Go to surfshark.com/... for 4 extra months of Surfshark ! *CORRECTIONS* -The character in the Crucible who says “more weight” when he is being crushed is actually Giles Corey, John Proctor just gets told about it later lol -Apparently Johann Christian Bach is different from Johann Sebasation Bach which arguably makes that reference worse -2:06:20 repeats itself lol sorry I’m gonna try and cut it out! -when I say that “it wouldn’t happen today” I meant that I don’t find it believable that this type of segregation justification would occur to magical creatures ALONGSIDE western US/UK societal changes, wars, and civil rights movement. Not that this type of segregation, eugenics, and social policing wouldn’t ever happen anywhere ever. This wasn’t very clear so my apologies! There are absolutely places in the world where this happens and it’s horrible. - 2:43:49 technically speaking the protagonist is an envoy(ambassador/missionary type person) for an “interplanetary trade coalition” in the pursuit of material profit and an exchange of knowledge, not strictly a military. My point still stands I believe and it doesn’t impact the argument, but honestly we could do another 4 hour video on the coalition functions & goals alone and I do want to make it clear that I LIKE left hand of darkness lol I still think it’s 1000x more worth reading than the swallow or all souls 😭
As a student of (among other things) medieval lit, the open disdain Diana displays towards books, academia, and historical study drove me up the wall. The lack of curiosity?? PAIN. I am in PAIN.
I was thinking the same thing! Also, like,' the book was unremarkable' is a terrible opening line for any book, let alone one that involves ancient & lost texts (haven't read the books, but this is my understanding 1 hour into this video essay lol)
That’s exactly what I thought as a history major! An “unremarkable book?” Are you kidding me? Even after I’ve seen numerous manuscripts, I still find them beautiful. Where’s the joy?!
@@helenahendrixson4240 So true!! No manuscript is ever unremarkable- especially not a *500 year old leatherbound codex containing an illuminated manuscript!!* No joy!
Having read the book this was kind of a pretty heavy misquote. In the book the main character says something along the lines of "when a historian is faced with information that challenges their theories they have 3 options: 1. Face it head on 2. Ignore it or 3 push it to another day" Diana chooses 3, which she says makes her a coward in this case but she really doesn't want to face magic today.
@EcclesiastesLiker-py5ts I wouldn't quite say that, I liked the series but broadly agreed with everything she was saying. It's easy when we are frustrated or don't like something to overstate or even misremember things, which is why direct quotes are important where possible. Not everyone who get something wrong has bad intentions
I mean the "they were gal pals, bestest of friends" meme of historical lgbtq couples exists for a reason. One historian from the 1800 in his own post-humously released autobiography wrote that he buried evidence of the homosexualty of some famous noble. Literally buried it in the walls of the house so that no one else would find it in his lifetime. And no one did.
I tried to read this book but didn't get past the first chapter. The prose, it was aubergine, it was lavender and lilac, it was mauve--but no one would notice such purplishness except Dr. Not Like Other Girls, so she put it back on the shelf without further comment and got distracted staring at some guy who just stands there, _menacingly._
It's what us OGs (think pre-NC-17 FFnet ban, citrus scale warning and yaoi-disclaimer-so-we-don't-get-flamed, have the angelfire-hosted fanon lexicon and the original Mary Sue Litmus test bookmarked tier Old Guard) would call *ultrapurple*, or _urple_ for short.
Biz, I am so sorry, both in real life and in The Crucible, the man who is crushed to death and instead of confessing said 'More weight,' is Giles Corey. I was in a local production of The Crucible when I was 15, and our set was almost entirely bare except for a series of 19 trees, one for each of the victims of the trials, plus one that was flat against the back wall, for Giles Corey who was pressed to death, which i think is kinda super neat. The central tree was also made up of 19 ropes. Vetween the first and second act we were sent out onto the stage to spread real autumn leaves to show the passig of time, which then made the chaos of the courst scene far more dangerous haha. I love your work, and your last few videos just got me through a recent house move, so thank you!
Fun fact about Massachusetts law (then and at least as recently as 2017) is that if you die while on trial or on appeal you are recorded as not guilty. So the children of Giles Corey and his wife (who had been hanged already) inherited all of his property. My mother learned to ride on the Corey farm in the 50s and 60s. No clue if the family still owned it at that point
Can't believe you're out here giving a passionate diatribe about vampire sparkling while your highlighter is the most gorgeous, sparkly thing I've ever seen. Pick a struggle.
3:57:30 okay I hate to do this to you but johann christian bach is not in fact The bach he is the son of The johann sebastian bach, the man had eleven billion children and all of them were composers named johann so there is *technically* a reason to full name jcb however the passage is still very silly and it honestly makes the sentence even more pretentious, like god forbid he choose a piece by the most famous bach we must use one by his seventh son and make sure everyone knows it or we'll be PLEBIANS
@@thegadflysnemesis4102 some days I can't believe I did classical piano competitively and very aggressively until I was 16. brings me back to everyone in that world making small talk by asking "who's your favorite bach?" as if it was a common greeting and if you didn't say CPE bach you were full of shit.
The part where they went out of their way to mention that Diana isn’t like other girls and eats a lot instead of getting salads is heavily reminiscent of the same thing happening in the mortal instruments. Of course, I know that was a common trope at the time, but I immediately thought of that scene from the first mortal instrument book where a character is like “wow main character I’m so glad you eat real food not like other girls your age”
I will have you know that all essay reviews/retrospectives of books, movies, tv shows, etc. that begins with the essayist to camera pouring wine and telling me how long it took to make this video is my personal weakness.
As a literary translator, thanks so much for the shoutout! We're typically only noticed if we make a mistake (or a perceived mistake), so it's nice to be appreciated! 🙂
I’ve had the show on my watchlist for years without starting it, and as a wheelchair user, when I saw the “E” word in the thumbnail, I realized I was ready to be talked out of it
I've never had a unique experience, I'm also a wheelchair user who's been debating whether or not to watch this for YEARS and just got swiftly and summarily disavowed of that notion
When you write that you like third person limited perspective, because you get some of the character's thoughts and feelings without having to be locked into first person perspective, it makes me think you might like to read what's called free indirect discourse. That's where you essentially put the internal thoughts of a character within the narration itself; Jane Austen uses it throughout her writing, it's what arguably makes her writing so enjoyable and accessible.
I hope you know that your video essays are far more interesting than the source material they discuss, and that with the exception of Midnight Mass, I will never consume them because they don't live up to your highly educational, nigh-schizo-yarn posterboard rants.
As an Israeli, I can tell you that for some people it is possible to have known about WW2 and still not see how eugenics is wrong, some of those people are in my government
While I also listen to that video every night I would also like it known that I watched the vampire diaries WHEN IT WAS AIRING MY PALS IM AN OG ELENA HATER
Oh I love half recap, half alchemy lesson, half my formal audition to play Pammy in ninth house and half eugenics disparaging commentary. How did you know? Also your hair looks lovely and I’m insanely jealous.
First an insanely long video on The Magicians (by certified genius Laura Crone), now this?? I kinda feel like the next step should be one of these on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
I don't even need to know what it's fucking about, this shit makes me feel at ease. You make me happy to be intelligent, mildly unhinged, and full of oddly specific, jarring interests.
