 So, almost one and a half years ago, I bought a giant stack of a bunch of Angel Young Adult Romance books. And if you didn't see that video when it came out, you can check it out right now. And basically, I bought just a bunch of them because I was wondering why angels specifically were so popular in this genre. Like, you know, I'm talking about young adult romances where, you know, Teen Girl falls in love with Supernatural Boy. And a lot of them were, you know, just vampires, because Twilight. But after vampires, the most popular were definitely angels. I, you know, bought all those and I have spent a lot of time reading through all of them. I have read the entire Fallen series, Hush Hush, Halo, and now I've read Unearthly. We'll get back to this in a minute or two. And I have not yet read Angel Fire, like I know that was in the stack, excuse me, but from what I've seen since I bought that, that one seems to be more of like an action adventure story with some heavy romance elements than just a full-on romance story with a little bit of fantasy elements, which is what Twilight clone typically is, or at least how I define it. And if I'm wrong on that, like I'm still going to read Angel Fire at some point, but if I turned out to be wrong on that, then I will do something. I will admit my fault. And after so much, I have come to some conclusions about how and why angels just dominated the subgenre. You know, it wasn't fairies or werewolves or something. Seriously? Right now? Or the lights are going to start doing that? After reading so much, I have come to some interesting conclusions about how and why angels just completely dominated the subgenre and why it wasn't like werewolves or fairies or leprechauns or something that teenage girls wanted to swoon over. And before I do that, though, I do want to go over unearthly. I'll go over the whole series I do at the other books here. And I will do basically the same thing I've done for the other series where, you know, I give a quick summary of it and go through like all the problems as they come up and mention issues with, you know, story characters, world building, all that. But I'm just going to do it in less detail. Like you might notice I have exactly one tab in this one and then the others also have like one or two each because while I maybe could have gone through and made like a forest of tabs and taken tons of notes and everything to go over this, I feel like I would just be repeating myself, you know, like I went over a lot of the same problems with things like the Halo trilogy and the thing is unearthly, yes, it is bad, but it's not bad in an entertaining way where we can laugh at how absurd and incompetent it is. And it's not bad in an interesting way where I can really dive in and examine what went wrong here and how it could have been fixed. It's just for the most part really boring, you know, it's, it pretended to have a story for a little while at least, but it pretty much entirely focuses on the bland main character and her bland romance. So if you're not interested in this and you just want to get to my main conclusions then feel free to skip over this. It's all about emo music and my immortal by the way, like I promise that'll make sense later, but yeah if you just want to skip to that then go ahead, but the unearthly bit here we go. This is the introduction song, it's not very good, but it's not too long. So this series is about a teenage girl named Clara Gardner who is one quarter angel, she's an angel blood and not only that she actually knows about this, it's not a secret that she discovers early on in the story or anything, she just has spent her whole life knowing that, yeah, her mom is a half angel but her father is a human and as a result she's an angel blood and she has certain powers and abilities that regular people don't. And I'll be honest, I think this is an okay setup. We don't have to waste time with her, like finding out about the magical world and she has to like investigate even though we all know what the premise is, like we just skip over that bit. Like she has grown up in this world and even though it is a secret from the rest of humanity, it's not a secret from her or from her mom or her brother because she also has a younger brother who's also a quarter angel. And plus she is a bit weaker than other angel bloods, you know, she's not just gonna pop up as a half angel and then she'll just have all these amazing powers because she's the protagonist, you know, there's not a point where they go, oh my god, she is the most powerful half blood in over a thousand years or anything like that, you know, she is weaker and so at least at first it seems like, okay, she's gonna have to work a little bit harder and struggle a little bit more to reach her goals. And that didn't wind up happening but, you know, it was at least a good setup. Now at the very beginning of this book she has a vision of being in the middle of a forest while it's on fire and then her saving a boy and preventing him from dying and apparently all angel bloods get these visions like this is her destiny, this is her purpose in life, I'm just gonna call it destiny going forward. And after examining some of the trees and stuff in her vision, her and her mom realized that this forest must be taking place somewhere near Jackson, Wyoming, which is here, if you're unaware, and so her mom just packs up their family and moves them from Southern California to Jackson, Wyoming, and that's mainly where the story begins. So here's an issue, the visions are just not at all explained. Like, we don't know how the angels really know about them, we don't know what these visions are supposed to lead towards, we don't know why they exist, etc. Like the thing about visions and prophecies and destiny or whatever, which I'm not