#he's too big for her to coerce into a cage. he's too intelligent to fall for the 'it's dark so it must be nighttime' trick

[molagboop]

#comic #raven beak #samus aran #chozo #metroid dread #Raven Beak's big booby couch surfing adventure #don't worry about it this is all written out in page 1 of The Care And Keeping of Giant Murder Bird Dad Things #yes that couch is to scale he is two and a half Samuses tall #not that the blanket/towel over the head works but she would be elated if it did #he's too big for her to coerce into a cage. he's too intelligent to fall for the 'it's dark so it must be nighttime' trick #he has a Bird PhD and special ops training. there ain't no fooling him #but there ARE a few reflexes Samus can take advantage of to have herself a little fun #if he's going to be occupying the couch for who knows how long she might as well make the most of it #he sleeps on it because 1. she wants her bed to herself and 2. bed's too small for him to sleep in it by himself anyways #the couch is also too small but it's better than nothing and Samus is the breadwinner here #as for reflexes she can take advantage of: tickling him under the chin may get him to reflexively open his jaw. #it doesn't always work though #that's something she can do to mildly annoy him. like in a 'why did you do that' sort of way. #it's far easier to make a Chozo hatchling open their mouth that way. parents do it to get stubborn children to take unpleasant medicine #Zebesian scholars speculated that it might be related to social feeding behaviors such as a hatchling's instinct to nudge a parent's #throat to tell them 'hey i'm hungry give me some of that sweet mush in your crop' #now i need to tag this with headcanons because i went too deep into the Fun Thoughts Zone #headcanons #anyways. more reflexes samus can weaponize. this one isn't exactly weaponizable in any meaningful way #but sometimes she plays music while he's busy with his hands or reading just to see what gets him to absently bob his head #so far she's gotten him to do it with 'Plastic Love' and ABBA. half the time he doesn't *appear* to notice that he's doing it #very rarely it becomes quite obvious that he's not only noticed the head bobbing but has foregone whatever he's doing to fully embrace it. #you know he's gettin' funky with it when his plumes stand on end #his neck kind of straightens or stretches out. he gives a short #robust shake of his head. and then everything moves from the shoulders down. full body bird-brained wiggles. it's very amusing.

[diaryofanobsessivefangirl]

Shipnalysis: The Juror

Overview:

Vincent is a cold murderer who never needed anyone, except Annie. He has found someone just as intelligent and daring as him in her. Someone worthy to care; someone he would be willing to share his life with.

And, although never admitting it, Annie sees what he sees: Too much of herself in him. It takes a lot of guts and deviousness to convince a whole jury to release the big head of mafia, lie for the police, mislead the system’s justice to make your own revenge and plan to murder someone.

Vincent talk about freeing Annie is also a fact she wouldn’t admit to be true. From the beginning, Annie is a talented artist, but has to work as a secretary sitting on a chair in front of a computer. This is the woman that went to Guatemala to kill a member of the mafia. Her spirit was being broken on that chair, afraid she would never sell her sculptures, afraid she would spend her days in front of a computer desk until she died. She fells like a bird in a cage, trapped in a unwanted job and a mediocre existence.

Then Vincent enters her life and forces her to face all kinds of fears. Not entirely, but there were honesty on the woods scene, when she tells him "I hate you and I hate it more that you were right”. Fear made her stronger. All the trials he imposed to her reminded her once again what she was capable of. It brought back up a strength she had long forgotten.

Vincent frightens Annie, but he also challenges her. When she faces him, confidence and the sensation of being alive comes back again. A small piece of her, the piece that can’t stand to live in fear anymore, admires him because he overcame that long ago. A piece of her is fascinated by him, as well as terrified and hating.

Scenes:

MOVIE

Vincent is a psycho, but every scene he shares with Annie has a romantic atmosphere: the scene on the balcony, like forbidden lovers meeting in secret through a fence; a valentine’s gift, when Vincent gives Annie a necklace, for he would be with her whenever she wore it. The bouquet? I can’t even talk about that.

There are these moments when for everything they sound like a married couple. When he scolds her for being too hard on Oliver; when she flees and he says “She just need sometime to be alone” (Sounding like a guy left by his wife); when she is making a tantrum in the woods and tells him to whip that condescending smile of his face.

