 Hey, what's up guys? So a little while ago I asked you to hit me with all your book related hot takes and now I'm here to respond to all those. So we'll see exactly how hot they really are and whether or not I agree with them. Also, this chair is way, way more comfortable than that beanbag I was sitting in before, so I should have switched over much sooner. Anyways, let's go. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. So, the first one here says, most dystopians are so unengaging because the main character is never actually a victim of the system. And then it goes on to explain how Katniss from The Hunger Games was actually a victim of the system and that's why she was so engaging. That is kind of a spicy take. Not super hot, I don't think, but because I don't think you'll find many people that disagree with it. But I do agree with you. I do see where you're coming from. Like, uh, one of the worst dystopias I've talked about, or the two worst dystopias I've talked about, I should say, would be Save the Pearls and the Testing. And in both cases, the main character wasn't really a victim. They were just a person who thought, this world sucks. Here's my hot take that I put in there. Military sci-fi is the most consistent genre in terms of quality. And I obviously can't rate the spiciness of my own take and obviously I agree with my own opinion. But I do stand by that. You know, military sci-fi, whether you love it or hate it, is pretty consistent. Like, you can just pick up any random entry by any random author and they won't necessarily be the exact same because while there are obviously tropes and character archetypes that the genre follows, that's what makes it a genre, it has similarities to other entries in that genre, they aren't all going to be exactly the same. But in terms of quality, they're about all the same. Like, there's outliers, there are some bad ones, there are some good ones, but overall it's a pretty consistent genre. Fantasy romance should be shelved with romance instead of fantasy because in most fantasy romance books, the romance is prioritized at the expense of the fantasy elements such as plot or world. I agree wholeheartedly with that. I don't know how hot I would say that. I guess we'll call it a spicy take because, you know, just whatever fantastical elements are in there, if it's almost entirely focused on romance, you should shelve it with romance and leave it away from the rest of fantasy. I don't know how many people would agree with that, but yeah, I am 100% on board with that. Most fantasy authors can't portray religious societies convincingly. Also, if your story has war as a major plot point, you need to include more than one battle. So that's two takes. I'll start with the first one about religious societies. That's a very hot one and you're completely correct. That's true. Like, a lot of fantasy stuff nowadays doesn't even really mention religion that much or focus on it that much, but especially back like 15, 20 years ago, they would have this tendency of having like a really powerful religious organization akin to the Catholic Church and have it just 100% be a purely cynical way of holding on to power, which is not how religious institutions have worked over the years. Institutions like the Catholic Church have only had power because people genuinely believe what they're saying. Like, obviously some people use it for cynical ends, especially the people who are leading it, but if everyone is going around saying, yeah, we don't buy into any of that crap, then you have to wonder like, how does this institution have any power to begin with? As to the second one about war being a major plot point and you need more than one battle, that's also a pretty spicy one, but you're also 100% correct. Like, people, if it's a medieval or ancient society, then yeah, usually there would just be one or two major battles and then the war would be over, but with modern nation states especially, like, there should be more than one major battle. Hot take. Flashbacks are obnoxiously overused and shown in action series. It's gotten to the point where there are entire arcs taking place in a flashback. That's cold. That's not a hot take. People have been complaining about that since I first started reading manga like 15 years ago, and I think it's really only done because so many manga, especially shown in action manga, are written on the fly and the author needs to come up with some time to come up with the later plot. Alright, this is a really long one, but it just says complicated family dynamic. Hot take. Modern fantasy doesn't always have to have gray characters. Mythological settings with a strong dualistic approach of good versus evil are just as valid. That's a pretty lukewarm take. I'll be real with you, because a lot of people have been complaining recently about gray morality. Like, a lot of people just seem to want things to have things be very simplistic. Wow, that was hard to say for some reason. But a lot of people just don't want to have to think about it too much. And I mean, if that's how you feel, that's how you feel. But the way that people are acting like black and white morality is somehow better and superior to having characters question things and have it really be a question of, okay, are we doing the right thing? Does the bad guy have a point? Like, for some reason they're acting like that's just inherently inferior to clear cut. Yep, bad guy's just evil. Let's destroy him. And I'm not sure why. The reason why authors like Colleen Hoover and those like her are so popular is that in today's society, her books are extremely easy to read. That is a very, very hot take. That's a house fire of a take. But I think you do have a very