a fan of generally, but usually when it pops up, especially in fantasy, it's building towards some sort of greater purpose. You know, we have like, oh, this person is destined to grow up and slay the dark lord, or this person is destined to become king and then unite all of Great Britain under his command. Like, you know, there's some sort of grand purpose for it. Whereas this, we don't get anything like that. It's just like, okay, all angels have some sort of task that they're supposed to do, and maybe you could say it's part of God's plan or something, but if it's God's plan, why does he really need to give them visions? Oh, okay, it's just there because the author couldn't think of another way to start the story off. You know, like, I just don't like prophecies and visions in general. You know, the only series I can think of at the top of my head that does them well is the Percy Jackson series. And that's because, well, the prophecies always come true, but they never come true in the way you expect them to. And that's because they're vague. You know, you have to hit that balance between being super vague and just not giving away the whole story. Like, you know, you know what I mean, man, man, you know what I mean? And plus, when we get to the end of this book, something different than Clara's vision happens. Which means that destiny is flexible and can be changed depending on your actions. Which means it's not really destiny, it's just one vision of a possible future. So how is this supposed to work? I know I'm harping on this a bit much, but it is foundational to the story of this series, or at the very least the story of the first book in the series. And it really does not make any sense when you get down to it. But anyways, when Clara is in Wyoming, she meets the boy from her vision at her school, his name is Christian. Okay, and she also meets another girl who is a half angel. And her name is Angela. These are the most creative names for characters in an angel story since Bethany Church. So it turns out actually that there are several angel bloods nearby in this area. Like, there's a bunch of half angels and quarter angels and stuff. And that leaves me wondering, how common are angel bloods? Like, Jackson, Wyoming is not a big town. It's only a couple of thousand people. So if there are this many in this area, is there like a reason that they're congregating here? Is it just coincidence? Are they this common everywhere? If they're this common everywhere, it shouldn't be a secret. Somebody would have let it slip by now and all of humanity would have figured it out. Oh, okay, that's just weird. Like, there's too many. Like, if you're gonna do a setting like this where there's magic, but it's hidden from humanity, you gotta know how much magic stuff to put in there. You know, you can't put too much. Otherwise, it just feels unbelievable that it would all stay hidden. And it also just doesn't feel magic anymore. But you also can't put too little because, well, then it's just a regular mundane story. And plus, this bit, I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail about. So don't worry if you find it upsetting. But when Angela explains to Clara that she's half angel, she does this like right after they met, too. Like, she meets her and then like maybe a day later, they run into each other again. And Angela just sees that Clara's angel blood. And so she decides to explain, oh, I'm also a half angel. But while doing all this, she says that her dad was a black wing, which is a, you know, a fallen angel, which, you know, they obviously have black wings. That's why they call him that. Someone who is cast out of heaven, basically. And she mentions in detail. She tells the story in fairly explicit detail how a black wing stalked and then raped her mother. And that's how she was conceived. What a f***ing start a conversation like that. I just sat down. Girl, you just met. You two just met. Why would you ever in your life tell someone who is still a stranger that? For a couple of reasons. One, wouldn't that be kind of like a personal thing that you don't talk about with very much? Even with like close friends and family and stuff. That just seems like something that you would only bring up when the situation really demanded it. And two, just why would you introduce yourself like that? Just say, yeah, my dad was a black wing. And then leave it at that. Like, you really don't need to go into more detail. And if the author still wanted to have such a dark backstory for her, then just have it be hinted at or have her bring it up later on when it becomes relevance, because it's not relevant here. And honestly, I don't think it's ever really relevant. So just why? That was just weird and unpleasantly surprising. So anyways, Clara tries to start dating Christian so that she can get close to him and she'll be there to save him when the fire happens. But it turns out pretty quickly that she likes a different boy that she meets named Tucker. And honestly, most of the rest of the book is about Clara and Tucker just dating and getting to know each other, plus her trying to hide her secret, the trying to hide the fact that she's an angel from him. And I will say that this section of the book is, it's okay. You know, it's not awful. They do have some genuine chemistry. I do mean that Clara and Tucker, like you can get why they would like each other. It's not like a super deep romance or anything, but there's more to it than just I think you're pretty. So I did enjoy that at least. The problem is that it really lacks the cute moments that romances need to thrive. An example of this and how the book kind of skirts on the border of being almost kind of good sometimes is this one scene where Tucker and Clara are out in the wilderness, or not the wilderness, they're