You Like What You Like
Feb. 27th, 2014 12:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shipperxIt's so funny to read book reviews on Good Reads. It's great having tons of reviews, but it brings home that people can like wildly different things. One person's four star review is another's "What the hell is THIS?!" And some of it really boils down to nothing but preference. Some of my biggest reactions are when someone flat-out admits to liking and/or disliking a certain trope and their like/dislike is the polar opposite of my own, or one I find the 'dislike' to be something I find to be inexplicable.
Examples of comments that made me go huh:
-- "I don't like it when the hero has been in love before..."
My Reaction: Wha-huh? Doesn't this cut out a LOT of potential stories and storylines? That seems terribly arbitrary.
--"I really liked the author's proper use of grammar..."
My Reaction: Um... this is a review of an AUDIO BOOK. What the heck are you talking about? Subject/verb agreement?
-- "I don't like a commoner involved with a titled person stories. I like them both to be aristocrats..."
My Reaction: What kind of classist B.S. is this? (Admittedly, the commoner/"beneath you" trope where classes intersect is one of my go-to kinks.)
-- The pervasive love of rich domineering assholes. There are SO many people who seem to love that archetype. My reaction to it this time basically came from a poll on an author's web site where she was asking which of her stories was her fans' fave, and the winner was the one where I spent waaaaaayyyyyyyyyy too much time mentally fuming re: the hero "What an ASSHOLE!!" The book was good overall (but not because of HIM), but the "hero" was a terrible asshat who needed to be taken down many a peg, but wasn't. Meanwhile waaaaayyyy down the poll list was my favorite of the writer's stories, the one where a bonafied nice person was the hero. I probably have a long musing post one day on the Uberwealthy Domineering Asshole archetype that seems so popular. Not today, but someday...
Examples of comments that made me go huh:
-- "I don't like it when the hero has been in love before..."
My Reaction: Wha-huh? Doesn't this cut out a LOT of potential stories and storylines? That seems terribly arbitrary.
--"I really liked the author's proper use of grammar..."
My Reaction: Um... this is a review of an AUDIO BOOK. What the heck are you talking about? Subject/verb agreement?
-- "I don't like a commoner involved with a titled person stories. I like them both to be aristocrats..."
My Reaction: What kind of classist B.S. is this? (Admittedly, the commoner/"beneath you" trope where classes intersect is one of my go-to kinks.)
-- The pervasive love of rich domineering assholes. There are SO many people who seem to love that archetype. My reaction to it this time basically came from a poll on an author's web site where she was asking which of her stories was her fans' fave, and the winner was the one where I spent waaaaaayyyyyyyyyy too much time mentally fuming re: the hero "What an ASSHOLE!!" The book was good overall (but not because of HIM), but the "hero" was a terrible asshat who needed to be taken down many a peg, but wasn't. Meanwhile waaaaayyyy down the poll list was my favorite of the writer's stories, the one where a bonafied nice person was the hero. I probably have a long musing post one day on the Uberwealthy Domineering Asshole archetype that seems so popular. Not today, but someday...
