Hi, I’m a very critical person (as in I like to criticize, not as in I’m of importance).

I love me a good bad media review. I love to dabble in bad media myself. The first DVD I bought when I decided I want to start up my physical media collection again was Cats (2019), for crying out loud. I have watched an unholy amount of book rants on youtube. Like, too many entirely. I’m not a toxic postivity type of person. If you dislike something I don’t think you’re gripped by some kind of hatred demon, or People These Days, or whatever reasons people give to discount negative reviews.

There are several reasons why negative reviews get much more attention than positive reviews and it’s not because people love to hate things. It’s just that… If I like something, I’ll give a very brief reason why I liked it, no spoilers and then I’ll tell whoever I’m talking to go experience the thing for themselves. If I dislike something, my coping mechanism is to crack jokes to make up for the time I lost choosing (! “choosing” being the key word) to read something I realized I wouldn’t like from probably the first 25% of the book.

But because negative reviews are often funnier, people are generally not worried about getting spoiled, etc. I feel like a lot of BookTok and BookTube creators are kind of pulled towards doing that and mostly that. I’m not going to name any of the creators that I’m thinking of while writing this, because it’s their job, it’s their time, it’s their platorm. They can do whatever the hell they want, I can just not consume any of their content for my own reasons, and neither party is at fault.

Authentic reactions to bad media that you just come across in the wild, can be so special. And so funny. But lot of bad books get put out partly because they’ll get the bad publicity coin and then get the reaction of “I can’t believe this is so pupular”. Like, I don’t know why every youtuber and their mom, several of whom didn’t do any book content before this, decided that their take on It Ends With Us was necessary, actually. I don’t get putting down coin for the sequel, threequel of Fourth Wing or Powerless if you hated Fourth Wing and Powerless that much you did a 4 hour rant on those books.

I guess I’m at the point where I need substance beyond “ranting for the sake of ranting”. I need some kind of mission statement that’s more than “mock this book and author with me”. There is a specific drag to the humor when it’s very obvious a creator chose a book because it’s already disliked and they almost feel like they have to make content about it. It’s almost cinema sins-esque, in a way.

When a creator says somethings like “I wasted x amount of hours of my life on this that I’ll never get back”, I’m just annoyed at this point. Girlie pop, you chose to do this. You decided to read what you’ve read, watch what you’ve watched. I’m very much of the school of thought that you should still have fun when consuming bad media.

Part of why I’m having so many thoughts about this is that I myself am consciously try to read more, but also less based on emotions. There have been so many times I see an exerpt of something that looks bad and I have the gut reaction of “lol looks bad, I want to read it”. And then I’ll be angry that I read it and who do I have to blame? Me. Sometimes friends, but mostly me. I can be temped into doing buddy reads on weird books. But, at that point it’s just more about the group activity than the book itself.

But most importantly to me, I felt my own mood getting dragged down. Unfortunately, I can’t really compartmentalize the negativity. I’m thinking about it all day, why something’s bad, the way it could’ve been better, and why I’m even invested in the first place. I don’t know if it’s obvious, but I’m a chronic overthinker. I genuinely wonder what people who aren’t overthinkers do with all their free time. What do they think about when they’re taking a walk? Genuinely curious.

Anyways, I made a set of rules for myself for the future:

1. No reading in bad faith.
2. If I do read in bad faith for whatever reason (see 4.), no 1-star reviews. I recently was perusing the reviews for a book that I read in good faith but ultimately really disliked after finishing, and one of the 1-star reviews was something along the lines of “I don’t like romantasy, but I needed to read one for my book quota. Hated it.” You know… sometimes something is just not for you, and that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. In this particular case, I did think the book was bad, but as a general rule, if you don’t like the genre, why read the genre and taint the review pool with a substanceless 1-star review?
3. When consuming book rants, try to avoid the ones with personal attacks on the author. I personally like the SBU English Club podcast. I think they hit a good balance of snark but from the angle that they do want to give actual constructive criticism and that’s a good portion of the episode every time. In contrast, with the whole Audra Winter saga that’s been going on there have been actual popular ranting channels that I found were mean for the sake of being mean and disguised it as “well, people only want to be nice because she’s white and pretty.” Which, true. As a general rule, though, I don’t think the solution to “If a hypothetical x did the same thing y did, they’d get treated way worse” is to just treat y as shit, because of what? Retribution for the hypothetical x? Strange behaviour.
4. If there’s ever a sequel to Ghotikana every previous rule is void. I, unfortunately, will gobble that up like it’s my day job (it’s not my day job).
5. I know there’s rumours of Stephanie Meyers publishing a Renesmee-Jacob book and just know that I already myself gave a stern talking to in the mirror. Let’s not spend our finite funds on that.

Again, no hate from me towards the kind of creators that do the type of rant reviews I mentionned. It’s just I can’t imagine it not grating on their mood to spend hours dunking on something they knew they would dislike going in but want to use that dislike for content.

Peace & Love

Unless