As a fanfic sommelier, this doesn't smell like a/b/o to me. Which makes sense; the first book came out in 2011, and a/b/o was invented in 2010. It really does feel like that precursor era, where people were kicking around and exploring all these ideas about gender and fantasy and biology and vampirism and lycanthropy. It was kind of a Thing in for individual writers to tinker with worldbuilding tropes, sometimes in very granular ways-turn the dial 1 notch, write canon events as affected by that; turn the dial another notch, rinse repeat. (The thing that most makes it feel not a/b/o is the worldbuilding. Omegaverse fundamentally thrives on the tension between what lights your body up with pleasure, and how much society wants to treat you like crap for occupying that role, and whether you and your lover can carve out a good place for yourselves in that world. The trademark of Omegaverse is that, whether in a small niche of supernatural beings or a world completely rewritten, the societal power structures have gone wholesale into the a/b/o distinction, so omegas have to deal with both concrete gender discrimination, and a lot of internalized shame and fear about their s*xual selves. And for what it's worth, I think the smartest pro omegaverse books are Dessa Lux's "Wolves in the World" series, which feature things like a domestic violence shelter for omegas.) Anyway, if All Souls was inspired by fanfic, it feels like the writers who had one foot in fanfiction, and the other in romantic fantasy, stuff like Patricia Briggs and LJ Smith and Anne Bishop. Fanfic (especially gender-speculative slash) writers in the mid 00s started making surprising amounts of money writing for outfits like Ellora's Cave. Then in the late 00s people deeply involved in and informed by fandom started to properly break though into the mainstream, like Cassie Claire and Seanan McGuire (and Sarah Monette-BIZ HAVE YOU READ SARAH MONETTE???, Catherine Valente, Sarah Rees Brennan, and Naomi Novik). And yeah, m/f was what sold, and yeah, there was a lot of Discourse when people who had written reams of gay p*rn didn't include any LGBTQ+ representation in their books, a subject I am not as militant about as the antifans, and I care less as more queer stuff hits mainstream publishing (though we always need more f/f of the exact flavour I prefer, of course.) Anyway yeah, I bet Harkness especially by the later books was reading a/b/o and taking notes, but was really locked into her workdbuilding and could only wrench the car so far off the road.
I don't have the words to properly express how reading this comment made me feel, like, meeting my doppelganger?? Who had a wholly unique yet parallel fandom reading development experience from me? Like, in the way you see the same car over and over at the interstate rest stops on long car trips and when they finally turn off the highway to their destination, you feel like shedding a single tear for their loss and wish them well... That's as close as I can get rn with words lol
@ Hahaha, I have that feeling sometimes when I go to slash conventions. I meet people who speak exactly the same language as me, but we have absolutely no communities, platforms, or media properties in common. So I'll mention something that's just completely universal knowledge to my social circles, like spending Christmas Day reading Yuletide stories, and they'll go, "What's Yuletide?"
As someone who has read a lot of a/b/o stories... thanks for this articulation of the core appealing tension in it. Also, since it's Christmas Day... What is Yuletide, and any story suggestions?
This is insane and everything about it screams “I watched the labyrinth” and then wrote half a fanfic about it before realizing that fairy porn was an overcrowded genre and they needed to switch real quick to vampires
I read omegaverse semi-regularly, its absolutely poorly scratched out het omegaverse serial numbers. The scent thing was the big give away, other than the odd mentions of bad wolf biology. Plus the getting married multiple times followed by being more submissive kind of cemented it for me. Also like 90% sure the original twin creation event was initially a heat cycle. Anyway this is a great video dropped at a good time for me to watch while knitting last minute christmas gifts at like 3am.
I was just about to make the same comments regarding the subdom aspect of omegaverse being integrated into the story, as well as the emphasis on pregnancy. Although the lack of primal desire/instant fucking in the books gives me pause to it truly being an omegaverse story. Edit: I was also knitting/crocheting whilst watching this video 😊 Crafting buddies!
When omegaverse is fun because its transsparent crazy enough that you have to vibe with it and, its not too self serious, that it works?! Plus sometimes there is often good gender commentary? And Omegaverse isnt nessesary having wolves sudo science or wolves stuff, you kinda have the heatr and the ABO genders that somehow work. And omegaverse is fun because it embraces the crazier aspects fully in earnest that much open. Its not any stealth smur, no you know its peobably aving erotica in it too.
Sometimes I phase out during the plot summaries, and get brought back to consciousness by a sentence like "the dragon that lives inside Diana". Thank you for the journey, will rewatch 3 times to somehow comprehend all that, but as usual, loved the interlude discussions. ❤
The authors motto is literally just "and then this happened" but with no cause and effect or rhyme or reason. I listened to the first book and I remember thinking it must be the author writing one-off fanfic scenes based on various media/ships, and then just stringing all those random scenes together and pretending she wrote a coherent narrative.
People who know history scare me. Like, where are you getting all this brain space, girl? People who know history but don't seem to learn anything from it scare me even more tho. Like, why aren't you using any brain space, girl?
When I read A Discovery Of Witches and came across the thing about alchemical child, I was like, hmmmm is this going to all be about her super special uterus? And I googled to find out the answer and then DNFd when I found out that yep that’s what’s going to happen. Ew no I’m not interested in that.
i feel like it’s especially weird that deborah harkness doesn’t even touch the thing about the gay aunts being so uncaring about their interspecies dating stuff considering that harkness herself is gay and married to her partner
I haven't read these books, but from your description, they are giving "discovery writer struggling to control her worst impulses." I.E. Random magical powers popping up with no foreshadowing, characters meandering around a particular setting without moving the plot forward, characters who are moved through the story by outside forces rather than making decisions and taking actions. So, I googled her writing process and I was correct. She is a discovery writer. It's a super fun kind of writing, but it requires a lot of editing out of repetitive scenes and killing random subplots that don't contribute to the theme or overall plot.
This was a journey. Sometimes when you read books as teenagers you just assume they are smarter than you and everything will click as you mature and... then you get there! This series will have a special place in my heart but you have made my nostalgia for it so much funnier 😂❤
Also now beyond the spinoff there is now a WHOLE OTHER Diana and Matthew book that basically has Diana go and discover a DIFFERENT side of her magic and her abilities from her father's side 💀
I got about 10 pages into “A Discovery of Witches” before I completely gave up because it was so intolerable. I have been waiting for this video for years.
Any time someone says "this historical document was lost to time!" after being found in a library or something, my mother sighs and rolls her eyes and says "no, it wasn't, the archivist knew it was there the whole time" which is true. It's not that these things are lost or forgotten, its just that no one thought to ask the archivists.
I audibly gasped when I saw the video length and subject matter. I remember seeing the premise for this series and being so pumped to watch/read it, and I simply could not, I just found it excruciating. So excited to watch!!!
Yeah, every scene was so stiff. I couldn't make it through the first episode. I can't fathom how they managed to fill multiple episodes with this type of content. Sucks because I love the dark academia settings and aesthetics.
Biz I love you dearly but re: your discussion about Matthews faith at 1:50:00 (roughly) if they were going to do that they were going to have to explain the protestant reformation and why this catholic had to go to Anglican services. It wasnt necessarily Illegal to be Catholic but it was illegal for a Catholic priest to enter England for a hot minute
The death of John Proctor you talk about in the Crucible is actually the death of Giles Corey in real life. I’m slowly making my way through this (I finally picked up the third book after putting it off for a year because of you). I love this analysis so far!
for someone who is repeatedly disappointed that the mindsets of the characters arent properly explored Biz is remarkably presumptuous to think that its unrealistic for a pair of lesbians to be bigoted against other 'creatures'. Like im reminded of that one scene in Maus where the main character tries to get his holocaust survivor father to care about the plight of black americans and the father makes it very clear that the violence levied against his people was only bad because affluent jews did not deserve to have violence levied against them and the same could not be said of other races. And the feminist movement in america was infamously pretty racist in that the white activists wanted the support of black feminists but would still insist that they not 'make it about race' by having them take up any space in the movement. also the idea that its weird that an archaic house servant would wish to remain in service even in the modern era when there are still living house servants in old households in the UK who would literally rather die next to their boss's laundry machine than face the indignity of retirement. kinda makes it seem like you think that power = conservative and oppressed = enlightened and it is therefore impossible for an oppressed culture to ever have hypocritical or self destructive beliefs (that are usually enforced or enabled by the ruling class)
I've been watching this video in chunks over the past few days. It's crazy watching Biz slowly descend into madness as this book series gradually worms into her mind. It's a good thing I never watched the Netflix show because I'd probably be drawing arcane symbols on the wall and convinced I could speak to the dead as they try to get the straightjacket on me...
