Got a few more pages and the prose was just too painful to read even for a Romantasy novel so I'm going to bounce to another probably not great Romantasy novel I picked up cheap.

I'm reading probably bad Romantasy nonsense and definitely not James Joyce. iirc I'm 99% sure the book I signed up for was some variety of Dragonrider Yuri with some degree of Angst/Smut. Just turned to Page 1 and got jump-scared by this monstrosity:

Mikdly evil is what we aim for. lol Also, I suppose it's flavorful that you the card for Bloodbending can be used to be mean to your friends.

Is this a good combo? No. It will cost 9-14 mana upfront and 10-12 mana every turn going forward assuming your opponents have no interaction. Is it silly? Yes. Will you have friends afterwards? Doubtful.

If you have multiple oppenents, Zevlor, Elturel Exile can activate with the Panoptic Mirror trigger on the stack to make a copy of the Mirror's copy targeting each other opponent effectively bloodbending each opponent.

The 2nd card is Panoptic Mirror, which lets you exile Secret of Bloodbending from you hand to create and cast a copy of it during your upkeep so long as Mirror remains on board. Since the extra 10 to waterbend Secret is an additional cost, you may still choose to pay it for the copy.

The main card in this combo is a card called "Secret of Bloodbending." For UUUU, you can control an opponent during combat on their next turn or just play their entire turn for them for an extra 10 mana. You may tap artifacts and creates to help pay for the 10. Secret of Bloodbending is then exiled.

I'm also easy to set off, albeit more on the topic of worldbuilding than in-depth literary analysis, but occasionally, there's animation franchises that will trigger it across multiple avenues of analysis. Usually, more bare-bones ones like ATLA and the fascinating train wreck that is RWBY.

I'd say do a me and accidentally find Reddit's comment character limit twice because I saw a post asking if a character was a deuteragonist or co-protagonist and it triggered the part of my brain dedicated to information about basic structure/tropes, but I'm not sure I'd actually recommend doing so.

I wish you a very merry Hollow Knight: Silksong release unless I'm missing something and there's another game releasing in two weeks time.

I think it was a good idea, but it also made the setting feel smaller than I would have liked to see for a new plane, especially a first foray into the Space Opera subgenre.

Keighley just always comes off as a dude who's good at the behind-the-scenes backroom part of the business trying to be the Steve Jobs of video gaming. Nintendo, on the other hand, feels like a nearly unassailable fortress carefully managing its name and that's generally learned how to market well.

I think you've hit the nail on the head here. Not just in terms of presentations but as a whole. Sony is having to over-rely on hardware because single console AAA exclusives are getting too expensive while Microsoft barely exists outside of it's slow retreat from consoles to publishing.

Also, soul magic (or whatever it's actually called again) while extremely cool in the first book's climax just causes things to basically become Kingdom Hearts 3 metaphysics and gibberish in the later books, even if it's occasionally cool.

Harrow the Ninth tries something clever where it tries to differentiate which character viewpoint it's currently in by changing between 2nd, 3rd, & 1st person. It's a neat idea conceptually, but it is extremely off-putting, especially since it's mostly in 2nd person, aka the worst to try to read.

And with Book 3, while I could see what the author was trying to do, it just felt unnecessary, disjointed from its predecessors, and even more off-putting. It felt like an interesting idea that should have been left on the back burner for book 1 of a sequel series or polished a bit more by editing.