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A review by bruhcheesee
If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
fast-paced
2.0
yawn. empty characters, no emotions, tensions rise and fall in passing with seemingly no effect on anyone, weird character motivations, extremely obvious foreshadowing, overuse of the word spliff.
this book suffers from a kind of genre-costuming. author clearly dearly loves all the things that entail "dark academia", but comes from a world of hindsight that understands it only as a disected collection of bulletpoints to use to move shit along and be "aesthetically pleasing".
also suffers from a severe case of telling-and-not-showing: instead of getting the time to understand everyone's personalities, the author quite literally lists one-by-one what everyone's weaknesses and strengths are (like literally, actually, the author writes down word for word in succession how to understand these characters in the first act); devolves them into charicatures (merideth boobed boobily, alexander smoked a spliff and is a druggy, promiscious gay guy who will fuck anybody, etc, all stereotypes); and tells us howhomoerotic and insane the tension and chemistry is between oliver and james is when we literally have seen zero interactions that communicate this. like i couldnt really even fill in the top brackets where it asks if the characters are lovable, if the book is character driven or if there's character development in the first place, cause i can't tell. they seem literally as empty as they started, like when you used to play with dolls or whatever and you would make telenovela shit happen to them. the characters are just the plastic vehicle with which a story trying to be devestating and shocking is told.
in conclusion: yawn.
this book suffers from a kind of genre-costuming. author clearly dearly loves all the things that entail "dark academia", but comes from a world of hindsight that understands it only as a disected collection of bulletpoints to use to move shit along and be "aesthetically pleasing".
also suffers from a severe case of telling-and-not-showing: instead of getting the time to understand everyone's personalities, the author quite literally lists one-by-one what everyone's weaknesses and strengths are (like literally, actually, the author writes down word for word in succession how to understand these characters in the first act); devolves them into charicatures (merideth boobed boobily, alexander smoked a spliff and is a druggy, promiscious gay guy who will fuck anybody, etc, all stereotypes); and tells us how
in conclusion: yawn.