at a national park and they run into a woman who is missing her daughter and then Clara just helps her, gives her a few directions and then Tucker is confused. And you see part of Clara's angel powers is that she just speaks every human language, which is a little weird, but okay. And it turns out that the woman they talked to was speaking Korean. So then she has to quickly come up with an excuse for why she speaks it. She tells him, oh yeah, I had a friend back in California who spoke it, so I just learned some. And the thing is, it's not really a scene. I know I said it was a scene, but it's not. It's like one paragraph long and you get less detail in the story than I just gave you. Like I'm not even really summarizing so much as stretching it out right now. And the thing is, if that was an actual scene, I think it would have been pretty funny, but it's not. It's just like the narrator saying post-hoc, oh yeah, this happened, which is just not very satisfying to read about. And that's what I mean when I say this series lacks the cute moments that romances need. You know, they thrive off of those little, little things that make you realize, okay, yeah, these people really do love each other and it makes you connect with them a little bit more. And so without that, even though Clara and Tucker have some chemistry, it's just not enough. And then we reach the end of the story where Clara sees the fire that's going on and she realizes, oh, this is going to be the thing that is going to kill Christian. But she also realizes that Tucker is in severe danger and so she flies off to save him and leaves Christian in the fire in his area. He doesn't die, I'll get to that in a sec. But she leaves him and that's also how Tucker finds out she's an angel blood. And Christian manages to live because it turns out he's an angel blood too, because everyone is in this area. And so he's able to fly himself to safety. You know, this may have been kind of interesting if her choice had had real consequences. Like, you know, if she had gone off to save Tucker instead and that meant that Christian died, that may have been interesting. That's not a guarantee. It could have, if you did it wrong, could very easily have come across as the main character is a selfish awful person who lets someone die. But if you did it right, then maybe in the later books you could have the guilt of that eat away at her and have it change her as a person and have her decide, you know what, I'm going to always save everybody rather because she doesn't want to leave anyone to die again like she did that. Like, you could maybe do that, but it would take some effort and this one just kind of sidesteps that by just saying, oh yeah, everyone survived. There was no problems here. This is also when the characters realize that the future can apparently change, but they're unaware of the consequences of that. I've read the entire series and I'm also unaware of the consequences. I guess not fulfilling your purpose just isn't a problem anymore. However, I will say that this is an okay cliffhanger. It made me wonder what the consequences would be for her not fulfilling her purpose and like, okay, she was supposed to save Christian and she didn't, but Christian still survived. So I guess it doesn't really change anything, but I was wondering what might become of that, but nothing became of it. And so that's it. That's the end of the first book unearthly and the biggest problems here that I haven't mentioned already are one, why do we really care about Clara following her destiny? You know, like, we don't even know why Angel Bloods have destiny. Like, is it a directive from God or something? Like it's just, yeah, like the author says that they have that and she didn't really think it through or bother explaining it. So there's that. And we just don't know Christian that much so we don't care that much if he lives or dies. So why should we care about all this? I don't know. And another issue is that Clara is just too perfect and too boring. Like, I've seen worse Mary Sue characters but she just doesn't really have any flaws or anything and the one tab I put in this book kind of explains my reasoning here. I don't know what I think. He's managed to tear his gaze away from the dish towel and it's now looking at me again. You're not normal, Clara. You try to pretend you are but you're not. You talked to a grizzly bear and it obeyed you. Birds follow you like a Disney cartoon or haven't you noticed? And for a while after you came back from Idaho Falls, Wendy thought you were on the run from someone or something. You're good at everything you try. You ride a horse like you were born in the saddle. You ski perfect parallel turns your first time on the hill. You apparently speak fluent French and Korean and who knows what else. Yesterday I noticed that your eyebrows kind of glitter in the sun and there's something about the way you move. Something that's beyond graceful. Something that's beyond human even. It's like you're something else. And that right there is a pretty good microcosm of the problem with Clara Gardner. She is too perfect. Like all the characters just love her except for the villains. You know all her problems are just solved too quick. Like she's just perfectly beautiful. She's good at everything. Like it's really difficult to get attached to someone like that. Especially when they don't really have anything else going on for them. Like there's just not much to her personality beyond that. Like what are her hopes and dreams and what are her likes and dislikes. Like there's just there's not much there. Overall though I've read worse. And then we move on to book two which is called the hallowed. And this one is very much the same. You know there's a lot of just dull stuff in there which isn't