#anti tfc

[q4martheleastwise]

the freak circus scares the living shit outta me because

A: why do they have canon dih sizes

B: why are their dihs longer than the Aleutian Trench, the Kuril-Kamchatka Trench, the Japan Trench, the Izu-Ogasawara Trench, the Mariana Trench, the Yap Trench, and the Palau Trench all strung together

(No hate to ppl in the fandom I have a friend who likes it and she’s great it’s js my opinion)

[ibuproffie]

i’m literally re-reading the aftg books and annotating them so i can bring the receipts to explain why i hate them so much

[ilyiad]

Would you be willing to give some examples of the Bad Stuff for the sake of being edgy in TFC? I'm not that same anon but I've always had a slight problem with the series despite loving it, but couldn't quite figure out why and would love to get some insight from you if you wouldn't mind!

(this is not me telling yall to stop liking these books, it’s only my opinion, etc.) sorry in advance, this is less insight and more just me having a rant but: 

during games andrew is 1) on drugs and 2) carrying knives around during a fuckin contact sport for absolutely no reason but to make him seem Scary tm. listen,, in no universe can i believe this would be allowed. what is the point. what does it contribute to the story. why has no one thrown him off the team yet

throughout the books there’s a lot of stuff thrown around about consent which, on the surface, is great BUT uhh the first thing andrew does is whack him with a heavy-ass exy racquet for literally no reason and drug neil without,,his consent,,,just to make sure he’s not going to fuck with aaron??,,which is,,,profoundly not cool but ok

it treats mental illness/trauma/ways of dealing with them SO BADLY lmfao it’s basically a free pass for andrew to do whatever the fuck he wants which is, in fact, Not how real life works! he goes around choking/hitting/attacking people for literally no reason because of some vague undefined Issues and it’s ridiculous and a shitty & insensitive portrayal and entirely not necessary

the whole moriyama thing???? is both an extremely stupid plotline and a racist one, two in one! sure thing white author, you go making the only poc 1) nicky hemmick, comic relief slash the one who sexually assaults neil to get whatever the fuck cracker dust is meant to be down his throat, and 2) the fucking yazuka. like. nicky, who is i think the only canonically nonwhite fox, constantly makes creepy jokes about neil. Sure Thing White Author 

i felt like all the torture/etc is graphic for the sake of being shocking?? personally i skipped reading all of it to get to the exy/andreil bits

honestly it would be a perfectly decent story if it was just about neil coming to palmetto from a life on the run falling in love with cold withdrawn andrew minyard

there literally wasn’t any need to make it this fucked up it’s just piling on tragedy for the sake of it and by the end it’s lost any impact it could have??? and it’s not realistic at all so it’s just uhh……Pointless

[astreiants-archive]

"there are reasons i didn't include it". i'm... interested. could you elaborate?

oh boy yes i can (it’s going under a read more so if anyone doesn’t wanna read it they don’t have to and also then they have no excuse for getting pissed off at me)

ok ok so:

the most minor reason why is that it’s really unrealistic. like a made-up sport becomes the most popular in the country in only 30 years? pull the other one. it’s also never really clear what the sport actually involves rules-wise. plus like hell would the authorities allow any of this shit to go down without sanction! you especially wouldn’t have a top school have a team made up solely of victims of trauma. it’s just unrealistic. (also, ever heard of anti-doping rules? yeah. those ones that mean andrew would absolutely never be allowed to play. and not to mention he wears freaking knives during a contact sport.)

the “bad guys” are the most hilarious thing. like they live 16 hour days in a basement painted all black, they wear all black, they’re basically a fricking cult. and meanwhile the yakuza run around doing gang-related shit, and yet this team is the bad guys? spare me. (honestly, the yakuza thing just feels thrown in like sakavic is going, hmm i need some higher stakes. only it ends up that those aren’t at all related to the end stakes.)

it’s really bad on the mental illness front. i mean, not even considering the “anti-psychotics” that andrew takes (no drug works like that, and no drug has you suffering from withdrawal symptoms within 4 hours). andrew has this unspecified mental illness that basically makes him a psychopath (he attacks people! he threatens them with knives! he shows severe callous-unemotional traits!).

to expand on the andrew attacking people. he attempts to choke matt, he pushes his brother’s girlfriend up against a wall and tries to choke her (while neil watches on like, yeah this is just andrew lol), and he attacks allison for like, touching his car or something ridiculous. you can’t excuse that! he never gets called out for it, everyone’s just like oh that’s just andrew. as if that explains it. (also let’s not talk about how that demonises actual psychotic illnesses.)

everyone treats kevin as a coward for not having faced up to his abusers and for not wanting to antagonise them. i mean like. victim blaming much?

the only characters of colour are the really bad guys (the freaking yakuza at that) and nicky, who is effectively just comic relief. great rep right there.

it’s basically torture porn at points. there are very graphic rape and torture scenes (i felt physically sick reading them) which seem to serve the most contrived of plot points, almost as if she’s putting them in because she wants to write them rather than because they move the plot along. like in order to set it in motion, the coach of the bad guys’ team has to make sure that andrew’s abuser is at the house, that his foster mum sends him upstairs alone, that he’s then sent to an institution where a corrupt doctor is going to kill him unless neil agrees to spend time with the team (where he ends up being tortured. and then as if that’s not enough, he also gets kidnapped by his dad in the third book and tortured again! as i said. torture porn). like. that’s actually beyond contrived.

and the scenes are so so graphic. and then compare this to the scenes of the games where everything’s just skimmed over and woops they’re done. it’s not looking good. they’re pretty much written for shock value.

in the first book, there’s a scene where neil is taken to a club and gets drugged by one of his teammates (andrew i think?). because they want to get information out of him about who he is really. so they do it by drugging him. and to avoid telling them anything, he gets himself knocked out. and these people he later describes as “family”. like. wow.

so yeah. that’s it. (i will admit i did initially enjoy the books, but then i thought about it and yeah. this is the result.)

[ibuproffie]

unpopular opinion time!

the foxhole court series is problematic and overrated; better gay books for teens exist

[ibuproffie]

check please > tfc i said what i said 

[ilyiad]

Anon who asked for insight here: I think I really just wanted to read your rant tbh, because yeah duuude, you're speaking truth. Especially in terms of race and gratuitous violence, there are passages I had to skim read because they were just horrific and it felt like torturing these characters to add drama, and the descriptions get so explicit sometimes it feels a little like she enjoyed writing it. also I s2g the yakuza stuff, rlly not the way to write complex POC's. Sorry to add to ur rant x

no worries this is a rant friendly blog lmao !! n mood tbh they’re highkey a mess :/

[crabbe]

why dont you like the foxhole court

Well, I don’t really enjoy the way almost all of the men in the series respond to something they don’t like with explosive anger. I don’t like the way Andrew beats literally everybody up  (except Neil, I guess, but he still threatens Neil on, like, multiple occasions) and beyond that I feel like a lot of the subject matter that the author writes about isn’t treated with the gravity those subjects warrant? A lot of it just feels kind of gratuitous like she just added tragedy to add emotional depth to her characters without actually bothering to flesh them out, like all of the characterization without any of the… writing. She trivializes tragedy but that’s just my onion.