I thought oubliette and octogenarian were college undergrad level vocab at most. I don't think it's so bad to have to look up a word in the dictionary, since that's how I've learned a lot of words myself.
[4:01:56] I could be way off on this but instead of meaning he was literally making the cello mimic the sound of human voices, I think the author could be referencing the way the cello is often likened to singing or wailing. Considering the cello is the closest in range to the human voice and can have a similar timbre.
2:55:49 Just to add an additional point here. Even beyond the people of sentinel island not wanting outsiders on the island. Indian law explicitly forbids entry into the region of 3 miles nautical radius around the island. It implicitly also speaks to a disregard of the laws of a non-western countries. The law was explicitly created to protect sentinel islanders from outsiders, in line with the wishes of sentinel islanders to be left alone.
Never expected my watching of the totally unrelated YT channel Esoterica would come in handy for this episode! Totally backs up what Biz is saying around 1 hour in, about the notes being written in code, partially to hide it from the masses, or rivals. And how easy it was, with no professional standards, for names of collectors to be applied as the authors, names to be mistaken in a "damm, this John Smith dude sure lived a long time and wrote a lotta books in a lotta fields!" kinda way... all sorts of great drama. Dr Justin Sledge, host of Esoterica, is a GREAT educator, and I HIGHLY recommend his vids to anyone into alchemy, early Christian Gnosticism, and Jewish Kabbala; it is truly graduate-level-courses stuff in plain English (and Hebrew, where necessary) that really gives a lil uninitiated white boy like me, a window into a different world... I came to his stuff thru the Demiurge and Yaldabaoth ideas from Persona 5 ^^;
3:04:57 Oh dear, hope everyone’s okay and that you and your family is doing alright, Biz! Props to you for finishing this video even when dealing with real life shit like this. I also hope you know that we don’t expect you to put out videos when you’re dealing with other difficult stuff, “real life” (for lack of a better term) stuff, and your mental health is far more important.
I heard via Hiromu Arakawa's hit manga (and later anime series), Full-Metal Alchemist, that alchemy is the science of deconstructing and then reconstructing matter. To get something, you have to give something of equal value and mass. This can be seen in the idea of turning lead into gold. If you ever do want to learn more about the subject with an infinitely more understandable magic system and more likeable characters, I highly suggest it.
Arakawa engages with the metaphysics of alchemy, with Hermeticism, but less with alchemy itself which was very laboratory & experiment orientated. Arakawa turns a science into a magic & the story is all the richer for it, because in the *i dunno*s that abound she weaves a very hopeful message
Fullmetal alchemist was so well done. Turning all the obfuscation, metaphorical instructions and symbolism of alchemy into a magic system was very much a perfect way to handle the mysticism of alchemy. I heard biz mention gates and i inmediately remembered fma's truth gate.
just watched it for the first time a couple months ago & was hoping someone mentioned it in the comments !! i soy faced when biz talked about the lion eating the sun thing
in highschool i stayed up all night binge watching the first 2 seasons and even then i knew it had flaws but i was just addicted to fantasy tv by the time the 3rd season came out i couldn’t sit through it anymore 😭
yeah my thesis was about how women/feminists and eventually gay people created/believed this mythos that paganism survived christianization and was persecuted as witchcraft. you can blame margaret murray.
to be clear, i am a feminist and a gay, but the framing that witchcraft trials were about sexism or paganism is an entirely modern notion. as you say, accusing women were given a huge amount of power, and men were also killed and accused of witchcraft. it was more proto-legal religious enforcement than anything else. it's just that all/most western systems are patriarchal so these trials happened to be as well. it was mostly accusing jews or christians of practicing christianity wrong.
idk why my comment's not showing up for me but just in case, i'll repeat what i said. the notion that witchcraft trials were about sexism/misogyny or paganism is entirely modern. women were accusers and men were accused. witchcraft trials were more like proto-legal religious enforcement, where jews and certain types of christians were persecuted for practicing christianity "wrong."
@@i.cs.zalways a good policy tbh. Kat, would you be open to sharing? I feel like the history of those periods is so mythologized by all sorts of people and I’d be interested to hear a more grounded take.
Just commenting so hopefully I can come back to this because I would also like resources for learning about this - that’s what I’ve believed because that’s what I’ve always heard 😅
I have a factum due after the holidays and this was exactly what I needed to snap myself back into an academic research hyperfixation. Thank you for your service.
ok the JC Bach thing is actually maybe interesting? because the really famous Bach was actually Johann Sebastian Bach. JC Bach was his son, and his music is way less popular than Papa Bach but also kind of considered really underrated in classical music circles. Really gorg sense of melody, was really popular in Georgian England and sort of a forefather of the classical movement in music, Mozart owes him a lot. But JC sort of fell out of the public consciousness after he died, whereas JS became a household name after his death (albeit long after tbh). So maybe Debbie was onto something thematic about dead fathers and prodigal sons? Anyways it’s a super weird music history deep cut, and I think when you say Lacrimosa most people just think of the one from the Mozart Requiem anyways, so in the end I still feel like it’s just like “insert religious art reference here”. Anyways, love the vid, I’ve been a fan since the midnight mass vid. thanks for the nuance, queen
I'm beyond excited to listen to this. I just wanted to thank you for your very long form rabbit hole tangent videos. They're like a massage for my brain. What you're doing is awesome and appreciated and as long as it's healthy for you please never stop. Also, your pacing is perfect, never change! This is a pausable video so there's no such thing as too long.
I get so excited when you upload. Hope to see that Lord Byron video! I don't care if another UA-camr did one. I'd watch you talk about the process of paint drying
As someone who absolutely loves the ADoW show, I was really excited to read the books after the show finished. Oh god was I disappointed. You really hit the nail on the head with all of the problems. Book Diana is insufferable, Matthew is controlling and patronizing, there are so many exposition dumps, and the pacing (which was a little shaky in the show) is absolutely awful in the books. Book!Diana is basically just a Deb Harkness self-insert. That's not to say the show is without issues, but it improved so much on the source material (with the exception of the anti-climatic finale)
this video is high art, although I love twilight, but like lets be real, they're not even actually vampires, technically they're more like those Celtic fairies, please dear god i need you to talk about it
I actually remember loving the series when it just came out, but I never got around to watching the third season. Glad to find out I didn’t miss anything 😅 All the inserts about alchemy, history, and social justice were really interesting. Sorry you had to go through all of that to give us another great video.
I was sold this series as magical realism. When it turned out to be more paranormal romance, I was disappointed since that wasn't what I was expecting. I got the first two books on sale and managed to get through the first but only part way through the second before giving up on it😅
Oh my god!!! I was (am in like a nostalgic way?) obsessed with this series in like middle/high school. I literally own the history lore book thing Deborah published which is like just as big as the third book😂😂 needless to say this video rocks and i can’t argue with any of your points. What can i say, 14 year old me REALLY wanted to be Diana
On the Creature Racism section, and it's getting increasingly bizarre to me that the author of these books is apparently an actual historian, because she sure doesn't seem to have any real interest in interrogating or displaying like. The very very very obvious fact that people have lived differently throughout history ? Lmao ? And the ways Very Large Unavoidable cultural forces such as colonialism and racism and religion and patriarchy are inherent to those experiences. Like that's. Kind of one of the main points of studying and discussing history ? Acknowledging that things used to be different than they are now (but also that everything then influences everything now) & then interrogating and investigating that within its own context & learning from it as a kind of scientific process. That's. More or less what doing history is. To not bother to do that is so deeply antithetical to everything I learned and the way I was taught to think/analyze as a history student. And like, I know academia has changed over time, we're always having new conversations, but according to wikipedia she is an active history professor, meaning she kind of Has to be involved in the current conversation. And she is about the age/even a little younger than most of my former professors, who for the record were mostly appalled by historical fiction in the first place, but certainly would've despised these books in particular Because her approach to history is so bizarre and non-historical. I understand wanting to write things for pleasure and wish fulfillment and whatever, blah blah blah silly vampire fanfiction reasons, but like, I literally just could not ever fuck around the way she fucks around in these books because I gained a whole fuckng lot of student loans to Know Better. I didn't get a whole ass degree in history to not do better. And I know she has to know better because she has a whole goddamn PhD. So the only conclusion is that she just does not care enough to do better. I do not want to call into question her validity as an academic just because of her bad vampire books, but I think I Can say that her bad vampire books are bad at least partly because the "academia" flopped as hard as it possibly could've
Honestly appalled to learn that she is an actual historian. You are 100% right to mistrust/discredit her academics btw, it’s not just about a random fantasy book in her downtime, I think she genuinely exposes problematic attitudes and beliefs about history and academic study that she does not realize in her writing.
