Meta Month: Catch-Up Part 1: JonTron, Film Brain, Todd In The Shadows and Lindsay Ellis (2017)

It’s April again, and you know what that means! It’s once again time for Meta Month, where I dedicate the whole month of April to discussing my critical influences and the people that I spend an unhealthy amount of time watching on YouTube. Well, not exactly. Given how last year’s catalogue consisted of articles and lists that I had literally been cultivating for at least a year beforehand, I’m not set up to do the same thing again this year. However, I will be doing some special reviews this month as well as doing a bit of catch-up on the reviewers I’ve already covered. See, while I have pinned down my favourites among their respective bodies of work, they have still been keeping busy and making videos that honestly stand alongside some of their best. So, in light of that, I’m going to go through what they have gotten up to over the last twelve months and cherry-pick some examples that, in my not-so-humble opinion, deserve a spot amongst the Best Of lists I did last year.

Awoken (2013) by Serra Elinsen - Book Review

Given how it’s been almost three years since publication, and the persons involved have been quite open about it since, I’m once again going for the fact behind the veneer with this one. Serra Elinsen, as a person, doesn’t exist. As a writer, she is the pen name of the initially titled 50 Shades Of Green project, headed by  Team NChick (Lindsay, Nella and Elisa). After the monster success of 50 Shades Of Grey, they got together and basically crowd-sourced the next worst paranormal romance fiction book for teens, getting ideas for character and plot and so for forth from their many Twitter followers. It’s rare that I’ll go into a project and know pretty much every little intent of the piece itself, which you’d think would make looking at a book that was, by authorial admission, meant to be terrible a lot easier than the media I usually cover on here. Well, as I have shown previously during Meta Month, intentional badness is an abnormal form of writing but it is one that shares no fewer potential pitfalls in its execution. If anything, this material is far harder to pull off than it may seem. So, let’s get started with this Lovecraftian love story, featuring hot Cthulhu.