 Hello friends, welcome to my video about starters. Now this is not a super well-known book series, so I think the best way to introduce you to it is by just reading you the summer. Callie lost her parents when the Spore Wars wiped out everyone between the ages of 20 and 60. Her and her little brother Tyler go on the run, living as squatters with their friend Michael and fighting off renegades who would kill them for a cookie. Callie's only hope is prime destinations, a disturbing place in Beverly Hills run by a mysterious figure known as the old man. He hires teens to rent their bodies to enders, seniors who want to be young again. Callie, desperate for the money that will keep her, Tyler, and Michael alive, agrees to be a donor. But the neurochip they place in Callie's head malfunctions and she wakes up in the life of her renter, living in her mansion, driving her cars, and going out with a senator's grandson. It feels almost like a fairy tale, until Callie discovers that her renter intends to do more than party, and that prime destinations plans are more evil than Callie could have ever imagined. Now if that sounds silly, that's because, yeah, it is. Having, having read the whole series, it's, it's pretty silly, yeah. And you might have heard of it just because of the Spore Wars thing. You know, like, I know it's become a little bit of a meme in some circles for people to just mention the Spore Wars offhand because they've heard of these books but don't know anything about them. And Norm, it is a strange book, yes, but probably not in the ways you're thinking, because normally with these crappy early 2010s, young adult dystopian novels, the oppressed minority is just poor people, and the poor people are a metaphor for, well okay, they're not a metaphor for anything, but you know, the oppressed people are just poor people. And starters is a world where the oppressed victims are literally just teenagers, like literally. The, the put upon group of people in the world are starters who are people under the age of 20, like, my goodness, man, that's, that's kind of ballsy, you know, because the young people literally, they all had their parents die in the Spore Wars, they legally aren't allowed to work, and if they don't have any guardians looking after them, which usually is their grandparents, then they are forced into these places called institutions, which are basically just orphanages, and they're run more like prisons than anything. And now, even their bodies aren't their own, like even then, they, just to survive, they are forced to literally sell access to their flesh and blood, and they are oppressed by enders who are old people, and I don't know, I don't have much else to add right here, so let's just do a summary, and then we'll get into all the analysis, I guess, so spoilers ahead from here, let's go. Hey guys, they were out of Snickers. So we start with Callie visiting prime destinations and deciding whether or not she wants to sign up to be a renter, and this is a year after the Spore Wars happened. Basically, there was already a conflict, and then during that, China released some spores that were supposed to kill everybody. However, they did develop a vaccine, and the most vulnerable people, who are those over the age of 60 and those under the age of 20, were given a vaccine, and only a couple of people in between those ages who are just called middles got it, and then the rest of them died, so there's a couple of middles left, but not very many, and honestly, starters and enders is kind of a stupid, those are both stupid titles, but calling someone a middle, that sounds like somebody who's comfortable being a top or a bottom. Also, people live a very, very long time in this world, like at one point Callie sees a man and says that he's about a hundred years old and describes that as being not that old, so people pretty regularly live to be like 120, 130 in this world, and after the death of her parents, Callie is now homeless, and she's squatting in an abandoned apartment building along with her younger brother Tyler and her friend Michael. Now, prime destinations is a place where young people can go to get a chip implanted in their brain, and then enders can rent them out for money, you know, so enders get to be young again, and renters get paid obscene amounts, so it seems like a fair, you know, a fair trade-off, but Callie decides not to do it, so she goes back home, and then a guy shows up and says he's their new landlord, so they all get evicted, along with a bunch of other kids who are living there, and then some police chase after them, and a bunch of kids get caught and sent away to institutions, and you know, what little they had is now gone, and so Callie is like, okay, we have no choice, so she agrees to go be a renter. Now, the first two rentals go okay. Like, she wakes up afterwards, and she has these mysterious cuts and bruises on her, but overall it goes okay, and each of these rentals lasts a couple of days, and she's unconscious throughout it, and she's supposed to only have three rentals, and then her period is up, and the third one, though, which is supposed to last about a month, she wakes up partway through, and she's just in a nightclub hanging out with some other people, and she tries to figure out who rented her and what is going on, and from there, what I can only describe as a series of events follows from there, because everything that happens in this series, it doesn't tie together very well, it's really just a series of flimsy justifications to have Callie put into difficult situations, which she then has to