u/Salt_Orange9961

Just curious and am anxious overthinker who is back in the dating game.

I get a lot of interest from guys whose main hobbies and interests are things that I tend to avoid because of my hearing: loud concerts, busy venues, large group activities, noisy large groups of friends, etc. and part of me wants to automatically swipe away on them because there's not much chance they'd enjoy my self-imposed quiet life any more than I would enjoy their too complex acoustics one. But then I wonder if that's me overthinking it.

It made me wonder, how early do you guys disclose your SSD (and hearing aids or Cochlear implant, if you have one) to potential partners? Do you put it right on the dating profile so they know from right out the gate? Or do you wait until you have gotten to know them first?

In the past I've waited to disclose until I got to know the guy first, but every guy was weird about it and treated it like I was revealing some deeply heavy trauma and in need of their comforting to cope, when I really was just being like "hey I actually am always gonna want to sit on your left, hope you're cool with that," and it made it weird.

I saw a book recommended here recently and I've scoured all my recently read threads, all the bookmarked threads, and romance.io but still can't find it.

I'm pretty sure it was a cutesy stylized cover. FMC was a college student, MMC was a professor. From the cover, it looked like romantic comedy or just general contemporary romance.

I believe FMC and MMC sleep together before they realize he is her professor. Or possibly she propositions him but they don't actually sleep together yet?

It is not The Love Hypothesis, I've read that.

This is a common kdrama trope that I love.

NOT in a "she takes a bullet for him" way, but FMC jumps into danger in another way -- a common one in kdrama is a heavy shelf or piece of equipment is going to fall on someone and she jumps in to rescue another person and/or save a valuable piece of equipment as it's falling or something, and the MMC's heart drops at seeing her rush into danger without thinking.

In some kdramas (usually the ones where the MMC hasn't acknowledged his feelings yet) the MMC jumps in to shield her and takes the brunt of the injury in order to protect her (common in workplace dramas especially, bc then the co-workers see it and are like 👀👀👀)

Curious what romance books have this trope. Off the top of my head, I know {Love on the Brain by Ali Hazelwood} has a scene where heavy equipment is about to fall on FMC and she's trying to save a cat that no one believes is living in the building, and MMC saves her from getting crushed. And in {Mr. Fixer-Upper by Lucy Score}, FMC is caught in a storm on a work site and uses her body to shield a child from getting hurt by debris and is injured, although MMC only hears about it after the fact.

I've googled everything I remember about this book and cannot for the life of me find the title. I dnf'd it because I didn't actually like it 🤣 but I can't find it in my Table list or my Libby history, it's like it disappeared into the ether.

It was part of an interconnected series and said it could be read as a standalone, but actually there was a LOT referenced from earlier books so it didn't make sense without context.

FMC lives in a trailer in a small town, MMC is a mechanic and his younger brother is a cop. They actively despise the FMC over an incident in the past that they blame on her, but she genuinely has no idea why they suddenly just started hating her one day.

MMC mostly leaves her alone, but the cop younger brother actually harrasses her, including writing her bogus tickets that he knows she can't afford to fight, getting her car towed, arresting her and holding her in jail all day for "disrespecting" him, etc.

FMC works in a diner and has a BFF that's like.... somehow super wealthy and is dating the best friend of the MMC. When the book opens, FMC has been knocked out and tied up in the diner and the diner was set on fire. MMC rescues her but immediately leaves after she's safe. Later he helps her in various ways -- jump starting her car, repairing it secretly after it's been towed, etc.

I dnf'd it because it was obvious that MMC had no real reason to blame FMC for whatever it was that happened in the past and I found everyone annoying and unrealistic

Currently reading {Silver Lining by Maggie Osborne} which nearly has a scene like this. MMC and his brother get into a fistfight about OW and FMC jumps in to break it up and is nearly flattened by MMC before he pulls his punch, but scares him to think she could have been hurt by jumping in like that.

Made me curious if there are other books with this micro trope -- FMC breaks up a fight, is hurt or nearly hurt in the process.

I'll try just about any genre if the writing quality is good!

This is a rant about What the Hex by Jessica Clare, but it is also a rant about wasted potential.

The horrific What the Hex was billed as an enemies-to-lovers romance complicated by the FMC's involuntary physical responses to the MMC (she orgasms every time he casts a spell through her).

The description from romance.io reads:

>

Sounds great, right?

Except that is not the plot of this garbage pile.

First, let's talk world-building.

