 Swoon is a parody, okay? I refuse to believe otherwise. You can tell me anything you want, I will not believe you, okay? Swoon is a paranormal romance that came out way back in 2009, and a bunch of people told me, hey, check it out, it's like a really bad paranormal romance. You might get a couple laughs out of it. And I finally got around to checking it out. And for the first half, yeah, I agree with them, it's just a really bad paranormal romance. I was laughing at it. But around halfway through, I realized 100% this is a parody of the genre. This is not meant to be taken seriously, and nothing you ever say will convince me otherwise. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. Before we go too much further, let's get out of the way what exactly a parody is. Parody, I mean, it's pretty simple at the end of the day, even though people use it in a lot of contexts where it doesn't fit. Usually you are trying to point out the absurdities of a genre or of a specific trope or cliche or something, and the way you do that is by taking that genre or trope or whatever else and just blowing it up to an absolutely absurd extreme. Like, you're not really changing anything, you're just taking it and kicking it up to 11. This is very similar to satire, but satire is usually meant to be serious, not always, whereas parody is explicitly comedic in nature. The 2000s and even the early 2010s had a lot of bad parody movies, because the scary movie came out and that one was a big hit, so then they made like 15 more of those, then they made like superhero movie, epic movie, disaster movie, and around the time Swoon came out, like I said, 2009, that was when Twilight was huge, and there were a bunch of books and movies that came out that were just like earnest copies of it, like, oh, let's get ourselves a slice of that pie, but there were also a fair number of parodies, and that included movies like Taint Light and Vampire Suck, both of which were parodies of the Twilight movies, and, um, man, they're not good movies, like, they're bad, but I'm not going to pretend I didn't laugh at a couple of points in them. Like, I promise, as long as you're with me, you will never get hurt. And if you saw my evermore video a couple of months ago, then you'll know that at first I thought that series might have been a parody of the paranormal romance genre as well, but as time went on, I realized, nah, okay, this is just, this is meant to be taken seriously, it's just very weird and silly while doing so. Now, a lot of parodies fail, and I'm including Vampire Suck in here because that's like, again, I'm not going to pretend I didn't laugh at a few points. It's not the worst movie I've ever seen, but it really does fail as a parody of Twilight because rather than taking all the weird aspects of Twilight and then kicking them up to 11 to show exactly how absurd and insane some of this stuff is, it just goes in weird directions. So it's like, lol, so random, look at this, isn't this so random and funny? And like, okay, sometimes, yeah, it is, but a lot of times it isn't. Like, what they should have done, just as an example, is made Edward much more of an asshole, whereas in the Vampire Suck, he's actually kind of nicer to Bella than he was in the original. And on that note, Bella actually has a lot more personality in Vampire Suck than she does in the actual Twilight movies. It's kind of odd, but like, again, they could have done something with that. Like, she could have literally just been a cardboard cutout that other characters carried around and they had like a voiceover for her dialogue and stuff, and other characters would just not acknowledge it and just react to her that way, like that would have been funny. But anyways, that's why a lot of parodies fail is because they just go for the lol so random route instead of actually understanding what makes this genre or trope weird and then blowing it up and making it even more weird. Now Swoon does not fall into this trap. OK, the story is about a girl named Candice, although she's usually called Dice because, you know, the main character of our young adult novel must have a weird quirky nickname. Why is this such a huge thing? I don't know why. But yeah, she's called Dice and her cousin slash best friend, whose name is Penelope or Penn for short, one day falls out of a tree and gets possessed by a ghost, like the ghost of a man named Sinclair, young blood powers who was hanged for murder in their town a couple hundred years ago. And I don't really know how to explain this. Like Penn doesn't know she's possessed at first, but she is acting really weird because Sinclair's influence is affecting her. But Candice figures it out and she talks to Sinclair a bunch and decides she wants to help him. And pretty early on in the story, Dice helps him leave her body and then he goes out and tries to get revenge and almost sort of becomes the villain of the story for a while. But also she loves him. And from here on out, I can't really explain everything about this story that is really funny and odd without going into spoilers. So if that's like the story of this is not good and it's very predictable, but I do still want to give warning for that. So if you're not wanting those, then goodbye. Still no date for the prom. Now, even though this book never comes right out and says it's a parody, there are several things that make me very, very certain that it is a parody. Number one being that the love interest in this is a sexy ghost. Like normally in this genre, they used creatures that are generally thought of as being like ethereal and beautiful. You know, that's why vampires were the big one and then angels were also really