rereading AR some more on the bus. wow! I’d nearly forgotten how close the ‘it used to be a para-ro parody’ roots remained. Even tho you can read it straight, especially the first half is really sort of not to be taken seriously.
gav, for example, is the too-pretty stalker type with secrets he refuses to share, while Fex is the probably-enemy but ultimately better love interest type, who is slightly unhinged and similarly cryptic, just with more power-hunger and less stalking.
and then the camp!! there’s a line about this, but I HATE the trope of apocalypse worlds where everyone for some reason lives in a camp
“Do you have any problems with angels here? I didn’t see any in town, but there must be a reason you’re living in the woods like this.”
“I suppose it’s because we all have bad memories of Norwich.”
see, there are ALWAYS camps in post apocal fiction. Angelfall, which I made sure to read only after this was published, did the exact same thing to my delight- the MC is wandering in the apocal world (filled with angels, in angelfall’s case), but after a chapter or two, end up in a camp. They stay here for a while, often way too long, only to find the people can’t be trusted/are incompetent. Chaos Umpire Sits, another angel apocalyptic book, has the heroes spend a lot of time in a camp, which turns out to be run by an evil angel in disguise. (read after AR)
“Sure. But it’s, you know, the end of days. Things are supposed to get a bit weird. At most these guys are going to be cultists or cannibals. Which would suck, but again, it’s sort of a given during the apocalypse.”
Erika says this, and again, it’s meant to be a joke- as is the reveal the camp is filled with angels pretending to be humans, which Erika points out is a really stupid trap.
Midori, too, tho I haven’t gotten to her yet, is meant to play into the trope of ‘kind of useless, vapid girl MC must protect/save who doesn’t matter as much as the two love interests’
See! I’m genre aware! AR was a parody at first, but I started getting really into just neat monsters, and the plot later just gets weird.
after this I’ll probably do chapter chunks as opposed to having 30 posts like this... but who knows??
this chap is unique anyway (it’s ch 1 and set up) so.
[...]Or I’d cry whenever I petted a stray dog, because I was the only person left in the world to pet dogs. There was no one left to appreciate art. I was never going to see a dolphin again. No one would ever teach me calculus.
Oh Erika! We... haven’t really heard your name yet, I realize, but eh- it’s on the inside flap.
So this chapter has Erika now, living in the art department of her high school, going about her life and being very lonely about it.
Erika talks a bit about painting here, and while that’s become a Thing for me- somehow always having a painter as a character in my books- I like to imagine she actually sucks. Like, is just god awful. But no one is left alive to tell her that :(
I barely use semi colons but I just noticed two in a row. They’re right but I would like to call the cops on my editor. Semi colons are a fools game and acting like I would use them so casually is false advertising.
Hold the phone, there’s 3 on this page. Three! boy howdy then. Anyway, the angels sure are cool, huh? That’s I think the tagline for this book: neat angels, right?
...of Drzendril and Gabriel, of Czoca and Joriphiel, of Cvac, Lucifer, and of Miasmiel and Michael.
Angel names!! I think at least one of these comes back later as an actual angel (not michael/gabriel/lucifer), which thinking about the broader happenings, is some kinda foreshadowing. Or at least, ‘points you can use in an online argument’ -ing. I hope it’s Drzendril. That was the name of my Gigalith (pokemon) and was a gem the moment I thought of it. I think I used it in Termi, also, as an angel name?
It’s just so silly.
and several months in
A very important part of AR is that it happens a few months AFTER the apocalypse. Like, school was going on (I would say May) when the angels arrived, and we flatly know it’s September when the book takes place. That’s at least 3 months of being completely alone after a severely traumatizing event, watched over by alien angels.
That’s gonna screw you up a bit, and is a significant reason why Erika is rash and emotionally off.
This is not a movie, though.
On one hand, it’s obnoxious when book characters do this. On the other hand, keeping in mind something later on....
I’m also enjoying this chapter tbh. It’s very ‘I’ led, but that can’t really be helped at this point.
Erika climbs a mountain, basically, and picks up a radio signal:
Can you follow a radio signal to its tower? I think you can.
No you really basically can’t, you dofus. But I’ll leave that to you to figure out!!
I need to figure how I’m going to approach writing these, because
1) I’m not sure how much I want to give away about spoilers, not that many people have read AR and it is a plot twist heavy book, essencially.
2) it’s hard to figure if I want to do a full summery or if this is more a read a long that you can mildly learn about, but makes most sense when you’re actually familiar with the text.