@@thegenderfluidthing8660 I feel like mistrust/discredit is the wrong word, it's more "increased skepticism"? "Higher scrutiny"? Like, her work could be absolutely valid and well researched, but the attitudes she has displayed mean that there are things that should be kept in mind when evaluating it in case they crop up in there...
I didn't realize how badly i want your twilight hot takes until just now--because I'm sure you've got solid philosophical reasons for appreciating the sparkle and i wanna know them. Also, how did you know I've been researching gnosticism for that fantasy novel I'm sure I'll finish someday--so thank you!
i tried to watch the show desperately needing more vampire content after interview w/a vampire but it was so cringy and so was the book 😭✋🏽 yet somehow ur video essay is literally 10x better 🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽 ate this up sis
I hated the first book as soon as I read it, despite its, at the time (shortly after it came out, so around 2012) rave reviews. Then it came up again later when another avid reader I knew said they really enjoyed the book, and I described it as weird Twilight on steroids fanfiction. I am LOCKED IN for this whole video.
I read at least 2 of these books, maybe 3? I read it thinking I would be obsessed but I couldn’t give you a single description of any characters at all. Matthew is one of those characters that I just don’t know. Diane is the same. I thought he was evil for most of the first book because he was so flat. It’s like I’m reading every scene from a gauzy curtain. I got so tired of not knowing what exactly what was going on. Matthew’s parents were the only concrete characters I remember. 50:25
i just realized the show your taking about when you said they talk to a witches head, omg. my mother watched the show and id see some over her shoulder. i did think the small amount i saw felt like a fanfinction. it all makes sense now.
To answer your omegaverse question, I don't think the All Souls trilogy was originally an omegaverse fanfiction... Mostly because omegaverse was only just becoming a thing as this series was being written. If anything I think the wolf stuff could be a nod to the community that originated the omegaverse because a/b/o did originally come from wolf shifter fic, but none of the vampire biology reminds me of old omegaverse fic. I guess they have pack dynamics but that's more wolf-Shifter stuff.
The weaving thing makes me think that a certain someone has probably read (or watched) the Wheel of Time Also, all the John Dee references made me think of The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, which is another trippy fantasy series that I absolutely recommend.
I just love how you dropped this video right after I lent the first book to my sister XD Personally I loved both the book and the show, but I love your rants even more and I'm having a blast!
When I read the books the main issue I had was how disappointing it was. I've read many weird books. But to take such an interesting premise - university professor witch and a biochemistry scientist vampire and to butcher it so much? I love the first episodes of the show. If I'm generous I like the first season. I can't stand the books, Diana is so fucking stupid. Deborah Harkness has so many good ideas, but then somehow manages to make them all terrible. And the ending is so infuriating I was raging to everyone that would listen. THEY DON'T SOLVE THE ISSUE! They just peacefully uphold the status quo and solve their own problems. What was even the point. I hate this series so much. It had potential, but the author saw it and shot it in the head
1:30:16 just a quick note because i absolutely love the crucible. john proctor was actually not crushed to death in the play. proctor is hanged after refusing to sign a false confession. he makes the famous, “because it is my name” speech. giles corey is the character who is pressed to death, and he actually existed in real life.
I was SOSOSOSOSO hyper fixated on The Magicians for a while, and its still as horrible and amazing as I remember so the little goblin in my brain went apeshit when you mentioned it
Go to surfshark.com/... for 4 extra months of Surfshark !
*CORRECTIONS*
-The character in the Crucible who says “more weight” when he is being crushed is actually Giles Corey, John Proctor just gets told about it later lol
-Apparently Johann Christian Bach is different from Johann Sebasation Bach which arguably makes that reference worse
-2:06:20 repeats itself lol sorry I’m gonna try and cut it out!
-when I say that “it wouldn’t happen today” I meant that I don’t find it believable that this type of segregation justification would occur to magical creatures ALONGSIDE western US/UK societal changes, wars, and civil rights movement. Not that this type of segregation, eugenics, and social policing wouldn’t ever happen anywhere ever. This wasn’t very clear so my apologies! There are absolutely places in the world where this happens and it’s horrible.
- 2:43:49 technically speaking the protagonist is an envoy(ambassador/missionary type person) for an “interplanetary trade coalition” in the pursuit of material profit and an exchange of knowledge, not strictly a military. My point still stands I believe and it doesn’t impact the argument, but honestly we could do another 4 hour video on the coalition functions & goals alone and I do want to make it clear that I LIKE left hand of darkness lol I still think it’s 1000x more worth reading than the swallow or all souls 😭
i heard "before we wrap it up" and looked at the time, there was 1h 50 min left. never change
As a student of (among other things) medieval lit, the open disdain Diana displays towards books, academia, and historical study drove me up the wall. The lack of curiosity?? PAIN. I am in PAIN.
I was thinking the same thing! Also, like,' the book was unremarkable' is a terrible opening line for any book, let alone one that involves ancient & lost texts (haven't read the books, but this is my understanding 1 hour into this video essay lol)
@@lukee76fr, even a 'seemed unremarkable at first' Would have been better. The first page makes me hate the main character totally.
That’s exactly what I thought as a history major! An “unremarkable book?” Are you kidding me? Even after I’ve seen numerous manuscripts, I still find them beautiful. Where’s the joy?!
@@helenahendrixson4240 So true!! No manuscript is ever unremarkable- especially not a *500 year old leatherbound codex containing an illuminated manuscript!!* No joy!
I feel your painnn --Classics student here
"historians push aside something if it doesn't agree with their thesis" is such a batshit narrative, both in real life and in fiction???
makes the author's label as "historian" VERY suspect
Having read the book this was kind of a pretty heavy misquote. In the book the main character says something along the lines of "when a historian is faced with information that challenges their theories they have 3 options: 1. Face it head on 2. Ignore it or 3 push it to another day"
Diana chooses 3, which she says makes her a coward in this case but she really doesn't want to face magic today.
There are definite examples of stuff like that. More so people just lying about stuff for money
@EcclesiastesLiker-py5ts I wouldn't quite say that, I liked the series but broadly agreed with everything she was saying. It's easy when we are frustrated or don't like something to overstate or even misremember things, which is why direct quotes are important where possible.
Not everyone who get something wrong has bad intentions
I mean the "they were gal pals, bestest of friends" meme of historical lgbtq couples exists for a reason. One historian from the 1800 in his own post-humously released autobiography wrote that he buried evidence of the homosexualty of some famous noble. Literally buried it in the walls of the house so that no one else would find it in his lifetime. And no one did.