common. There were a couple of fairies. There were a weird number of gods of death who were there. A bunch of them were just like dudes who were immortal or otherwise had crazy magic powers. And here it's a ghost. Like I don't think ghosts are really thought of as being sexy in modern popular culture, at least. And on top of that, when Dice is first falling in love with Sinclair, he is in her cousin's body. Like he's not in a spirit form so she can see him and hear him, but she can't touch him or anything like you would imagine with a ghost. He is possessing her cousin's body, so he's speaking with her mouth and everything and Dice is falling in love with him. And no one ever mentions, hey, that's a little weird. Like that's just a thing that happens. And Dice also is not attracted to girls, so it's even stranger. And then later, though, he stops being a ghost because the ritual for her to get his soul out of Penn's body is to put it into a golem, which, I mean, golem like from Jewish folklore, you know, they're like big things made of clay that are supposed to be guardians of families and stuff. And I'll admit, I have not seen a golem anywhere else in this genre. I have not seen a golem as a love interest. And actually, at first I was thinking, oh, this might be kind of interesting. It is at least unique because, I mean, Dice and her family are Jewish in this book, so maybe they'll like lean into that and go into a lot of folklore surrounding it or something. And they don't, but, you know, there was potential at least. And Sinclair in his golem body looks like a regular dude. You know, he doesn't look like he's made of clay. And when they touch him, he feels like a normal dude and everything. He just is made of magical clay. But I just could not stop picturing the golem from an episode of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror, who's just made of clay. Like that's just what I was picturing the whole time because golems are not thought of as sexy. This is the voice I've got. Sounds like I should be selling egg creams in Brighton Beach. That's what we call Jewish humor. You don't have to understand it because the words sound funny. Like there's so many other creatures that she could have gone with, which are considered sexy. But here the author was, again, taking the absurdity of thinking like werewolves are hot or whatever and just blowing it up and putting it right in your face by showing you, hey, like, look, golem, is that sexy? No, then you understand how strange the rest of this is. The second thing that makes me very certain this is parody is the bad boy love interest, by which I mean Sinclair. His full name is Sinclair Youngblood Powers. But partway through the story, Dice gives him a nickname and just starts calling him Sin for short. The bad boy love interest is literally called Sin. Guys, that's even more on the nose than calling him Damon, which was weirdly common. Like it's a joke, guys. And the thing about Dice and Sin's relationship that really drives home how absurd this is and how it's odd that she would fall in love with him so quickly and how a lot of these love interests are like weirdly abusive and mean, just really big jerks, basically. All Dice knows about him is that he was hanged for murder a couple hundred years ago. Now he tells her the story of his life, which is actually kind of an interesting backstory. And he claims that he's innocent, but all she knows is that he was hanged for murder and he says he's innocent. And then she still helps him. You know, she still falls in love with him. She still helps him leave his pen's body, which he's possessed in. And when he becomes a golem, he decides to go out for revenge. Like he he's not killing people, but he wants to get revenge on the families of the people who killed him a couple hundred years ago. And the thing is, like I said, his backstory is kind of interesting and is tragic, and I did feel sorry for him. And had they just leaned into him being the villain from this point forward, then I think it could have worked fine as like a more serious, dramatic story, which is meant to be taken seriously. But that's not what they're doing here. So basically his way of destroying their reputations and ruining the families is just making them have sex. Yeah, because like he has like powers of persuasion, I guess you would say. And he uses those to just make people have sex with other people who like it like it's not assault exactly. But like he's that they're having sex with people they shouldn't be. You know, he's making them cheat on their spouses and stuff. And at one point where Dice like truly realizes, OK, we need to stop him because he's doing bad stuff here. He causes a bunch of old people to have an orgy, and then that causes a fire to start and nobody dies, but some of them get injured. And if you want to know what I'm talking about there, you're just going to have to read the book yourself because it's saying. But like that's what I'm getting at. Like these are he's doing some pretty bad stuff here. And again, if he was the villain, then sure, that could work. The villain is supposed to do villainous things, but he's really not. You know, throughout all of this, him and Dice are still very friendly with one another. And all of her attempts to stop him are extremely half-assed, to be honest. Because the story isn't really treating him like he's a villain. It's treating him like he's just a bad boy love interest, you know, exactly like a hundred others before, except this one is like kicking it up a notch. So we realize, OK, yeah, a lot of these love interests are genuinely pretty awful. The third thing that makes me think this is a parody is