very fun to read and it's not very fun to talk about either. And one thing I kind of liked about the first book was how it seemed like at first that there was going to be a love triangle but then it was just kind of unceremoniously tossed aside. Like it was made very clear that Clara didn't really like Christian that much. She was in love with Tucker. And in the second book it seemed to also be following that path but then the third book comes around and then love triangle comes back. Which is really fucking obnoxious but at least in this one we don't have to put up with that. Which is good. And then in this one there's some fallen angels wandering around doing something evil I guess. Like they were brought up once or twice in the first book as well but we never really find out exactly what they're doing. It's barely explained even by the end of the series. Like I know they need some powerful angel bloods to do their plan whatever their plan is. It has something to do with hell I think. But I mean even maybe I could figure it out if I went and like reread the last 100 pages of the last book but I'm not gonna do that. It's just it's dumb. Okay is what I'm getting at. We don't know exactly what the conflict is here. And we also learn partway through this book that Clara is actually not one quarter angel. She's three quarters angel. See her mom was a half angel yes but her father was not a human. He was a full-blooded angel. So this actually doesn't change the story that much. It's really just there to make Clara look cool which I mean I already kind of mentioned the issue here. Here she's just too perfect. She's good at everything and now it's also coming right out and just saying yeah she's way more powerful than the average angel blood. And I don't think it affects the story that much either so it's it's just there to say yeah she's cooler. And so that bit at the beginning where I thought the setup that she was only a quarter angel was pretty good is not there anymore. One subplot in this book that I genuinely did like though is one where Clara's mom dies. You see Clara knows that her mom is over a hundred years old at this point and as far as she knows like half angels are just immortal because her mom is you know very old but she only looks like she's around 40 and she's still healthy as far as she can see. But it turns out that half angels live around 120 years. Like once they start approaching the 120 year mark they just very quickly get sick and deteriorate in age and then they die. And her mom is reaching that expiration date. And you know watching that happen and she dies near the end of the book watching that happen is actually pretty good. You know both the audience and Clara have to sit here and watch her waste away. You know we really feel the despair and the sadness of that and the helplessness. You know like if you've ever seen someone die of something like cancer which is what they tell everyone in town it is. If you've ever seen someone die of that like just watching them slowly waste away and knowing that you can't do anything is genuine it's awful. You know and the book gets that across pretty well. Like if I had to guess I would say that the author has lost someone that way. And you know it works pretty well. And then at the end she you know like I said her mom dies and she briefly goes up to heaven and she doesn't get to talk to her mom again but she does like see her off in the distance and her dad makes it clear that hey you'll you'll see her again one day. And it's it's a really sweet heartwarming moment. I did genuinely like genuinely like that. So I think that subplot is one of the parts of this series that is you know not terrible. Like there's good bits in here. And then the ones have I put in here is more confusing than anything. It's not that God doesn't like it. She explains it's that angels don't live in linear time like you and I do which makes having a relationship with a human woman nearly impossible since that would require the angel to stay grounded in the same time for a sustained period. Cool I don't know what the hell that means. It's just an excuse to say how angel-human relationships aren't that common even though they seem very common based on the number of angel bloods running around. And finally we get to book three which is boundless and I don't have the dust jacket for this one. I bought it used and it said it was in good condition which I mean it is but it didn't mention that the dust jacket was gone which is annoying. Like I would have paid an extra 50 cents for that but okay whatever. So this one picks up quite a while later. Clara and all her friends and stuff are now in college and I do like that actually. I like how this story takes place over the course of a long time period and they do grow up over the course of it. It's not like a lot of genre contemporaries where they have like their whole romance and saving the world plot and all that take place over the course of like six weeks like Fallen did that it was one and a half months and it was just it was weird you know. People don't change that much in such a short amount of time and so having it actually take place over a longer period does help with that. So it's a small detail but I enjoyed it. Now Clara and Tucker have temporarily parted ways like they're on a break they're not dating anymore. The reason for that being the author says so because she wanted to bring back the love triangle I guess so for a period of this book Christian is Clara's kind of sort of almost boyfriend which is just annoying like you know it's a romance story we're here for the romance we're not here for the will they won't they especially when the will they won't they question has already thoroughly been answered and her and Christian just don't have much chemistry