More bad book discussion on the SBU discord! discord.gg/RSuU5CeDSU Channel members get access to our writing community, Lightlark emojis, early access to uploads, and more! Join here: www.youtube.com/@sbu_englishclub/join
WAIT WHY am I in the video HELP???? Thank you so much for the mention, that's so kind!!!! I'm genuinely so flattered I will be doubling down on my journey to promote this podcast now. This channel is so wonderful and a welcome break from negative 24/7 critiques I'm just. Wow. I can't believe I'm canon in the ECP now.
I imagine the Star Stick as, specifically, Sailor Venus's transformation wand, I believe the second upgrade where the top is star shaped. So it's orange and plastic and gaudy and available in Japanese toy stores or US Hot Topics.
So I’m kinda paraphrasing with this but a guy called Down The Rabbit Hole was reading some of the free Empress Theresa chapters (it’s an archived stream, also wasn’t monetized) & he said something along the lines of ‘there are no bad writing ideas, there are good/neutral ideas & bad writing’. I think that applies here too. I just can’t be bothered to find the exact quote since the stream was 3 hours long.
@@sbu_englishclub like….i honestly think her having powers could work. Just have her suddenly be no more powerful than the other leaders. It would still be disempowering for someone completely accustomed to being the best. The heart thing could still work too, by having her being grossed out, wishing for there to be more for her people to eat & envying the others for having options for food. Though me liking darker stories may be warping my perspective on this.
@@serene1172 it could work in that you could tell a good story with it, and yeah I agree with you I’d personally prefer a story that had that kind of grit. But not having it in Aster’s case is where the business intercepts with the writing-it’s MUCH harder to sell “MC has to eat human hearts” to the Fourth Wing/ACoTAR crowd than us. And ultimately she wants their money, not ours
@@sbu_englishclub in that case, why introduce the heart thing in the first place? Why not just limit it to a specific & very hard to grow mushroom, because the mushroom only grows in the waste of an animal that’ll drive the harvesters insane eventually. or something. In my opinion, if a story is gonna introduce something off putting of gross like eating hearts, then it should basically apply it evenly. Edit: I guess what I’m getting at is, it looks like she’s trying to worm outta her own world building
@serene1172 you said it in the edit: my theory is she had the idea, posted about it on tiktok and got attention for it, then realized more or less what you’re saying and did what she could to get out of committing
Honestly as someone who loves worldbuilding, this series drove me insane. I even started thinking up a complete rewrite where the whole thing takes place in a World Tree type of deal and each realm is held in different branches. 'Lightlark' is like Asgard, but more like it's a neutral realm where the people from different realms meet and live, also where there are the elders who communicates with the - placeholder thingy here - Celestials, from whom the realms derived their powers from. When this curse happened to the tree, the tree is now dying and is cut off from the Celestials, so everyone gets cut off from their powers. So the curse itself is not unique, but getting cut off from their sources of their powers affects the realms uniquely because of the nature of those powers and how it shapes the realms, their way of life, etc. So when they are deciding upon which realm to cut off, it _is_ a pruning.
@@sbu_englishclub Oh yeah! But here I'm thinking like, since the people in the realms know that there is a greater world out there anyway, I'm thinking the new twist would be discovering that there are other trees. The trees used to be closer to each other, but like space, everything slowly drifts away as the universe expands. Also. "Isla" and "Grimm" romance. We can keep that ship and have it be endgame, but everything about it gotta change, man. Instead of this framing of Hades and Persephone, why can't it be more like "Death keeps all the gifts Life gives them"?
40:00 small correction. The Vinderlings left the wildling realm way before the curse (i don't remember why) and lost their wilding abilities long ago so they don't have the curse. So they don't really care about the Wildings abandoning lightlark. I don't even think they know Isla is their ruler. They just encountered her by chance on moonling aisle and saw a meal. I think you mixed up their motivations with the "Creatures" of lightlark. They are the ones who are bitter about feeling abandoned by the Wildings. The moonlings that tried to assassinate Isla are actual moonling nobles. They just wanted the games to be over with.
45:17 personally I understand her bitterness and lowkey was rooting for her to succeed. If my best friend and fiancée was cheating behind my back and having talks about marrying, I would burn EVERYTHING down
i like listening book podcasts while im sewing stuff and yours was a delight to find. i really enjoyed how you were still considering the author's ideas and did not take the easy negative route. can't wait to listen your other episodes
One of the comp titles this was marketed under was The Hunger Games and despite having watched like... 3 different review videos... I'm still wondering where exactly the Hunger Games part comes in.....
