Eighth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

It's one thing if mankind is hunted to extinction by ChatGPT, but I really do object to being executed by Bing.

(https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/2511.html?thread=3169743#cmt3169743 )

Welcome back! Fandom chat, misc creativity, internet weirdness, books, films, anything! Tell meme about it so we can get to the next post title!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

Comments

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

So I have a question. Does the tim's mom ever have any sort of ugly breakdown? Because suddenly losing a child will fuck you up but I didn't notice any sort of ugly outbreak or expression of grief in your writeups....

Especially if your child was killed by a friend of his!! There is no way you'd adopt a live and let live perspective!

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

We don't see an ugly breakdown. She is described as v sad in various ways, tbf; me not quoting is just because it was the default assumption rather than because the authors left it out. and the narrator is the mother of the accused. So she glares at the narrator a bunch, and tbf the narrator probably wouldn't witness her worst moments. The scene at the end of the book is her visiting the narrator's house as a kind of apology, going "I'm glad YOUR kid isn't dead". (paraphrased. Just to be scrupulously fair to picoult.) So narrator responds by giving her a jar of honey, and the curtain falls!

The narrator assumes that tim's mother must desperately want a second trial, but the cop says tim's mother doesn't mind because she reckons she won't survive another one. It's literally one sentence. So maya skips off to college. =D

So yeah, total empathy fail, but I didn't personally find much problem with the depiction of her ongoing grief until the ridiculous twist.

I think they wrote this just so that people would say things like "maya should have gone to jail" and it would muddy the waters, reinforce a negative association, etc. Lets ppl say things like "Oh, is she the one that killed that trans girl?" Or even give death threats and then pretend they were aimed at the fictional character. I put nothing past these creeps.

But hm. Maybe an argument can instead be made for this as an edgy work of antiracism; observe:

tim: u have mysterious asian wisdom

maya: *pushes tim down the stairs*

Re: Books - mad honey (Jodi Picoult, Monsieur Boylan)

[(Anonymous)]

This whole expedition does make me wish I had a review blog with decent seo, though, so I could offer a terven tour of this trashheap. Maybe I'll get a substack after all.