And I don’t know about you guys, but the car scene seemed a allegory for sex to me!

“Who is going to protect you, Annie?“ "The teacher. The teacher will protect me.” “Uhg? Who is going to protect you?” “The teacher. The teacher will.” “Say it again.” “The teacher will protect me.” “Again, again.” Then she screams and next they are heavy breathing

What we know about Vincent:

He grow up in the same neighborhood mafia’s big heads grew and it was probably a poor, at least a modest neighborhood.

He was friendless since as a child, but he never minded that.

He never minded anything, in fact. Louie Boffano says he knew him for 10 years and Annie was the first thing he ever saw made a impact on Vincent.

He doesn’t even blink when he murders a young boy. This + Anti-social, apathetic behavior presented since childhood. We can by now affirm Vincent has a slight level of sociopathy.

He admires Annie’s art and believes she is the owner of a talent unjustly overlooked. He is also thrilled by the fact that her work tells some much about who she is, that getting to know Annie’s art is getting to know Annie herself. Vincent keeps the pieces he bought and is very protective towards them. When he was about to kill Rodney, he spoke calmly until the visibly drunk visitor touched them.

When Vincent tells the girl on the photos, Annie, is his girlfriend to outwit Rod, he wishes it would be so. In a kind of way, she is to him. She is the woman he is daily getting to know and falling all the more in love with.

He is uneasy, but impressed that Annie found out he was The Teacher by first guess.

Vincent sees his experience with Annie as a marriage: going through the harshness together and willing to do anything to keep their child safe.

When Vincent kills Juliet, he means not to just keep Annie scared, but as a payback for convincing her to see the judge, which he sees as Juliet making Annie betray his trust and place Oliver and herself in danger for her own “hero complex” reasons.

Once Annie cleans her bank account and disappears, Vincent is afraid she is gone for good. When he says “She would never betray us”, he actually meant “She would never betray me”.

“Annie is in great danger and her child is in great danger and I will do everything that I can to protect them. Now what part of that don’t you understand? I can explain it to you.” is his way of telling the world that he loves her and Eddie practically tells him to keep his sick ideas of love to himself. Is like wanting to vent with your best buddy about this girl you’ve met, but he is not willing to hear you.

Vincent was willing to broke his agreement with the Cabbal, kill Boffano before the time planned and the entire mob, besides burning the money he won for coercing Annie, to save her. At one point, coercing Annie was not about the payment anymore, but to keep her safe from the rest of the organization.

OMG He is fucking crying because she tried to kill him! You didn’t just betray him --you set up his death! After all he had done for you! My baby!

I’m sorry, I know he is a killer, but think about the other side: Exactly because he is a cold murder, when he cries over someone, you can say how much that person meant for him. There is a quote “Just because people don’t love you the way you wish they would, doesn’t mean that they don’t love you with all their being” Vincent love was dangerous and not at all reconcilable, but it was real. He deserves to burn, doe.

Vincent knows there is no chance he will ever get out of that Maya ruin alive when he pulls that gun towards Annie. To be printed in her memory is good, but to die with her. Teacher and the Juror, Romeo and Juliet... Yes, to take Annie with him would be his last wish.

Two short moments you won’t like to miss when you watch the movie:

After Rody leaves his place, Vincent hears Annie on the speaker and holds the rod.

Vincent heavy breaths when Annie unbuttons her shirt and reveals her bra to take the police recorder from there

When he is asking Annie “If Louis Boffano didn’t order the killing then who did?” at their meeting in the rain, he sits besides her and his hand almost reach hers before he stops himself.

BOOKS

It’s canon in the book that Anne is attracted to dominance and danger. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) She rejected Turtle to shortly date Oliver's father, the singer on Turtle’s band with a drugged rock star attitude. He had none of his friend sweetness, but he had a sense of control, and she dig into him so fast she became pregnant and he left her in a few months.

One thing lovely about the book is the metaphors: how Vincent talks about Annie while actually talking about apparently unrelated stuff.

“You must keep showing her you love her. Sooner or latter, she will get rid of the padlock. In the mean time, at least you know she is not sleeping around.” He is stalking her so... yeah, he knows she is not sleeping around as well.

