Theory 1421 (Book Club)

0:00Hello chickens, this is the fabulous Adam Richard and I have a theory! Oh hey chickens, I'm very dry in here, dry! It's very dry. I want to say another hello to Tom, thank you for joining up and anyone who's not a member on Patreon just will let you know you don't have to listen to the ads. It's the main thing I can think of really but thank you for listening to the ads. If you are listening in the regular feed, I appreciate it. Also you can watch on YouTube, I think there's no ads on there. I don't know how the ads work. They probably do put ads in and I get numbing. This is how the world is isn't it really? It's what happens on Instagram, you put something up on

1:03Instagram, there's an ad after your post and you don't get that money because we are all peasants, we are all working on the land, the digital land for our feudal overlords at Meta. Lord Zuckerberg must take his tithe of our hard toil. I'm getting sad and angry at my old age. So Kim has said, Akatar, one is very trope every, Akatar! That's so exciting when you say it like Akatar, that is short for a Court of Thorns and Roses. It's Thorns and Roses, isn't it? Roto Court of Thorns and Roses. I don't know. It's a Court, there's Thorns, there's Roses, most Roses come with Thorns and I guess if they're in a Court, it's a very terrible place to play tennis. Don't listen to me, I must do a joke, they're not good. But yes, a Court of Thorn and Roses

2:05number one says Kim is very trope-heavy and yes, it's Beauty and the Beast crossed with Twilight. I don't get the whole, you know, so I read quite a lot for my Agony Art thesis that I did. I read quite a lot of a book about romance novels from the 80s and the expectations women are placed because of this idea of what a romance is and how problematic they are. There is a lot of assault in these books by the main man and then he apologizes and she comes to love him and that was a big thing. It was always, you know, in the old times. It's a terrible, terrible trope and it needs to go away. Obviously, they've gotten rid of that a lot in more recent romance, kind of writing, except

3:12then along comes something like Twilight where you give, you know, because it's a supernatural being, a vampire, sparkly vampire. You've got your sparkly vampire being and then you've got your growling very hot like he's described as like hot like the temperature, like he's radiating heat, the vampire, the werewolf character in Twilight. So you've got these two male characters who she doesn't know, who she's in love with. The text have four books to decide. I get it, I have yourself loved. Nothing text that long, surely. Anyway, so they've both got these supernatural reasons for not being able to control their desires. So we get back down into that terrible place of non-consensual behavior. And same with a Court of Thorn and Roses, there was, there's a thing that happens to fairies. It's a bit like the Pond Fah, as they call it in Star Trek,

4:20where your main male character has like this, you know, every century or every 30 years. I don't know what the time span was, but you know, they have a festival and he goes a bit dipsy la la and has to be in the company of someone for a good time or something. You know, it goes into a weird cave and then he goes and finds the girl that he's kind of in love. And it's just like, I'm like, why are we making these excuses for non-consensual behavior? And it feels like it gives men, let's men off the hook for their behavior. And I don't think that that's an appropriate way for us to think about people of any gender in the 21st century. Like, I don't know why these books are so popular when

5:24right at the heart of it is this really problematic depiction of male power and lust and how those things are excused in our society because like, oh, he was just, you know, a bit head up. I mean, you know, we've just had a case with a bunch of footballers behaving abominably towards women who, you know, had agreed to a certain level of physical contact, but not that much. And yeah, it's, I don't know, I just, I find it problematic when the there is an excuse for terrible behavior embedded into the fictions that we watch. And all when that behavior is used as like a thing to say, see how bad he is. He's real bad. He's a real bad person. So yeah, it's some, anyway,

6:30how did I get here? A quarter of Thorne and Roses. Oh, yeah, this is book club. I'm having book club, but Kim. So Kim says, yes, it's beauty in the beast truck, cross with Twilight. It takes a sharp turn in books two and three, four is a quick read. Five is very good. If you can get that far, six comes out in October, six and seven are coming out with even this like a couple of months of each other out there, like six months apart. So yeah, and they're being made into a TV series. So I'd be interested to see what they do with that particular problem that the fairies have. It feels weird that their fairies like, you know, the fay, the fairies. I mean, it's, it's a term that's been used for my people for some time. And, you know, we're all perfectly, we're not, we're not that crazy about human ladies that wander into our village. I mean,

7:32we like to hang out with them and go shopping, but you know, we're not going to have like a, a little turn and take them into the cave. We'll take them to the cottage if we're there. Even if they're playing ice hockey. Um, Kim says, uh, it's tempting to do a reread. There is a lot I probably missed. There's so many minor characters. Um, I mean, oh, yeah, I found it too much of a slog to get through the first one to be honest. I don't think I could do two and three or four, no matter how quick it is and no matter how good five is I just, I just, I don't want to. Brad, however, has also, because we're in the book club. Welcome to the book club. Welcome to the book club. I guess it was already book club because we're talking about Xianglui. Um, Brad says, hello, Adam. Have you read the Thursday next series of books by Jasper Ford? Um, double F for Ford. Uh, very fistery genre. I adore them. Thanks, Brad. I bumped into Brad the other day. We were

8:35at, um, services, new South Wales and we had like our numbers. We're right apart from each other. I love services, new South Wales. Like this is something that people in Victoria, I'd probably have never experienced, but you just do everything at the one place. It's amazing and they get through it so quickly. Like there's no waiting around. It's, oh my god, it was so exciting. Um, yeah, it's like anything that has vaguely anything to do with the new South Wales government. You go to services, new South Wales and then someone will see you and you get a ticket and they just ding you through. Um, it's pretty amazing. Uh, and I went to the one in the city, which is busy. And it was, you know, I was in and out of there in about 20 minutes. Like you can go in your lunch break. It's amazing. Um, so it makes it like, do I get it? Do I get money for this? Is this an ad? It's not an ad. Yes, thank you, Brad. Uh, I fill up from the Glitter Plus podcast has a number of Jasper Ford

9:35books on his bookshelf. You know, nested amongst his precious charmed and Zena novels. That's a pretty other thing I twitch. Um, but yeah, I, uh, yeah, I, I would like to read them because he was describing them to me and they sounded amazing. Uh, anyway, we will barrel on with the next episode. Uh, I think it's time to watch an old episode of Doctor Who. Should I hit the randomizer or should I? Actually, Peter's been texting me. Um, let's go with what Peter's been texting, which I think is the colony in space. Have I ever done this before? He wants us to do it again. He calls it colonoscopy in space warning you.

10:35Oh.