Recent DNFs
Oct. 20th, 2025 08:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterI feel bad DNFing so many things in a row recently, but it's been surprisingly hard to find anything I feel like reading! This isn't a list of everything I've picked up and put down in the last few weeks, but a curated shortlist of things I disliked enough to want to gripe about.
Rose in Chains by Julie Soto is one of the three big Dramione pull-to-pubs that's getting huge hype at the moment. You guys all know about my fondness for pull-to-pub romance by this point, but this particular one turned out to be squick central for me. In a messy game of fandom telephone, the fic behind this novel was inspired by a different Dramione fic, which was inspired as much by The Handmaid's Tale as by Harry Potter, and the melding of serious feminist talking points with blatant fetish content REALLY didn't work for me. (To be honest, while acknowledging the high risk of hypocrisy here, I pretty much always feel differently about rapey kinkfic published in a fannish context than I do about rapey kinkfic published for money and for a general audience.) I can't trash this book on its merits: if you enjoy het slavefic, it will cater to you very nicely in prose that's pretty much on par with other successful romantasy. But it wasn't for me. It probably didn't help that all the stuff about crushed hearts and burnt fallopian tubes managed to trigger my first vasovagal episode since completing exposure therapy. Fellow BII-phobes, be warned.
Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan sounded so good by its description, but is kind of just...meh? in execution. It's an isekai-inspired novel in which the dying protagonist gets sent to not!Westeros as a villain, but I don't know what happens beyond that because the combination of mediocre prose and unfunny tumblr references has completely put me off reading any further. Maybe I'll come back to this when I'm hungry for deconstructions of villainy as a concept, but right now there are too many other similar works on my TBR for me to feel any pressure to give this one a second chance.
What Happened to Nina? by Dervla McTiernan is marketed as a thriller, presumably because the publisher took the author's word that it revolved around a dead young woman and investigated no further before pushing it to shelves. It's about the aftermath of an intimate partner homicide, in which the victim and killer's families battle it out in the legal system while the true crime fans of the world look on. Or at least, that's what I gather from the summary; I didn't get far enough in to see any of that actually happen. I'm sorry to be so harsh, but this book is charmless. It's too slow and boring to be a thriller, too obvious to be a mystery; the prose is too amateurishly bland for litfic and the characters are too shallow for it to pass as psychological drama. I tried twice, because the cover is appealing and it sold so well and widely that I thought surely it would at least make for easy reading, but no. No, it's an absolute slog, and I have flicked through to the final chapters just to see what happened (which was nothing I wouldn't have seen coming a mile off) and set it aside with no regrets.
Rose in Chains by Julie Soto is one of the three big Dramione pull-to-pubs that's getting huge hype at the moment. You guys all know about my fondness for pull-to-pub romance by this point, but this particular one turned out to be squick central for me. In a messy game of fandom telephone, the fic behind this novel was inspired by a different Dramione fic, which was inspired as much by The Handmaid's Tale as by Harry Potter, and the melding of serious feminist talking points with blatant fetish content REALLY didn't work for me. (To be honest, while acknowledging the high risk of hypocrisy here, I pretty much always feel differently about rapey kinkfic published in a fannish context than I do about rapey kinkfic published for money and for a general audience.) I can't trash this book on its merits: if you enjoy het slavefic, it will cater to you very nicely in prose that's pretty much on par with other successful romantasy. But it wasn't for me. It probably didn't help that all the stuff about crushed hearts and burnt fallopian tubes managed to trigger my first vasovagal episode since completing exposure therapy. Fellow BII-phobes, be warned.
Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan sounded so good by its description, but is kind of just...meh? in execution. It's an isekai-inspired novel in which the dying protagonist gets sent to not!Westeros as a villain, but I don't know what happens beyond that because the combination of mediocre prose and unfunny tumblr references has completely put me off reading any further. Maybe I'll come back to this when I'm hungry for deconstructions of villainy as a concept, but right now there are too many other similar works on my TBR for me to feel any pressure to give this one a second chance.
