As I said earlier, I've been revisiting some of RL Stine's work. I re-read one of the best Goosebumps books earlier, & to follow it up I decided to read what might be the worst.
What makes Be Afraid so bad? Lots of things, but probably most notoriously: YOU FINISH THE STORY. 1/ Stine has claimed that when he writes a Goosebumps book he writes a 10 page outline. I think he or his ghostwriter must've skipped that step for this one, because the way the plot meanders & the bizarre twists it takes seem unplanned. 2/

One thing that really separates Tatsuya Endo from like 99% of writers today is that he can write a character whose motives are batshit insane yet give her a thru-line of logic that you can empathize with, without resorting to 1 dimensional torture porn in her backstory.
I obviously don't APPROVE of Princess Izumiya's goal of building "a true mountain of corpses" (literally her goal is just death on a massive scale), but I get WHY she thinks this way. The progression feels realistic. No small feat when the end is such crazy villain territory.

So it turns out that the trans youth whose supporters claim was "bullied into suicide" was making suicide posts for a long time & his supporters responded with... support. Support for his suicidal attitude, not support as in encouraging him to feel better.
Yeah.


There's a lot of pretty damning stuff here.