find her way out of, so eventually we find out that the woman who was renting Callie actually started dating a wealthy boy named Blake, who is around Callie's age, and Callie, while pretending to be the other lady, grows kind of attached to Blake as well, and then we learn that the woman renting her is named Helena, and she is a wealthy ender, and Helena winds up telling her that prime destinations is not going to actually pay her when her final rental period is up, that they're going to keep her around forever and keep renting her out to other people, and eventually, renters are also going to be available for permanent purchase, so like, you know, old people can just have their real bodies sitting somewhere being medically taken care of, and then they just take over the body of a young person and get to be young again. Now, before actually getting, you know, taken on as a renter, Callie and everybody else gets cosmetic surgery to give them, you know, perfectly smooth skin and nice hair and everything, and some wealthy kids really wanted that cosmetic surgery, but their families wouldn't pay for it for whatever reason, so they used fake identities and then became renters so that they could get that, but then they went missing, and it turns out that, again, yeah, that this is how Helena found out that people are being permanently bought, and they're never getting out of there, and her granddaughter, whose name is Emma, was actually one of them, so that's why she met up with some other people who have been working against prime destinations and is working against them, and specifically, she took Callie's body so that she could assassinate a senator who has been working with prime destinations. Yeah, the senator in question is Blake's grandfather, so that's why she's dating him, she's trying to get close to the senator. Now, again, Callie really isn't anything special, so I'm not sure why she got chosen specifically, or if she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but whatever. Now, they cannot remove the chip from Callie's head because that would kill her, and that's actually evidence they used to show that, like, yeah, these things were meant to be permanent, and so she gets it modified, that way the two of them can just communicate back and forth, like almost telepathy, and so Helena tries to get her to help, and Callie's like, no, no way, but then Helena is found and killed pretty quickly after, and then what I can only describe as some things happen, like, again, none of it really makes sense, none of it ties together. I can cut out like 60% of these books, and the story still makes sense, trust me, and so Callie, who again has been missing at this stage for a couple of weeks, her friend Michael is desperate enough to need money after she disappeared, that he also becomes a renter, and so he gets taken by a buyer, and when Callie runs up and sees him, he sexually harasses her for a bit, and then afterwards she is caught and sent to an institution, and Tyler is most likely taken by prime destinations, and the institution is bad, and she's there for a little while, and it like, super sucks, I guess, and while she's there, she meets a girl named Sarah, who has a heart condition. Now, Sarah and Callie do work together to escape, however, they're about to be caught, and so Sarah has to run off and cause a distraction, and the guards hit her with tasers, and because of her heart condition, she dies, like, she is killed. So after escaping, Callie goes and meets up with some of Helena's comrades, they broadcast a message to the country, letting people know what's going on, and then they go off and they raid prime destinations, rescue some of the people there, and they confront the guy who runs it, who is just called the old man, and hasn't shown up in person up until this point. He is a dude who, for whatever reason, wears this weird electronic mask that obscures his face, and then he flees in a helicopter, and then later Callie finds Blake, and he doesn't recognize her because it turns out that when she was talking with Blake, he was actually being controlled by the old man the whole time. Ew, so yeah, this guy that she was kind of falling in love with was just an old man in the body of a teenage boy, that's a weird thing to think about really, and it turns out that the old man was inhabiting Blake's body, he was essentially holding him hostage in order to make his senator grandfather work with him, like it turns out after this, once they rescue Blake, the senator actually turns out to be on their side, and he's pretty reasonable. And apparently Helena altered her will at the last minute, so now after Callie is able to rescue her brother, she inherits all of Helena's possessions and her money, and one of Helena's friends named Lauren agrees to sign on as Callie's legal guardian, like she's not gonna actually try and tell her what to do and be her mom or anything, but it just is a way to prevent her from being sent to an institution, and then Callie vows to find the old man, and she vows to find Helena's granddaughter Emma, and then the book ends. And then the second book, which is the last one, is called Enders, and it starts with Callie trying to use her new wealth to help homeless kids nearby, you know, she's like bringing them food and everything as, doing as much as she can, and the people who had the chips put in their heads by prime destinations are no longer being rented, and people decide to just call them medals, for some reason, like, we don't, we don't need a name for that, you know, we don't need to capitalize a noun for everything