epistler: (Default)
epistler ([personal profile] epistler) wrote in [community profile] antishurtugal_reborn2021-06-05 04:22 pm

Sinner Sporking: Part Three

The next chapter is titled “Disturbing Arrivals”, which would make a great name for a horror movie about evil babies. We open with Leagion being escorted to meet Mr Dreamboat by Drago, who’s still being a perfect gentleman. They meet up with Caelum, who’s apparently gone in for the Emo look as he’s dressed entirely in black for no particular reason. He glares at Drago, who tenses up. Dude, let it the fuck go already. Quite frankly I think Drago’s scared of the asshole, and who could blame him? Everyone stands around for a bit, and Cosmo arrives at the bridge. Leagion freaks out about what she’s wearing and the state of her hair. I must say I very much enjoy being the sort of woman who doesn’t give a fuck about what dudes think about my clothes or hair, and wouldn’t even if I were in a relationship or hoping to get one.

Cosmo finally makes his grand entrance and for some reason he’s “stunned” to see Leagion. Didn’t anyone tell him in advance? He hops off his horse to go meet her but is intercepted by Caelum, who starts with the boring formalities. Cosmo is about as impatient as I am with all this, but puts up with it, and Caelum continues to act like a po-faced robot, saying it’s time to put a stop to this bickering between Cosmo and Askam. Cosmo’s two totally-not-co-conspirators, the earls Herme and Theod (no relation to Theon Greyjoy, sadly), lie about why they’re with him, and Goldfish and Heave-ho lurk up the back hoping Askam won’t notice them.

On seeing the two guys with Cosmo, Askam yells at them for being here without permission, which results in a mini pissing match until Caelum tells them to shut their pieholes. I don’t know about you guys, but when I see “epic fantasy” I definitely go in expecting to have to slog through a lot of petty bickering between idiots.

Eventually someone remembers Leagion exists, as Cosmo asks what she’s doing there. Alas, no mad passionate making out for either of them as they have to sit through a boring formal dinner first (this time it’s Cosmo complaining about it, not me). The only real highlight is that we’re briefly introduced to an Icarii named – snicker – “DareWing FullHeart”.

Competition time! Have a go at making up your own Icarii names in the comments section. The most snigger-worthy entry wins! And keep it PG-13, people. Sex jokes and naughty language are the easy way out.

Cosmo mentally whines about how he’s not sitting anywhere near Leagion, the girl of his dreams, and isn’t allowed to sleep with her. I guess both of them need a few lessons in how medieval style noble marriages work, then. This isn’t the goddamn 20th century, people!

The bitching and moaning continues for three freaking pages, and when Earl Hermia quietly points out that marrying Leagion would help cement Cosmo’s claim to the throne, he throws a tantrum and spits back that he doesn’t care about that – he just wants to marry her because he loooves her. This guy wouldn’t last ten seconds in Westeros, I’ll tell you that right now.

That night Cosmo goes to Zenith’s room and asks her to bring Leagion to see him. Zenith quite sensibly thinks that this might not be a good idea, because if those two are left in private for any length of time they’ll probably start going at it like rabbits. She knows damn well Caelum isn’t going to let them get married, but apparently Cosmo has guessed that already.

But then she just shrugs and decides to go ahead with it anyway, but warns him that she’ll be keeping an ear out and if she hears any funny noises she’ll be in there with a bucket of water. Finally a protagonist with some goddamn common sense. (That is until later on when WolfStar fucks it all better, of course). Cosmo, being about as mature as every male character Douglass ever wrote, spits and snarls at her. Rather than, oh, I don’t know, politely assuring her that he’s not going to be ripping any bodices so she needn’t worry.

Finally he’s allowed into Leagion’s room, where he finds her asleep. Mercifully he doesn’t stand there ogling her, and the sad thing about that is that I was honestly surprised to see a male character in one of these books not act like a creep toward his love interest. In a just world, we’d all expect that to be the default. Alas, we do not live in a just world. (Twilight was translated into 37 different languages – sit the fuck down).

Instead he just quietly wakes her up, whereupon – oh gag. Oh ick. Leagion seriously opens with “am I dreaming?” and is then gathered into his manly arms with a “broken” cry of “oh gods, [Leagion]!”. Hit me with the syrupy romantic clichés right away, why don’t you?

Fortunately we then cut to Zenith outside. Like me she’s having a good cry, though for different reasons, as she internally moans about how she doesn’t have Twu Wuv too. Then out of nowhere she has “a sense of doom” and ends up so freaked out she wraps herself up “in enchantment so thick that a spear would have bounced off an arm’s distance away”. Because magic can do that now, apparently. Also, quite frankly what just happened sounded like a panic attack to me. I get those sometimes. It sucks.

