It’s been a while since I released a book review! I’ve been focused on reviewing The Legend of Vox Machina and the latest FromSoft game, Elden Ring, but I recently finished reading Malice and want to get my thoughts on the book out there before I dive into the second book in the series. I found the book to be a bit of a mixed bag, which I was led to expect anyway—some people really don’t seem to enjoy this book, but still like John Gwynne’s Shadow of the Gods, so I came into this feeling like I was either going to love or hate this book. So, let’s get into the spoiler-free review of Malice, the first book in John Gwynne’s The Faithful and the Fallen.

In this post, I’m going to talk about five tropes in storytelling that I absolutely loathe. Some of them I hate because they are fundamentally awful, others because they’re overdone, and still more simply because they run counter to my personal tastes and wants. This is all largely my subjective opinion, so some of these may be tropes that you enjoy!

let’s talk about my praise and criticism for The Legend of Vox Machina: Season One. This might seem a little all over the place, but I’m going to try to condense it in a way that’s cohesive and understandable, rather than random and scattered. This isn’t a review, necessarily, they’re just the spoiler-y thoughts I wanted to present but could not in my spoiler-free reviews. If you want my star ratings, I’d suggest going back and reviewing my previous five posts for The Legend of Vox Machina’s first season.

In today’s spoiler-free post, let’s talk about the entirety of the first season of The Legend of Vox Machina as a complete whole: the good and the bad. If you’ve seen my prior reviews, you know how I felt about each episode in this first season, but how do I feel about the entire thing now that it’s over?

Today I want to talk about my own experience with getting a vasectomy, start to finish, in the hopes that it will encourage others to just get out there and get this thing done. I’ll be going over my personal reasons, how I convinced the doctor to do it, what the procedure was like, and how recovery went!

Dark content has been prevalent in stories of all kinds for a long time. However, it hasn’t always been as pervasive or in-your-face as it seems to be today. It seems like we can’t turn on a show, go see a movie, play a game, or open a book without experiencing content that’s aggressively dark or grim hitting our eyes at some point during the story. This is something I’ve seen ramping up lately, particularly with the success of shows like Game of Thrones. The question I want to ask today is… do stories need dark or controversial content? Are violence, gore, sex, drugs, trauma, and other topics that have been considered taboo in the past necessary for stories? Do they improve the stories overall, or would the stories be better if this content were cut?