Manny’s Reviews > Une Passione fatale > Status Update

Dontcha just hate it when your heart is broken, you are faced with inevitable humiliation, ruin and death, your only honourable course of action is to take your own life first, and you find you're stuck in a review thread where everything you say has to start with "Dontcha just hate it"?

Dontcha just hate it when your country has been invaded, your husband has committed suicide, your treasure has been confiscated, your children are threatened with immediate execution, you have been arrested and imprisoned, you've just been brought face to face with your cruel enemy, and you haven't even been able to wash your hair first?

Dontcha just hate it when, in a desperate position, you're on the verge of concluding an extremely complex and sensitive deal which might conceivably save you and your family, and at the critical moment your jealous idiot of a husband decides that your enemy's ambassador is being too familiar with you and orders him removed and flogged?

Dontcha just hate it when you're facing the inevitable advance of your implacable enemy and your main options are to threaten to destroy your treasury or offer to commit suicide, and then you discover that not only does your personal physician refuse to provide you with a reliable poison, but you have fewer sacks of emeralds in the strongroom than you had believed?

Dontcha just hate it when your husband's been defeated in several key battles, two of your key allies have turned traitor and joined the enemy, your galleys are infested with shipworm, and the wine's gone off?

Dontcha just hate it when you're such a world-class babe that even your hairdresser is a celebrity, and then your envious political enemies, who have no class at all, go and use that against you?

Dontcha just hate it when you discover that your political enemies are circulating fake news in the form of lewd amphorae which depict virtuous little you as Omphale and your hunky hyper-hetero hubby as an effeminate cross-dressing Hercules? Like, it's so ridiculous you'd laugh if it weren't also so fucking insulting and lots of people are apparently dumb enough to fall for it.

Dontcha just hate it when your darling hunk of a guy has finally managed to conquer a country, using just a minimal force of a few thousand men, and then you find that the fucking Senate refuse to grant him an official triumph, even though he's got the fucking ex-potentate of Armenia sitting in chains in your fucking dungeon?