just wanna say THANK YOU for ur tags on that last post, I've seen so many hot takes about how stiefs like a class traitor bootlicker which completely disregard the fact that 1) she based blue n adams economic status off her own experiences as a poor creative w 3 jobs (p fuckin obvious from "I want to feel awake when my eyes are open") and 2) she was like at her lowest mentally 2015-2016, and /all/ parts of the later books degraded in quality, not just the poorly executed messages/character arcs
for context, my tags on the post were: “#i mean the main answer for this is 'stief's brain was pretty much falling apart during the last two books' #i feel like she's been pretty upfront about what a terrible time that was for her and how it kept her from writing the story she wanted #if the latter half of trc feels unfulfilling and messy to you..... that's because it is #like don't get me wrong stief isn't perfect and isn't a flawless author... but it's obvious bllb n ESPECIALLY trk aren't her usual standard #or at least that's how i feel reading them compared to say trb or the majority of tdt #yeah anyways the haphazard non-conclusions of trk are definitely unsatisfactory that's for sure #i think she just wanted to get through it in the end? particularly since iirc Scholastic had threatened to drop the book #and i'd say it shows in the execution #gansey #text #queue #folks who remember these deets more clearly should message me if i'm wrong because ya gurl here has TERRIBLE recall most days”
YEAH i think it’s easy for newer folks to not realize that was a thing that was going on, given the transient nature of fandom in this day and age. Heck I got into TRC only the summer after TRK came out and I still didn’t find out that Stief’s brain had been progressively melting during the latter parts of the series until quite a while after the fact. And even then, one of the reasons I DID find this out was because Stief herself mentioned it in a post back when she had a tumblr!
Once I knew though, it completely recontextualized my issues with the end of TRC. I’d even described the difference between the first two books and the last two books to a friend as feeling “like you’re reading and entirely different series” and then I finally learned it’s because YEAH, you ARE pretty much reading an entirely different series! I think TRC would have been something very different if Scholastic had given her more time to address the problem or if she had be able to get a diagnosis/treatment more quickly.