These are always very fun. I probably wouldn't have looked into the book too much because of the bad buzz, and I'm coming away with an interest in the story behind the story and a respect for the author's multifaceted ideas that went into it.
Something I'm questioning regarding the demonstrations is why have them? If people in this world know that those of a certain race have specific powers, and the leaders of their respective races have the same powers, why are they demonstrating their abilities? I havent noticed any incredible special abilities in regard to them being royals, so why demonstrate the BASICS of their powers that everyone already knows about?! Unless I missed something, they didnt demonstrate their Flares, the actual special abilities, they just did their usual daily abilities. Even though its clearly for the reader's information and understanding, it makes no sense in the world.
@@sbu_englishclub That makes sense lol But now (cuz im apparently just really hung up on this) I know Isla does some knife throwing as "her power" and no one says anything. When really, they should be SUPER confused! Wildling powers are known, so why would she not do something? Thats what they should be asking her, but we can't let her secret get out that easily i guess. Oro can't betray her trust if everyone already questions and concludes she has none (despite he should have known sooner given his Flare of knowing when people LIE) The scene just doesn't work and it bothers meeeee!
So the demonstrations are basically the demonstration in the Hunger Games, that's what she's pulling from there. And where in THG it's meant to get sponsors interested in you when the game proper happens, here it's part of the participants society who they want to partner with. Because the first half of the competition leads up to the pairing up, and those with higher points are able to choose who they get stuck with. So to be charitable, it could actually make sense to do something nothing to do with your power since yeah, that should be known. But this gets at the bigger problem I feel, of why are they partnered at all for this "game"? If they were taking the assumption that the prophecy meant one of the rulers had to be killed, what good does partners do. But then with no one having died in these games before, I'm not sure how they actually know about the population dying with the ruler or how they decided what the prophecy meant. She did a bad job of explaining past attempts to solve things.
I sorta think that this book is more about emotion than anything else, viz. giving the reader a loosely-connected series of emotional experiences that they aren't meant to think too hard about. Gotta let the limbic system enjoy itself and keep the prefrontal cortex from raining on its parade. Maybe writing like this is a bit easier because you don't have to have a perfect explanation for everything and can focus on writing scenes that you think are going to be rad. BUT, if you go too far than you'll get your reader asking too many questions, or you'll write something that sounds dumb. I also think that a big part of the emotional appeal is wish fulfillment. I think that a lot of our fantasies as humans are about having our cake and eating it too...for example, if I fantasize about winning the lottery I'm fantasizing about both getting fabulously wealthy and doing so while not doing any work and with minimal risk. Or if your parents offer you cake or ice cream and instead of choose one or the other, or a half-serving of each, you go for a full serving of both. I kinda think that books like this try to give this to the reader...you can imagine yourself as a pretty princess who is also a badass knife fighter, as a powerful noble who is also common, as attending an event with lots of arbitrary structure as well as exciting chaos, as the outsider who is also the center of the story. I do not understand the whole structure thing, though...why spend so long putting on those weird demonstrations and challenges? What is the purpose of these demonstration? To intimidate? To inform? It's not like all their countries are on the brink of war and this is the Congress of Vienna or the League of Nations or something (thus necessitating careful negotiations and espionage and power plays and whatnot). Isn't there something better they could be doing with their time? Is this book really some kind of critique of ineffectual elites? My questions: what about elaborate social rituals and being split into groups with defining character traits appeals to people? And why the weird sex stuff? Is that also some kind of wish fulfillment?
Wish fulfillment is DEFINITELY the name of the game here. It’s easy to get sucked into the rollercoaster as you read and completely lose track of the (lack of) connective tissue and it does seem to be by design-like tou said, Aster wants you to feel like you’re a badass pretty princess with all the melodrama that comes with that. The demonstrations I believe are so weird and stripped down because Aster didn’t want them and either publisher pressure or story pressure made them feel necessary. They’re just obligations for the real trick of Lightlark-the aforementioned badass princess romance or whatever. I wish we’d thought like you in our suggestions though. You could easily retool it into “commentary” on leaders being ineffective without having to edit much, even though I’m positive the reason the demonstrations exist today is nothing near as deep. Seems like a good compromise All the other weird stuff with tribes and sex I think are appeals to base instinct, simple as that. We want to know who our people are, what that means, and how to make more of them. That’s not Aster’s fault but damn did she capitalize
@@sbu_englishclub she then apparently proceeds to largely ignore her Starling powers for the rest of the book? Just tries to harness Wildling and Nightshade, and just think on that dichotomy? Why not just pass on the Starling powers to someone who cares about them?