“We strip away the gilt and the jewels. We teach him what the world is really like. We crush those lights one by one. It won’t be easy. It’s not a matter of slapping him around a little. It takes great suffering and patience and persistence to change a things at the soul’s core. But once he learns this lesson, I believe that he’ll be grateful for it. Or I hope he will. Despite his anger. Despite his bitterness.”

“The Teacher is tending the orchids, discipline where needed. [..] How quickly, without nurturing, living things will lose their shape. Their clarity, Their order.” 

This is right after he has to remind Annie what she was risking by talking to the judge. There is a clear dichotomy in this story between chaos and order, respectively represented by Annie and The Teacher. Order stands for Vincent's design and chaos for Annie’s struggle to be free from it. Chaos will prevail, as I talk about latter on this post.

During Boffano’s trial, doe, chaos is controlled through fear. Vincent strips Annie from her morals boundaries and proves to her what she really loves is not the law or social justice, but the people close to her. Nevertheless, that same lesson pulls her off the edge when he fulfills his threat and kills Juliet. Vincent thinks keeping her scared will also keep her compliant, but Annie is the type of heroine a villain can only press that much: the harder you push her, the harder she pushes back. That is what he loved about her in the first place. With Vincent’s “lessons”, she sees through the fear that he will also kill Oliver, sends him to Quatemala and takes the risk because a beloved person was finally killed, and if Annie doesn’t retaliate because she is scared it will happen again, she will be afraid for the rest of her life.

“All you care about is your kid and your work and a handful of your friends - and if the gray suits can’t protect these, then who needs the gray suits?”

Another well-learned lesson: Annie doesn’t involve Boffano’s death and the police task with it’s legitimate procedure into her revenge plan against Juliet’s death because it was personal, but also because she had lost fate in the State's interference. Although Annie is a moral person who fought to do the right thing in Boffano’s trial before succumbing, she was just a woman against the mob. She could afford to see the bastard free; she could not afford her to have her best friend’s murderer walking free and terrorizing she and her child for life. Not realizing this was Vincent’s probably only mistake. At the same time, he showed once again they were not so different. That, although she has more boundaries than him, by the end of the day, they are ruthless in their love.

The book confirms that, after her experience with Vincent, Annie doesn’t recognize herself in her old art anymore: everything seems frivolous, warmhearted bric-a-brac. Her next piece is a house made of sharps of broken glass: stumble and you get cut. She embraces the tension she has been enduring for the last weeks through her sculpture. She opens up to fear. And it’s clear like a house with glasses filled with sunshine. Not a corner is dark and mysterious; everything is neat, all organized by some finicky spirit.

Annie knows Vincent better than anyone. Besides knowing he wouldn’t touch her and find the wire, she says the reason why she is certain he will never quit her is the same one Vincent’s gives to Eddie: “What we have been through is like a marriage”. She also knows he won’t kill her even when he is racing her and Eddie with a gun.

“Does it seem depraved---my fascination for that man?”

The Teacher says this, but it actually speaks to Annie. Like I’ve said before, their last meeting in the woods is a part in which Annie has to play with honest feelings towards him to get his trust. Yeah, she is fascinated by him. She knows Vincent himself was the one to give her the weapons to defeat him. And there is no one else she hates more for it.

Funny thing, that quote is a chapter’s title, the same chapter in which the author makes the reader question if Annie has fallen for her stalker. Before returning from Quatemala, she quotes the Teacher saying their relationship was like a marriage, the police officer is afraid “she been jumping through that bastard’s hoops so long she’s starting to like it” and Eddie wonders as he watches Annie betraying the police and get into Vincent’s car what is about him that gets to every woman. She also gives him way more reasons to hope in the book and it’s Annie herself who pulls the Teacher into a kiss. Until she shows Boffano the tape and goes like “Don't waste any time” HEY YEAH Not my Annie, bitches! Not my heroines, they don’t go Stockholm no sir

Vincent makes clear to Annie he wants to leave the mob and his ambitious plans and marry her. I’m dead.

