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Bonds of Brass by Emily Skrutskie
Apr. 25th, 2025 08:09 pmBonds of Brass
2/5. Frothy M/M scifi about the kid at military school who discovers his roommate – who he’s in love with – is the heir to the conquering oppressive empire.
A book has not made me this mad in quite a long time.
I picked this up because I have a terrible weakness for space royalty. Queer space royalty? Put it in my face.
But then I started it, and went Wait, what is happening here? And did some googling, and discovered that this book was straight up marketed as “pick this up when you’ve run out of Finn/Po on the AO3.”
Okay.
Look.
Do I love that publishing has been busily co-opting fannish language and customs? I do not. Don’t get me started on how shit terrible they generally are when they try to tag things. But do I acknowledge that the small glut of fannish authors turned pro and serial numbers filed off books has done good things for genre and for me personally? Sure.
But that’s not what this is.
This is a book that could chase a Finn/Po binge in the sense that . . . I mean it has space in it? And – I’m guessing here – the art of the two leads is clearly the actors? Otherwise . . . no. Not the slightest bit of the same thing at all. Which pisses me off because it's a total misunderstanding of why shippers ship. Yes it's because the actors are hot, but fundamentally it's about the character dynamic. So if you market me Finn/Po and then give me two people with a wildly different set of personalities and histories and interactions, well now I know that you really don't get what you're trying to sell at all.
But the thing that really burns my biscuits is how this book starts, on page one, blithely like “so I’m totally in love with him, anyway, here’s our story,” with no grounding as to why or how this alleged love came about. It definitely requires explanation, because the love interest in question is, well, yikes to say the least.
But we don’t get an explanation or any grounding. At all in the whole book, to be clear. We’re just dropped in cold and expected to buy it. Which is 100% a move you can make in a Finn/Po AU on the AO3. It is absolutely not a move you can make in an original fucking novel. Because in fact, co-opting the language and customs and narrative structures of fandom for traditionally published books is, quite often, a terrible idea with terrible results.
Don’t get me started on everything else wrong with this book, like how it’s a first person narrator who withholds a vital and completely relevant piece of information to the end of the book. That is a hard road, and the author does not have those chops. Nor does she have the chops for the delicate and complex story of collaboration and trauma and imperialism and internal conflict she was vaguely gesturing towards. Not even a bit.
Put the AO3 down, publishers.
2/5. Frothy M/M scifi about the kid at military school who discovers his roommate – who he’s in love with – is the heir to the conquering oppressive empire.
A book has not made me this mad in quite a long time.
I picked this up because I have a terrible weakness for space royalty. Queer space royalty? Put it in my face.
But then I started it, and went Wait, what is happening here? And did some googling, and discovered that this book was straight up marketed as “pick this up when you’ve run out of Finn/Po on the AO3.”
Okay.
Look.
Do I love that publishing has been busily co-opting fannish language and customs? I do not. Don’t get me started on how shit terrible they generally are when they try to tag things. But do I acknowledge that the small glut of fannish authors turned pro and serial numbers filed off books has done good things for genre and for me personally? Sure.
But that’s not what this is.
This is a book that could chase a Finn/Po binge in the sense that . . . I mean it has space in it? And – I’m guessing here – the art of the two leads is clearly the actors? Otherwise . . . no. Not the slightest bit of the same thing at all. Which pisses me off because it's a total misunderstanding of why shippers ship. Yes it's because the actors are hot, but fundamentally it's about the character dynamic. So if you market me Finn/Po and then give me two people with a wildly different set of personalities and histories and interactions, well now I know that you really don't get what you're trying to sell at all.
But the thing that really burns my biscuits is how this book starts, on page one, blithely like “so I’m totally in love with him, anyway, here’s our story,” with no grounding as to why or how this alleged love came about. It definitely requires explanation, because the love interest in question is, well, yikes to say the least.
But we don’t get an explanation or any grounding. At all in the whole book, to be clear. We’re just dropped in cold and expected to buy it. Which is 100% a move you can make in a Finn/Po AU on the AO3. It is absolutely not a move you can make in an original fucking novel. Because in fact, co-opting the language and customs and narrative structures of fandom for traditionally published books is, quite often, a terrible idea with terrible results.
Don’t get me started on everything else wrong with this book, like how it’s a first person narrator who withholds a vital and completely relevant piece of information to the end of the book. That is a hard road, and the author does not have those chops. Nor does she have the chops for the delicate and complex story of collaboration and trauma and imperialism and internal conflict she was vaguely gesturing towards. Not even a bit.
Put the AO3 down, publishers.