Status Updates From Brighter than Scale, Swifte...

they're cute

okayyyyy !

My patience is being tested 🙃

Yeva nooooo 😭

reading books like this is so exhausting tbh... books that expect you to do all the heavy lifting of emotional resonance. here's all this information that will be narrated to you, the audience, in poetically distant third person; now aren't you feeling things?? aren't you sad/angry/happy for Yeva since that's what I, the book, am telling you to feel??? do some STORYTELLING ffs

Recién me genera interés pero ya no se redime de todo lo anterior

not to sound like a Disney simp but when I watched The Mandalorian and reached the very few scenes where Din took off his helmet, I was so uncomfortable with it that I looked away because it felt so wrong to see his face. marketing for this book drawing that parallel when the impact of armor/helmet removal is just noottttt here is........ meh.

you can't use The Mandalorian as a comp title if the armor/helmet come off Just Whenever. such a big deal is made about Yeva never taking off the armor, needing to wear the helmet, and then two people are like "hey you should take off your armor/helmet" and Yeva's like "well okaayyyyy if you insist :3" like. come on. you have not earned the removal of armor/helmet.

Yeva is like the dragon-killer version of when a character is meant to be a brilliant criminal but the author isn’t clever enough to pull it off so it just feels like the world’s standards for a mastermind are comedically low. or when a character is supposed to be a great poet but the author isn’t, so it feels like the world’s poet laureate is fantasy rupi kaur.

also I went into this expecting a nonbinary protagonist and have been sorely betrayed on that front. I would say ‘unless Yeva figures out some stuff in the book’ but there just isn’t room for such an arc to mean anything. We’re 1/4 through already and she’s still just an empty slate and I don’t think a nonbinary gender journey would be satisfying. like at all.