and call it world building, you know, we can just call them people who used to work for prime destinations or former renters or something, you know, it's, it's weird, but also the old man is still talking to Callie through the chip in her head, and she also hears a voice which sounds like her father, which doesn't make sense because her father's dead, and also the old man can make the chips randomly explode, like, to show this off, he has somebody blow up in the middle of a mall and kills some people. So after a couple more events, Callie runs into somebody who is named Haydn, it's spelled almost like Haydn, but it's pronounced Haydn, I don't know why, and he tells her that he is the old man's son, and Haydn is about her age as well, and he wants to help her take him down, and Haydn has a bunch of money and a bunch of connections, so they decide to work together, and Callie like sort of starts falling in love with him too as they're working together, because obviously, and also Michael, she's been kind of in love with Michael this whole time, I don't know, like, we'll get more into that later, but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and while they're going around doing this, they are captured by a man with a leopard tattoo who we later learn is named Dawson. Now Dawson experiments on them and experiments to see what their chips can do for a bit, including trying to control them while they're still conscious, because you know, again, normally when they get someone else takes control of them, it's like they fall asleep, and then they just wake up afterwards with no memory of what was happening, but Dawson is doing experiments to see if they can remain conscious and aware of what's going on while somebody is controlling them and forcing them to do things against their will, and at first it works, but Callie does also learn to resist by, as the book puts it, she imagines a blue line from her controller to her, and a gold line from her to her controller, and then she's able to reverse it. It's, I don't know, it doesn't, it's weird. It's just weird future sci-fi tech, okay? This is many decades in the future by now. I just don't think about it too much. Now, after a while, Dawson lets them know that he is actually working for the government. It's basically just a secret portion of law enforcement that operates outside the law, which is suspicious, but okay. That's suspicious. That's weird. Also, Callie's father is alive. We get confirmation that he is alive, because it turns out he was actually a scientist who was working on the technology that was used in the chips that control people, and he was kidnapped by the old man, but they somehow faked his death during the Spore Wars. Now, I just want to say this was not mentioned at all in the first book. Like, there was nothing saying that Callie's father was a scientist in the first book at all. This is 100% a retcon. Let's be clear. She also runs into Helena's granddaughter, Emma, and she's like, oh great, I found her, but then she dies very quickly after her, so that just kind of leads nowhere. And also around this time that we get in several twists around here, we learn that the old man is not Haydn's father. Haydn is the old man. You see, like, when she saw Haydn, or when she saw the old man wearing that crazy mask and everything, that was just Haydn in disguise. Like, he was trying to pretend that he wasn't a teenager. So he had the mask. He had some fake white hair. He had lifts in his shoes. You know, he was trying to look different. Now, you might realize this is the same twist from the first book where she realized that Blake was actually the old man and now she's wearing that Haydn is actually the old man. This is the same twist, but it's okay. You see, Haydn did create prime destinations, but it wasn't just to make money. He was planning to, yes, make money from the business, but also, like, take all of his customers and keep them in, like, comas, not quite permanent, but almost permanent, and then drain their bank accounts and use all their money to lobby for changes and make life better for starters, you know, stuff like ending the institutions and replacing it with school, getting rid of the laws that tells them they can't work and that they have to have a legal guardian, otherwise they get arrested, you know, stuff like that. Now, the real bad guy, the one who kidnapped Callie's father and is doing bad stuff with the chips and everything, that is Haydn's father, but he's not the old man. He's not the one that was in charge of prime destinations. I'm just going to call him the bad guy, because let's be honest, none of us care what his name is. It doesn't matter. He's just, he's the bad guy. That's all there is to him. He's the one that is, you know, making metals explode randomly and he's also trying to use the technology to do other nefarious things. So they wind up going out to his compound, which is hidden out in the desert somewhere, so that they can find Callie's father and put a stop to everything. However, they are captured by the bad guy pretty quickly. And I guess the timing was very fortuitous here because he just happens to be running an auction where he is showing off the technology to some prospective buyers. And he mostly, he mostly talks about how it could be used for assassinations, you know, like he could take over someone's mind and force them to take out business rivals and stuff like that. That's the main thing he focuses on. And to show it off, he parades Callie out in front of a crowd of billionaire auctioneers. You know, she's still conscious, but he is