I'm so glad this channel got randomly recommended to me, I've listened to a bunch of episodes while working and it's so nice to hear some decent book critique that isn't mean-spirited for the sake of it (I won't lie, I do also love a thorough roasting, but it's nice to switch it up every so often). As a sidenote I tried following you guys on Instagram, but it looks like the username linked above doesn't exist anymore?
![Method Writing: The First Four Concepts - Jack Grapes [FULL INTERVIEW]](/img/n.gif)
More bad book discussion on the SBU discord! discord.gg/RSuU5CeDSU
Channel members get access to our writing community, Lightlark emojis, early access to uploads, and more! Join here: www.youtube.com/@sbu_englishclub/join
Crow Caller imagines the "Starstick" as a $30 princess wand from Disney; I, however, imagine it as a wand from Fairy Oddparents
I like your idea. I mean, it’s LITERALLY a star stick
WAIT WHY am I in the video HELP????
Thank you so much for the mention, that's so kind!!!! I'm genuinely so flattered I will be doubling down on my journey to promote this podcast now. This channel is so wonderful and a welcome break from negative 24/7 critiques I'm just. Wow. I can't believe I'm canon in the ECP now.
Listen idk what to tell you I was just a horrible combination of flattered you DMed and humiliated I had ghosted you
Lost it at the talk about how her skimpy clothes could conceal hidden weapons EVERYWHERE.
If every skimpy article of clothing is also a weapon then there’s no problem, right?
I imagine the Star Stick as, specifically, Sailor Venus's transformation wand, I believe the second upgrade where the top is star shaped. So it's orange and plastic and gaudy and available in Japanese toy stores or US Hot Topics.
@@ribbonquest new headcanon unlocked
So I’m kinda paraphrasing with this but a guy called Down The Rabbit Hole was reading some of the free Empress Theresa chapters (it’s an archived stream, also wasn’t monetized) & he said something along the lines of ‘there are no bad writing ideas, there are good/neutral ideas & bad writing’. I think that applies here too. I just can’t be bothered to find the exact quote since the stream was 3 hours long.
Yeah, that’s exactly what’s going on here. She pitched her ideas, but ultimately couldn’t deliver on them meaningfully
@@sbu_englishclub like….i honestly think her having powers could work. Just have her suddenly be no more powerful than the other leaders. It would still be disempowering for someone completely accustomed to being the best. The heart thing could still work too, by having her being grossed out, wishing for there to be more for her people to eat & envying the others for having options for food. Though me liking darker stories may be warping my perspective on this.
@@serene1172 it could work in that you could tell a good story with it, and yeah I agree with you I’d personally prefer a story that had that kind of grit. But not having it in Aster’s case is where the business intercepts with the writing-it’s MUCH harder to sell “MC has to eat human hearts” to the Fourth Wing/ACoTAR crowd than us. And ultimately she wants their money, not ours
@@sbu_englishclub in that case, why introduce the heart thing in the first place? Why not just limit it to a specific & very hard to grow mushroom, because the mushroom only grows in the waste of an animal that’ll drive the harvesters insane eventually. or something. In my opinion, if a story is gonna introduce something off putting of gross like eating hearts, then it should basically apply it evenly.
Edit: I guess what I’m getting at is, it looks like she’s trying to worm outta her own world building
@serene1172 you said it in the edit: my theory is she had the idea, posted about it on tiktok and got attention for it, then realized more or less what you’re saying and did what she could to get out of committing
I was not expecting Zelda CDI and MLP references this episode.
Lightlark warrants only the finest points of reference
This is the greatest moment in the ECP fandom
Honestly as someone who loves worldbuilding, this series drove me insane. I even started thinking up a complete rewrite where the whole thing takes place in a World Tree type of deal and each realm is held in different branches.