The main difference between book and movie is the race to reach Oliver in Guatemala. First of all, Vincent’s original plan when he kills Boffano was not to protect Annie. In the book, he finds out about her betrayal before the meeting through his in-tell and that Boffano wants to take him out on that day. I prefer that in the movie his first idea was to save Annie and that we could see his face when he is told “The woman you think is the love of your life wants you dead”.

Vincent reaction to her betrayal is also more passionate on the movie. Vincent calls her half-drunk and with tears in his eyes. In the book, he seems to be walking with his wife to their son’s funeral. She doesn’t want to go, and he is like “Honey, we must do this. We must attended to the details”. He is sorrow, he is afraid for her and for him when they see the body, everything tastes bitter, but he has to keep control for both of them. He is understandable of her struggle to accept “the facts”, he is sad for her, but that doesn't seen like a reaction of a sane person. He takes his agency away from what's about to happen so sincerely that you'd think Book!Vincent is crazy if he was not full of bullshit.

Movie!Vincent will fulfill his threat of killing Oliver because power means to promise something and deliver it (The Way of Power is an unvarying way); Book!Vincent, on the order hand, believes him and Annie are tolls on the plans of something bigger. He is going to excuse himself from Oliver’s death by believing he was playing order’s role and Annie was playing chaos. When chaos tries to corrupt the rules and they become unbalanced, the Tao rages and order must be reestablished. But chaos can’t help it; it’s her nature. She would fight him and he would have to kill her child for it. Chaos struggles against the grip and order is invariable in her way, predictable. When Annie tries to take Vincent out, he “realized” they were doomed from the start and have been fighting like fools against that true. Movie!Vincent also thinks that, from the moment his path crossed with Annie’s, Oliver would die, but he doesn’t turn this into something mystical or religious. Annie, treacherous and stubborn in her fight, and him, abiding in his words as well. Two people how could not change who they are. I like this intimate zoom on the situation better.

Movie!Vincent also seems to be moved, as I’ve said, by his emotions more than Book!Vincent. He is hurt, therefore he is going to be the man he has always been. Keep his word of killing Oliver is not only about his own integrity, but also a matter of self-defense. Annie made Vincent believe they could change everything and be together, and next she shows him he was the only one willing to take a step forward from the mess they have been. The hope she might had some sort of feeling for him was a trick. Annie played with his emotions. It’s like “Ok, you wanna go back to stage zero? Fine with me”. Spoiler alert: It’s not.

He has tear in his eyes because her son is about to die and she is confused and struggling like a child. I CAN’T.

Even while he is shooting at their car in his way to kill her son, he is praising her courage.

Vincent wants to be near when she finds Oliver’s body, to comfort her. Because that sad moment belonged to them. WHAT IS THAT EVEN?!

Also, shows up out of nowhere and “Annie come into the car. Annie wanna be with me? Annie. ANNIE.” I swear, he is the Jaime Lannister of this book.

Vincent is killed by a firing squad of men in animal’s mask. The circumstances of his death is chaotic, as he states himself, like he is in a zoo. In his last moments, he tries to quote something from the Tao, but for the first time, he can’t think of any charlatan Philosophy, not among so many distractions. For a guy who relied on the calmness of “Taoism”, seems like the right death to me.

In the last seconds before his death, he thinks he has Annie under his persuasion again and he is about to convince her to leave him for the cops... till he says “for the sake of your child”. She was triggered, as was the gun in her hand.

#The Juror #The Juror 1996 #Annie Laird x Teacher #Teacher x Annie Laird

[mainstreamtags]

Hearts & Other Body Parts Review

Rating: (⅖)

So…. I’ll start by saying...Hearts & Other Body Parts was okay. Not the best of YA fiction but not OVERLY terrible.

I was initially attracted by the cover. Black and red with fun, gothic typography; my aesthetic. Opening the cover to read the synopsis on the other hand, I was hardly as impressed;

“A novel of love and monsters.

Sisters Esme, Katy, and Ronnie are smart, talented, and gorgeous, and better yet . . . all three are witches. They have high school wired until the arrival of two new students. The first is Norman, who is almost eight feet tall and appears to be constructed of bolts and mismatched body parts. Despite his intimidating looks, Esme finds herself strangely -- almost romantically -- drawn to both his oversized brain and oversized heart.