so that's annoying throughout this book we see some more Fallen angels going around doing stuff they're a bit more active than they were in the first two Angela has a baby with a full-blooded angel so her baby is also three quarters like they call them triplare and apparently there's only seven on the earth at any given time how that works is never explained but I think we're used to that by now and then Angela just decides to go to hell because we need a climax and there really is no reason for it like some fallen angels are talking to Angela and they're like hey you want to come down to hell and it's not even like they have to trick her into it or they give her some sort of bargain and she winds up signing away her soul or anything like that they literally just say hey you should come down to hell it's fun and she just decides to go with it because we need a climax and then Clara gets her out of hell by going down there and then talking to her because she's just that cool and that persuasive and that amazing and then on top of that like throughout most of this book her father has been teaching her to summon a sword made of glory which in this context glory is like the power of god I guess and Clara stabs like the leader of the fallen angels with it and at first it seems like she killed him but no she actually like cleansed him of all his sins I guess and then he goes back up to heaven because I guess that's a thing that can happen you know one of the surest signs of a Mary Sue is when they can just cleanse people of evil like you know they don't even have to sully their hands by killing bad guys or anything they just make the bad guys good again because they're just that cool and that does kind of tie into what I mentioned earlier where she just kind of convinces Angela to leave hell even though Angela went there willingly like you know this whole ending is just an excuse to show off how amazing Clara is and I don't want to use the term Mary Sue again because like there's just some criteria that need to be met before I can really say that and it's overused but she comes close she comes pretty close and that's the end of the story they live happily ever after Clara gets back with Tucker you know the drill by now so like I said this series very very dull but hey it's not awful you know it's it's not like there's any parts which are truly like offensive or rather there's very few parts that are like truly offensive or truly truly stupid like there's just a lot of bits that are kind of dumb and a lot of bits that are boring and the only thing about this series that I will genuinely say is awful from start to finish is the prose you know the way it's written like here's just one example she's lying I can feel it like she has a neon sign that says lying flashing over her head like that that's just one line yes but there's a lot of those sprinkled throughout this series like they're not even funny bad they're just stupid like obviously for starters there's that's telling not showing you know if you wanted to show that she was lying then just have be like I saw her eyelid twitch and I knew that she was not telling the truth or you know something like that and this lines like that it makes it seem like it's just trying to be quirky and not like other girls which doesn't really fit with Clara's personality you know you can sometimes get away with having narration like that if the it's first person and the characters are just like that but Clara very much isn't so it's just weird and then you know throughout the whole series it's just not particularly good you know so the prose I will genuinely say yeah that's that's pretty awful and then this just just this black wings are unlikely to harm you directly dad says there's still angels after all and to hurt someone on the side of good goes against our design it would cause even a black wing a great deal of pain that's why they prefer to use minions to inflict any physical damage okay so apparently we're finding out like a third of the way through the final book that black wings just can't physically harm people but um do you remember how the first time we hear about black wings is when we hear about one of them raping somebody is this implying that rape isn't harming someone I just okay yeah we're not I don't want to I don't want to get into that yeah so this is a lazy entry in an oversaturated genre you know I'm not even gonna say like oh it's just one more of these books like because it's not this one feels lazy you know Halo was equally boring as this or actually I would say it's a little bit less boring but it was close to being this boring but at least that one was written by a 16-year-old girl who felt like she was trying you know she just didn't have the skill to make it work unearthly just feels lazy it feels like no one cared about it and I just want to forget about it as soon as I can so yeah that's that's all I have to say about that series so we'll move on to my thoughts on the whole genre now guys your harmonies were a little pitchy Gordon you're amazing talent recognizes talent so the entire genre of young adult supernatural romance uh quick refresher this is basically just things that we're trying to copy twilight you know a teen girl meets a supernatural boy and they fall in love usually there's some sort of love triangle thrown in there or there's some sort of bigger supernatural conflict that the supernatural boy ties into and the girl has to somehow also tie into it's not that important and many of these stories just straight up went with vampires because that's what twilight did and vampires were like trendy and they were easy and they just didn't need to think about it that much but most of them did change it you know they went with other types of creatures like aliens or fairies or ghosts