Fourth Wing and the YA Vortex

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I have to put a disclaimer at the beginning of this post: this is not a review of Fourth Wing. I haven’t read most of the book, nor am I currently feeling well enough to do so. This is more an explanation of why I bounced off it so quickly and viscerally when I tried to read the sample, but in a way it’s not really about Fourth Wing at all; it’s more about a particular trend I’m noticing in the adult fantasy genre that very much doesn’t agree with me.

After I briefly mentioned the book in my Gizmodo round-up, Rebecca Yarros’ dragon novel seems to be taking off in a big way, showing every sign of becoming A Thing in the publishing world. Given the lightning speed that pop culture moves at today, that means we’ll probably have a movie or streaming series adaptation within a year, and an aborted attempt at a cross-media Dragonverse by Christmas 2025. Naturally, I had to get on this bandwagon early, so I downloaded the sample of Fourth Wing (or to give it its full current Amazon title, Fourth Wing: Discover TikTok's newest fantasy romance obsession with this BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick! aka FW:DTTNFROWTBBCR2BCP!) and hopped on board.

It…well, let me walk you through it.

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Reject Book, Embrace Manga

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I’ve been unable to read books for most of the summer due to migraines, so in search of the good kind of brain stimulation I decided to get back into reading manga. I used to be pretty into it during my teenage years and my early twenties, but for whatever reason I fell off pretty hard in recent years.

Thankfully, accessing manga is a lot easier and cheaper than it was back in the day—in fact, Viz’s Shonen Jump app offers a subscription that will get you more manga than you could probably ever read for less than three smackeroonies a month, which I think we can all agree isn’t a lot of smackeroonies even if you find yourself somewhat smackeroonie-deficient.

Here’s a review of the first three manga I picked.

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Books I Didn't Finish: Percy Jackson And The Lightning Thief

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Recently, or possibly a year ago (my grasp of time isn’t great these days), I saw people on twitter lamenting that they could no longer read Harry Potter due to JK Rowling’s controversial stance in the Gender Wars™. Lots of Twitter commentors were recommending Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series as a replacement, which got me thinking that I’ve never actually read any of those books. By the time they started coming out I had moved on from middle-grade fiction, save for some old favourites, and they were off my radar.

Also, they’re about Greek gods swanning around in modern-day America, and as I mentioned once or twice in my recent book preview post, that’s not my jam.

But now I’m a big cool adult, so I can read whatever I want without feeling self-conscious about it! Plus, there’s an Apple TV+ series coming next year, which means that we might soon be in the midst of full-on Percymania. Can you really afford not to be part of that cultural zeitgeist? I’m performing a public service here, if you think about it.

Anyway, I only got about halfway through it.

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Judging Books By Their Covers

Occasionally I like to read through upcoming book previews like this recent one from Gizmodo and decide whether I want to download a sample based solely on the one or two sentence blurb and the cover.

Then it occurred to me that I can turn this exercise into easy, low-brainpower blog content while simultaneously revealing how irrational and shallow my book opinions are, so here you go.

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The Unsolved Mysteries Iceberg Part 1

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Hello my loyal blog readers! I’ve got something different for you today.

As I’ve alluded to multiple times, although the Urge To Blog burns ever bright in my heart, I have been having a lot of trouble ingesting the delicious media–books, games, movies–that fuel that flame due to my migraines. What I’ve been searching for is a source of Infinite Content, something that I can bang away about without having to do much—or any—research. Just sit down when I’m feeling up to it, hammer out some content, then take a nap.

Recently, I‘ve been watching iceberg explainer videos on Youtube, and I came across this extensive unsolved mysteries iceberg chart which includes a lot of topics I‘m already familiar with. In case you‘re not familiar with the concept, an iceberg chart lists topics revolving around a specific theme in order of obscurity, with the top layers (the parts of the iceberg that are above the surface) being more mainstream or generally well known, while the deeper layers list obscure theories or trivia. Some icebergs also order their subjects by how disturbing they are, with the Not Safe For Life topics going at the bottom.

For this blog post series, I‘m going to discuss some of the topics on the Unsolved Mysteries Iceberg and give my take on them. I‘m not going to tackle all of them, because there‘s some I don‘t have any familiarity with and the whole point of this exercise is that I won‘t have to do any research, but I‘ll hit as many as I can.

