Therobishow - The Robi Show

What in the 1990s is this

Ok but Roma is such a pretty name. Roma. Roma Roma Roma. I could say it all day

R*wling shows throughout the series that she believes that bad things are only bad when they're done by the Bad Guys. However, if one of the designated Good Guys does the same thing it's not bad.

For example, use of the Unforgivable Curses. When the Bad Guys use them it's horrific, evil, one of the Worst Things Ever. But when Harry uses them, with alarming frequency, it's fine. He's not a Bad Guy, so the things he does can't be bad.

Then there's Snape. He's awful. Just awful. He's an incel creep. He's racist. He bullies young children just because he can, and is outright abusive to them if he didn't like their parents (even when said parents died when the kid was an infant). And oh yeah, he's an incel creep who became obsessed with a girl who did not return his feelings, called her slurs, and was a-okay with her husband and infant son being murdered. You cannot tell me that he wasn't hoping to swoop in and try to manipulate her into a relationship when she was vulnerable due to extreme grief. But, because she for some bizarre reason unwilling to stand aside quietly during the murder of her family, he started working for the Good Guys, which totally means that he's a Good Guy and none of the horrible things he did actually matter.

And then there's Dumbledore! Oh boy, I could write at least an Order of the Phoenix sized book about all the terrible things he did. But I'll keep it short here. He knowingly left a particularly vulnerable child in an abusive situation, and didn't even bother to actually check in on him now and again to make sure that he wasn't being, you know, abused or anything like that. He also left the baby in a basket, outside, for hours, because that was for some reason better than knocking at the door? He then manipulated a young child into basically becoming his private soldier against an evil wizard so powerful that the entire magical world pissed themselves at the mention of his name. But all this gets glossed over and is forgiven as easily as if he had just lost a pen someone had lent him. Because, after all, he's the ultimate Good Guy. And a Good Guy can't do bad things. Therefore, none of the things he did were actually bad.

This got a lot longer than I intended it to be. The views on morality in this series really bother me.

Sometimes I just sit around and think about ways to improve the Harry Potter books. Not even in a fix-it fic way. Just like...there are some seriously dropped threads in Deathly Hallows especially.

Do y'all ever think about the thing with Griphook? Harry choosing to deceive him about the sword of Gryffindor? Well, I do. It bothers me that there are no negative consequences for this. Because oop- Griphook double-crossed them too! So we never have to think about Harry making that choice. And the characterization of Griphook is squicky, man. He relishes the idea of weak creatures suffering, he's obnoxious. We can't even REALLY examine wizard/goblin relations because Griphook is such an uncomplicated little asshole. Did Gryffindor steal the sword from the goblin king??? Harry is uncomfy about it for like two seconds and then oop--guess we never need to think about it again. It's a bad writing choice and when I think about a book like Terry Pratchett's Feet of Clay--a book that complexly and carefully and humanely examines racism--i feel super disappointed in the way the Harry Potter series just like...lets some things go.

This is, I think, one example of a handful of moments when Harry does a Bad Thing: lies, uses unforgivable curses etc. But there's no real examination of it. She nods at it a little like "harry was becoming as reckless a godfather and Sirius was to him" but then it just gets...dropped. There isn't even a "this is war; there is no moral high ground" moment. R*wling just seems to have no plan at all to examine any moral complexity in that final book. It makes me nuts.

CLUELESS (1995), dir. Amy Heckerling + Letterboxd Reviews

“that character is problematic” i am sick and twisted. next

I have no idea how old your book rant post is, but here I am, about to be your problem

I HATED THE SUNBEARER TRIALS

Yeah, okay cool, it’s a book with a trans author and trans main character. EVERYTHING ELSE WAS TRASH

It starts off great, with the MC graffitiing (spelling???) a wall with two birds and then he never does anything interesting again in favor of pining over/think about/hate a guy from his childhood that was mean to him once ten years ago. Before you go thinking the MC’s hatred of him is justified, just know all that is because the guy pulled a mean girls and said YOU CANT SIT WITH US a literal decade ago.