There is none.

Admittedly, this is a sequel and I didn't bother to read the first book, which is based off a Reylo fanfic. I read enough reviews to know that the world-building was also not present in the first book, so I'm just gonna complain about this one.

This is a world that looks essentially just like ours, except witches and warlocks exist and can take on familiars to train them. Witches and warlocks have significantly extended lifespans because of their powers, while familiars have to train for at least 20 years before they can go out on their own and become witches and warlocks themselves. If they are not taken on and trained, they have a regular human lifespan and will die of old age before ever becoming a witch/warlock.

(For brevity, I'm just going to use "witch" as a catch-all because there seems to be no difference between a witch and a warlock in these books other than gender.)

So...if a witch can take on a familiar and that familiar can become an independent witch in 20 years, and those new witches now live hundreds, if not thousands, of years longer than a human/familiar lifespan, and those new witches can take on familiars of their own, surely there's a pretty steady stream of familiars getting trained, right?

Because the demand would continually be growing and would eventually surpass the supply.

Let's say there are 100 original witches, and they all train a familiar, which means 100 new witches after 20 years. These witches are living hundreds, if not thousands, of years, so the population of witches is growing at an exponential rate.

Now there are 200 witches, all of whom can train a familiar.

Twenty more years later, there are 400 witches.

Another 20 years: 800.

Even if there's a hard limit to their lifespan (say 500 years), even if some familiars don't "graduate," even if, like, a third of witches choose not to take on a familiar, the witch population is still growing at a rapid rate.

Meanwhile, the familiar population...is not.

The book explicitly tells us that there are too many familiars and not enough witches to train them. Okay. But then where are all these familiars coming from? How are they reproducing quickly enough to maintain a huge population of familiars while the witch population is exponentially increasing?

This brings me to another world-building issue that the author simply doesn't bother with: what the fuck are familiars?

Are they born?

Are they raised?

Are they taught?

Are they genetically distinct from witches?

Are they simply humans with magical potential who haven't been trained?

The FMC appears to be a familiar because her parents are also familiars, indicating that this status is either genetic or cultural. But then what happens when familiars have children with witches? Or regular humans? Are the children familiars? Witches? Mundane humans? Is it a coin toss? Is it genetically determined? Is there a dominant familiar gene? Do witches' children automatically become witches, or are they familiars who need training like everyone else?

I don't know.

The author doesn't know.

Or, at least, the book doesn't tell me.

The book also doesn't really describe what happens to familiars who are never trained. It heavily implies that this makes them, essentially, losers who will never live up to their potential and will also only live a normal human lifespan.

But they also seem to exist in a magical society.

Penny works in an apothecary shop, packaging spell ingredients for mail order. The other familiars all seem to have some kind of magic-related or magic-adjacent jobs. So there is apparently enough witch-related commerce to support an entire society of familiars working in magical professions, which doesn't quite make sense if there is supposedly such a small pool of witches.

And then we get to the really fun part: what happens to a familiar once a witch takes them on?

For reasons that are never explained and don't stand up to scrutiny of any kind, witches benefit from the use of familiars. They can apparently choose to keep their familiar for much longer than the 20 years necessary to train them, but they do not need a familiar to function as a witch.

Which opens up a few tiny little questions:

• Are familiars in some kind of forced servitude once a witch takes them on?
• Can they leave voluntarily and become a full-fledged witch after their 20 years are up?
• Can their witch refuse to let them leave?
• At what point is their life magically extended?
• Can a witch take on a familiar, benefit from having them around, and simply never grant them permission to leave?
• If the familiar remains with the witch indefinitely, does their lifespan become extended as well, or can they theoretically spend their entire human lifespan serving a witch and die at 80?
• And if a familiar can technically leave, what does that mean in practice? If leaving means giving up the only opportunity they have to become a witch, is that really a meaningful choice? If a familiar has spent their entire life being told that becoming a witch is the only way to avoid being a second-class member of magical society, how voluntary is "you can leave whenever you want"?

The book never asks any of these questions.

And this is particularly bizarre because there is clearly a magical governing body overseeing witches. We know this because Willem is being punished by said governing body. He has been censured and is prohibited from practicing magic in the normal way.

So....there is a magical legal system. There are rules. There are authorities. There are punishments.

Which leads to the obvious question: who is overseeing the treatment of familiars?