good point. Like, a lot of people aren't looking for something super complex and super difficult to figure out. One of my biggest pet peeves is status quo is God, which has mostly started bothering me with some Warhammer 40k novels seeming to do high stake stuff, but eventually just settling back to nothing has changed, including none of the people you met. Okay, that's just use periods, man. That's a long run on sentence. I'm not reading that whole thing. Fire! That is a spicy take, certainly. And I am on board with it. It's really only a problem with, like, long running things, though. So the franchises like Warhammer 40k or Star Wars or Star Trek or anything like that, they operate by having this world, which is almost in stasis. Like, this is what it's like now and just set a bunch of stories in it. But, and that's cool. Like, being able to run around and explore it in a lot of different ways is fun, but they can never really change anything, otherwise the setting loses what was so cool about it. Wheel of Time could and probably should have been condensed into five books. Okay. Okay. Yeah. That is a blisteringly hot take, that one. Because the idea that Wheel of Time is way too long and stretched out is ice cold. But the idea that it could be condensed into five books is saying quite a bit, because there's 15 in the series. 14 books in the main series and one prequel. Personally, I think that you could cut it down to like 10 or 11 books without losing anything important. And you could, if you were willing to like really cut out some important stuff and kill your darlings, you could probably cut it down to like seven. But the idea of five, man, you would be rushing a lot of shit. Hot take. You should judge a book by its cover. There were a couple of people who had some variation on this. And I think like 10 years ago, that would have been nuclear hot, like nuclear explosion hot. Nowadays, I'd say that's a bit more lukewarm, because nowadays more people are like, we just have more access to books than we used to, you know, like it used to be what was at your library and what was at whatever was nearby, which was usually like Barnes & Noble or some other big bookstore, like Borders, which isn't around anymore, RIP. The point is you were really only getting the most mainstream stuff. Whereas nowadays with the internet, we can find all sorts of different genres and niches, even if they're not that popular. And yeah, your cover does need to catch somebody's attention. Like back then, it would just be because we had such a limited selection, you really had to stop and consider like, okay, will this be good or will it be bad? And you had to think about it a bit more, whereas nowadays there's so much more that like, okay, if someone's making a bad cover, then what does that say about their ability to do anything else properly? My hot take is that authors that start book series and make public claims for set series to be say, 10 books total are annoying. Yeah, that that's fair that I don't know how hot that take is really, because I feel like I haven't heard that discussed a whole lot, but I don't think many people will disagree with you, at least not vehemently. And yeah, I largely agree, I see where you're coming from. Pointless exposition is really good when in footnotes. That you're correct on that, but that is ice cold, man. Ice ice cold. I don't know how common this is, but I hate when the author does not give a solid description of what important characters look like until like 200 pages into the book. Not really a hot take, that's that's a very lukewarm one, but I agree with you, it's annoying. It seems to mostly happen in like first person perspective books, because it's kind of hard to describe what a character looks like in first person without having that cliched scene of they look at themselves in the mirror and just examine their face. This same person had a second one where they say, also this isn't a hot take, but can romance authors please stop trying to convince me that thin short white women is not conventionally attractive because she has brown hair instead of blonde or something. Fucking freezing. Ice cold take, but you're correct, that is very annoying. Listening to an audiobook is a different experience than reading words. It takes the nuance of interpretation out based on tone, emphasis, and voice acting. Some even have music and sound effects. Burn this. That that's a spicy one. I wouldn't say it's super hot, but that is a spicy one, because some people do say that audiobooks don't really count as reading, and those people are dumb, don't get me wrong, but there are a couple of commenters that said something along these lines where like listening to it is different than reading it, and that's true, like having different character voices and having the narrator put emphasis on different things and just the way they read it, that can really make or break the story. As for the ones with music and sound effects, it's not an audiobook at that point. It's a fucking radio show. I'm not on Audible, well I'm not on Audible anymore, period, but the point is people don't go to Audible for radio shows. Stop that. I'm honestly tired of seeing medieval European fantasy. I want to see fantasy that is so unconventional when it comes to settings, like what about a world that takes place in a good world? Hey, if we're under water, how could there be a... That is Antarctic cold, man. You're not gonna find a whole lot of fantasy fans who are saying we don't have enough fantasy inspired by medieval Europe. We should get more of that, like you're gonna find a lot of people who are fine with it, and you're gonna find a lot of people who are annoyed by how Eurocentric the genre is, but