there was a fair amount of uh just magical boys like boys that were somehow involved in some sort of magic society like wizards or something like that there was a fair amount of those but like I said earlier angels were by far the most popular and the reason for that is due to emo music and my immortal and when I say my immortal I don't mean the evanescent song I mean the harry potter fanfiction now that sounds stupid I know but let me explain so in the aughts which is when this genre really got started emo culture was probably at its peak or emo subculture was probably at its peak like it seriously was everywhere if you're if you're my age you know exactly what I'm talking about there were tons of people with like the hair and the fashion and the music was all over and uh there were tons of like books and stuff that also just were buying into that culture and if you for whatever reason don't know what I mean when I say emo music uh here's a couple of examples I'm not necessarily talking shit on any of those because in some cases I did like this stuff but you know that's what it was it was emo subculture and when you get down to it this subculture was all about embracing strong emotions in fact that's where the term emo comes from like particularly embracing sadness on we and hopelessness and that's why it resonated with so many teenagers and young people like you know it's just oh yes I also feel sad I also feel hopeless like a lot of them just bought into that and the emo subculture looks really silly from the outside like you know when I was a kid they were the butt of a lot of jokes like just a lot a lot both in popular culture and just among other people like I was around 15 or 16 when it really died down at least in my generation and uh even I was a huge loser at that time I was still one of the people that made fun of the emo kids you know we we all looked down on them which in retrospect yeah it was harmless but that's what it was people largely disliked them and then that brings me to my immortal now my immortal is a harry potter fanfiction and it is the worst fanfiction ever written I did do a read through of it myself so if you want to check that out go ahead and see what I'm talking about but my immortal was 100 percent a troll now I know there's been a lot of debate on this over the years but like guys it was not sincere like some people think it was a sincere person who tried to write this and just did such a shit job like no that that would not have happened for a lot of reasons a couple of them being that they would misspell words but they would misspell the same word like eight different ways and there's no way you would do that on accident like that that's purposeful and another example being that at one point in the story they reference st mongos which is a wizarding hospital which is never mentioned in the movies but the author says that she never read the books and only watched the movies so how would she know about st mongos like you know it's there's a lot of reasons why it's definitely a troll and this story was very much a parody of self-indulgent terrible fanfictions which have always been popular like and they probably always will be popular but you know it was very much a parody of those but what a lot of people seem to miss is that it's also a parody of that emo subculture which was super big at the time it was written you know all the characters are constantly dressed in all black you know they constantly talk about how life is meaningless except for their bae and for sex they characters like just will literally drink blood uh the music you know they constantly talk about how amazing my chemical romance and some other emo bands are uh harry potter insists on calling himself vampire potter which when when i was young i went to school with a guy who insisted people call him lucifer like he was an emo kid who called him that like that's why we made fun of them if you're unaware like they they were sometimes pretty silly we're all pretty silly especially when we're young but that's why people did it and you know there's just a lot of things like that in my immortal which we're making fun of emo kids and this is really just one example of how they were mocked like it it was pretty popular for a while like i was saying and when the emo people emo people when the emos heard about this and they started to realize that okay yeah some of this stuff we do is kind of silly they started to change a little bit you know their their culture changed and eventually they went from more of a life sucks message to life sucks but there are bright spots particularly with romantic love like think about how often you saw that either in music or whatever else where they're talking about how oh life is terrible life is hopeless but the one bright spot here is my bae and as long as we're together we can fight back against this terrible cruel heartless world like you know that was pretty common and so when all of these young adult supernatural romance books came out and tried to ape on twilight success a lot of them really leaned into the darker themes or at least into the darker aesthetics like if you don't believe me you can just look at some of the covers for these things like twilight really was not a dark story not in terms of theme not in terms of aesthetics or anything like that it it wasn't about how life is awful except for kind of the beginning part of new moon but that's the worst book by far it it wasn't about that really but a lot of the imitators tried to be you know and then enter angels like i said i would finally get to the point angels are just inherently dark and light at the same time you know they're made in god's image but they also fell from grace you know they help humanity but they are also demons in hell who do all of