juzzielicious replied to your post “carmine and cobalt? :D”
The books are trash and I suffered through 3/4 of the series until I threw my hands in the air and quit to go back to AO3. Sam's entire motivation in it is MUST SAVE ANNIE AT COST OF ALL CHARACTERIZATION and Annie is just like I AM ANNIEBOT 2.0 I COULD BE REPLACED WITH A LAMPSHADE AND SERVE AS MUCH PURPOSE TO PLOT and Gene is...aware of musical pop culture references I wouldn't expect? It's weird. The only good bits are with the Test Card Girl burying Sam in his own grave.
You are confirming all of my worst fears. In the short story, the characters weren’t even like cardboard cut-outs of themselves, they were like cardboard cut-outs of what the characters would be as narrated by someone who had only read news articles about the show, and it was so inherently misogynistic in a way the show wasn’t.
I think, if I were going to write LoM novels, I’d do a trilogy, and I’d do one set early in the show, early in Sam’s journey. It would be more heavily casefic and dynamic building and I’d get to do lots of Sam & Gene build a friendship scenes, as well as Sam & Annie cement their friendship scenes. It’d be missing scene hijinx with social commentary, basically.
One that spans the ending and the resolution which gives us the emotional motivations and Sam’s belief in ‘73, where I’d get to do a lot more magical realism/sci-fi stuff, with themes of identity and belonging. As well as casefic, natch.
And one set a couple of years after the series ends, where we get to see how the characters have grown, how the team is now strong and work together to solve cases - and there’s some kind of twist (parallel worlds or BUST, babeh!)