you are not gonna find a lot of people who are saying we need more. A lot of authors do not need to be shitting out these eight to nine hundred page bricks they keep pumping out. Sarah J. Moss is one of the biggest offenders of this trend. This went from flurries to a blizzard. That's a chilly take. That's a cold one, which you're not gonna find people disagreeing with. I certainly don't disagree with it. Like, so many books these days are only that long because their editors just refuse to actually put their foot down and tell authors, hey, this part's fucking stupid, get rid of it. And this isn't a new phenomenon, but like other modern authors like Sarah J. Moss and even Brandon Sanderson are just really successful, so whatever they pump out is going to sell, and so the editor is really more of a proofreader than anything. You know, they're just not willing to tell them no. I just finished reading Fourth Wing for my book club, and I'm pretty sure it made me a worse person. Please fix it. Do you know what a hot take is? There were several comments like that, and a lot of them mentioned Fourth Wing. They're just like, Fourth Wing, that's all. And like, that's not an opinion. A hot take is an unpopular, strong, strongly held opinion. Number one, everybody hates Fourth Wing. That's why I bought this freaking thing. I'll get to it sooner or later, don't worry, because they want me to make fun of it. But also just saying Fourth Wing, like, that's not an opinion. That's just mentioning the name of something that exists. Most canon couples are boring, and or their romance isn't well planned, or they don't have any chemistry, but stay together because an author thinks everyone needs to be in a relationship to be a happy ending. I really can't stay. Maybe it's cold outside. That's a, that's a chilly take, but you're correct. Like, way too many people just feel obligated to put romance in their stories for some fucking reason, and it is honestly annoying. Hotest take I can think of is this. People need to read outside their age ranges more. I don't know how hot that take is, but yeah, you could probably stand to do that. More people who are young, like teenagers, could probably stand to read, you know, above young adults, like just read regular fantasy or regular romance or something. More younger kids could probably stand to read young adults as well. And older people shouldn't be afraid of reading children's or young adults books. I'm sorry, but I just cannot work up a shred of care for Lord of the Rings. There were a couple of people who said something along the lines of Lord of the Rings is overrated. That is blisteringly hot, so let me tell you, but I kind of agree. Like, I appreciate how much it has inspired the fantasy genre as we know it today, but trying to read it nowadays, it just, it doesn't get me. It doesn't appeal to me that much. It's just not written in a way that modern audiences are super into, and it's not that it's super slow or anything. It's just not focusing on most of the interesting stuff. Middle school books do romances better than some YA fantasy romances. That's not even a take, that's just objective fact. Like, especially because you're qualifying it with some fantasy YA romance, which for whatever reason YA fantasy romance is just abysmal. Most fantasy books don't need a map. Sometimes the map makes the world more confusing. Nuclear hot take, but I don't know why you feel that way man, because if you don't like the map being there, you can just ignore it. Okay, I have another one. Enemies to Lovers is the worst of all romance tropes. Given how many people love Enemies to Lovers, that is blisteringly nuclear hot is what that one is, but I honestly don't have an opinion on that. I don't care that much. I've seen Enemies to Lovers done well. I've seen it done poorly. I don't care that much about it. There are probably more poorly written YA books than good ones, and the only reason the genre is as prolific as it is is due to its target audience caring more about projection than actual narrative quality. The real hot take here is that despite me finding it annoying, that's not really a bad thing. You know, that is a hot one. That's pretty hot. You are correct though. Like, nowadays, like I was saying earlier, there are so many, we have so much more access to books and it's so much easier to find stuff that fits into very, very specific niches and very, very specific genres that it seems to have created a very large market of people who just want to be pandered to constantly. I don't really like morally gray main characters unless they struggle with their morality or at least have some qualities about them that can make me sympathize with them. I know the entire point of unlikeable main characters, but I can't enjoy those kind of books. You seem to be confusing gray morally gray characters and villain protagonists. Those are not the same thing. Like, George Ancrath from Prince of Thorns is not a morally gray character. He's a villain protagonist. He's a horrible person. He has a couple of redeeming qualities, but I would not call him morally gray in any way. So your take here is very ice cold because it just doesn't make sense. High fantasy and futuristic sci-fi are the same genre just reskinned. Can it burn more of the screen? Oof. That's a blisteringly hot one that a lot of people will be upset with you for. Honestly, you're correct a lot of the time. This comment isn't about you, but other booktubers. I think booktubers should read just as many books that they enjoy as they hate and have more of an indie spotlight to break up the monotony of the NYT bestseller list. That's uh, that's a bit lukewarm. I think a lot of people would probably agree with you