The second new arrival is Zack, an impossibly handsome late transfer from the UK who has the girls at school instantly mesmerized. Soon even sensible Esme has forgotten Norman, and all three sisters are in a flat-out hex war to win Zack. But while the magic is flying, only Norman seems to notice that students who wander off alone with Zack end up with crushed bones and memory loss. Or worse, missing entirely.

Hearts & Other Body Parts is a wickedly addictive novel about love, monsters, loyalty, and oh yeah, a Japanese corpse-eating demon cat.”

Can you see where I hesitated? Around “the nice guy is the only one who sees what’s wrong with his romantic rival and has to “rescue” his crush from thinking she loves the other guy”? Yeah. But hey, I thought, I got through Heartless and ended up liking it more than I thought I would so maybe this one will be a little cringe worthy in the beginning but pull out a decent ending too.     

I was half right. There were definitely parts that made me need to lay down for a minute like #GiveUsASnog, the blatant stereotypes masquerading as inclusivity, the frankly alarming overuse of the term “beautiful girls”...

It never managed to pull itself together in a way that made the ending worth it. About halfway through I found the writing continued to lack and there was hardly any substance to keep me there. I powered through purely for the sake of this review. It wasn’t that it was BAD, just all around lack luster. Certainly not the WORST, but just… boring. 

Honestly though, “not the worst” is probably the best thing I can say about this book. I can appreciate what it was trying to be. A campy bit of romantic horror that played off of big name monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, and Witches. Nothing more than a bit of fun. Unfortunately the fun wears off in the first few chapters. A good B Horror relies on being so terrible it’s good, making use of overdone tropes but putting enough twist and creativity into it that it comes together into something memorable even if it’s totally cheesy. Hearts & Other Body Parts fails this on the most basic level. Sure, it’s filled to the brim with all the cliches you could ever want in a B Horror, but it doesn’t have the creativity it takes to bring it together. Instead, we’re left with a collection of poorly thought out characters, a forgettable plot line, and an ending that leaves you wondering if the eight hours it took to read was really worth it.

The answer is no. No it was not and yet I bought it because I was promised a good time.

Side tangent, I’ve noticed a trend in formatting when trying to look up published reviews for books. They paste in a summary of the book and then the writer spends one or two brief paragraphs talking about it in the most ambiguous way possible with a couple of buzzwords like ‘witty’, ‘inventive’, and ‘funny’ tossed in for good measure. You’ll also see the phrase, “I was given a free copy of the book for an honest review.” Honest, yet they don’t tell you WHY a book was funny or inventive, and they definitely don’t tell you if the book was bad, honest or not. Marketing at it’s finest.

So yeah, I’m going to tear this bitch to shreds. I’m going to talk about everything in this book and I’m going to do it in the plainest language I can. It won’t be pretty, but that’s the point. I don’t want it to be filled with flowery language because that shit is hard to write and takes away from the point of the message. No fluff, no buzzwords, no mercy. There will be spoilers, so be warned because I’ll be talking about the ending to this book A LOT.

Let’s start with the backbone of a story; the characters. Hearts & Other Body Parts switches point of view chapter to chapter, sometimes in the middle of a chapter and sometimes whenever the fuck it feels like it. This would be fine, especially if the characters had strong voices, but everyone in this book sounds almost exactly the same. It makes for stilted, awkward dialogue as well. Jokes made by characters don’t land because the conversations they were having felt unnatural.

The only one who had some semblance of a narration style is Norman. Norman is not the main character but it felt like Bloom REALLY wanted him to be and ends up as the most fleshed out character in the book. Considering that every single character in this book is a high school stereotype, that’s saying something.

The witchy sisters this book touted to be the main players felt like one girl broken into three that had never been raised together. The summary calls them smart, talented, and gorgeous and they’re exactly that, in that order. They all get to have only one thing according to B Horror laws and they can’t possibly share anything. Yes they lived in the same house, yes they sit at lunch together but nothing beyond that suggests that they're actually related. They riff on each other occasionally like siblings might but there are no mentions of shared interests and we hardly get to see into Veronica or Katy’s lives aside from “one is super hot and likes makeup and the other likes fashion subcultures and dogs”. I didn't even know Katy was supposed to be a jokester until another character pointed out that she was. As for Veronica, the gorgeous one, she’s youngest sister and only fourteen. Creepy.

