re: your brainwyrms tag oh my god AHHHHHH her previous novel was equally as hand hold-y and insipid I find her shit so tiring. literally opens with a This Book ... Is About FASCISM authors note and then beats you over the head with the metaphor in the first few pages, like thanks I'm 5 years old and this is my first novel, I never would have figured out that on my own
re: brainwyrms i'm on page 253 of 297 rn and i've been having an ok time. until that enraging author's note i was having a pretty wonderful time. but once that sacchrine twitter mommydommy ff.net note hit i have soured on the entire book. to paraphrase the conversation @carco5a and i had about it: girl, we have all read botfly girl. let's humble ourselves. we are all adults here, we can handle a yucky book.
i find the storyline with vanya and xavier's mom to be very emotionally impactful and compelling as something i have gone through personally. but i have been shocked at how much depth her transmasc characters are given wrt their familial and sexual trauma, and how much backstory and development they're given compared to her transfeminine main character frankie who is given little to no interiority despite being the book's principal pov. like we are given so much insight and background on vanya's parasite fetish, their sexual abuse, their grooming, and frankie's pregnancy fetish is just presented to us over and over again as something that she wants but struggles to communicate to her partners. no "why", no depth, no exploration of her developing sexuality pre-transition like we get pages and pages of with vanya.
it's such a stark difference i was and am continuing to be unpleasantly surprised by it.
the worms/terf allegory is kind of interesting but at nearly the finish line i do not see it connecting to the purposefully paralleled fetishes of our main couple. disappointing also that the very obvious parallels between a parasite and a pregnancy fetish in a t4t relationship where there is obvious anxiety/resentment over the biological capacity of their respective bodies to fulfill their fetishes is like... like it's there but it isn't explored. it is a theme that can be observed but it is not impacting the novel.
more than all of that though i do not need my yucky book to talk down to me about how i can be a good brave girl and take a break to calm down for mommy. i'm actually an adult who made the decision to read a yucky book?? i don't need the yucky book to pull out a stoplight system check-in on me in the middle of a sentence. it's a book. i can close it whenever i want on account of it being a fucking book.