'Lightlark' is like Asgard, but more like it's a neutral realm where the people from different realms meet and live, also where there are the elders who communicates with the - placeholder thingy here - Celestials, from whom the realms derived their powers from. When this curse happened to the tree, the tree is now dying and is cut off from the Celestials, so everyone gets cut off from their powers. So the curse itself is not unique, but getting cut off from their sources of their powers affects the realms uniquely because of the nature of those powers and how it shapes the realms, their way of life, etc.
So when they are deciding upon which realm to cut off, it _is_ a pruning.
@@amaririii_ch wait I really like that plus that’s very similar to the twist in Nightbane so sounds like you have the right idea here
@@sbu_englishclub Oh yeah! But here I'm thinking like, since the people in the realms know that there is a greater world out there anyway, I'm thinking the new twist would be discovering that there are other trees. The trees used to be closer to each other, but like space, everything slowly drifts away as the universe expands.
Also. "Isla" and "Grimm" romance. We can keep that ship and have it be endgame, but everything about it gotta change, man. Instead of this framing of Hades and Persephone, why can't it be more like "Death keeps all the gifts Life gives them"?
I'm glad that improv of improv comedy was censored it can be very disturbing to some people
as a content creator it is my duty to protect the public
40:00 small correction. The Vinderlings left the wildling realm way before the curse (i don't remember why) and lost their wilding abilities long ago so they don't have the curse. So they don't really care about the Wildings abandoning lightlark. I don't even think they know Isla is their ruler. They just encountered her by chance on moonling aisle and saw a meal. I think you mixed up their motivations with the "Creatures" of lightlark. They are the ones who are bitter about feeling abandoned by the Wildings. The moonlings that tried to assassinate Isla are actual moonling nobles. They just wanted the games to be over with.
45:17 personally I understand her bitterness and lowkey was rooting for her to succeed. If my best friend and fiancée was cheating behind my back and having talks about marrying, I would burn EVERYTHING down
i like listening book podcasts while im sewing stuff and yours was a delight to find. i really enjoyed how you were still considering the author's ideas and did not take the easy negative route. can't wait to listen your other episodes
I’m so glad you enjoyed! Hope to see you around. Happy sewing
i really love this style of review, especially with these kinds of books. it's really lovely how you guys care for the writer's ideas!
One of the comp titles this was marketed under was The Hunger Games and despite having watched like... 3 different review videos... I'm still wondering where exactly the Hunger Games part comes in.....
43:05 Azul actually did do it. But it was bc he saw she was Aurora
These are always very fun. I probably wouldn't have looked into the book too much because of the bad buzz, and I'm coming away with an interest in the story behind the story and a respect for the author's multifaceted ideas that went into it.
hooomahgod im so excited to watch this one but IM NOT AT HOME RIGHT NOW have my like and comment prematurely though
Your investment will pay dividends 💰
Something I'm questioning regarding the demonstrations is why have them? If people in this world know that those of a certain race have specific powers, and the leaders of their respective races have the same powers, why are they demonstrating their abilities?
I havent noticed any incredible special abilities in regard to them being royals, so why demonstrate the BASICS of their powers that everyone already knows about?!
Unless I missed something, they didnt demonstrate their Flares, the actual special abilities, they just did their usual daily abilities.
Even though its clearly for the reader's information and understanding, it makes no sense in the world.
LITERALLY. No yeah I think it was just their normal powers. But Aster must have figured we have to have something happen in the scene so here we are
@@sbu_englishclub That makes sense lol
But now (cuz im apparently just really hung up on this) I know Isla does some knife throwing as "her power" and no one says anything. When really, they should be SUPER confused! Wildling powers are known, so why would she not do something? Thats what they should be asking her, but we can't let her secret get out that easily i guess.
Oro can't betray her trust if everyone already questions and concludes she has none (despite he should have known sooner given his Flare of knowing when people LIE)
The scene just doesn't work and it bothers meeeee!
@@MikaWind I really question the logic of throwing a knife but super well = magic power, but what do I know about the intricacies of lightlark culture
So the demonstrations are basically the demonstration in the Hunger Games, that's what she's pulling from there. And where in THG it's meant to get sponsors interested in you when the game proper happens, here it's part of the participants society who they want to partner with. Because the first half of the competition leads up to the pairing up, and those with higher points are able to choose who they get stuck with.
