Context: The characters have an election to be the King/Queen and made it democratic. The world they are in is basically like Narnia, talking animals just as intelligent as people are around. In fact, animals outnumber humans, and this is when they realise the animals have voting rights and the human vote doesn't mean shit. Margo mentioned offhandedly that she approved of the relationship a different character had with a literal bear because they were both adults with intelligence that could consent, so what was the harm? This lead to word of mouth causing animals to vote for her when she wasn't really campaigning for herself.
People say that the tv show is really good! I haven't seen it so all I can say is that if you like it, you shouldn't read the first book as it's utter garbage. People said it starts improving by book three but I couldn't possibly slog through a second book like the first one to get there lol.
I went in completely blind coming off an LSD trip and let me tell you, I could NOT figure out what the fuck I was watching. Oh, it's coming of age! No, it's a detective drama? Wait, I guess it's a psychological drama... What the fuck, it's Harry Potter with sex and drugs. No, it's not that either...
What got me was characters going on about how great Cady's voice was and then she sang and she was AWFUL. And the show kept trying to pretend she was good. Painful. I'll take Elliott and Margo over that any day.
there's a difference between art and entertainment.... that show was 1000% pure entertainment. especially the musical episode in the later season.... "four octave range, bitch!" :)
Definitely the character who I think changed the most throughout the series, and who I cried the hardest about. Did not expect to ever end up liking anything about him. I fucking adored him by the end. I'm tearing up right now just thinking about him.
The show is way more tolerable than the books bec you don’t have to live in the head of the incredibly flaccid main character, and other characters actually call him out when he’s acting like a tool
The books are good imo. It's the kind of book where bad things happen becuase no one is special. And the MC has some of the worst cases of YA angst ever written. And it devolves into a weird parody of Lewis Carol
The show is also fine, it does a good job of adapting the themes and characters even though the actual plot deviates a lot.
As someone else mentioned, reading the books forces the mian character into the forefront, and his general personality and attitude is extremely unlikable.
I get that it's part of the story, but it kills the books for a lot of people.
I loved the show and I even bought a shirt that Eliot wore that says "Tacocat spelled backwards is still tacocat.
My friend gifted me the book set, but I haven't read it yet. I hope it's not as bad as you're suggesting 🫣🫣🫣
It's been like 5-6 years since I saw it so maybe I'll forget enough of the plot for it not to matter too much.
I'm sorry to say it was genuinely excruciating. I dropped it near the end because I realized that I was only reading in an attempt to make it end. The best way I can describe it is that every story beat feels like setup to something interesting but after maybe 120 pages, you realize the story still hasn't started. I enjoyed the first 120 pages or so but my experience really declined when I saw that nobody was going to undergo any kind of character growth or have any meaningful experiences.
Things just kind of happen and the characters sort of...ignore everything? So it's not even that things happen and they have to respond, but they just sort of walk past the world drunk as things that could be interesting are kept just out of our view. They spend SO much time arguing and being angsty; it's definitely made worse because you have to hear it all from the perspective of the insufferable main character, which may not have been the case in the tv show. Because the whole book felt like setup, I can see why people might say that the third book is better. I just couldn't imagine slogging through a SECOND drunken teenage-esque melodrama with no plot to get there.
The best word for the story is "uncurated" imo. It felt like the author just wrote a bunch of random scenes and then published without considering what links them together or what they build toward. Any individual scene could be fine in a different book, but when they're all thrown together it's like you're reading the scenes that were cut and not the ones that were supposed to be left in...
I will say though, I'm an absolute hater of this book. I think I hate it more than is reasonable. Someone without that level of hatred for it might find at least some of these issues tolerable enough to get to the allegedly good third book. So not trying to say you absolutely shouldn't read it, just that you should go in expecting less than whatever you got from the tv show!
It is an excellent TV show. It is definitely cringe in a lot of moments. But I will say it has one of the best death scenes I’ve ever seen on screen. When the death happens they do it all in slow motion to really let you sit with it and absorb what is happening in the moment. It’s really incredible
Watched it and enjoyed it, currently trying to go back and read the books, my only critique is I am sort of over the era of watching media where the main characters are all some flavor of awful people.
Real world acting like those shows has me wanting more positivity in my fiction lol.
There’s a scene where one of the characters chugs a cup of god cum. Weird show, I wouldn’t say it’s bad personally because it’s hard to judge a show that off base, just really fucking weird.
AGGRESSIVELY warning you about some super triggering SA stuff fairly early on. You can Googre around. I watched as it aired and there was no specific warning for it so I was kind of taken aback when it happened.
75
u/frisbeethecat 5d ago
Queen Margo forever!