALLY plausible the author saw it and, even if she doesnt subscribe to it, was inspired by it. Aaaaaaaaa. Aaaaaaaaaaaa.
Love the sex education in the beginning! Especially the segment of “is it a kink or is it a crime”?
I try to put more effort and care into these reviews than the authors put into the books. I TRY
I love this so much! I gave up after chapter two and reading that far was rough 😅
I wanted to give up so many times. I think it took me 3 months to slog my way through it. A nightmare!
I GASPED after you put up the photo of the author after the description of Adeline. Omg.
Slightly off topic: The dub-con thing is so useful and I’m glad that the fanfic community made it popular. Stuff like sex pollen or accidental (not someone drugged someone) potion ingestion, etc. fit perfectly in that window. I think it shows a growing understanding of consent, something that used to make me feel optimistic. But then I watched this video and now… much less optimistic 😂
As someone with trauma relating to non-con stuff in fiction (I was a child getting into dangerous topics in my own writing), the dub-con stuff can still tend to trigger me at times, but I never fully realized that implied consent also fell under dub-con (implied consent in fiction is where characters don't really have to go through all the planning motions because the narrative shows through the writing that both are, in fact, consenting/enjoying it.) in many situations. I think that fictional "two characters are both super high and have sex" is also technically dub-con purely because unlike irl, the writer can very much show and say that both are still okay with it even beneath being high as fuck (it's a trope I kinda like admittedly, guy shares his stuff with another guy going through a rough spot, they both fuck around, they fall asleep together, then wake up and sober up and end up going to one of their places and it slowly evolved into them both helping the other get outta their depressive spots. Is it cliche? Maybe. But it's one of the more self-indulgent romances I enjoy).
I really wish people would stop trying to present what is very CLEARLY SA as dub-con, because it can seriously hurt people who either are too young to understand separation of fiction and reality, or seriously twist how people view a genuine medium of displaying consent in fictional media
@@exist4046its such a red flag for me when the fic taged dub con is just straight up non-con with no room to argue otherwise because like ? Are they telling me they think thats that's * somewhat * ok ? Sometimes it feels like they think its hot and therefore cannot possibly be truly SA and thats such an awful narrative
I’m puzzled by Adeline’s remark at the book signing that she doesn’t want to get into a conversation about skin conditions. Does she think freckles are a disease?
I’ll just take this as a sign that it’s been too long since I’ve rewatched this one 😌 gonna make some popcorn and settle in haha
You are the best, I swear. Thank you so much.
Adeline's 'books' seem like the books you would get commissioned to review here on this channel
I can't believe I didn't think of that all the times I watched the first video
Yeah I think "Adeline's books" are HD's books and I want to cry.
I get the ick when someone praises this book tbh. Im not gonna tell people what to do with their lives but if I hear someone say they love this book I'm gonna be dying on the inside. Also thanks for some of the educating about SA trauma. Always happy to be more understanding of the struggles of others in case they need a friend who's got their back.
P.S. I am tempted to write a dark romance true crime novel that has healthy interactions now as a result of this book series 😂
@@Rivkahwastaken I'll read it :)
The amount of biker boys I've seen using this book or booktok in general to gain followers😭And its always with these cringey ass pick up lines lmao
1:55:08 HD Carlton has this habit of taking common phrases and pushing it past the point of intention where they’re absolutely confusing
brought this book last year after seeing all the "good" reviews and thought i will be getting a well written dark romance. What i received in turn was an abomination and an intense desire to bleach my eyes
"Subject/verb agreement? Why bothers!"
I literally laughed until I cried.
I listened to the first.... I dunno, 1/3 of the audiobook, but then I just realized I didn't care what happened to the characters, so....why bothers?
Thank you for this freaking AMAZING review/rant.
I feel so validated with this video. My best friend loves this book but I genuinely hate it so much
Are they ok?
I hope they’re just incredibly sheltered and have not been horribly treated into thinking this lunacy was ok.
Thanks for reviewing this book I’m a avid reader and very picky about which books I read I’ve been hearing about this book all over saying how amazing it was my friend told me to read it saying it’s so good and spicy!
When I did a little research about it without spoilers I was totally turned off to read it thinking how can someone read this trash
This “book” is so problematic and I agree with another comment I saw on here saying the type of people that like this book are the ones that didn’t grow up reading and don’t know real literature 100%!!!!!!!! And praise it because they saw it on booktok just to jump on the bandwagon
Me a HUGE fanfic girlie holy F this read like a poorly written one when the “author” didn’t know anything about what dubcon is or how SA is just a fun quirk
I’ve read so many fanfics that were 100x better than this
I feel like that author didn’t know how to write these types of situations in the right context to make it “okay” if that makes sense
Anyway sorry I’m ranting but I’m glad I found someone like you that agreed with my feelings about this book and how awful it was
Looking forward to watching more of you :)
The parts you take it is literally in chronological order and I struggle to not cringe and be confused by the transitions. It feels all over the place and just wattpad fantasy ideas that doesn’t really care for character depth.
It was incredibly disorganized and that never went away.
1:38:38 Adeline’s social anxiety means nothing in this book omg. If she was agoraphobic and stuck in her house, it would *heighten* the stalker narrative and explain why she decides to stay in her house instead of seeking out help. Her safe space slowly getting more and more violated. Instead, it just serves to be a throwaway line in all the scenes of her talking to other characters (and not even TO ZANE???)
from my understanding, noncon and sa really are the same thing. the word 'noncon' was only coined bc the fanfic community was iffy about using sa or the actual r word since they feared it might help desensitize people to it. that being said, i see people using them interchangeably when talking abt fiction
I will say what I said on the original upload. Thank you so much for this review. I was this close to getting this book on audible for a 'fun trash listen'. You saved me from a horrible fate whilst giving me a good laugh!
1:23:30 Not that I think this book can be redeemed but what’s the point of dark romance if the love interest is going to be sanitized? I probably would’ve liked if Nana did die because her stalker because it would linger as a cautionary tale for Adeline throughout the series. Would Zane kill her? Could he be pushed to that point? That’s another reason why I hate the dual perspective