So to be charitable, it could actually make sense to do something nothing to do with your power since yeah, that should be known. But this gets at the bigger problem I feel, of why are they partnered at all for this "game"? If they were taking the assumption that the prophecy meant one of the rulers had to be killed, what good does partners do.
But then with no one having died in these games before, I'm not sure how they actually know about the population dying with the ruler or how they decided what the prophecy meant. She did a bad job of explaining past attempts to solve things.
I sorta think that this book is more about emotion than anything else, viz. giving the reader a loosely-connected series of emotional experiences that they aren't meant to think too hard about. Gotta let the limbic system enjoy itself and keep the prefrontal cortex from raining on its parade.
Maybe writing like this is a bit easier because you don't have to have a perfect explanation for everything and can focus on writing scenes that you think are going to be rad. BUT, if you go too far than you'll get your reader asking too many questions, or you'll write something that sounds dumb.
I also think that a big part of the emotional appeal is wish fulfillment. I think that a lot of our fantasies as humans are about having our cake and eating it too...for example, if I fantasize about winning the lottery I'm fantasizing about both getting fabulously wealthy and doing so while not doing any work and with minimal risk. Or if your parents offer you cake or ice cream and instead of choose one or the other, or a half-serving of each, you go for a full serving of both. I kinda think that books like this try to give this to the reader...you can imagine yourself as a pretty princess who is also a badass knife fighter, as a powerful noble who is also common, as attending an event with lots of arbitrary structure as well as exciting chaos, as the outsider who is also the center of the story.
I do not understand the whole structure thing, though...why spend so long putting on those weird demonstrations and challenges? What is the purpose of these demonstration? To intimidate? To inform? It's not like all their countries are on the brink of war and this is the Congress of Vienna or the League of Nations or something (thus necessitating careful negotiations and espionage and power plays and whatnot). Isn't there something better they could be doing with their time? Is this book really some kind of critique of ineffectual elites?
My questions: what about elaborate social rituals and being split into groups with defining character traits appeals to people? And why the weird sex stuff? Is that also some kind of wish fulfillment?
Wish fulfillment is DEFINITELY the name of the game here. It’s easy to get sucked into the rollercoaster as you read and completely lose track of the (lack of) connective tissue and it does seem to be by design-like tou said, Aster wants you to feel like you’re a badass pretty princess with all the melodrama that comes with that.
The demonstrations I believe are so weird and stripped down because Aster didn’t want them and either publisher pressure or story pressure made them feel necessary. They’re just obligations for the real trick of Lightlark-the aforementioned badass princess romance or whatever. I wish we’d thought like you in our suggestions though. You could easily retool it into “commentary” on leaders being ineffective without having to edit much, even though I’m positive the reason the demonstrations exist today is nothing near as deep. Seems like a good compromise
All the other weird stuff with tribes and sex I think are appeals to base instinct, simple as that. We want to know who our people are, what that means, and how to make more of them. That’s not Aster’s fault but damn did she capitalize
Do a Colleen Hoover book!
1:09:53 - No, because she took Aurora's powers into herself, the ruler powers of Starling survive, so they're safe!
Also, I believe, though it's not stated anywhere that Grim and Oro have the same surnames as their ancestors, so Oro Rey and Grim Malvere.
Yeahhh this ends up being like the first plot point in nightbane, guess we just lost it in the deluge
@@sbu_englishclub she then apparently proceeds to largely ignore her Starling powers for the rest of the book? Just tries to harness Wildling and Nightshade, and just think on that dichotomy?
Why not just pass on the Starling powers to someone who cares about them?
Yeah! I was only half kidding about her handmaiden; there’s so many other things Isla should be worried about
Grim looks like Fulgrim, lmao. I’m only mostly joking.
No wait I think that’s as good a description as any
Hype
I'm so glad this channel got randomly recommended to me, I've listened to a bunch of episodes while working and it's so nice to hear some decent book critique that isn't mean-spirited for the sake of it (I won't lie, I do also love a thorough roasting, but it's nice to switch it up every so often).
As a sidenote I tried following you guys on Instagram, but it looks like the username linked above doesn't exist anymore?
Thanks so much! And thank you for calling out the instagram, totally forgot I changed it. We’re @sbu_englishclub !
Your art is fantastic btw!! Big fan
@@sbu_englishclub ah thanks so much!! :D