Cut to Caelum, and apparently he felt it too – “it” being “the sudden alteration in the Star Dance”. But because he’s so OMG powerful he can sense what it actually means: “a powerful Enchanter” (there’s that phrase again) has just done something to fuck around with the Dance thingy (maybe they put on a Panic! At the Disco album). Caelum somehow knows it’s WolfStar, and screams his name dramatically at… uh, the ceiling before teleporting away.

The next chapter opens with Wendy Orr, the Ferryman. He’s checking out the Star Gate Atlantis, and he can hear something on the other side. Whatever it is it sounds eeeevil, so I guess the main villain or villains is finally going to show up.

WolfStar comes along and says whoever it is is a “they” and that they’re his “judgement”, but it’s okay because they’ll never find the gate. This of course means that they will find the gate, and everyone except me will be very unpleasantly surprised. Orr says they’re the voices of all those kids Wolfy threw through the gate centuries ago.

I have an idea – why don’t you idiots cover up the gate? Or destroy it? The thing’s a fucking liability. Hell, if you just put some spells on it or welded it shut, or collapsed the cave it’s in, this entire trilogy wouldn’t need to happen and – spoilers – the entire COUNTRY wouldn’t end up reduced to a smoking crater. These guys are too stupid to live.

Then, joy of joys, Caelum shows up. In case you were at risk of liking him, he in all seriousness addresses WolfStar as “lonely wolf of the night” and then pointlessly recaps the deeply satisfying- uh, I mean tragic death of MorningStar in the last trilogy, apparently for the reader’s benefit. Shut up, Caelum.

Wolfy spreads his wings for some reason, though quite frankly most of the time the fact that the Icarii have wings goes ignored and they’re just written as sparkly oversexed humans. Hell, they don’t even have any problem sitting on chairs (or toilets) or getting through doorways and curtains. So I guess we were due a reminder. (For the record, I wore a pair of wings for a cosplay once, and the damn things caught on everything and made sitting down a real pain in the itinerant. And they weren’t even full-sized).

Meanwhile the voices from the gate start yelling Wolfy’s name and saying they’re “coming”. Dude, TMI! Wolfy insists they’re lying (no sex in space unless you’re a Sue!), and Caelum says he’s bluffing. Wolfy offers to give him some answers but he’d rather do it in Sigholt, and then pisses off promising to visit in a day.

Caelum checks out the gate and asks Orr about the voices, and Orr promises to stand guard. Rather than, I don’t know, beating some stolid steel into a twelve-inch-thick door with spikes on the inside and then jamming it over the hole. Nope, just have this one guy there who will be easily dispatched when the inevitable happens. I wouldn’t trust these morons to organise a bake sale.

Cut to WolfStar… without so much as a line break. Multiple award winning writing, people. He’s at the entrance to some random place called the Maze, which has never been mentioned before. It has a gate with a stone archway, with magic writing on it. I have no idea where it’s actually physically located, and I don’t think it’ll ever be explained. Is it underground? In a forest? A castle? Hovering a thousand feet off the ground in the stratosphere? Who knows!

All we do learn is that the magic writing is in some ancient language belonging to someone called “The Enemy”, and it used to have references to a “Crusader” on it, but now that’s changed to “StarSon”. Oh, and we also learn that the “Maze” somehow taught WolfStar the stupid prophecy… and get this. You’re not going to believe this, because it has to be one of the most idiotic retcons I’ve ever seen in my life.

Supposedly, the stupid prophecy… never had anything to do with Gorge and Saving The World in the first place! Nope, its ONLY purpose (and that’s the author’s wordage and emphasis, not mine), was “to breed the champion the Maze needed”.

See? See? That’s why the latter two books of the last trilogy stopped being Epic Battles and just turned into babies, babies, babies! It was supposed to be like that, see? Because the deaths of thousands and the destruction of cities and the murder of children didn’t matter – the little shit Caelum being born was the only thing that mattered! In other words, you officially wasted your time reading that crap because it only existed so this crap could happen. Don’t you just love it when an author accidentally cops to having screwed you around for thousands of pages and then says it was intentional? Because Christ that takes a lot of nerve.

It then turns out Wolfy was doing this in front of an audience, because he turns around to see “hundreds” of other Icarii sitting and watching the gate, and they’re all wearing “the golden knot”, which was briefly mentioned on Caelum’s first appearance but who cares. They answer – apparently in unison – that they’re “True to the StarSon.” Well that’s not creepy at all.

So now you’re thinking – we’re going to watch the grown-up Sue Baby fight ineffectual evil just like his daddy while having a boring and abusive romance with some hot chick, right?
As a matter of fact, the answer to that is no. What’s actually going to happen is surprisingly rather more original and a lot more fucked up than that.