I tried to read this book but didn't get past the first chapter. The prose, it was aubergine, it was lavender and lilac, it was mauve--but no one would notice such purplishness except Dr. Not Like Other Girls, so she put it back on the shelf without further comment and got distracted staring at some guy who just stands there, _menacingly._
It's what us OGs (think pre-NC-17 FFnet ban, citrus scale warning and yaoi-disclaimer-so-we-don't-get-flamed, have the angelfire-hosted fanon lexicon and the original Mary Sue Litmus test bookmarked tier Old Guard) would call *ultrapurple*, or _urple_ for short.
Biz, I am so sorry, both in real life and in The Crucible, the man who is crushed to death and instead of confessing said 'More weight,' is Giles Corey. I was in a local production of The Crucible when I was 15, and our set was almost entirely bare except for a series of 19 trees, one for each of the victims of the trials, plus one that was flat against the back wall, for Giles Corey who was pressed to death, which i think is kinda super neat. The central tree was also made up of 19 ropes. Vetween the first and second act we were sent out onto the stage to spread real autumn leaves to show the passig of time, which then made the chaos of the courst scene far more dangerous haha. I love your work, and your last few videos just got me through a recent house move, so thank you!
WHOOPS YOU ARE VERY RIGHT will add to my list of corrections 😭😭😭
Fun fact about Massachusetts law (then and at least as recently as 2017) is that if you die while on trial or on appeal you are recorded as not guilty. So the children of Giles Corey and his wife (who had been hanged already) inherited all of his property. My mother learned to ride on the Corey farm in the 50s and 60s. No clue if the family still owned it at that point
@@elizabethinglee-richards7112I LOVE THAT
OMG that set sounds dope af
Can't believe you're out here giving a passionate diatribe about vampire sparkling while your highlighter is the most gorgeous, sparkly thing I've ever seen. Pick a struggle.
she was glowing the entire video!!
@@lizzielizz21 thank you!!!!!
thank you!!!?!?!?!
3:57:30 okay I hate to do this to you but johann christian bach is not in fact The bach he is the son of The johann sebastian bach, the man had eleven billion children and all of them were composers named johann so there is *technically* a reason to full name jcb
however the passage is still very silly and it honestly makes the sentence even more pretentious, like god forbid he choose a piece by the most famous bach we must use one by his seventh son and make sure everyone knows it or we'll be PLEBIANS
truly cannot tell if this makes it better or worse (but I do appreciate there correction lmao)
not only is he not The bach, he's not even The #1 bach child, that would be CPE bach. he had to pick the LESS FAMOUS bach jr.
@@thegadflysnemesis4102 some days I can't believe I did classical piano competitively and very aggressively until I was 16. brings me back to everyone in that world making small talk by asking "who's your favorite bach?" as if it was a common greeting and if you didn't say CPE bach you were full of shit.
The number of plot points from this trilogy that seem like they were ~heavily inspired~ by The Mortal Instruments is quite funny
the collaboration to prevent the outing from humans? swore i was back to age 12 reading tmi
The part where they went out of their way to mention that Diana isn’t like other girls and eats a lot instead of getting salads is heavily reminiscent of the same thing happening in the mortal instruments. Of course, I know that was a common trope at the time, but I immediately thought of that scene from the first mortal instrument book where a character is like “wow main character I’m so glad you eat real food not like other girls your age”
plagiarizing from an infamous plagiarist is kind of genius. well played, debbie
I will have you know that all essay reviews/retrospectives of books, movies, tv shows, etc. that begins with the essayist to camera pouring wine and telling me how long it took to make this video is my personal weakness.
As a literary translator, thanks so much for the shoutout! We're typically only noticed if we make a mistake (or a perceived mistake), so it's nice to be appreciated! 🙂
13:27 "If you don't have a leather-bound codex containing an illuminated manuscript at home, magic book is fine."
@@pinkasaflingmango CACKLING
I’ve had the show on my watchlist for years without starting it, and as a wheelchair user, when I saw the “E” word in the thumbnail, I realized I was ready to be talked out of it
I've never had a unique experience, I'm also a wheelchair user who's been debating whether or not to watch this for YEARS and just got swiftly and summarily disavowed of that notion
When you write that you like third person limited perspective, because you get some of the character's thoughts and feelings without having to be locked into first person perspective, it makes me think you might like to read what's called free indirect discourse. That's where you essentially put the internal thoughts of a character within the narration itself; Jane Austen uses it throughout her writing, it's what arguably makes her writing so enjoyable and accessible.
@@eggplantpopolopolous congrats on writing that whole comment in second person
me at 1:07:53 as a test tube baby: “… am I the alchemical child??”
Lmaooo This made me cackle
biz: it was a book with flowers and shit
me: omg it was not the voynich manuscript was it.
biz: it was the voynich manuscript
me: YEAHHHHHHHHHHHH
I hope you know that your video essays are far more interesting than the source material they discuss, and that with the exception of Midnight Mass, I will never consume them because they don't live up to your highly educational, nigh-schizo-yarn posterboard rants.
I too watched midnight mass after a video essay and I loved it so much. It stuck with me forever.
As an Israeli, I can tell you that for some people it is possible to have known about WW2 and still not see how eugenics is wrong, some of those people are in my government
וודאי. וגם אפשר להיות נכד של ניצולי השואה ועדיין לחשוב שפשיסטים לא הולכים לדפוק אותך ברגע.
you being israeli and saying this shit while israel is commiting a genocide and applying eugenics every day 😂
REAL AS HELL
@naamaweiss being israeli and daring to talk about these stuff the audacity
@@ralucarascanu2728 this audacity is gonna get me put up against a wall and shot as an enemy of the state in... I wanna say two to three years
So glad biz knows I fall asleep to the Jenny Nicholson vpd video every night and wrote every joke in this script for me
While I also listen to that video every night I would also like it known that I watched the vampire diaries WHEN IT WAS AIRING MY PALS IM AN OG ELENA HATER
THROUGH THE MIRROR OF MY MIND
@@ActuallyAnanya The series that brought women to the front line!
Oh I love half recap, half alchemy lesson, half my formal audition to play Pammy in ninth house and half eugenics disparaging commentary. How did you know?
Also your hair looks lovely and I’m insanely jealous.
First an insanely long video on The Magicians (by certified genius Laura Crone), now this?? I kinda feel like the next step should be one of these on Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
Absolutely!
You have the best combo of long, quality content and frequent uploads ever
Every time you upload a video a girl gets her thesis approved by her favourite professor
This is such a Sweet comment omg
4 hour flight , 4 hour biz video perfect timing! 😮
I’ve def watched snake wives on a plane, it was perfect
Alchemy is literally just medieval era chemistry mixed with feng shui and other astrological bullshit.
Thank you for giving me the holiday gift of knowing that somewhere out there, there's someone who disliked this book as much as I did.
I don't even need to know what it's fucking about, this shit makes me feel at ease. You make me happy to be intelligent, mildly unhinged, and full of oddly specific, jarring interests.
As a fanfic sommelier, this doesn't smell like a/b/o to me. Which makes sense; the first book came out in 2011, and a/b/o was invented in 2010.
It really does feel like that precursor era, where people were kicking around and exploring all these ideas about gender and fantasy and biology and vampirism and lycanthropy. It was kind of a Thing in for individual writers to tinker with worldbuilding tropes, sometimes in very granular ways-turn the dial 1 notch, write canon events as affected by that; turn the dial another notch, rinse repeat.
(The thing that most makes it feel not a/b/o is the worldbuilding. Omegaverse fundamentally thrives on the tension between what lights your body up with pleasure, and how much society wants to treat you like crap for occupying that role, and whether you and your lover can carve out a good place for yourselves in that world. The trademark of Omegaverse is that, whether in a small niche of supernatural beings or a world completely rewritten, the societal power structures have gone wholesale into the a/b/o distinction, so omegas have to deal with both concrete gender discrimination, and a lot of internalized shame and fear about their s*xual selves. And for what it's worth, I think the smartest pro omegaverse books are Dessa Lux's "Wolves in the World" series, which feature things like a domestic violence shelter for omegas.)