Esme, the actual main character of the book, falls victim to the “sudden rash decision heroine” trope. She’s shown previously to have been level headed and intelligent yet when, #spoilers, her sisters are kidnapped by the book’s villains, Zack and the Ancient, she’s suddenly running into a death trap by herself without a plan. Of course, she’s stopped in the nick of time by Norman who is still sensible because he’s smart and also a man. It’s an exhausting trope to have to read over and over again in YA books with female leads, especially leads that are supposed to be intelligent planners.

In the end, Veronica and Katy just end up becoming a combined damsel in distress trope. They only exist to give main character Esme someone to save and to push along the finale. Afterwards, we hear that they “recover” but we don’t see any lasting effects. Bad Guy Zack is still left alive. How do they feel about this? We just don’t know. Norman is the most thought out character in the book, but really at his center he’s still an obnoxious “nice guy” and his very existence feels almost as if the author was pushing an agenda. “Look girls, he may be ugly but he’s intellectual and kind! He’s obviously the correct romantic choice because he’s a NICE GUY.” Norman himself doesn’t do anything overly untoward but the author pushes Esme and Norman together in the worst way. Bad Guy Zack is handsome and the guy all the girls want but he’s just another dumb jock without substance who will cheat on you. So obviously the right choice is Norman.

Having a solid friendship just isn’t an option and looks aren’t EVERYTHING, until, oh wait, they are. In the end even Esme is so unconvinced of her attraction to Norman that she feels she has to drug herself with a love potion to feel anything and drug HIM with a beauty potion in order to make him lovable--which is ableist by the way--and sends the message to disabled readers, “sorry but if you're not at least semi conventionally attractive, no one can truly love you.” The fact that she feels required to be with him because he loves her says it all, really. Speaking of Bad Guy Zack though, his ending was one of the most disappointing parts of the book. Throughout the story we are shown glimpses of his relationship with his vampiric master, the Ancient. In the beginning we’re told that the Ancient chose Zack for a very specific reason. What that reason was, we’re never really told but I’m guessing it’s somewhere along the lines of “he’s hot” and because he’s hot, it makes it easier to draw in women to serve as food sources. The Ancient coerces Zack into doing his bidding and kidnapping women by enthralling him with the use of his vampiric mesmer abilities. Of course, when Zack fails (or whenever the Ancient feels like it apparently) he’s beaten and tortured for hours. These beating are apparently so terrible that the only thing that saves Zack is his fledgling vampire durability; if he was human, he’d only last for a few minutes.

So to reiterate, Bad Guy Zack is actually Abused Minor Zack forcibly coerced into kidnapping girls by his father figure/master. Yes, he’s a player, yes he strung along the sisters in order to eventually kidnap them but if he didn’t he would be tortured. He’s an abused minor repeatedly shown to have remorse for his actions along with other qualities that could have made for a potentially decent redemption arc but instead he is “adopted” by Norman’s father and instead of receiving therapy or support, he submits himself to to being locked in a cage and wanting to take “any punishment that could be meted out to him,” including his own self harm which was described as “absolutely medieval” in design. The idea that a victim of of this type of psychological and physical abuse would would consider himself guilty and deserving of punishment isn't unrealistic but the fact that self harm to the extent described was being seen as acceptable is laughable at best and disgusting at worst. I’m not sure whether to look to the narration of Esme or the writer himself for this but considering Esme’s upbringing, it wouldn't make much sense for her to see any amount of self harm or abuse as normal. As for the Ancient himself, he suffers from a case of overhyped villain. We’re shown repeatedly that he’s willing to do terrible things and told repeatedly that he’s extremely powerful but in the end, it takes all of 7 pages to take him down and I’m being generous with that number. The majority of those 7 pages is even spent with him TALKING about how he’s going to kill Esme without doing anything to support that. The final battle, if you could call it that, is entirely fluff and any sort of threat that the Ancient might have posed instantly fell short the second he started talking.

