The Sentinel Mage, by Emily Gee

This is book one in a trilogy. It's very book one in a trilogy. By the end of the book we get a good idea of how magic works around here and what the political situation is, and some of the practical problems brought up at the beginning of the book are resolved, but it's very a beginning.

It also needs trigger warnings for ( Read more... )

It treats all those things as inevitable facts of life for women, and they all happen in the story to make men have feelings and do things. Mostly violence.

So it's nothing I want to read and I won't be continuing with the series. Full of nasty.



Why I picked the book up is it said the Sentinel Mage of the title, a woman, is a shapeshifter and for complicated plot reasons has to disguise herself as a man. As in, shapeshift to be male bodied, while still being female gendered. That has potential to be an interesting story. Except at first as far as I could tell it was doing absolutely nothing with it. ( Read more... )

So I'm vaguely bored and annoyed with what they're doing with gender so far and expect to be annoyed by it in future.




Other than that it's a plot with multiple points of view, some of which you can only assume will ever have anything to do with each other, all of them dealing with different aspects of a big curse that's going to hit the whole entire continent. The main character is the mage who is part of the party dragging a prince around to three locations (one per book :eyeroll:) so he can get this curse broken. There's a lot of sneaking around trying not to get killed, and then a bunch of undead that surprise no one but the characters.

Women exist in a mesh of men, one lady mage doesn't talk to the other lady mage much if at all, the princess talks to her slave/servant, and the slaves have a different skin colour than the masters and are legally forbidden to learn to read.

It's showing us a sexist and racist system at some length, and setting a couple of royals up to be the secretly caring sort who will save everyone by being nice and not liking slavery after all.



I think my basic reaction is :eyeroll: and blah.

But I'm sure lots of people would like it.

Avengers Earth's Mightiest Heroes Volume 7

This was sort of disappointing. When Carol was added to the team I thought she'd be as well as the other female characters we'd met, not instead of. But no, on this disc, we have Jan and Carol, with Amora on the bad guys side. There's a few images of Pepper but no actual Pepper. Jane isn't even mentioned. Mockingbird is missing, I think since the end of the first season. Black Widow same. Maria Hill and Quake are likewise nowhere. This disc is such a sausage fest. Snore.

Also it has Black Widow on the box but not in the episodes, and it says Featuring Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, The Hulk, but there is no Hulk. That's just plain cheating.

This still concentrates on the big fights, usually hero on hero, and is light on the character interactions I'd rather see more of. Genre, I guess.

Powerless: ( Read more... )

Assault on 42: ( Read more... )

Ultron Unlimited: ( Read more... )

Yellowjacket: ( Read more... )

I liked when Hawkeye was watching TV and someone told him off for it and he's being all 'you do research your way, I do it mine' and had in fact found journalists talking about the current topic.


Emperor Stark: Tony takes over the world in less than a month. Rock on. ( Read more... )

Code Red: ( Read more... )

This disc was not awesome. Needs more ladies and more actually fighting bad guys and not each other.