Polyamory and Pronouns 

This is the first novels I've even heard of that discusses polyamory in a remotely respectable way. Maybe that's because American culture villainizes it so there's no way it gets picked up by major publishers.

N. K. Jemisin's "The Fifth Season" has a a poly relationship which i thought was really good when I read it years ago. I need to re-read those books...

Does The Witcher count?

Not in relation to the poly aspect, but in relation to the pronoun and non-binary aspect, the Imperial Radch trilogy of books by Ann Leckie does something similar, though in a different form. The protagonist is part of a far future human civilization that only uses she/her pronouns to refer to absolutely everyone, with them effectively not having a concept of separate genders as every form of expression and identity is just considered equally valid and normal. Since it's within the protagonists prospective, all other characters are referred to with these pronouns. This is interesting because the other characters, but not the protagonist, are given descriptive details including a lot of commonly gendered traits, but then always referred to with the same pronouns and terms such as "mother" or "sister", and by the end of the series, it ends up making what are seen as very gendered binary pronouns and terms in our lives feel like they are non-binary and gender less through how the books use them. It's also interesting as the main character comes into contact with members of other human societies outside her own that still hold very binary views of gender identity and expression, and she always views these societies as confusing in the limited scope allowed to their members for self expression and the limits placed on them bizarre and arbitrary , and through experiencing the book in her eyes you see our own rigid gender ideas as weirdly arbitrary and restricting (though part of that might come from the fact that I myself am non-binary and autistic, so have a very outside prospective from binary gendered society) It also has some exploration of the perspectives of different forms of intelligence, as the main character is a fragment of a ship's hivemind AI stuck in a cyborg body, and has the aspect of being unable to assign a gender to a primary character with the protagonist, whose description is intentionally non-gendered (ie, she mentions what is basically dysphoria about the singing voice of the body she now has, but it is never mentioned what it is about the voice that bothers her). Anyways, this is an already far too long comment on a 3 year old video, but just felt the need to throw this out there for anyone wanting books that similarly challenge the gender binary and people's assumptions about pronouns. I'm also very excited to read this book now, as I hadn't known of any other books that explored pronouns and gender in a similar way to Ann Leckie's work, so glad I found this video!

I've recently picked up "Iron Widow" by Xiran Jay Zhao, and while the story itself is not a romance, its romantic subplot does feature a polyamorous throuple, which I really enjoyed for its casualty and for deliberately subverting the love triangle trope.

Good that he has a sense of humor 👍

What a good sport!

“He?”

@@samschmit7181 the joke is about maskulin reproductive anatomy so a male partner or masculine bodied individual is sort of required to make the joke work

​@samschmit7181 Wow! The person reviewing a book about the LGBT community, is part of the LGBT community!

You of all people should know how forward I can be

While CCC has a small install base, a good chunk of it seems to be made up of some of the most important (to me) RU-vidrs on the platform, so hearing Joseph isn't unexpected.

I'm here from his tweet, so I definitely was.

Cloud cuckoo country is that one quiet kid who claims his dad owns Nintendo and is actually right

It's definitely a mental adjustment, but I can say from experience, it doesn't take long using de-gendered pronouns for it to start clicking. Well, romantic orientation simply describes a person's *capacity* to be romantically attracted to someone else. Much like how being heterosexual doesn't mean you're attracted to *every* person of the opposite gender, just that the range of people you would be attracted to are those who the opposite gender to you. You can still not be attracted either because of non-gender related factors, or because you're just not looking for anyone. If I'm panromantic, then that still means I can form non-romantic friendships with everyone. Just because someone is in my range of possible romantic attractions doesn't necessarily mean I want to get all kissy with them.

Yes

Wait, as in MandaloreGaming? What part?

@@pyrix 4:00 I KNOW HOW YOU FEEL. MY COCK DOESN'T LIKE YOU EITHER, BUT I LOVE YOU TOO.

Oh boy a poly

Book length doesn't factor too much into whether I enjoy a novel. I've abandoned short novellas, and completed huge epics. If a book is good, I'll continue reading it. Granted, a longer book has a greater chance of losing me at some point because it'll just have a greater chance of having bad content in it *somewhere*, but I've never abandoned an otherwise good book for being too long.

@@CloudCuckooCountry in that case i suggest a small Sci-fi called the Transaile saga, (been a couple of years since ive read it.) But its a good little book that i remember quite fondly, its no masterpiece by any means but it told a good story from what i remember. Its no Poe, or Sophies world, but I'd say give it a look.

I would say it's definitely worth a try. If it's attention span that's getting in your way, I'd recommend finding a book with relatively short chapters and committing to reading at least one chapter per day before bed. So, in addition to Giddy Death and Strange Demise, I'd also recommend Snare by Lilja Sigurdadottir, Dragoncharm by Graham Edwards, and I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver. Another thing I can recommend is to try audiobooks and radioplays. As much of an advocate for on-the-page reading as I am, some people just prefer listening to reading and that's still a valid way to experience literature. You can ease yourself into it with the same idea: one chapter per night before bed.