Esme also has the support of her not-so-japanese, not-so-corpse-eating, demon familiar Kasha who takes the form of a cat and information dump character right along with demon ex machina for the final battle. There is literally no other reason to this character. The chapter that has him get involved with the fight is literally called “Deamon Ex Machina”.  You could have replaced him with a decent google search and the story would have lost nothing. It would have even saved the book from one of its multi-page info dumps and a terrible joke about gophers used 5 too many times. The ending might have even been halfway decent without Kasha. The Ancient might have become the threat he should have been and we could have had an exciting, climactic fight. Instead we got a ridiculous game of cat and mouse that had the terrifying villain reduced to a mess resigned to his fate. Boring.

All of the side characters had this sort of simplification of personality too. The LGBT characters especially suffered from this. Esme’s mother is referred to as a lesbian while also being absent, evoking that age old “gay people are terrible parents” adage. Nick, the background football player, had to be shown by white cis-het Esme that being gay was okay, after which he immediately becomes a fashion obsessed trope despite no hint of him showing interest in it before. You can tell he’s also meant to become a comic relief character, but the jokes are entirely centered around him being gay and effeminate. If that wasn’t the worst, the only trans inclusion comes in the form of the Goddess who offers to show Esme her genitals as proof of being intersex without any prior prompting. Because thats a thing that people do.

Hearts & Other Body Parts was touted for its humor and intelligence but the jokes more often fell flat, and the intelligence came only in the form of page long wiki-esque information dumps and latin terms tossed in for the sake of sounding smart. It fails to be smart in ways that matter. The lack of character depth is one thing, but there were times when I had to set book the book down for a moment because immersion was completely broken by a plot hole or interaction that did nothing to support the character, story, or humor.

For instance, after Esme finally breaks free of Zack’s hypnosis, she makes her way to Norm’s house to meet his father Dr.Frank: a scientist that has important information on vampires. Shortly after she arrives, so does football player, stereotypical meathead Jackson. Earlier he had been in a fight with Zack and left him with extreme anxiety regarding speaking about the fight. Jackson is looked over by Dr.Frank and then given a cocktail of anti-anxiety drugs and narcotics to make him sensible and able to explain who hurt him. Afterwards, Jackson is never mentioned having an issue with panic attacks again. While it’s mentioned he doesn't sleep much, hinting at the anxiety, this doesn't cause him any issue with functioning in general or assisting Esme with tracking the vampires. That is:

A.) Not how sleep deprivation works. B.) Not how anxiety works. C.) Suggests that not only did Dr. Frank medicate an underage child without parental consent but that he CONTINUED to supply this child with medication.

This is one of the most jarringly immersion breaking instances but there are several more like it along with a multitude of smaller instances such as typing an entire url instead of using the search bar, purposefully cooking a brisket until it’s dry, and not considering that other LGBT people may exist outside of the chosen three which would have entirely messed up the “only some men are immune to vampire mesmer“ thing. It leaves one wondering if Bloom thought a lot of this through, or if he simply wrote himself into a corner a few times and had to come up with something on the fly to fix it.

This book was a struggle to read and even now, I’m struggling to come up with anything positive to balance out the negative. The grammar was decent. The sentence structure wasn't bad, but decent syntax only means so much when it’s the content itself that’s the issue. I’m not asking for a serious drama from a book meant to be along the same lines as a Syfy special, but I am asking for at least some effort. The plot was a forgettable ode to nice guys, the humor was flat, the pacing was off, the characters were walking cliches, the representation borderline phobic, and the ending was entirely anticlimactic. The writing wasn’t the WORST but it wasn’t good either. It was as if Bloom had only wanted to get a book published and nothing more so he wrote the most generic crap he could manage then tossed in some black and red with a Japanese cat as a hook. I can't say it didn't work because I spent money on this snooze-fest but damn. Reading Hearts & Other Body Parts was a slog. If it had been terrible, it might have met its B horror mark. It was a slog not because it was bad, but because it was just plain mediocre.

Ira Bloom, nice try but for your next book, a little more effort would be appreciated. Thanks. #SorryNotSorry.

#book review #hearts & other body parts #fiction rants