Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.
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@KopiCAT said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
@Travis-Butler That's fine. We are allowed to have different opinions thankfully. Though in Henrietta's case I would call it teasing. We tease people because we like something about them, and because we know it bothers them.
All I can say is that you must have had a very different life experience than I had. I went through two different periods of teasing - grade/middle school and mid-30s workplace - and neither one was benign, both were malicious and yes, sadistic.
To give an example of the latter, one of the people responsible also liked to 'tease' one of our office ladies - in her 50's - with jokes about taking out her dentures and giving him a "gum job". That's not all in good fun - that's vicious, that's nasty, and it's way beyond any kind of civilized behavior.
So I have a bit of a thing about teasing. It can be benign. It can also go way beyond that into taking joy at making others suffer, and that's sadism, pure and simple.
Henrietta absolutely takes it that far with Akatsuki.
So calling her sadistic for what she's doing would make most people sadistic. Definitely a lot of characters in anime, LN's and manga. The characters that teases other characters because they are bothered by it is basically a trope. So don't you think calling her sadistic is going a bit far?
Not in the slightest.
Sadism or everyday sadism (which is the subclinical term) refers to experiencing pleasure in seeing others suffer or inflicting suffering on others. Sadistic individuals enjoy cruelty and seek opportunities to induce suffering upon others.
Yes. And that describes Henrietta's behavior towards Akatsuki to a 'T'. She knows Akatsuki hates being used as a dress-up doll, that it humiliates and frightens her. And Henrietta seeks out opportunities to do it. She's outright ecstatic at the chance, and follows it up with head pats and other infantilizing humiliations.
Her relationship with Shiro is a lot healthier, but there are still moments when she takes glee in poking at one of his weaknesses.
This stands out to me because in most ways, I actually like Henrietta. She's smart, hard-working, and has it together in most situations. I sympathize with her occasional frustrations in dealing with Marielle, and recognize the friendship that keeps things going there in spite of the frustration. That just makes it even more annoying when she acts like a predatory asshole.
...Cats are the proof of a higher purpose to the universe.
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@Travis-Butler More like I have grown a thick skin. Once you get over spending years considering suicide, you kinda stop caring. And once it stops bothering you, as a survival mechanic, you stop seeing it as a problem. Because if I didn't start thinking like that, I doubt I'd still be alive.
So no, I probably didn't have that different an experience from you, I just changed in a different way.
I mean, if grade/middle school and mid 30s, you are luckier then me. I lived with it since second grade all the way up til my early 30s.
Edit; So in the end, I think I'll just agree to disagree. I see no maliciousness in her actions at all. All I see is friendly teasing. The same way me and my friends make fun of each other all the time.
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@KopiCAT I think the tsundere trope is kind of dangerous, in a RL sense. While you may find a real life tsundere, is it really something you would want? Someone who is always ragging on you in public? And how would you tell the difference between a tsundere and a girl who actually hates you? Do you have to wait until she calls the cops on you? Complains to your boss or the school's admin? Best to avoid a girl who acts like that, it could save you a lot of heartache in the future.
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@Folker46 Since I've never liked the tsundere trope to being with, I don't disagree with that.
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Pet peeves. Cities with walls around them but no farmland, and why is the forest right next to the town? Wouldn't it have all been cleared when they built it?
Adventure guilds in big cities that send people on fetch quests where the forest is right next to town. Wouldn't that kind of work already be done by the town's poor people? Any forest would have been cleared to build housing, for farms, and firewood.
Most LN authors spend no time thinking of travel distances and how hard it would be to go long distances. Let alone understanding wagons and how many horses you would need. Adventure guilds should be on the outer edges of an Empire, not right in the middle of one!
Hair. The men never talk about how hard it is to shave with a knife or wash their hair, let alone how hairy the women would get. (eww!)
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To have a specific hate, I think bookworm just lost me.
Great world and protagonist, but the way it handles villains is pretty consistently atrocious and it's inability to properly handle certain side characters is so very alienating (looking at you, treatment of Wil and his retainers both in the general narrative and specific events).
It started with the awful women (always women somehow) from ahrensbach, and it's only gotten worse as the series has aged.
Logic is out, Unreasonableness is in!
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@Windsagio said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
awful women (always women somehow) from ahrensbach
I don't deny that it's got an abnormal amount of women villains, but Count Bindewald says it's not always women there. Gerlach and Bezewanst are also of Ahrensbach descent and are aligned there politically, but those are certainly more edge cases.
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@GeorgeMTO Oh totally. The villians in general are of much poorer quality than the setting or the main cast. Just the women are sustained and particularly poorly characterized (most of the male villians have essentially no characterization at all, which is frankly an improvement).
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@Windsagio see, always found them very believable. They all come from the same family, and there is a clear cycle of abuse. Veronica discarded Georgine, causing Georgine to resent Sylvester. Georgine never forgave him, and she tried to gain as much power as possible in Ahrensbach. Everyone was treated as a tool, but she still never let go of her resentment for Ehrenfest, her mother and her brother. She was abusive to her own children in her quest for power, and she looked down on Delitinde. I think she also associates her daughter with her mother, which affected their relationship.
I do see where your coming from, and I saw it the same way before. But I do feel that Georgine's back story and influence explains a lot.
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@Windsagio I have a lot of problems with bookworm. Magic as an evil force that devourers people souls? The MC (and the views) can hear the girl whose body she is in dying as her soul is destroyed. As a viewer I feel nothing but horror and dislike for the show from the start.
The way the nobility and the church view magic are also weird, they see it as a gift from the Gods but also restricted it to themselves, like they have some divine right to it. While commoners who have the "gift" are allowed to die or must serve as slaves of the nobility. I can understand why the MC doesn't react to this immoral setup, she's powerless to change it, but it still rubs me the wrong way.
Why I never really enjoyed the series, I hate the world the MC has to live in. -
Something that's been bothering me with Ascendance of a Bookworm is just how much the narrative has slowed to a crawl. Sure, there are a lot of things happening, but it feels like we can go an entire volume worth of narrative dealing with other things before we get one chapter on a given thread.
It's... frustrating to read. Payouts happen so far apart in reading time that they end up not being satisfying, and often we don't even get them at all! (I really wish we'd seen that conversation from that recent short story, but alas, we can only imagine how that went)
I'm invested, and I want to know what happens, but I wonder if I'd enjoyed it better if I had waited until it was completed and I could have binged my way through.
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@Folker46 said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Magic as an evil force that devourers people souls? The MC (and the views) can hear the girl whose body she is in dying as her soul is destroyed. As a viewer I feel nothing but horror and dislike for the show from the start.
While you are free to interpret that scene how you like...