@@CloudCuckooCountry Thanks so much for the response

I actually attempted to mentally substitute zie/hir with they/them while reading the book, but it didn’t work. The only thing that worked for me was adjusting to the new pronouns and getting used to them. Granted, you may have different success with that. I’m certain that someone can still acclimate through hearing zie/hir spoken and through speaking the pronouns themselves. I never said reading the pronouns was the only way to acclimate, just that it might be more effective if you’re determined to read the book to its conclusion. If I’m flat wrong and most people don’t find reading to help them adjust in the way that I say it does, that’s fine, I’ll accept that, but the only way to find out for sure would be for more people to try out reading or listening as a form of mental adjustment. In the meantime, I think it’s reasonable to stand by the theory in this video.

It requires a lot of trust & love to maintain poly without falling into the online-friend trap of not feeling like anybody is there for you.

@@littlemonztergaming8665 It does, but the end result of a successful one is wonderful and loving.

ShadowmarkReturns woahhh

Hell nah…. Lmao

@@definetlyyes89 ?

It's a bit of an abstract theory, but I'll try to clarify: Linguistics differentiates between written-language and spoken-language as two entirely different modes of communication that people process differently. This is why you can have people living with various mental disorders that affect their writing capacity, but not their speaking capacity, or vice versa. The most commonly known one is probably dyslexia. The basic idea is: reading/writing and listening/speaking take different pathways through the brain when being processed as information. This next bit largely draws from my experience and the experiences of other avid readers of classic fiction whom I've talked to, and it's a bit artsy, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt: in the act of reading, your brain has to use the text on the page essentially as code to reconstruct a "voice" in your own mind. The "voice" of the narrator essentially becomes your mind's own "voice". So when you read "zie/hir" off of the page, it's your mind that is using the pronouns to construct meaning. This is different from if you heard a speaker using "zie/hir" because a different voice is providing the meaning. You may still understand what they mean, but it's not *your mind* that's providing the voice which is using those pronouns. Since reading requires you to provide the voice of the narrator in your own mind, reading invented pronouns can be a way of practicing them with your mind's voice, which can help you acclimate to thinking with them. Hope this helped!

Possibly

I'm asexual but I cannot comprehend the distinction between the two.

@@cultreader9751 Simple explanation: sexual love is “wow they’re attractive I want to pleasure them erotically/want them to pleasure me” romantic love is “wow, I want to cuddle and kiss this person, I want to wake up next to them and I like to go on dates with them.” You can have one without the other.

I experiment with the CCC character.

Thanks very much. Glad you enjoyed my video.

Strange. There were still physical copies available first and second-hand when I made the review

I'm not really an avid reader of fantasy or scifi, so Brandon Sanderson has never been on my radar, unfortunately.

They're not actually animals in the book. The animal puppets are just a fun way of representing the novel's characters. The "roundness" of Caroline's puppet is a consequence of how I draw the characters' clothes over the base image. Drawing dresses tends to make the wide bottoms of all the puppets way more obvious. There's no symbolism behind that, it's just the visual style. There are a few characters with chubby body-types in this novel, however I can't recall if Caroline is one of them. Richard is, if I recall correctly.

@@CloudCuckooCountry Ah, alright. Thank you. ^^

I agree, but Cuckoo specifically says he means a cisgender should have questioned their gender identity, and as a cishet person who did once question themselves I agree.

Julie Winchester I can understand the problem if we’re talking about someone doing this in real life. If there was a real person calling people pronouns they didn’t wish to be called, regardless of their intent, that would be wrong. That being said, I think it’s fine for this to happen in fiction as an exploratory exercise. Fiction is a space where people can explore topics and ideas in a safer capacity than in real life. Obviously that doesn’t mean every topic is fair game, or that there aren’t wrong ways to explore certain topics, but in this case no real person is being misgendered and the novel doesn’t advocate for people to use invented pronouns to refer to others against their wishes. It’s simply one way of exploring the idea of de-gendered language in fiction. I can understand if you still find the idea distasteful, but I don’t see that as a problem with the book (or with you, to be clear) because I still believe that fiction, up to a point, should have leeway to explore topics that may be considered distasteful.

There's no reason why monogamy should be culturally enforced in the way that it is. Everyone's best lived life is different.

@@CloudCuckooCountry BUT THINK OF THE CHILDREN! /s the children, or you uptight boomers? :P

@@pyrix Can attest to the fact I thought monogamy was a ridiculous thing to be culturally enforced as a child with no outside exposure to the concept of polyamory.

And this is bad for?

@@helrem ...?