His best friend is a part of a group he hates, but it’s okay because she’s one of the good ones

And now: The cardinal sin

THIS BOOK IS MARKETED AS PERCY JACKSON MEETS THE HUNGER GAMES YET HAS NO CHARACTER DEATHS AT ALL AND SAYS **** IN THE FIRST LINE

WHO IS THIS FOR????????

I adore Hunger Games, but I mean it when I say that if I could travel back in time to stop those books from ever being published, I would do it in a heartbeat just so I would never have to see a book marketed as "X meets Hunger Games" ever again.

If you put even the slightest hint of competition in a YA or YA-adjacent book, it gets called Hunger Games. I could write a full rip-off of Bring It On, but the competition element would guarantee that it would be marketed as an HG style book.

The same thing happens with Mean Girls. Does your book have teenage or early 20s girls being in proximity to each other? Well it's Mean Girls now.

And it's really not doing these books any favors. Cause people pick them up expecting something in line with the brutality and messaging of HG, and end up disappointed as hell when that's not what they get.

I think publishing houses might actually be my mortal enemy

⬆️ Me fighting publishers for all the bs they pull (especially Red Tower - hate them)

This is a nsft blog but by far the book I hate and love the most is Kneller's happy campers. The themes of hopelessness and depression are prevalent throughout the entire book, and as somebody who struggles with depression and got better, I was waiting for the same thing to happen to my main characters.

This is not the case. It's a beautiful novel that I need to reread through the lens I have now and see if I missed something in my first reading, but as I remember it, it's just edging you and has the message of "everything sucks forever" instead of "find your own happiness one step at a time". I might have been too immature to understand it though.

Please read these book if you aren't sensitive to depression, su*c*de, AH, self harm, or things of that sort, I fucking hate it so much. I also love it. It really captures the monotony and hopelessness with depression and puts a very interesting take on the afterlife.

Please then tell me what you think if you read it.

Oh yikes. Gonna stay far away from this one in that case. I really don't like depression narratives that - intentionally or not - play up the idea that it's just hopeless. I don't want sugarcoated "have you tried not being sad" stuff either. I feel like both can be really damaging. Especially since the people most likely to seek out depression narratives are people who are going through it themselves

fandom people are literally insane this is so dark imagine living your life this way

Ides of January Reading Update

The Cloisters got DNF'ed. I don't like to do that, but I had to. It was so fucking boring. The stuff about tarot was interesting, but it would only be focused on for like two paragraphs and then utterly forgotten so the protag could whine some more about not being cool enough. It was also all tell, no show. At one point, it's said that the MC has been having trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality and might be having full-blown hallucinations. And....that's it. We never get to see it at all. If it weren't for that line, there'd be no way to know that was happening. And it's like that with everything. Awful book.

Babel is good, but it's taking me forever to get through it. I like it, it's just slow going.

So This Is Ever After is the only romance I've ever enjoyed reading. It's funny, sweet as hell, and Queer af. I don't even know why I decided to read it because I don't really like the romance genre, but I'm so glad I did.

Maus made me cry and that's all I'm ready to say about that.

Iron Widow is one of the best books I've ever read. Wu Zetian is an absolute gold medal badass and I love everything about her. I don't know if I want to be her friend, her girlfriend, or just be her; I'll even accept being her enemy if I have to. I'm just obsessed and want her in my life somehow. It's fucking brilliant and I cannot wait for Heavenly Tyrant.

The Weight of Blood is very good so far. It's a Carrie retelling set in a 2014 Georgia high school about to host its first integrated prom. I'm only about a third of the way through it right now, but I'm really enjoying it so far.

Sunrise. Instagram: AngryFluffy Twitter: @Angry_Fluffy DeviantArt: AngryFluffy