What Happened to Nina? by Dervla McTiernan is marketed as a thriller, presumably because the publisher took the author's word that it revolved around a dead young woman and investigated no further before pushing it to shelves. It's about the aftermath of an intimate partner homicide, in which the victim and killer's families battle it out in the legal system while the true crime fans of the world look on. Or at least, that's what I gather from the summary; I didn't get far enough in to see any of that actually happen. I'm sorry to be so harsh, but this book is charmless. It's too slow and boring to be a thriller, too obvious to be a mystery; the prose is too amateurishly bland for litfic and the characters are too shallow for it to pass as psychological drama. I tried twice, because the cover is appealing and it sold so well and widely that I thought surely it would at least make for easy reading, but no. No, it's an absolute slog, and I have flicked through to the final chapters just to see what happened (which was nothing I wouldn't have seen coming a mile off) and set it aside with no regrets.
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Date: 2025-10-20 11:04 am (UTC)...Is it mean to say that my days of believing that if a fic was pull-to-publish-able it wasn't a good fic (in that it had something to say about its source material/characters) to begin with are definitely coming to a middle? :/
(100% agree with rapey kinkfic reading different in fandom than for profit tho. At risk of sounding like the 'think of the children' crowd, removing it from a fannish context takes it from 'I have something to say about these characters and/or my preferences in written erotica' to 'I have something to say about the world in general' in a way that, while not necessarily Actually reflective of what the author wants to say about the world, is literally never something I'm interested in reading and is almost always offputting. Live your dreams! I will be rolling my eyes and living different dreams lmao.)
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Date: 2025-10-21 10:51 pm (UTC)removing it from a fannish context takes it from 'I have something to say about these characters and/or my preferences in written erotica' to 'I have something to say about the world in general' in a way that, while not necessarily Actually reflective of what the author wants to say about the world, is literally never something I'm interested in reading and is almost always offputting.
This is pretty much how I feel as well. I'm happy to assume the best of the authors as people while still feeling like the content has a different weight in a mass-market het romance novel than it would in a fanfic. If nothing else, rapey fanfic generally exists within a left-leaning, (comparatively) feminist-friendly atmosphere where most of us have at least had the conversations about fiction vs reality and formed conscious opinions. Whereas tradpub reaches a much wider demographic and as a pro author you're sharing shelf space with other successful authors who also write about eroticised rape but really MEAN it. Just ... yeah. Icks me. It's not a strongly held moral opinion but it's a kneejerk emotional reaction that I don't intend to examine any time soon.
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Date: 2025-10-20 02:16 pm (UTC)I too tend to feel differently about rapey kinkfic published in fandom and published in profic. Is this hypocrisy? Does this reflect that rapey profic tends to have a female victim? Is there hypocrisy inherent in the fact that I'm only interested in rapey kinkfic with a male victim? Who can say. Maybe simply good to understand one's personal preferences in this matter and know what to avoid.
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Date: 2025-10-21 10:59 pm (UTC)This is true! I can't put my finger on why the tumblrese bothered me so much, because I really liked when Tamsyn Muir did basically exactly the same thing in The Locked Tomb, and that's a setting where it doesn't make any in-universe sense for the characters to know about tumblr. But it was funny there, and here it's just a bit grating.
Maybe simply good to understand one's personal preferences in this matter and know what to avoid.
Yeah, I've learnt something new about myself from this experience at least. I actually do like rapey kinkfic with female victims, but apparently I really don't like rapey profic with female victims, even if it's the same level of self-aware about its kinkiness. I don't think I'm going to be unpacking my biases beyond that any time soon. Bestselling author Julie Soto will just have to with the knowledge that I, lucymonster, am saying mildly judgy things about her book to my 12.5 followers.
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Date: 2025-10-20 08:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-21 11:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-23 04:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-10-25 04:58 am (UTC)Do you feel like you often flip through to the end of the book when you know it's a DNF? Or only if you know for sure you're not going to pick it up again?
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Date: 2025-10-25 05:25 am (UTC)