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Tiktok sensation LightLark is the final boss of bad fantasy YA— a failure built on aesthetic boards and tropes, unable to pretend it has a heart

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A full summary with spoilers, analysis, quotes- and so much more on the subject of a book you should never read. This is a long piece. Like ‘Youtube Video Essay’ long.

Lightlark is joyless, a husk beyond parody, a checklist of every Island of Blood and Bone and Glass and Hearts that has come out in the last five years, built and sold on tropes and aesthetic boards. This is a book written by an author who is not a writer. It would fit in on the dregs of an amateur writing site with eerie perfection.

But Lightlark is more than that. You see, Lightlark is… a TikTok book.

EDIT:

Thanks :')

There's now a video version. I heard Tumblr likes video essay long watches on obscure very specific content... may I introduce you to:

I'm not making a dime on this, I have no horses, only like 70 hours of work looking at this mess of a book and I just want to make sure everyone knows how bad it is. Let's be bitter at this multimillionaires flop together.

#want this pinned because this is an excellent criticism and whole reason i was able to actually love the book #the full review takes a while even if you're a fast reader but it's very comprehensive and does a great job of explaining #the book's critical failings #oh and it's just very fun to read #the creator's other videos are great too while you're at it

Cleo x Isla is my favorite ship(I read Lightlark Drabbles on AO3)

What is your content on them?

I.e. your headcanons, thoughts, how do you think Cleo feels, how does Isla feel? literally anything surrounding them.(They have become my new hyperfixation)

This is just a handful because there is So Much in my brain about them it's hard to organize all of it, but I think a lot about how Isla's love language is antagonizing people and Cleo understands that better than anybody

• For Cleo, Isla is something new and bright. She explodes to life over and over again like she's always doing everything for the first time. For Isla, Cleo is a bulwark against the entire world. She could survive the end of everything and be the only constant that remains.

• All of the rulers are angry people—even Azul, who would sooner bury himself alive than admit it—but Cleo is an anger that Isla understands. She can carve away the face of the glacier and see the same fear of inadequacy she has been burying under her floorboards for her entire life. There's a little selfish part of Isla that believes that she's the only one who sees this, that it's a secret just between her and Cleo.

• When they first meet, Cleo is mean to Isla, and it's maybe the only reaction to Isla's presence at the Centennial that Isla knows how to manage. Grim is too familiar with her and Oro is somehow both too distant and too closely connected with a mission Isla doesn't want to be on. Cleo's disdain is, for once in her life, not Isla's fault, which means Isla can actually retaliate and enjoy retaliating. As counterproductive as it seems, part of their ability to bond comes from a rivalry rooted in blowing off steam. They needed a language for communicating other than riddles and false diplomacy, and for two people with zero positive relationship role models, sometimes that language is verbal sparring and trying to kill each other with icicles. It's actually pretty tame compared to Oro and Grim's relationship.

• The breakthrough that officially triggers the flip from a rivalry to romantic attraction is the realization of the above—that they don't actually hate each other at all and they both look forward to their "fights" when they're both lungs-deep in panic over the Centennial. Cleo finds a vaguely threatening note in her bedroom and, for the briefest of moments, entertains the thought that she wouldn't mind running off with Isla and fixing the entire ordeal without input from the other four rulers. What seals the epiphany for her is realizing that they probably could if the prophecy weren't so fucking demanding.

• It's about their respective anxious, trauma-drenched needs for control. Isla feels more in control when she's with Cleo than she does anywhere else, and Cleo feels like she doesn't have to be in control for goddamn once when she's with Isla.

#isla #cleo #asks

Just consulted my Nightbane notes to determine whether I have to reread that one before going into the next one, and fellas let me tell you

I Do Not Remember Reading This Book

So probably I'll do that and maybe twenty-five hours straight of Lightlark shenanigans will finally drag out the long-form fic I've been shoving into the back of the brain closet forever

Ah fuck Skyshade is out and I haven't looked at my notifications on this account in like. Months

Sorry folks for some reason I started having panic spirals every time I logged into Tumblr, but I think I want to do some Lightlark writing so I'll post it if I do 👍

#obligatory I'm Not Dead post

I'm on a Cleo/Isla rampage. I like when angry people learn to communicate

drabble idea: celeste and isla hanging out before the centinneal

Thank you! I don't know that I quite met the prompt, so I might take another stab at it

Drabble requests?

#Lightlark

Early on in Lightlark, Celeste mentions Isla wanting to cut her hair, and now I just want scruffy short-haired Isla

Isla sneaks Grim into her tower and drags him into her closet and he thinks Okay I know what this is about there's basically only one thing people do in closets. And then right as he is about to say something tone-deaf and needlessly suggestive in classic Grim fashion, Isla slaps her hand over his mouth until he agrees to shut up and then she digs through a clothing chest with a false bottom and pulls out the raggediest stuffed rabbit in Lightlark history and is like. Look at him. This is my best friend. Do you understand.