Given that this involves unsolved murders and serial killers, it gets into some heavy territory. As such, entries that are likely to be disturbing or upsetting will be titled in red. There are none of these in the first post.

Let me know in the comments if you find this stuff interesting

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Trash TV: The Watcher

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The case of The Watcher is a fascinating unsolved mystery. The link I provided gives the full details, but the gist of it is that an American family purchased their “dream house” and then started receiving creepy and vaguely threatening letters from an unknown stalker. The family were ultimately scared into selling their home at a loss, and the identity of The Watcher was never uncovered.

It’s the kind of story that seems tailor-made for adaptation into a movie or TV series. Indeed, among those who believe that the Broaddus parents made the whole thing up, that’s one of the most popular proposed motives. So how could producer Ryan “American Horror Story” Murphy and a boatload of Netflix cash take such fertile material and turn it into…this?

Netflix’s The Watcher is either one of the most ineptly-made pieces of media I’ve ever seen, or a stealth parody whose cover is so deep that it’s looped back around to being unironically terrible. I honestly don’t think it matters which is true, because the show is a hilarious trainwreck either way.

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Smile

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If you’ve been paying any attention to the horror movie scene lately then you’ll know that “elevated horror” is one of two genre sub-types blowing up right now (the other one is folk horror). The exact definition is a little blurry, as these things tend to be, but the general definition of what separates an elevated horror movie from normal horror movie is the following:

  • Novel hook

  • Focus on social issues, especially as metaphor

  • A24 logo on the poster

  • Vibes

That last one is important: more than anything else, you know an elevated horror movie when you see it…or rather, you can tell when someone is trying to make an elevated horror movie, even when they completely and utterly fail to do so.

For example,

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Metroid Prime Remastered

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Well, we all knew this was coming. My decision to cover this game will, of course, be controversial to some of my readers, but for reasons I will refuse to elaborate on, anyone criticising me for my media consumption is violating my freedom of speech and also bullying me. I must live my truth.

I scarcely need to name the game in question. After years of rumours and feverish speculation  this game, part of a storied media franchise and a universal keystone of millennial nostalgia everywhere, is finally here. It’s by far the biggest, most highly-anticipated game of February and quite possibly the year.

That’s right: I’m talking about Metroid Prime Remastered on the Nintendo Switch. 

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Books I Didn't Finish: A Court Of Thorns And Roses

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In the post-Hunger Games world, no book series has managed to dominate the YA space and become the Next Big Thing, as many commentators and (perhaps more importantly) people with a vested financial interest in the YA market predicted something would. Instead we have multiple claiments to the throne, much like a dark fantasy setting might feature a host of squabbling monarchs.

One of those claiments is Sarah J Maas, who wrote extensively for a YA audience before more recently switching to adult novels (probably a smart financial decision). I’m completely unfamiliar with her work, so I decided to experience the Maas Effect for myself by jumping into A Court Of Thorns And Roses, the first book in her most popular series.

I didn’t get too far.

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Trash TV: The Walking Dead Seasons 1-3

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Note: Going to take January off blogging, enjoy 2023 y’all

So I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but The Walking Dead recently ended after airing for forty years continuously. I have a strange and mysterious inclination to get involved in pop cultural media right before they end, so I decided now would be the perfect time to travel all the way back to 1962 and check out the first three seasons of AMC’s putrid golden goose.

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Dying Light

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I recently had a sudden urge to play some games about zombies—as you do—so I decided to go back and finish Dying Light, the zombie parkour game that came out in 2015 and got a large amount of free and paid content updates over the next five years. You can now buy all of the significant content (minus cosmetics and overpowered DLC weapons) for cheap, which is a pretty good deal if you want a lot of zombie-killing action.

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Station Eleven

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Hey everyone, here’s a very quick, spoiler-free post on why I found Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven disappointing. I actually read the whole thing before I decided to review it this time!

For 90% of my time with the book, I actually thought I was going to come away from it feeling quite positive. Then I got to what I guess passes for the climax of the book, and that changed quickly.