on that one. My perspective on it is that, again, I do talk about books I like and dislike all the time. I get a fair number of comments saying, James, you should talk more about books you like. Look through my fucking channel, you idiots. I swear to God. Like, literally just scroll through videos I upload and at least like once every month or two months, I talk about a book or book series I read that I was generally very positive on. Like, it's a frequent occurrence for me. That said, I really don't blame people for largely just going for book series that they hate because the hateful ones, the negative ones, get a lot more views. They just do. I'm sorry. If you want more people to start talking positively about books, then you're gonna have to start actually watching the videos we put out that are positive. Not sure if this is a hot take anymore, but Divergent is straight garbage. Girl, that take is so cold, all atomic movement in the vicinity has stopped. You're correct, but you are not gonna find people disagreeing with you. This person had several, but I'm gonna focus on the second one. Enough talk about men writing female characters breasting boobily to the stairs and tidding downwards. We need more talk about women writing male characters cocking scrotumly to the stairs and shafting downwards. Fire! Yeah, I mean again, this is like a huge thing in young adult romance for some reason. Like, we talk rightfully so about male authors writing female characters in this like weirdly objectifying sexual way, but let's be honest, female authors do the exact same thing for male characters in romance a lot, and it just, granted, it's romance. Like, again, it's just soft-core porn a lot of the time. It's about the fantasy. It's not really trying to make complex characters, but it does still deserve some criticism. Rick Riordan's books vary a lot in quality. The Percy Jackson and Ken Chronicles books are classic. The Heroes of Olympus books are meh because of Jason, Piper, and Leo who are all really uninteresting and even boring at times. Oh, that's hot. That's hot. I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but they also go on to say how the Magnus Chase books are really bad, because almost every character is extremely over the top. Magnus is an annoying Percy clone who just isn't funny no matter how many jokes he tells. Alex's whole character is that he slash she is tough and gender fluid. Sam's character is almost completely about her religion, which gets really boring really quickly. I say this as a Muslim myself, et cetera. And you know what? That's a spicy take. It's not blisteringly hot, but it is spicy. And I largely agree. Like, yeah, Percy Jackson is the best of his series, and the other ones are all enjoyable, but they vary a lot in terms of quality. And I do agree with you that Sam's entire character was built around her being Muslim. I can see how that would be annoying. However, I did like that she didn't just go down the cliched route of she falls in love with Magnus Chase, you know, because that's what a lot of authors would have done. And Rick Riordan just had it be like, nah, they're just friends at the end. So I did like that personally. I usually prefer not to be surprised in stories. In fact, unless a work is meant to be consumed in one sitting, e.g. a standalone movie, I usually look it up on Wikipedia before starting it so I can know if there's anything I need to emotionally prepare for. That's a clean burning hell, I tell you. That's a spicy take. I've seen a lot of people say similar things over the years, though. And honestly, I think that's extremely stupid and kind of childish, to be honest. Like, I'm not gonna judge you super harshly for like consuming media the wrong way or something. So like, sorry if that comes across that way. But the fact that you never want to be surprised and you always want to know exactly what is going to happen and exactly how you should feel about things before even experiencing them, like that's just not how life works. And I have no idea what mindset leads you to that. Any book longer than 400 pages is too long. Any series longer than a trilogy is too long. I'm a slow reader. That is a nuclear hot take. Yeah, I mean, like we were saying earlier, a lot of books are way, way too long. So I see where you're coming from. But that's a hot one. That's a hot one. I don't agree, but it's a hot one. Fantasy books are marred by eugenic EBS. I know the medieval times wear two, but they aren't writing for a medieval audience. I'm not talking about the attitudes of the characters. I'm talking about how those attitudes just happen to be proven correct by the narrative. That is a blisteringly hot take and you are 100% correct, man. Several years ago, I put out a video on how fantasy, for whatever reason, is weirdly pro-monarchy. And I, to this day, get so many comments from people saying things like, um, yeah, fantasy societies had monarchies. Obviously, fantasy that's based in medieval society is going to have monarchies. There is a difference between characters believing something or something being like this in a world and the story showing that to be good and showing that attitude to be correct. Because the idea that, um, there can be chosen one monarchs who just fix everything is very eugenicy and very pro-divine right of kings. I swear to God, all the people who completely miss the point of that video are the same people who think that a piece of media portraying something is also the same as endorsing something. So these are the people that say Attack on Titan is fascist or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is racist. The need to have more morally gray characters and anti-heroes is crippling storytelling. Everyone