i’m not exactly old (mid-20s) but i do feel very tender about younger gen z teenagers discovering rogue one and star wars through andor when they were probably too young to see the movie when it first came out and cling to it with the specific excitement you can only have at 16 because you have so much more free time and you’re not yet beaten down….like i feel like i’m sitting on a porch smoking a cigar going ah yes the children are our future…
no but im never going to be normal again. LOOK at this. look. IMMEDIATELY before this he gave a whole miserable speech at the graveyard about how much he misses the kids and how he wants them to come home. He was grieving so hard it started to rain. He cried while he sang to them. It was the perfect end to 5 days of grieving- and then he does this.
and the rain isnt about grief anymore- the thunder isnt a peaceful background to a heartbreaking scene. It is rage. the whole context changes. The storm raged on while he grieved like he raged during the Everything Else that happened (“there are a lot of federation workers on today. I need to interrogate them about some things” he said while he was following forever ALONE to distract him. he knew forever was fucked up and about to put more marriage pressure on him and for anyone else that would have been Terrifying. how could you focus on anything but that? but. bad was thinking about tormenting more federation workers)
i just!!!! its so good. its SO good its so scary its so good. bad hasnt accepted the loss of his children but he has accepted how far he will go to get them back. (he will do anything)
this one-hundred paged fixation has had an iron grip on my smooth brain for the past half-year
(on another note, here's a list of ways of how to express "shooting yourself in the foot" in various programming languages, although some are, arguably, not actual programming languages, and some are just references to certain operating systems)
You are so right in your distaste for Blades book 2. No matter how great things get near the end, a majority of the book was horrible. They led us along like mouse to cheese. It’s inexcusable to play with their audience this way.
I only wish more people were less willing to excuse PB’s mediocrity. The signs were on the wall for me when DLS was flat out better than Blades 2, and it’s narratively quite simple. The story told was well paced, thought out, and above all kept us waiting for more each week. I cannot say the same for B2. That is sad.
I mean I do understand why people still enjoyed it and were willing to overlook the negative aspects or didn’t have much of a problem with them to begin with. Blades 1 was a fan favorite, we all missed these characters a lot, and many people (myself included at one point) didn’t believe we would actually get book 2 because of all the bait and switches PB had done in the past. But the first two things are why I personally couldn’t overlook the glaring issues.
I can’t remember who the OP was now, but I remember seeing a post from when book 2 only had a few chapters out where someone said something about it seeming like the writers learned all the wrong things about what made the book so good, and I couldn’t agree with that person more! Yeah, book 1 was good because it was different from anything we had ever gotten before. But I think the main reason it was so good was because of the characters as individuals and the relationships we got to form with those individuals to ultimately become a family. Yet they didn’t really acknowledge those individuals or relationships in ways that did them justice for the majority of book 2. And on top of that, MC’s own characterization was inconsistent at times because the writers picked and chose when they wanted us to be a competent leader and when they wanted us to be virtually clueless for plot convenience.
Book 1 was also relatively straightforward whereas it seemed like the writers wanted to turn the sequel into their own personal commentary on religion, which is an incredibly complex topic in itself. They had some social commentary in book 1, but it was done a lot better in my opinion because it didn’t take so much of a front seat. They managed to make it clear that that commentary was important and relevant to the writers, the characters, and the readers living in the real world while never robbing book 1 of that fun adventure game used for escapism feel. Meanwhile, book 2 almost felt like ‘Rising Tides but make it religion’ at times. And that’s on top of all of the other issues I’ve already mentioned in my previous posts.
I will say that I can see how there’s usually a lot of pressure to blow things out of the water for a sequel to something so beloved, and that most likely contributed to how things played out. So maybe I’m being a bit too harsh in my judgement of everything. But I still find it very disappointing to wait so long for something just for it to be so messy and miss the mark by a mile
too much art of sunday hsr just standing around looking pretty. that man is so fucking insane even doctor veritas ratio was like "you need like. serious psychiatric help or something man what is Wrong with you" where are my sundays completely wracked with wretched grief and now completely uncaring of who or what he destroys in the process of avenging his dearest little sister. he doesn't give a damn about maintaining the harmony's peaceful image anymore. robin was all he had. he gave up everything for her. it didn't matter - he could be stuck in a cold mud pit all alone and be fine with it so long as he could still see her smiling. but now she's gone and will never smile again. you need to understand that he is exactly .001 seconds away from just biting someone's head off out of a grief-stricken rage and if your art doesn't reflect this in some way then i cannot accept it as sunday. thank y