See, this is how Douglass works. Either she slavishly follows a string of tired fantasy clichés… or she writes absolute batshit insanity. This time around it’s about 5% tired clichés, 95% batshit insanity. And it is glorious. Strap yourselves in, guys. You have been officially warned.


ultimate_cheetah: Ra'zac with a skull (Default)

[personal profile] ultimate_cheetah 2021-06-05 02:26 pm (UTC)(link)

FluffFeather DownFlop

ultimate_cheetah: Ra'zac with a skull (Default)

[personal profile] ultimate_cheetah 2021-06-05 02:39 pm (UTC)(link)

Thanks. Also, you reference Game of Thrones a lot. Is it good?

ultimate_cheetah: Ra'zac with a skull (Default)

[personal profile] ultimate_cheetah 2021-06-05 06:01 pm (UTC)(link)

...but it eventually got bogged down by too many subplots and the main plot stopped going anywhere and has essentially been spinning its wheels for the last two massive books, the second of which came out a decade ago. And nobody has any idea when the rest of the series will come out, if ever.

Oh. That's too bad. I guess it's a good thing my parents won't let me read the books, then.

Also, didn't the books get bigger and bigger, with one being the size of the entire LOTR trilogy?

ultimate_cheetah: Ra'zac with a skull (Default)

[personal profile] ultimate_cheetah 2021-06-07 12:54 am (UTC)(link)

I'm not surprised it's forbidden. There's some very graphic stuff in there.

I looked it up, and I regret it.

Same thing happened with Harry Potter...

I liked Order of the Phoenix, but Half Blood Prince just wasn't it for me. It had too much lounging around at the school than I would've liked. At least in the other books, people are more active. And of course, in Deathly Hallows, there's this part where the author clearly got stuck. So many things could've gotten cut.

-once a series becomes popular enough, the publisher often starts cutting corners to maximise profits, and a major result of that is the author is allowed to have a lot more creative freedom with all the subplots and pointless scenes they like.

Oh yeah. It happens so often. Personally, I think that even if the author can keep track of all the subplots, the reader might not be able to. That's why there shouldn't be too many. Maybe like one to three. (Individual character arcs may have more room.)

Like with His Dark Materials, there was this weird side tangent to another world, and a side character. The Golden Compass was great, and the Subtle Knife was good (except for the whole Witch kills John Parry for not having sex with her), but the Amber Spyglass, while not absolutely terrible by any means, is where it went off the rails.

  • Sound familiar? It should.*

Except with Paolini, even the first book wasn't that good.

uueiaa: (Default)

[personal profile] uueiaa 2021-06-05 03:01 pm (UTC)(link)
Why are all the Icarii named like utter dingbats? Seriously, that double-capitalization naming scheme with no space in between is an atrocity. I'm assuming this was happening in the original trilogy, too?
Edited 2021-06-05 15:02 (UTC)
uueiaa: (Default)

[personal profile] uueiaa 2021-06-05 05:51 pm (UTC)(link)
I will at least give the author credit: aside from "SpearWing" (wings are nothing like spears at all; is that a character infamous for stabbing other Icarii in the wings or something?), all those names at least sound vaguely like something a race of impossibly self-absorbed winged humanoids would name each other. It's just the lack of spacing between the first and second that keeps throwing me off. Even the much-maligned hyphen between them would look better on the page. It's just such a strangely terrible choice that it's baffling.
Edited 2021-06-05 17:51 (UTC)
mara_dienne459: (Default)

[personal profile] mara_dienne459 2021-06-05 11:28 pm (UTC)(link)
We’re going to throw out FaffleWaff DiddlyBean as our entry.
cmdrnemo: (Default)

[personal profile] cmdrnemo 2021-06-06 04:19 am (UTC)(link)
BattleStar CyberCrow?
HerpityFloopin BorkBork?
WestWing HeartRose?

"That button launches all of our nuclear missiles!"
"Then which button gets me a latte?"
"That would be the other identical button 3 ft. away."
"Who designed this system?"
"You did."
"Fair enough."

Sometimes the difference between comedic and serious works is exclusively that comedy acknowledges when an idea is incredibly stupid.
https://youtu.be/L1CxlyMoFRs
torylltales: (Default)

[personal profile] torylltales 2021-06-06 11:46 am (UTC)(link)
HerpityFloopin BorkBork?


It's Chef-approved!

Ooh, there's a good one. CrispyFried ChickenWing.
Edited 2021-06-07 09:28 (UTC)
cmdrnemo: (Default)

[personal profile] cmdrnemo 2021-06-07 02:25 pm (UTC)(link)
Did you change that? How about FingerLickin' McChicken?

torylltales: (Default)

[personal profile] torylltales 2021-06-07 08:39 pm (UTC)(link)

I did edit, yes. I felt that ChickenWing fit the aesthetic of the book better than FriedChicken.