wants to be strong in their beliefs, so why are we pressuring authors to write about weak characters? Instead, write about a strong character in a morally gray world, the struggles, successes, and failures that come from this. I honestly don't know what you're talking about here. What do you mean weak character and gray character? What does that mean? My hot take, cis women authors should stop being praised for writing mm romances and more actual queer men should have their books become bestsellers or famous, especially since most cis women authors write mm romances in either infantilizing or fetishistic ways or very queer baby ways. That's a spicy one. I think that if you're just talking like straight women who consume that sort of thing in, again, like a fetishy way, then that'd be a nuclear hot take. But I think among like the LGBT community, that's a much more commonly held belief. Yeah, like it seems to me, from my perspective at least, that they just sort of say, look, it's a gay romance. And then like I was saying earlier, people just want to be panned or two. So people looking for gay romance don't even really think about anything else. They just go, oh, cool. And instantly go out and read it, even if it's not that good. And it's not that good of representation. Epic fantasy is mostly power fantasies with uninteresting characters and bland themes. That's why it gets the reputation of not being real literature. Nuclear fire of a hot take there, man. You're wrong, because a lot of fantasy main characters are not self inserts by any means. Like Caledon from Stormlight Archives, the first one that comes to mind, that dude screws up a lot. But not all fantasy or not even most fantasy is just self insert power fantasies. Fantasy is overrepresented in the booktuber scene and most of it is just Lord of the Rings knockoffs. That's a bonfire of a hot take. I'll give you that. I do kind of agree with you though. Like, I read a lot of fantasy largely because that's what interests me and I think a lot of other booktubers are in a similar spot where that's what interests us. But again, people are going to go where the views go, you know, and when I talk about other stuff, it does get less attention. I don't mind that quite as much as some other people might, but what do you expect? Malazan, Book of the Fallen, is not a well written book. An author refusing to give you context to anything under the guise of, you have a brain figure it out, is not a good writing technique for novels. That is also a nuclear hot take and it's also correct. People keep telling me, James, you should read Malazan. Hey, fun fact, there's a fucking search bar on YouTube guys. Type James Tullis Malazan or James Tullis Garden of the Moon, which is the first book in the series. You will find something! I've already talked about this. Malazan's not a good series. It's very shittily written. My hot take, The Witcher is Pretty Pooh, and then he goes on to a lot of reasons about why The Witcher is Pooh. Again, a blisteringly hot house fire of a hot take. I haven't read The Witcher books, so I can't comment on it that much. Everyone keeps telling me, oh, there's so much better than the show, but it's something I keep getting this bad feeling that if I read them, I'm going to think these these are different than the show, but they're just as shitty. The only book reviews worth reading are the ones given three stars. I will never trust a five-star or a one-star review of a book. This part is probably a less hot take, but a five-star rating on Goodreads holds zero value. Nothing on Earth has a value less than a Goodreads five-star review. Burn this. Well, there is one thing with less value, and that's a Goodreads one-star review. That's a spicy one, but yeah, it's true. It's true. Like, one-star and five-star reviews are generally pretty shit if you want, and this goes for like Goodreads as well as like product reviews on Amazon and such. Like, the three and four-star reviews are generally the best ones because those talk about positives and negatives. Book talk bad. You know, I'm not on TikTok, so I can't really comment on a lot of stuff there firsthand, but that is a spicy take, and yeah, it is kind of annoying how literally all discussion on BookTube nowadays stems from shit that people talk about on TikTok, and if you're not following trends, it's very difficult to get any sort of attention. All right, and the final spicy take of the day is self-publishing is largely a bad thing. Gatekeeping is good, actually, in so much that it ensures a minimum level of basic competency. That's a hot, hot take, man, but you do have a point. Like, yeah, a lot of people self-published just because their books would never, ever get taken by a regular publisher. The Onision trilogy or several other YouTuber books are pretty good examples of that sort of thing, but at the same time, traditional publishers will put out some real stinkers, so I don't know if I really agree with that, but whatever the case is, yeah, that's my response to these hot takes. That went on way longer than I wanted it to. Let me know down below some more of your hot takes and how you feel about these, and that's about it. That's all. Goodbye. See you later. Have a lovely day. Wait, don't click away. I know you think the video is over and that these are just the end credits, but we have a sniper nearby. He's aiming directly at your head. If you click away, you're going to die. All these names here are my patrons. These are the people that send me money once a month over on Patreon. If you want to get stuff like early access to videos, then consider, you know, doing that, becoming one of these guys. 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