I hate that nobody on here is talking about the Audra Winter thing enough like yall should be all over this its like that All or Nothing show or like, all those other failed tumblr pitches. Yall aren't fun anymore we need to bring back being messy on main.
Like what do you MEAN this Lil white girl is claiming to invent the illustrated novel as an artform what do you MEAN she's basically committing tiktok shop fraud what do you MEAN this Lil white girl is throwing her editor under the bus for her shitty writing what do you MEAN shes saying her writing isnt bad its just autisticTM what do you MEAN her book used to be a fanfiction on wattpad what do you MEAN shes asking for SEVENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS of funding from investors when her book was so bad it was pulled to be edited and revised after a WEEK..
This is a level of white girl audacity I haven't seen in YEARS. please Interact with this post if you know about it so I can yap with people about it.
Elrose has responded to the email I sent into gardian asking when the refunds were coming. I asked first on the 20th since it was right before the end of the window for banks. I followed up on the 23rd, after the windows closed. I just not got a reply nearly 2 weeks later.
It is safe to assume that you just need to file with the proper agencies about this. It is important to note that they (Elrose and Milo) have stated an intent to refund, but refuse to give a definitive time and have been doing so since the cancelation of age of scorpius version 2. We were told in May that it would be coming in a month or so on their patreon, so now we have a direct contradiction I think?
No issue of me doxing myself; I used a burner email.
NOTE: This post was made before the author (now Milo Winter) came out as trans, and thus uses his old penname and pronouns.
Okay, so, I think I figured out the deal with Age of Scorpius.
One of the biggest criticisms I've seen is that it reads like it's a sequel, a second book in a series, like the worldbuilding was all done already so we're just dropped in the middle and expected to understand everything from jump. The worldbuilding in-story is offered through exhausting infodumps that are seemingly contradicted later in the narrative anyway, and readers are supposed to be able to figure out which portrayal is correct based on some preceding storyline we've never seen.
This is because it seemingly started out either heavily inspired by or directly based on a series that was written this way: Legend of Korra. The difference is that Korra got to do that, because Avatar: The Last Airbender had done all the heavy lifting already years prior. Scorpius doesn't have that.
But Nashi, you ask, what makes you think it's based on Korra?
I'm so glad you asked!
Age of Scorpius:
Main couple is two queer ladies
A world separated into four nations (the Unions)
The world capital, the Hub, is the only place all four of these nations consistently intermingle
Each nation has a unique set of powers specific to its people
All but one of these nations has an elemental power explicitly available to them and them alone (Conviction has fire, Autarchic has Water, Societal has Light, while Assiduous has no such power)
The most dangerous power in the land can mess with other people's powers (this power is called "Turning")
The most specialest person in the land (the Archpower) has the most dangerous power but narratively we know it's totally okay if they're the one using it
The ritual to reveal this power is called the Ceremony of Rebalancing
The world was destroyed in ages past because of "machines," as technology is evil and bound to tear humanity apart if allowed to fall into the wrong hands
Audra Winter started this story at some point in 2015
Legend of Korra:
Main couple is two queer ladies
A world separated into four nations
The world capital, Republic City, is the only place all four of these nations consistently intermingle
Each nation has a unique set of powers specific to its people
All four of these nations have an elemental power explicitly available to them and them alone, but one of them was all but wiped out, rendering one element more or less missing until later in the series (Fire, Water, and Earth having well-established nations, with Air having been the victim of genocide)
The most dangerous power in the land can mess with other people's powers (these powers are referred to as "bending")
The most specialest person in the land (the Avatar) has the most dangerous power but narratively we've already seen it's okay if they're the one using it (Aang removing Ozai's bending in Airbender vs. Amon removing random people's bending in Korra)
A key plot point involves an event called Harmonic Convergence, in which elemental powers are, explicitly, rebalanced all over the world
The world is thrown into turmoil repeatedly by the utilization of advanced technologies capable of posing an existential threat to all existing social structures and multiple planes of reality (the Equalists with their various gadgets, Kuvira with the Colossus and the Spirit Energy Cannon)
This series ended in late December of 2014
Oh yeah also, here's Rieka Spring, main character of Age of Scorpius, versus Asami Sato, main love interest in Legend of Korra:
And here's Rowan, Reika's hot dad with water powers, versus Tonraq, Korra's hot dad with water powers:
(Note: I won't hear a single fucking word against the artists who drew these pieces, their work is phenomenal and I love it. These people were commissioned to illustration character art, and they did—it's none of their business if it resembles an existing character. They deserve every cent earned for the work they've done, and more besides. They deserve all the support in the world.)
Audra Winter is a lesbian in her early twenties. She was tween when Korra first aired—and it ended with a queer main female protagonist going off into a whole new world with her queer secondary female protagonist at her side. Korra mirrored the framing of a heterosexual wedding shown moments prior so that Steven Universe could show Ruby and Sapphire get married on-screen. It was an enormous deal for queer fandom as a whole, and hugely formative for a lot of baby gays who got to see it air on primetime television.
Age of Scorpius is written as though the worldbuilding was done in advance, as if we should all already understand what's going on and what basically everything means—Legend of Korra is also written this way, but it earned it by being a sequel to one of the best Western animated series of all time. We went into Korra with the knowledge we got from Airbender: we knew about the four nations, about bending, about the Avatar and the related reincarnation cycle and berserk state. We didn't need it all spelled out in advance. Hell, we even had one of the biggest plot twists of the first season of Korra spelled out in advance in Airbender through its portrayal of bloodbending.