controlling her. And to demonstrate the control, the bad guy actually has her stripped down to her underwear and danced around in a provocative manner in front of this crowd of people. And this got a little dark, didn't it? Don't worry, nothing else happens. But this scene is really horrifying and gross, but like, it's supposed to be, you know, like this scene really does hammer home how awful it would be to not even have control of your own body. And so scenes like this do make it clear that these books had a lot of potential and they could have been something cool, but pretty much all the details need a lot of work. Also at this stage, it is a man inside of a girl's body. So I guess it's now a trans allegory or something. I don't know. It seems like lazy YouTubers always either would say that it's woke trash because the main character's a girl or they would say it's queer coded. Like those takes are both very, very stale by now. So the bad guy gives Callie a gun and tries to make her kill her own father. But due to her training from before, she is able to not only resist the compulsion but reverse it. And so she takes control of the bad guy for a little while. And using his body, she orders the guards to put away their weapons and they're confused, but they do it. And then Dawson and some other people come in and they arrest everyone. So Callie is reunited with her friends and family. The day is saved and everything is great. The last real scene from the story is Callie confronting the woman who ran the institution that she was in for a bit in the first book. And the woman just straight up admits that she was selling kids to the bad guy for experimentation and to be sold as renters and stuff. And it was $10,000 per kid, which I guess inflation doesn't exist because again, this is decades in the future. So you think $10,000 wouldn't be that much, but whatever. And then while they're talking, she actually grabs a letter opener and stabs herself with it. And then she calls out for help. And she's like, help, help, Callie stabbed me. But it turns out Dawson was watching through Callie's eyes the whole time. So he heard her confession and he knows Callie didn't do anything. And so the woman just gets arrested. And then the end is with Callie and the others working with Dawson trying to figure out how to prevent the technology from being abused. There's a few moments of hope. And then Callie's like, yeah, let's make the world better and then it ends. So the thing about dystopian fiction is that it has to comment on the real world in some way. Otherwise, it's not really a dystopia. It's just a world that would be shitty to live in. And starters almost makes a point about the real world. You know, it doesn't, but it comes kind of close because many of you watching this are really young. And so you probably are aware that the cost of living has risen exponentially in the past couple of decades. And at the same time, wages have fallen significantly from when our parents and grandparents were around. And as life expectancy has risen more and more, young people are increasingly being shut out of government, business, and even more of our income is going to stuff like social security and pension funds, which in all likelihood, we're never going to benefit from. Like in the US, the social security is going to be insolvent in about 10 years unless they change something. And on top of that, they are increasingly making horrible, short-sighted decisions that they won't live long enough to feel the consequences of, e.g. ignoring climate change. Or hell, another good example of this would be the US was in Afghanistan for about 20 years. And by the end of that war, there were soldiers over there who were not even born when the war started. Because again, it lasted 20 years, and some of the youngest soldiers over there were 18 or 19. The more time goes on, the more it starts to feel like we are always paying for the actions of our elders and that we really are just tools to be used and discarded by them. And Starters almost does something with that, you know? Like it almost stands up and says, hey, they've taken everything, now all that's left is to literally buy us and use us as vessels for their own pleasure. And again, that almost could be something. Like again, the scene where Cali is forced to strip and dance in front of people is horrifying. And with more scenes like that, I think this book could have really been powerful. But the combination of the world being nonsensical, the plot being all over the place, the main character girl needing to be the center of things, and the happy ending kind of ruins it. And what that all comes back to really is the tone. Because this should be a dark, disturbing story. And there's like one or two scenes where it is. But for the most part, it seems like everyone in the world is completely oblivious to the horror of the world. At one point, Cali and some other renters see an advertisement for, you know, being able to buy people's bodies permanently. And Cali snaps at one of the other renters and says that buying somebody's body would be like killing them, because you know, they're essentially put to sleep forever. And the other lady actually stops and is like, damn, you're right, that really would suck. And I just, no one who would be okay with buying another person and shutting their mind off forever would be unaware of what they were doing. And they wouldn't suddenly become sympathetic to their, to the plight of the people that they'd be doing it to, simply because somebody said that it was bad. Like, if all of their society