Anyway, if All Souls was inspired by fanfic, it feels like the writers who had one foot in fanfiction, and the other in romantic fantasy, stuff like Patricia Briggs and LJ Smith and Anne Bishop. Fanfic (especially gender-speculative slash) writers in the mid 00s started making surprising amounts of money writing for outfits like Ellora's Cave. Then in the late 00s people deeply involved in and informed by fandom started to properly break though into the mainstream, like Cassie Claire and Seanan McGuire (and Sarah Monette-BIZ HAVE YOU READ SARAH MONETTE???, Catherine Valente, Sarah Rees Brennan, and Naomi Novik). And yeah, m/f was what sold, and yeah, there was a lot of Discourse when people who had written reams of gay p*rn didn't include any LGBTQ+ representation in their books, a subject I am not as militant about as the antifans, and I care less as more queer stuff hits mainstream publishing (though we always need more f/f of the exact flavour I prefer, of course.)
Anyway yeah, I bet Harkness especially by the later books was reading a/b/o and taking notes, but was really locked into her workdbuilding and could only wrench the car so far off the road.
I don't have the words to properly express how reading this comment made me feel, like, meeting my doppelganger?? Who had a wholly unique yet parallel fandom reading development experience from me? Like, in the way you see the same car over and over at the interstate rest stops on long car trips and when they finally turn off the highway to their destination, you feel like shedding a single tear for their loss and wish them well... That's as close as I can get rn with words lol
@ Hahaha, I have that feeling sometimes when I go to slash conventions. I meet people who speak exactly the same language as me, but we have absolutely no communities, platforms, or media properties in common. So I'll mention something that's just completely universal knowledge to my social circles, like spending Christmas Day reading Yuletide stories, and they'll go, "What's Yuletide?"
As someone who has read a lot of a/b/o stories... thanks for this articulation of the core appealing tension in it.
Also, since it's Christmas Day... What is Yuletide, and any story suggestions?
Wait did Seanan McGuire write fanfiction or was she just in fandom space???? That's super interesting
@ Oh yeah! Check out her Fanlore article
This is insane and everything about it screams “I watched the labyrinth” and then wrote half a fanfic about it before realizing that fairy porn was an overcrowded genre and they needed to switch real quick to vampires
I read omegaverse semi-regularly, its absolutely poorly scratched out het omegaverse serial numbers. The scent thing was the big give away, other than the odd mentions of bad wolf biology. Plus the getting married multiple times followed by being more submissive kind of cemented it for me. Also like 90% sure the original twin creation event was initially a heat cycle.
Anyway this is a great video dropped at a good time for me to watch while knitting last minute christmas gifts at like 3am.
I was just about to make the same comments regarding the subdom aspect of omegaverse being integrated into the story, as well as the emphasis on pregnancy. Although the lack of primal desire/instant fucking in the books gives me pause to it truly being an omegaverse story.
Edit: I was also knitting/crocheting whilst watching this video 😊 Crafting buddies!
When omegaverse is fun because its transsparent crazy enough that you have to vibe with it and, its not too self serious, that it works?!
Plus sometimes there is often good gender commentary?
And Omegaverse isnt nessesary having wolves sudo science or wolves stuff, you kinda have the heatr and the ABO genders that somehow work.
And omegaverse is fun because it embraces the crazier aspects fully in earnest that much open. Its not any stealth smur, no you know its peobably aving erotica in it too.
Sometimes I phase out during the plot summaries, and get brought back to consciousness by a sentence like "the dragon that lives inside Diana". Thank you for the journey, will rewatch 3 times to somehow comprehend all that, but as usual, loved the interlude discussions. ❤
"the vampire king of london was in new haven" I'm pretty sure that's just the plot of a vampire the masquerade sourcebook
It's literally THE first edition plot hook for new players and DM for VtM, afaik.
My Mom called her late step-dad, "step-daddy" and it gave me a grey hair every time.
Another great vid, Biz! SO pumped whenever you post!
what.
The authors motto is literally just "and then this happened" but with no cause and effect or rhyme or reason. I listened to the first book and I remember thinking it must be the author writing one-off fanfic scenes based on various media/ships, and then just stringing all those random scenes together and pretending she wrote a coherent narrative.
People who know history scare me. Like, where are you getting all this brain space, girl?
People who know history but don't seem to learn anything from it scare me even more tho. Like, why aren't you using any brain space, girl?
When I read A Discovery Of Witches and came across the thing about alchemical child, I was like, hmmmm is this going to all be about her super special uterus? And I googled to find out the answer and then DNFd when I found out that yep that’s what’s going to happen. Ew no I’m not interested in that.
i feel like it’s especially weird that deborah harkness doesn’t even touch the thing about the gay aunts being so uncaring about their interspecies dating stuff considering that harkness herself is gay and married to her partner
Oh wow, that does make it extra odd.
I haven't read these books, but from your description, they are giving "discovery writer struggling to control her worst impulses." I.E. Random magical powers popping up with no foreshadowing, characters meandering around a particular setting without moving the plot forward, characters who are moved through the story by outside forces rather than making decisions and taking actions.
So, I googled her writing process and I was correct. She is a discovery writer. It's a super fun kind of writing, but it requires a lot of editing out of repetitive scenes and killing random subplots that don't contribute to the theme or overall plot.
This was a journey. Sometimes when you read books as teenagers you just assume they are smarter than you and everything will click as you mature and... then you get there! This series will have a special place in my heart but you have made my nostalgia for it so much funnier 😂❤
Also now beyond the spinoff there is now a WHOLE OTHER Diana and Matthew book that basically has Diana go and discover a DIFFERENT side of her magic and her abilities from her father's side 💀
I got about 10 pages into “A Discovery of Witches” before I completely gave up because it was so intolerable. I have been waiting for this video for years.
2:23 the Dan Olsen line goes up reference reaffirms what great taste you have. Pamela is also my favorite Ninth house character! So excited for this!
Any time someone says "this historical document was lost to time!" after being found in a library or something, my mother sighs and rolls her eyes and says "no, it wasn't, the archivist knew it was there the whole time" which is true. It's not that these things are lost or forgotten, its just that no one thought to ask the archivists.
a 4 hour video about some piece of media I never heard of? Yes, please
I audibly gasped when I saw the video length and subject matter. I remember seeing the premise for this series and being so pumped to watch/read it, and I simply could not, I just found it excruciating. So excited to watch!!!
I watched like the first 20 minutes of episode 1 of this series and simply couldn't go on. Soooo stupid and annoying.
Yeah, every scene was so stiff. I couldn't make it through the first episode. I can't fathom how they managed to fill multiple episodes with this type of content. Sucks because I love the dark academia settings and aesthetics.
Biz I love you dearly but re: your discussion about Matthews faith at 1:50:00 (roughly) if they were going to do that they were going to have to explain the protestant reformation and why this catholic had to go to Anglican services. It wasnt necessarily Illegal to be Catholic but it was illegal for a Catholic priest to enter England for a hot minute
The death of John Proctor you talk about in the Crucible is actually the death of Giles Corey in real life. I’m slowly making my way through this (I finally picked up the third book after putting it off for a year because of you). I love this analysis so far!
for someone who is repeatedly disappointed that the mindsets of the characters arent properly explored Biz is remarkably presumptuous to think that its unrealistic for a pair of lesbians to be bigoted against other 'creatures'. Like im reminded of that one scene in Maus where the main character tries to get his holocaust survivor father to care about the plight of black americans and the father makes it very clear that the violence levied against his people was only bad because affluent jews did not deserve to have violence levied against them and the same could not be said of other races. And the feminist movement in america was infamously pretty racist in that the white activists wanted the support of black feminists but would still insist that they not 'make it about race' by having them take up any space in the movement.
also the idea that its weird that an archaic house servant would wish to remain in service even in the modern era when there are still living house servants in old households in the UK who would literally rather die next to their boss's laundry machine than face the indignity of retirement.
kinda makes it seem like you think that power = conservative and oppressed = enlightened and it is therefore impossible for an oppressed culture to ever have hypocritical or self destructive beliefs (that are usually enforced or enabled by the ruling class)
This 👆👆👆
i think the point is that it’s never explored. but yeah people are like that (ლ‸－ )
glad i wasnt the only one really caught off guard by that take LMAO
I've been watching this video in chunks over the past few days. It's crazy watching Biz slowly descend into madness as this book series gradually worms into her mind. It's a good thing I never watched the Netflix show because I'd probably be drawing arcane symbols on the wall and convinced I could speak to the dead as they try to get the straightjacket on me...
