The Last Dragon of the East
Feb. 20th, 2025 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraThe Last Dragon of the East, Katrina Kwan, 2024 fantasy romance novel. (Is this the romantasy I keep hearing about?) It wasn't good and honestly I mostly kept reading it out of a sort of perverse curiosity to see whether it might pull an interesting ending out of nowhere. Gorgeous Kuri Huang cover though.
I don't want to run on about my dislike but I have two somewhat general thoughts. One is that I'm not sure how well I think soulmate tropes (in this case red strings of fate) work in standalone original fiction - like, I will absolutely read fanfic with every possible version of soulmates, but in fic I'm already sold on the pairing. Without it, in something like this, it kind of just felt like love by authorial fiat instead of love by chemistry or character interaction on the page. I'm sure there's some orig-fic soulmate work I've liked... I very vaguely recall that one of the Pants Press comics people was doing a red string comic I liked (with some digging, I think this was Jen Wang's Strings of Fate)... but idk.
My other thought is that putting an author's note up front that this was a "fantasy intended for adult readers" was maaaybe not the best move for something that mostly read like YA in tone and writing style. Like, I get wanting to do a content warning, especially with the very YA cover, but phrasing it that way foregrounded that question of tone/style for me, and maybe that was not the most generous lens to be reading through.
I don't want to run on about my dislike but I have two somewhat general thoughts. One is that I'm not sure how well I think soulmate tropes (in this case red strings of fate) work in standalone original fiction - like, I will absolutely read fanfic with every possible version of soulmates, but in fic I'm already sold on the pairing. Without it, in something like this, it kind of just felt like love by authorial fiat instead of love by chemistry or character interaction on the page. I'm sure there's some orig-fic soulmate work I've liked... I very vaguely recall that one of the Pants Press comics people was doing a red string comic I liked (with some digging, I think this was Jen Wang's Strings of Fate)... but idk.
My other thought is that putting an author's note up front that this was a "fantasy intended for adult readers" was maaaybe not the best move for something that mostly read like YA in tone and writing style. Like, I get wanting to do a content warning, especially with the very YA cover, but phrasing it that way foregrounded that question of tone/style for me, and maybe that was not the most generous lens to be reading through.
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Date: 2025-02-21 06:15 pm (UTC)I haven't read Elfquest in a while, but they had soulmate stuff in there, and my recollection is that they did some interesting things with it, like "we are soulmates but don't especially like each other" and "we are soulmates but I'm in love with someone else" and stuff.