was just sick, and there had been a severe moral decline from where we are today, then, you know, that would make sense. But then most people would just not see this as a big deal. And because that's not the case, that means the villain is, it's not society. It's literally just this one bad company run by this one guy. Or so we think. The company turns out to be run by a good guy, but there is still just one bad guy. There's no plot about overthrowing an evil government, like in most of these crappy, dystopian young adult novels. In fact, the government is actively helping them at the end. Prime Destinations wasn't like an evil corporation that was doing everything. It was a front for fixing the world. And I don't really have a good place to put this, but it doesn't make sense for people. The whole renter thing just doesn't make sense. You know, because people under the age of 19 legally cannot rent and they cannot, or excuse me, they cannot work and they cannot rent or buy housing. So even if Cali got all this money and was like, you know, paid under the table or whatever, she wouldn't really be able to do anything with it. The only evil things in this world are Haydn's dad and a couple of mostly anonymous billionaires. And at first it seems like these people are just using the starters for their own pleasure, you know, which is really bad. But then at the end, the bad guy just hypes up the technology by saying you can use it for assassinations, you know? So I feel like you could literally just take this same plot and put it into today's world and just have it be, it would make about as much sense, you know? You wouldn't need all of society to shift around it in order for it to make sense. And that's not really a dystopia. Also, this world is technically post-apocalyptic. Or at least the United States is technically post-apocalyptic because the Spore Wars only hit here and then everyone else closed their borders to make sure the spores didn't spread. But the Spore Wars killed so many people and yet other than a bunch of homeless kids, things seem the same. You know, they still have malls, they still have governments and elections, they still have rule of law. You know, there's not like huge chunks of the country that have become lawless wastelands run by raiders because the government just can't control them or anything. Like, it's just everything is exactly the same except a bunch of the people, of all the middles died. I hate referring to them that way, but the people between the ages of 20 and 60, most of them died. Most of the books take place in Los Angeles and the surrounding area and it doesn't feel like the charred remnants of a city or anything. So this world feels less like a post-apocalyptic wasteland and more like a typical cyberpunk setting. You know, like there's advanced technology, there's computers and holograms all over the place. There's a huge divide between rich and poor people. The boundaries between people's minds and bodies are being broken down and start to lose coherence. Like, it feels like a cyberpunk story and not in a bad way, but that just doesn't make sense with the whole spore wars thing happening. You know, like, if a huge chunk of the population died all at once, then society would collapse. Like, it just would. Like, all the people who keep things running dying would cause some issues down the line, let's say. And because the spore wars barely feature into anything, it would have been substantially better if they weren't there at all. You know, like, this story would make a lot more sense if the war didn't happen and Callie was just made homeless after her dad died. You know, literally everything else would be the same. And so this isn't a dystopia. You know, it's just not, even though it's trying to be, and it's not post-apocalyptic, so what is it then? And I'm not sure. I think this weird, unfocused world building stems from a lot of people's complete inability to realize that things can't continue the way that they are forever. You know, like, in their minds, our way of life, by which I mean, like, liberal democracy, peace, capitalism, consumerism, women's rights, et cetera, they think all of that's gonna be here unless there's some sort of big shake-up, like, again, the spore wars. Like, they can't imagine in their minds of, okay, this just slowly breaks down. You know, they can't imagine entropy being a thing. And so I get the feeling that if in this world the spore wars hadn't happened, everyone would be humming along happy as a clam except for one evil guy who is up to no good. And I don't know, it just makes me feel like dystopias can't be created by people who don't have an understanding of the real world. There is nothing to say about most of the people here. You know, Callie is our POB character. Everything is told from her first-person perspective. She is a teenage girl who gets wrapped up in things that she didn't want to get wrapped up in. She loves her brother. She loves her dad. She loves Michael. She loves a couple of boys, really. That's it. And that's all I can think of. You know, I can't think of anything else for her. And so at first she kind of seems like a completely personalityless blank slate. However, credit where it's due, she does things. You know, the story is changed and the direction of the story changes based on her actions and her choices. And at the end, she helps to save the day, but she doesn't do it herself. You know, she just subdues the bad guy and then allows the cops to come in and arrest everyone. So that's good. But at the same time, she isn't really special in any way. She