Never clicked so fast, you’re my favourite video essayist! I’m always left chewing on all the ideas you present hours after
I thought oubliette and octogenarian were college undergrad level vocab at most. I don't think it's so bad to have to look up a word in the dictionary, since that's how I've learned a lot of words myself.
Agree. And I would be super irritated if an author stopped to give the definition of "big" words.
i learned the word “oubliette” only a couple months ago from playing baldur’s gate 🙂↔️
We vitally need that 100k because that video will be incredible. Your collection is so fun to listen to
[4:01:56] I could be way off on this but instead of meaning he was literally making the cello mimic the sound of human voices, I think the author could be referencing the way the cello is often likened to singing or wailing. Considering the cello is the closest in range to the human voice and can have a similar timbre.
FOUR AND A HALF HOURS GIRL, DAMN. these just keep getting longer and longer and tbh i'm not complaining but i am in awe.
u are literally my favorite video essayist ever thank u sm ik what im gonna listen to at work tmr
Part 5 ending has some issues, the section starting 1:56:30 repeats itself starting 2:02:24 and then ends abruptly. Just to let you know.
Thank you for commenting this, I was rewinding back to 1:56:30 because of that, as I thought I didn't hear anything that was said in these 12 minutes
OMG MY BAD I had to re-edit this like 4x for youtube lol I think I can cut it out though! Thank you!!!
2:55:49 Just to add an additional point here. Even beyond the people of sentinel island not wanting outsiders on the island. Indian law explicitly forbids entry into the region of 3 miles nautical radius around the island. It implicitly also speaks to a disregard of the laws of a non-western countries. The law was explicitly created to protect sentinel islanders from outsiders, in line with the wishes of sentinel islanders to be left alone.
Never expected my watching of the totally unrelated YT channel Esoterica would come in handy for this episode! Totally backs up what Biz is saying around 1 hour in, about the notes being written in code, partially to hide it from the masses, or rivals. And how easy it was, with no professional standards, for names of collectors to be applied as the authors, names to be mistaken in a "damm, this John Smith dude sure lived a long time and wrote a lotta books in a lotta fields!" kinda way... all sorts of great drama.
Dr Justin Sledge, host of Esoterica, is a GREAT educator, and I HIGHLY recommend his vids to anyone into alchemy, early Christian Gnosticism, and Jewish Kabbala; it is truly graduate-level-courses stuff in plain English (and Hebrew, where necessary) that really gives a lil uninitiated white boy like me, a window into a different world... I came to his stuff thru the Demiurge and Yaldabaoth ideas from Persona 5 ^^;
@@86fifty I LOVE ESOTERICA! I’m one of their patrons on patreon lol
4:05:00 the stars breaking up the paragraphs and POVs is sooooo fanfiction lol
3:04:57 Oh dear, hope everyone’s okay and that you and your family is doing alright, Biz!
Props to you for finishing this video even when dealing with real life shit like this. I also hope you know that we don’t expect you to put out videos when you’re dealing with other difficult stuff, “real life” (for lack of a better term) stuff, and your mental health is far more important.
the moment you said discovery of witches i was sat, i cannot express the deep and abiding hatred i have for this book
Lol my favourite Roger Bacon fact is that he died from stuffing chickens with snow
I heard via Hiromu Arakawa's hit manga (and later anime series), Full-Metal Alchemist, that alchemy is the science of deconstructing and then reconstructing matter. To get something, you have to give something of equal value and mass. This can be seen in the idea of turning lead into gold. If you ever do want to learn more about the subject with an infinitely more understandable magic system and more likeable characters, I highly suggest it.
Arakawa engages with the metaphysics of alchemy, with Hermeticism, but less with alchemy itself which was very laboratory & experiment orientated.
Arakawa turns a science into a magic & the story is all the richer for it, because in the *i dunno*s that abound she weaves a very hopeful message
Fullmetal alchemist was so well done. Turning all the obfuscation, metaphorical instructions and symbolism of alchemy into a magic system was very much a perfect way to handle the mysticism of alchemy. I heard biz mention gates and i inmediately remembered fma's truth gate.
just watched it for the first time a couple months ago & was hoping someone mentioned it in the comments !! i soy faced when biz talked about the lion eating the sun thing
in highschool i stayed up all night binge watching the first 2 seasons and even then i knew it had flaws but i was just addicted to fantasy tv by the time the 3rd season came out i couldn’t sit through it anymore 😭
now that I know you've seen IWTV show I want biz explaining IWTV 4 hour video!!! loved this as always biz
yeah my thesis was about how women/feminists and eventually gay people created/believed this mythos that paganism survived christianization and was persecuted as witchcraft. you can blame margaret murray.
to be clear, i am a feminist and a gay, but the framing that witchcraft trials were about sexism or paganism is an entirely modern notion. as you say, accusing women were given a huge amount of power, and men were also killed and accused of witchcraft. it was more proto-legal religious enforcement than anything else. it's just that all/most western systems are patriarchal so these trials happened to be as well. it was mostly accusing jews or christians of practicing christianity wrong.
idk why my comment's not showing up for me but just in case, i'll repeat what i said. the notion that witchcraft trials were about sexism/misogyny or paganism is entirely modern. women were accusers and men were accused. witchcraft trials were more like proto-legal religious enforcement, where jews and certain types of christians were persecuted for practicing christianity "wrong."
I blame Andrea Dworkin personally.
@@i.cs.zalways a good policy tbh. Kat, would you be open to sharing? I feel like the history of those periods is so mythologized by all sorts of people and I’d be interested to hear a more grounded take.
Just commenting so hopefully I can come back to this because I would also like resources for learning about this - that’s what I’ve believed because that’s what I’ve always heard 😅
i had never heard of this series but i'm actually studying history at oxford so now i'm even more intrigued in this 4 hour video
I have a factum due after the holidays and this was exactly what I needed to snap myself back into an academic research hyperfixation. Thank you for your service.
What's a "factum"? That's a word I've never heard before. If I had to guess it's a short research paper? Am I close? I'm probably not close...
ok the JC Bach thing is actually maybe interesting? because the really famous Bach was actually Johann Sebastian Bach. JC Bach was his son, and his music is way less popular than Papa Bach but also kind of considered really underrated in classical music circles. Really gorg sense of melody, was really popular in Georgian England and sort of a forefather of the classical movement in music, Mozart owes him a lot. But JC sort of fell out of the public consciousness after he died, whereas JS became a household name after his death (albeit long after tbh). So maybe Debbie was onto something thematic about dead fathers and prodigal sons? Anyways it’s a super weird music history deep cut, and I think when you say Lacrimosa most people just think of the one from the Mozart Requiem anyways, so in the end I still feel like it’s just like “insert religious art reference here”. Anyways, love the vid, I’ve been a fan since the midnight mass vid. thanks for the nuance, queen
Sorry, can’t make it for Christmas, mom. Biz just dropped another four and a half hour video.
I tried watching the Netflix show but couldn’t get over the “insta-love”. I hate that trope and think its lazy
I'm beyond excited to listen to this. I just wanted to thank you for your very long form rabbit hole tangent videos. They're like a massage for my brain. What you're doing is awesome and appreciated and as long as it's healthy for you please never stop.