satan's uh lake work you know they're the ones that torture you after you die if you were bad uh and in the popular culture they are beautiful and ethereal so it's not like you really needed to change up the mythology that much to get people thinking oh yeah i wish i had an angel bf like you could just do it and of course this also gave them opportunity for bigger conflicts there's this big war between god and lucifer there's fallen angels there's regular angels sometimes demons and fallen angels are different things but you know it's not important let's not go with that sometimes there's nephilim and so you know there's a lot of these different things which are just ripe for conflict and the reason that angel stuff isn't really remembered fondly and in fact i would go so far to just stretch this out to this entire the twilight clone genre is that the protagonists are just too bland you know you can sometimes get away with having uh bland characters or bland protagonists and just bland characters in general i wouldn't recommend it i think that in all cases it would be improved if they were better but you can sometimes get away with it like if you're writing a spy thriller or we're talking about an action movie or something you can usually get away with that because those are about what happens it's not so much about who's doing those things you know what i mean like when you're watching a james bond movie james bond just isn't a very compelling character but he's still been around forever because you know we're more interested in what the bad guys plan is and we want to see it stopped and we want to watch the car chases you know that sort of thing so while james bond would be better if he was a deeper character and some of the more recent movies have tried to make him a deeper character uh they don't really need to do that in order to have a successful film whereas romance is the exact opposite of this like this one is 100 about the people and not so much the things that the people are doing and the events that are happening to them like we need to understand these people and we need to understand their connections with one another and we need to like them you know we we need to be attached to them and think like oh yes i also sometimes fall asleep at inappropriate times or something like that we need to connect with them on some level and pretty much all the entries in the genre didn't do that they just went with the pure self-insert wish fulfillment route which i mean that's fine if that's what you're into that's fine but i've noticed that many of the people who were fans of these types of books back in the day they don't really look back on them that fondly like they don't say oh man i love those when i was a kid they say yeah i liked those when i was younger but they're pretty stupid they might still hold some nostalgic value but they'll just straight up say yeah those are they were pretty bad and the reason for that being that the main characters were just bland you know if anyone had bothered to make a twilight clone where the heroine was not awful which i already read it it's called hush hush you know and that is not an amazing series but it is at least decent you know i'm i'm gonna remember it longer than i'll remember unearthly and i read that like a year earlier and in addition to the boring main characters oftentimes they would bring in that you know supernatural conflict but they wouldn't really bother giving it the time it needed to develop so what you would wind up with is a story that was like 80 to 90 percent romance and teenage drama but all of that seems even stupider and pettier than it already does because like aren't y'all supposed to be saving the world you know you're sitting there thinking aren't you supposed to be saving the world and sometimes they would spend a little bit more time on that but it would often come at the cost of well the romance because you know a lot of times it's not even really focusing on romance so much as focusing on the main girl pining after the bad boy vampire or angel or wherever because he's just out of the picture he's not really in the story so either way though they are going too far in one direction or the other and they aren't hitting that balancing act that you need to have this sort of thing and twilight for all its flaws was mostly just the edward and bella show like stephanie meyer understood that yeah this is just about the two of them falling in love and everything else is secondary and these didn't understand that so with boring main characters and the bigger conflict taking a back seat it just completely falls apart and that's about all yeah so i am i am still searching for a good twilight clone you know like i said hush hush is the closest i've come so far but i do genuinely want to find one of these where i can look at it and say you know what that author tried i was attached to what was going on it wasn't terrible i i enjoyed that and i don't regret spending my time reading it like i will find one of those one day however as a final note to this video i want to note that angel romance was really only one half of the coin because you see the emo subculture was not just focused on romance but they did really love their angels so when they wrote angel young adult novels about half of them were romance and i guess you would say they were more uh aimed at girls but then the other half were fantasy adventure romps and those were mostly aimed at boys and i found a couple of those lately so uh join me sometime far in the future i suppose when i finally get around to talking about why angel fantasy adventures were so popular it it's not really that much of a mystery like people just liked them goodbye if you watch this far thank you so 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