is just the body that Helena chose to try and assassinate the senator with. So she just winds up getting caught up in things by pure coincidence. But then she also winds up being the best person for that position because she can reverse the control of the chip, which no one else seems to be able to do. And she also can work with Haydn and he trusts her and she trusts him. But I don't know, even in spite of all of that, who is Callie? Who is she? What drives her? What sort of dreams does she have? I really couldn't tell you. It feels like she popped into existence a year before the story started when she first became homeless, and then it feels like she fades away into nothingness after the story ended. So she doesn't feel like a hero, but she also doesn't feel like a normal person that just got swept up in all of this. And she also doesn't feel like an empty vessel that's just there to deliver the story either. So it feels like she's trying to be all three at once, which is very strange. I don't think I've ever seen that before. But even if she had just been stupid or annoying, she would be a lot less of a mess than trying to do all of this at once. Like, to be honest, I think I would rather she was just a blank slate, as for the other characters. I mean, again, there's really not a lot to say about them. Like, her dad just sort of pops up in the second book in order to give her a personal connection to the bad guy. And speaking of the bad guy, why exactly is he evil? Like, at one point, Callie just straight up asks him, why are you doing this? Is it just for money? And he says, yes. Like, there is nothing else to him. Also, he was only introduced three quarters of the way through the last book. So we get barely any time with him. Good job, guys. That's great. You know, once again, he's not like a symptom of a sick society. He's not a representative of some sort of awful system. He is just an evil, powerful man who wants more power. And I'm not saying that you can't do a villain like that, but you have to do, you know, something with them. You have to give us some time with them. You have to give them a little bit of personality. Maybe give them some sort of motivation or some sort of depth. Otherwise, they fail as a villain on a personal level. And that's what the bad guy does here. He fails on a villain as a personal level, and he fails as a symbol of any other sort of message that this book might have tried to send. And to be honest, the one character in this that I had any sort of attachment to at all was Sarah, you know, the girl from the institution who died and had a heart condition. Like, she was willing to die so that others could escape. And she's really only there to, you know, help out Callie and then make her feel bad sometimes when she thinks back and remembers it. But, hey, I felt something. You know, everyone else here just occupies a role in this society, but they do it very poorly because as I explained earlier, this society is nonsensical and not in a deliberate way. You know, Michael is homeless, but for the most part, he doesn't act like he's starving or desperate or anything like that. He's just, he's like, I don't know, hallmark homeless, where you're just a normal person who lives outside, I guess. I don't know. Haydn is somehow a teenager that set up a massive company and planned out a whole scheme involving bank fraud and political lobbyists. Again, he's like 18, but and he managed to do all this. But he had to be a teenager so that Callie could fall in love with him. Now remember, Starters was written back when authors of young adult novels tried, for the most part, to have age-appropriate love interest for their main characters. Nowadays, they just will openly have men in their 20s and 30s and beyond just like having sex with teenage girls. Like they just, they just do that and they see no problem with it, I guess. And then we have Helena, who is an old woman who became an assassin for some sort of anti-corporate slash anti-government group somehow. Like we know her motivation for it was that her granddaughter went missing, but we don't know anything else about how she, you know, became the person that they turned to for assassination. Dawson is some sort of government agent that shows up to help defeat the villains at the end. Like he, but he needed teenagers to help him somehow. And then, I don't know, when you isolate all of these characters and just look at them on their own, it becomes really obvious how strange and stupid many of them are. So Callie sort of falls in love with Blake in the first book, only to find out that he was actually the old man. And she's also sort of in love with Michael throughout all of this. And he's taken over by a different old man for a bit, you know, that random ender who kind of sexually harasses her, you know, he, he tries to hug her, he licks her face. He's just, he's generally creepy and sexually aggressive towards her. And again, this is one of the scenes that does kind of drive home the horror of the situation because like her friend is gone and this guy is wearing his skin. And at the beginning of the second book, there is a thing with her where she seems to feel weird about, you know, falling in love with the old man, even if she didn't know it was him at the time. And it seems to be maybe working towards something, but nothing ever comes of it because it turns out the old man is actually a hot teenage boy, so she doesn't need to feel weird about it. But then between Callie and Haydn, there's really nothing even resembling chemistry, you know, like just, here's two good-looking