that there is a lot of sex in the story or a lot of sex talk, just just a lot, which is even stranger because I listen to this as an audio book and it starts and ends with something saying, this is from Audible Kids. And it has like a chorus of like eight children with really high pitched voices saying that. And at the end it goes, thanks for listening to Audible Kids. And so like this is clearly meant as a kids book. I don't know why they would say that if it has this much sex talk in it. But like again, at the beginning, when Penn is first possessed by Sinclair, he's just making her act really horny. And there is a scene very close to the beginning where they're all swimming in a lake and a dude like goes under the water and starts going down on Penn while he's down there. And she like she encouraged him to do it. And she specifically mentions that like when he's under there, his tongue doesn't feel wet, it feels rough. And I was like, are you sure this is a kids book? Like when I first read that, I'm not sure what was going on with that. And there's a bunch of other sex stuff in here, which is treated very casually. All things considered, like probably the most egregious example of this is when there's a bunch of kids that are hanging out at someone's house and they're just watching porn on a giant projector. Like they have a projector going across the entire wall of a room and they're just watching porn on it. And then Dice walks in and is like, oh, that's kind of weird. She describes it for a little bit. But she doesn't go like, why are you all watching this together? Like a normal person would or anything like that. And again, all of this is like very casual. And I think it's meant to contrast with the Puritanism of the rest of this genre. Like, I don't know, but normally sex is a very taboo subject and they barely bring it up if at all. So here I think they're just kind of poking fun at the idea. I don't know that this one is admittedly a little bit less of a parody thing and more of just doing something different. But either way, it was really funny. And the fourth and final thing, which makes me very certain that swoon was intended to be a parody is just the prose, like the way it is written. You know, and in fact, like I said, halfway through, I became instantly convinced that, OK, yeah, this is this is a parody. Like the first half, I was just thinking it was really badly done and funny. The second half, I was like, OK, parody and the exact moment that made me realize it was during the projector scene when they're watching porn on a giant projector. Dice describes a woman's genitals as a vagina the size of a walk-in closet because it's all big on the screen and everything. And I was like, OK, this is this is a parody. There's no way this was intended to be taken seriously by any human being ever. And there's a lot of other lines throughout that that are throughout just like that. Like, again, I kind of wish I hadn't listened to it as an audiobook because if I had an actual copy, I could like point to them and read a couple of them off. But there are a lot of like that that were very funny. There's one where she's describing how there's their town is almost entirely white people, but it's also very wealthy white people. And so the few who aren't are also very wealthy. And so she says around here, everyone is the same color, the color of money. Just, you know, shit like that. There's a lot of lines like that throughout. And I'm like, OK, this is not meant to be taken seriously. Swoon is a parody. Swoon is a joke. And it's great. It's a great joke. And I loved it. I loved reading it. I know there's a sequel. I might get to it at some point. I don't know that the first book ends pretty definitively. And again, it's not like it's a dramatic story where I want to know what happens next. I don't really give a shit. It's just it's a joke. So cool. We'll do that. It is it is a subtle parody, admittedly. You know, again, people tend to think of parodies through the lens of like all those crappy ones that came out in the 2000s and early 2010s because like that's what parody was back then. You know, it was epic movie where it would just come right out and be like, hey, look, I'm a parody. Look at me. I'm a parody. It would advertise itself that way and it would be really loud and obnoxious while watching slash reading it or actually, I guess, not reading because I don't know if there were many parodies like that that were books. But so Swoon is, you know, much more subtle than you might be used to. But it is 100 percent meant to be a parody. And it works amazingly. It works amazingly well. So like if you're looking to get a couple of laughs out of something, then go check out Swoon because I'm very glad I did. And I think you will be, too. Wow, you you're still watching. I I mean, I guess I appreciate it, but I'm not sure why. I mean, at this point, all that we have left is all these names here. These are my patrons and including my ten dollar and up patrons. Apo Savalainen, Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotis, Buffy Valentine, Carolina Clay, Dan Anceliovic, Dark King, Don Dio, Echo, Flax, Carcat Kitsune, Lexi DeLorm, Liza Rudikova, Lord Tiebreaker, microphone, Mist Boy, Peep the Toad, Robi Reviews, Sad Mardigan, Sillier the Vixen, Stone Stairs, Tesla Shark, Vaivictus and Wesley. These are all great people. You know, let me let me just let me tell you if you want to get your name on here, then consider donating to me once a month. Become a patron or if you don't feel like doing that or you just can't because, you know, you're like poor or whatever. No shame in that. 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