Also, your pacing is perfect, never change! This is a pausable video so there's no such thing as too long.
I never made it past the first episode once I learned that the vampires didn't have fangs.
I get so excited when you upload. Hope to see that Lord Byron video! I don't care if another UA-camr did one. I'd watch you talk about the process of paint drying
Also, congratulations on your sponsors. I really enjoyed when there were not adds, but I'm glad you're being paid.
Seeing a new 4+ hour biz video as soon as i get up is the best fucking way to start the day
As someone who absolutely loves the ADoW show, I was really excited to read the books after the show finished. Oh god was I disappointed. You really hit the nail on the head with all of the problems. Book Diana is insufferable, Matthew is controlling and patronizing, there are so many exposition dumps, and the pacing (which was a little shaky in the show) is absolutely awful in the books. Book!Diana is basically just a Deb Harkness self-insert.
That's not to say the show is without issues, but it improved so much on the source material (with the exception of the anti-climatic finale)
this video is high art, although I love twilight, but like lets be real, they're not even actually vampires, technically they're more like those Celtic fairies, please dear god i need you to talk about it
I actually remember loving the series when it just came out, but I never got around to watching the third season. Glad to find out I didn’t miss anything 😅 All the inserts about alchemy, history, and social justice were really interesting. Sorry you had to go through all of that to give us another great video.
I was sold this series as magical realism. When it turned out to be more paranormal romance, I was disappointed since that wasn't what I was expecting.
I got the first two books on sale and managed to get through the first but only part way through the second before giving up on it😅
I cannot explain to you how excited I got seeing a FOUR hour video from you. time to get ALL the artwork done
Oh my god!!! I was (am in like a nostalgic way?) obsessed with this series in like middle/high school. I literally own the history lore book thing Deborah published which is like just as big as the third book😂😂 needless to say this video rocks and i can’t argue with any of your points. What can i say, 14 year old me REALLY wanted to be Diana
On the Creature Racism section, and it's getting increasingly bizarre to me that the author of these books is apparently an actual historian, because she sure doesn't seem to have any real interest in interrogating or displaying like. The very very very obvious fact that people have lived differently throughout history ? Lmao ? And the ways Very Large Unavoidable cultural forces such as colonialism and racism and religion and patriarchy are inherent to those experiences. Like that's. Kind of one of the main points of studying and discussing history ? Acknowledging that things used to be different than they are now (but also that everything then influences everything now) & then interrogating and investigating that within its own context & learning from it as a kind of scientific process. That's. More or less what doing history is. To not bother to do that is so deeply antithetical to everything I learned and the way I was taught to think/analyze as a history student.
And like, I know academia has changed over time, we're always having new conversations, but according to wikipedia she is an active history professor, meaning she kind of Has to be involved in the current conversation. And she is about the age/even a little younger than most of my former professors, who for the record were mostly appalled by historical fiction in the first place, but certainly would've despised these books in particular Because her approach to history is so bizarre and non-historical.
I understand wanting to write things for pleasure and wish fulfillment and whatever, blah blah blah silly vampire fanfiction reasons, but like, I literally just could not ever fuck around the way she fucks around in these books because I gained a whole fuckng lot of student loans to Know Better. I didn't get a whole ass degree in history to not do better. And I know she has to know better because she has a whole goddamn PhD. So the only conclusion is that she just does not care enough to do better. I do not want to call into question her validity as an academic just because of her bad vampire books, but I think I Can say that her bad vampire books are bad at least partly because the "academia" flopped as hard as it possibly could've
Honestly appalled to learn that she is an actual historian. You are 100% right to mistrust/discredit her academics btw, it’s not just about a random fantasy book in her downtime, I think she genuinely exposes problematic attitudes and beliefs about history and academic study that she does not realize in her writing.
@@thegenderfluidthing8660 I feel like mistrust/discredit is the wrong word, it's more "increased skepticism"? "Higher scrutiny"?
Like, her work could be absolutely valid and well researched, but the attitudes she has displayed mean that there are things that should be kept in mind when evaluating it in case they crop up in there...
Silly Biz, alchemy is obviously the science of understanding deconstructing and reconstructing matter however, it is not an all powerful art...
I feel like so many alchemists made soda and went, “damnit. I wanted booze”
I didn't realize how badly i want your twilight hot takes until just now--because I'm sure you've got solid philosophical reasons for appreciating the sparkle and i wanna know them.
Also, how did you know I've been researching gnosticism for that fantasy novel I'm sure I'll finish someday--so thank you!
i tried to watch the show desperately needing more vampire content after interview w/a vampire but it was so cringy and so was the book 😭✋🏽 yet somehow ur video essay is literally 10x better 🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽 ate this up sis
Babe wake up new biz vid just dropped.*
*I say to my cat because I'm a spinster
I hated the first book as soon as I read it, despite its, at the time (shortly after it came out, so around 2012) rave reviews.
Then it came up again later when another avid reader I knew said they really enjoyed the book, and I described it as weird Twilight on steroids fanfiction.
I am LOCKED IN for this whole video.
Well now I want to write my own alchemy-esque story which is an elaborate metaphor for the reactions between elements.
I read at least 2 of these books, maybe 3? I read it thinking I would be obsessed but I couldn’t give you a single description of any characters at all. Matthew is one of those characters that I just don’t know. Diane is the same. I thought he was evil for most of the first book because he was so flat. It’s like I’m reading every scene from a gauzy curtain. I got so tired of not knowing what exactly what was going on. Matthew’s parents were the only concrete characters I remember. 50:25
the sparkling thing was silly until you realized that vampires appear to me made out of some kinda fucked up crystal and then its like 'oh cool'
i just realized the show your taking about when you said they talk to a witches head, omg. my mother watched the show and id see some over her shoulder. i did think the small amount i saw felt like a fanfinction. it all makes sense now.
To answer your omegaverse question, I don't think the All Souls trilogy was originally an omegaverse fanfiction... Mostly because omegaverse was only just becoming a thing as this series was being written. If anything I think the wolf stuff could be a nod to the community that originated the omegaverse because a/b/o did originally come from wolf shifter fic, but none of the vampire biology reminds me of old omegaverse fic. I guess they have pack dynamics but that's more wolf-Shifter stuff.
The weaving thing makes me think that a certain someone has probably read (or watched) the Wheel of Time
Also, all the John Dee references made me think of The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, which is another trippy fantasy series that I absolutely recommend.
I'm always happy to catch these when the video is newer than it is long. Thank you!
I just love how you dropped this video right after I lent the first book to my sister XD
Personally I loved both the book and the show, but I love your rants even more and I'm having a blast!
55:21 I think it's very funny that the Pacifier movie had this premise foreshadowed more effectively than a novel.
When I read the books the main issue I had was how disappointing it was. I've read many weird books. But to take such an interesting premise - university professor witch and a biochemistry scientist vampire and to butcher it so much? I love the first episodes of the show. If I'm generous I like the first season. I can't stand the books, Diana is so fucking stupid. Deborah Harkness has so many good ideas, but then somehow manages to make them all terrible. And the ending is so infuriating I was raging to everyone that would listen. THEY DON'T SOLVE THE ISSUE! They just peacefully uphold the status quo and solve their own problems. What was even the point. I hate this series so much. It had potential, but the author saw it and shot it in the head
1:30:16 just a quick note because i absolutely love the crucible. john proctor was actually not crushed to death in the play. proctor is hanged after refusing to sign a false confession. he makes the famous, “because it is my name” speech. giles corey is the character who is pressed to death, and he actually existed in real life.
I was SOSOSOSOSO hyper fixated on The Magicians for a while, and its still as horrible and amazing as I remember so the little goblin in my brain went apeshit when you mentioned it