Scorpius does not have the benefit of being a sequel, and I don't think Winter understands that. She tries to patch it with the aforementioned infodumps, but it doesn't work because she's trying to patch it into something based on a story explicitly written without these gaps being a problem.
I don't know if Age of Scorpius was ever an out-and-out fanfic, mind you. More likely, it was Winter deciding she was gonna write something of her own using the trappings of something she loved without understanding what made those trappings so distinct in the original work. I think most of us who started writing as children have written something that copied another work of fiction almost beat-for-beat, because we loved it so much we wanted to make it our own. Imitation is referred to as the sincerest form of flattery for a reason.
What most of us didn't do was decide we were going to publish that mimic fic, and spend a decade refusing to accept genuine criticism or make difficult revisions in order to polish it into something that lived up to the love we had for it. Most of us didn't market our mimic fics like they were fully edited finished works, get a bucketload of preorders, and proceed to brag constantly how we were child prodigies and are above criticism, calling ourselves masters of the craft and going on at length about "owning a six-figure business," claiming to have set a world record, and that we're better than everyone else who has ever self-published their debut novel.
That's the biggest problem here. I don't actually care that it seems to be Korra mimic fic, I just wanted to share because it explains a lot about how the book came into being, and why it reads the way it does.
(TW: This post contains information with descriptions of SA; discussions of mental health issues and other harmful topics such as abuse and manipulation)
[View Discretion is Advised]
(In the process of editing these posts, will add more links a bit later. I'm procrastinating hardcore 😫)
Pattern of Behavior Posts:
I Have Something to Say
The History
Other Lies: Doxxing, Naturalist, and more!
College?
Career?
Career Pt. II
Mental Health
Sellers and Federal Law:
FTC: Online shopping: Advertising, Preorders, Delays, and the Law
Extra Information:
Just Some Extra Things
Milo and The Team™️: Reconn Avia
Questions + Anons:
Closing remarks:
Thank you all for the questions, the discussions, and yes, even the corrections (y’all kept me on my toes 😭). I genuinely appreciate the help in finding more information because chile… this has been a ride from start to finish. Some of my original thoughts definitely did a full 180 once I started rechecking my receipts again.
I’m going to go back, reread, and clean up my posts by fixing things, swapping links, and making everything a little less chaotic.
I’ll still be keeping an eye on the situation, but I’m not running a Milo fan club or a hate page, so unless something new actually pops up (or we hear about those refunds 👀), I’ll be minding my business. Well that is, after I put up a few more writing related posts. I'm going sit down and try cause it's now summer break.
That said, I’ve always been really interested in patterns of behavior, so I hope that came through clearly in everything I had shared (with just a little personality mixed in).
See y'all on the other side scholars, magicians, and detectives.
One thing i dont understand about the world building of Age of Scorpius is that in a world where children can be taken away and are forbidden to live in either their birth nation or their family based on their birth date... why isnt pregnancy highly regulated? If ppl actively hate Saggitarius to the point they r barred from living on land and are a segregated/persecuted minority-- why would anybody risk having sex on any months that could lead to a saggistarius? Why would anybody living in a country that is not welcoming to X zodiac sign would risk having sex in the wrong months? Why is the govertment in this dystopia not force feeding their population birth control pills?
Look, you can rage about traditional publishing all you want (sometimes it's both justified and good to do so) but if Audra Winter had put herself through that process, she wouldn't now be in this mess. If a real professional had taken a look at her manuscript — and I refuse to believe anyone did, as she claims — there is no way they would've let her get this far.
I've seen one video by someone raising the talking point that, by virtue of ...publishing an unfinished novel, Audra Winter somehow possesses a quality of audacity (that's certainly true) lacking in many other authors; that "perfectionism is the enemy of done".
That's a very useful saying and there's a lot of truth to it ...as far as first drafts go. You don't publish first drafts. You don't even publish second drafts.
And this is partly why I'm so against BookTok, and why I do think that it's a negative influence on contemporary literature. Nowadays all that matters is aesthetic, -cores, pretty pictures. The actual stories are all slop (I'm talking about what becomes popularised, of course there are plenty of indie or smaller authors putting out great work.)
I hadn't intended for the first post on this blog to be argumentative or related to discourse, but here we are.
something that i think needs to be kept in mind about audra winter is that yes the people who preordered her book were a little silly for preordering a self-published debut fantasy novel from a 22 year old whose entire marketing pitch was "i've been writing this since i was 12" and "it's a fantasy world inspired by the zodiac".
but at the same time, i don't think "well they should have expected it to be bad" is the right thing to say in this situation where they were sent a clearly unedited manuscript. they were not just given a bad book, they were given an incomplete product. they were not stupid for being upset that the book they received was not edited when audra winter told them, repeatedly, that she had hired multiple professional editors for the age of scorpius.
so while unfortuantely for them i don't think those who preordered the age of scorpius are entitled to refunds, i also don't think "you don't get your money back just because you didn't like the book" is an entirely honest and accurate summation of the audra winter / the age of scorpius debacle because the issue isn't simply that the book was bad, it's that it's basically a first draft.
i honestly can’t get over how the book community is so obsessed with hating on audra winter, yet completely ignores the fact that everything they accuse her of is exactly what they praise SJM for.