The story takes place before and after an apocalyptic flu pandemic (the opening chapters are great if you want to flash back to early 2020 and feel really anxious), with initially-disconnected characters and plot threads that are gradually intertwined, in your typical literary fiction “people’s lives connect across space and time in unexpected and beguiling ways” (85% of all literary fiction is about this). As far as those kinds of stories go it’s pretty well done, especially in the second half when the different threads start coming together.

However, having gone to all the work of setting this up, the pay-off is extremely underwhelming. The climactic action of the story comes really abruptly and is dealt with in the space of a few pages, via means that don’t really have anything to do with the protagonist or any of the plot elements established up to that point–even though (and this is the part that kills me) the scene in question does actually bring in all of those elements, in a way that seems like it’s going to really tightly wrap up all the book’s thematic strands. They’re just not relevant at all to what actually happens.

The impression I get is that Mandel was fed up with the story and wanted to wrap it up even though the story seemed like it had enough fuel to keep going for a lot longer. At the point it goes into the climax, it felt like there was another third of the book still left to go.

Station Eleven got a TV series adaptation recently which, going by the episode descriptions, seems to flesh out the ending much more as well as tying one particular character more tightly into the rest of the plot, so apparently I’m not the only person who noticed these problems.

Books I Didn't Finish: Babel

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After completely failing to connect with The Atlas Six, I was still in the mood for a vaguely “Dark Academia” flavoured alternate history fantasy. Luckily that describes roughly forty percent of the current genre market right now, so I wasn’t short on options. RF Kuang’s Babel got a huge amount of Buzz prior to release and had an interesting premise, so I chose that. Is it better than The Atlas Six?

Yes. Technically.

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Books I Didn't Finish: The Atlas Six

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So I was recently strolling through my local bookshop, looking at things to buy on my Kindle for substantially cheaper prices, when I spotted one of those “BookTok made me buy it” shelves, and I got curious—what are the TikToks making the kids buy these days?

Of the options available, Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Six seemed the most up my alley. I had vaguely heard that it’s Buzzworthy and Bingeworthy and various other kinds of worthies, so surely it has to be a compelling and well-written tale, right?

Right?

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The Silent Hill Transmission

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Silent Hill is back, baby! It’s good again!

Maybe.

I have written before about my obsessive love for the Silent Hill franchise of video games, most notably in a big multi-part series of essays I did years ago on my old blog (look out for those getting ported over here at some point). As such, I have been keenly following the rumours of a series revival that have been swirling around for quite some time. A few days ago Konami finally lifted the lid on that revival, and boy howdy, us Silent Hill fans are going to be feasting in the years ahead.

First, a quick primer for people who have no idea what I’m talking about.

The Silent Hill series launched on the Playstation back in 1998, rose to prominence with a handful of sequels on the Playstation 2, entered a decline period in which the original development team broke up and new games were farmed out to third parties on an apparently semi-random basis with decidedly mixed results, then appeared to die for good when Konami acrimoniously parted ways with Hideo Kojima, who was developing a new entry with Guillermo Del Toro, amidst a major pivot away from video game development.

In the years since, Konami’s pachinko and fitness club enterprises have waned due to factors largely outside their control (primarily changes to Japanese gambling laws and the Covid pandemic), and management shakeups have ousted the anti-games faction and brought in executives who want to re-pivot back to videogames as a core business, with a particular focus on exploiting Konami’s classic IP stable. Silent Hill isn’t quite the top tier of that stable—that would be Metal Gear—but as a franchise not connected to a particular auteur creator who’s unlikely to ever work with them again (reportedly Kojima and Konami have smoothed things over, but Kojima has since launched his own studio and is unlikely to come back), it makes an obvious choice for a big return, especially with high-budget horror getting a huge boost via Capcom’s wildly successful Resident Evil efforts of late.

So we knew for a while that Silent Hill was coming back. We just didn’t know how much it was coming back. It turns out the answer to that question is: all the way. It’s coming back all the way.
Specifically, during their “transmission” video Konami announced five major Silent Hill projects, consisting of three video games, a movie and one…thing (I’ll get into that more later). In order of announcement, here’s what we have to look forward to in 2023 and beyond.

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