#isla would have a secret security plush #there's no symbolic reason for it to be a rabbit i just find plush rabbits specifically very comforting #terra took it from her as punishment for sleeping late too many times when she was little #she stole it back and when terra went through all her shit looking for it and couldn't find it #she just assumed poppy had gotten rid of it #and poppy assumed terra had gotten rid of it #henceforth secret bunny #isla #grim

bikuwana-still-on-discord-deact

girls when the media they're obsessed with is never going to be as good as they wish it could be

lordofseagulls

girls when the media they're obsessed with is never going to be as good as they wish it could be

The rest of the sticky notes:

- Kind of fucked up that the dreks used to be people. Fortunately they were Nightshades so it's okay.

- I love the idea of Nightbane as a potent drug with healing properties when processed correctly, because I'm a scientist. The metaphor for Isla as "both curse and cure," however, is incredibly forced. Also not a strong enough motif to justify having the book named after it.

- Please please please stop with the segues into the flashbacks. It reads like a fifth grade essay I'm begging you

- Being able to teleport everywhere kind of kills the tension and urgency

- All Of The Spicy Scenes Are The Same

- Also if the book is allowed to have this many straight-up sex scenes, I kind of feel like they should also be allowed to swear, or at least use less tepid insults. Isla calling Grim a bastard or a son of a bitch would soothe my soul

- I want to scruff Grim like a kitten and toss him in the ocean. He's still not a good character and he has no personality and he's awful. Every time I feel a shred of warmth for Grim I have to remember that it's because my version of him is so unrecognizable against canon that I probably need to start from scratch again just to be able to call him the same character

- Cleo ily never change (but also shoehorning in a dead son just to give her a reason to side with Nightshade is so bland I'm losing my sense of taste)

- GRIM MENTIONS GODS. WHO ARE THE GODS.

- And They Were Married (Oh My Unnamed Gods They Were Married)

- Is. Is this a normal amount of sex scenes for a YA novel.

- Some of this feels like borderline retconning (eg. Isla surviving being shot through the heart in the first book not just because of the Heart of Lightlark but also because of the ill-defined power of the love bond)

- No training montage for Isla learning to steal Grim's powers :(

- There Are Hot Air Balloons. The Event Is Called The Launching Of The Orbs.

- EGG CAMEO

- Grim and Isla have a moment where they both gush about everything they've learned about each other, and it's nothing. It feels like they don't know each other at all, but of course we're supposed to find their relationship heartwarming and intimate

- Am I going to have to make a spicy sideblog for this oh my god

- Pointless baby dragon. Did I zone out at the wrong time or did nothing become of that?

- The Terra fight is also nothing :((((

- Just like the first book, so many bombs are dropped at the end of the book because simply resolving the existing plot threads isn't enough I guess. Anyway the founders of Lightlark came from another world and created Lightlark in its image like reckless teenage gods but anyway GUYS there are HOT AIR BALLOONS

- Unearned final battle. Book once again lacks the guts to kill a major character and expects us to be moved by the deaths of interchangeable background cast members

- Damn crow-caller is right this REALLY aggressively sets up a third book. I'm wondering what middle book syndrome looks like for something like the Lightlark Saga and whether this is it

- This book was Not Good. It feels like poor fanfiction of the first book and I cannot stress enough that I enjoyed every second of it no matter how frustrating it was. Thank you Ms. Aster I owe you my life

#Nightbane #Nightbane spoilers #damn my social anxiety because i want to talk about this so much and like. engage with people #i must yell

I'm gonna do So Much with the shapeshifter snake lady

I'm so delighted by how little was learned from the first book.

Three-quarters of the way through, suddenly there's a plot beat about Isla having a flair and being able to save all the realms from dying if their rulers die. People want her to kill Oro. Not having a flair is a curse. Nightshade is still a faceless evil.

There are so many plot points and none of them work and I'm slurping it up like a smoothie

#Nightbane #Nightbane spoilers #i just realized i should tag that bc i'm posting in the main tag and there might actually be folks who don't want spoilers

Someone please come save the lesbian Sunling from this book. Enya doesn't deserve this

I've definitely been willing to accept worse in better-written books, but the flashbacks in Nightbane really grate on me because Isla didn't just lose her memory of a few spicy nights over the course of a year. She was doing extremely active and involved work looking for the sword with Grim. Convenient plot point or not, it's frustrating that losing a whole year of her life had zero impact on her before the reveal in Lightlark.

#it's almost like none of the events in the flashbacks were thought out before the sequel #look i love a book told half in flashbacks #i really enjoyed bird box #this just. doesn't do any of it right and i want it to be better #so really this is the perfect sequel because it's just as frustrating and inspiring as the first one lmao #Nightbane

Okay some plans for the big kitty

- Isla's mother named him Lynx because she was maybe six when she first met him, before they were officially bonded. She has also called him pretty much every other large predatory mammal that exists

- Lynx doesn't bond with Isla. He grudgingly tries to keep her safe and parent her a little because there's a fragment of her mother's soul that still exists within him, but neither of them can establish that link. This is both to make things miserable for Isla and to lead up to her bonding with a drek later because I refuse to let that go.

- Basically this is a Fake Dating arc but instead of a romantic relationship they're faking a soul bond because Isla once again cannot do the one thing she feels she absolutely must

#Nightbane #Isla #Lynx

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