people of a similar age. They are kind of in love now, I don't know. And like, the thing is, I'm sure there have been plenty of people who rented bodies and then had sex or began relationships using those rented bodies, like, hell, again, in the first book, Blake and Helena were doing that. And this could have added to the horror or the injustice of the situation and it could have left everyone involved with weird confusing feelings that they don't know what to do with. Like, there's a lot of directions you could go with this, whether you're trying to be like dramatic or comedic or whatever. And none of those directions are taken, you know? And like, the thing is, if this just wanted to be a regular romance, then fine. But there's almost no regular romance in here. Like, I know I'm devoting an entire section of this video to it, so you'd think there would be, but there's really not that much. Like, by the end, I couldn't even tell you who Callie is in love with or if she's in a relationship with anyone. Like, I think she's in love with Blake at the end, but also he's barely in the second book. So maybe she's in love with Haydn, and I'm not sure how she feels about Michael. Like, I don't know why they would have a love triangle without having a resolution at the end. Or I guess it's not a love triangle so much as a Pentagon, because you have Callie, Blake, Michael, Haydn, and if you count Haydn as the old man as a separate one, then, you know, there's five. But yeah, by the end, there's no confession of love. There's no big kiss or anything. It's just, it seems almost like it's forgotten. And it kind of seems like the author didn't want the romance there, and if that's the case, then why did she include it? My first thought was that, you know, she put it in there to make it sell. Like, either that was her own idea, or the publisher really wanted her to do it, or something. I don't know. But at the same time, maybe this is something the author wanted to put in there. Like, maybe this was her vision. And if it was her vision, why didn't she commit to it? And if it's not there to, if it's just there to sell, like, if they think it'll make it appeal to a broader audience, then same story. Like, why, why not commit? I don't know. Like, why is there a romance here at all? I couldn't tell you. It's okay. I got it. Now, I know that's a pretty vague thing to say, but like, bear with me for a bit. What is Starters? You know, if I had to sum it up in just a sentence or two, how would I do that? Like, what is the emotional core of this book series? And I thought about that for a while, but I came up completely blank. You know, everything here feels like it was done on accident. You know, it feels like someone dumped some paint, paint onto a canvas, and then pretended that the resulting mess was purposeful. You know, they pretended that that was deliberate. That's what I wanted to do. Who was this written for? What is it trying to be? You know, is it trying to be an action-adventure story? Because if that's the case, it fails because it doesn't have a whole lot of action-adventure stuff in it. Is it trying to be about a girl in difficult circumstances who finds love and falls in love? Well, if that's the case, it fails because it doesn't have a whole lot of romance or anything in it. Is it trying to be a social commentary or satire? Well, then it fails because everything here is completely ridiculous. Like, is it trying to be something else? Like, I couldn't even begin to guess at what that something else would be. And if so, so if it's trying to be that something else, it failed at that. Like, I don't know if I've ever read a book series with this much of an identity crisis. I really don't. So what is starters? I can't tell you. And I read the damn thing. Starters feel so much like something that could only ever possibly exist as part of a trend. You know, not necessarily something that's bad, but just something that is very clearly trying to cash in and get some of that sweet, sweet Hunger Games money, you know? And that's why it feels like so many different things while also not really feeling like anything. It's not trying to be anything. It's grabbing random pieces and trying to assemble those pieces into the shape of what we've seen before, e.g., you know, the Hunger Games and other popular young adult dystopias. And from a distance that might work, but up close the differences become really, really stark. You know, when you first heard about starters, whether it was at the beginning of this video or even earlier, you probably would have just assumed it was yet another one of these, you know, Hunger Games ripoffs, but it really isn't. You know, once you go looking into it, it doesn't know what it wants to be. And so at the very least, I can say that it's unique. It's trying to rip off something much better, but its incompetence accidentally made it different. So, yeah, that's the main thing I have to say about starters. Like, it wasn't good and it wasn't entertainingly bad, but I do feel like I got something out of it. I don't know what that something is, but I got something out of it. And, well, that's something, I suppose. Oh my goodness, I love all of you so much. If you want your name on here, then consider donating to my Patreon page. You also get early access to videos and some exclusive content, which, you know, if you actually like me for whatever reason, then, you know, that's probably beneficial. And if you don't feel like doing that, then, you know, just like the video, comment, subscribe to the channel. That, you know, all that stuff. Goodbye.