• Do familiars have rights?
• Who ensures those rights are being met?
• Are there witch ethics committees?
• Is there a magical labor board?
• Are witches subject to any kind of regulation regarding their familiars?
• Can a familiar report an abusive witch?
• Can they terminate the relationship?
• Can they transfer to another witch?
• Can witches refuse to train a familiar for arbitrary reasons?
• Can witches keep familiars indefinitely?
• Does the governing body care?

The author doesn't care about any of this and didn't think we would either, I guess.

Anyway.

Penny is the FMC, who is theoretically supposed to be 30 years old and kind of a failure-to-thrive loser in the familiar community because she hasn't been taken on by a witch at this point. She's desperate for it to happen before she gets even older and becomes an even bigger loser.

Which, again....why?

If there are a shit ton of familiars who will never be trained because there simply aren't enough witches to take them on, why does being an untrained familiar make someone a loser?

Anyway, Penny is written like a child. As in a literal prepubescent child.

She speaks and behaves in a bizarrely juvenile way. The author gives her a pet squirrel with a goofy name, pigtails or frilly headbands and bows, hot pink unicorn-print clothing, and a whopping height of 4'11" to really drive home how totally not child-coded she is. She also only speaks in bizarre internet slang and fake swears, stuff like "double-yew tee eff!!" and "oh em gee!!" non-stop, like all 30-year old women desperate to be taken seriously totally do.

Obviously, MMC Willem is 270-years old, well over six feet tall, extremely serious and grumpy, and only wears suits.

So we have a tiny, aggressively child-coded 30-year-old woman who dresses and talks like a 12-year old paired up with an extremely powerful man who has been alive for nine times her lifespan.

I am not saying that an adult woman cannot be attracted to an extremely old supernatural man. Obviously. The problem is that the book goes out of its way to make its adult FMC seem as young and childlike as humanly possible and then asks us to find her sexually appealing to this enormous, centuries-old man.

That is a deeply uncomfortable choice, especially given the other power disparities already built into their relationship....what, exactly, is Willem attracted to about Penny?

And then the rest of the book is as terrible as you can expect.

Willem hires Penny under the table as his familiar (or maybe engages her in indentured servitude; we really aren't privy to the details, but it does involve a collar/bracelet that Penny is not allowed to remove, which binds her to Willem. She can remove it voluntarily, but by doing so she is no longer his familiar and cannot be trained by him again, so I'm leaning toward "magical indentured servitude" as the technical term).

He uses her to disguise the fact that he's doing magic so that the governing body that has censured him can't tell what he's doing.

Penny orgasms every time Willem does magic through her, which is apparently an unheard-of reaction in this society.

Willem legit never notices. He just thinks she's tired.

They decide they need a cover story for why Penny lives with Willem, and agree that the most rational explanation is that Willem wants a child and Penny has agreed to enter into a relationship with him to give him said child.

They fake date.

Then real date.

At some point Penny reveals to another couple (the Reylo fanfic couple, I assume?) on a double date that she orgasms every time he uses magic through her. He's astounded because he never noticed.

As it turns out Willem was framed for his original crimes. Penny and the Reylo couple save the day and reveal the truth. Happily ever after for the child-code FMC and her 270-year-old boyfriend and whatnot.

And yes, this book sucked ass.

I have ADHD and no ability to shut up either in writing or in real life, and if anyone is still reading this at this point, bless you for your patience.

But the real rant here is that this was an AMAZING premise utterly wasted on a pile-of-shit book.

I feel like the current state of publishing deserves some kind of do-over system where better authors are allowed to pick up the plots of books that sucked and redo them. If self-publishing unedited crap is an option, then plagiarism of ideas shouldn't be off the table.

Because the original premise was good.

A society where familiars are desperate to become witches.

A familiar so desperate to become a witch that she agrees to apprentice under the table to a censured witch, even though the arrangement may or may not involve indentured servitude—because even if she technically can voluntarily leave, is that likely to feel like a real choice? If leaving means going back to being a second-class citizen in a society that has spent her entire life telling her that becoming a witch is the only way to fulfill her potential, then how free is she to leave once she's finally been chosen?

That could be an exploration of bodily autonomy, power dynamics, intimacy, and sexual tension, all against a backdrop that could be an obvious and very effective metaphor for class, capitalism, and the rat race.

Imagine a society where people are born into a lower magical class, spend decades working and waiting for someone more powerful to give them an opportunity, and have to rely on established members of the ruling class to gain access to the profession that would allow them to become independent.

Imagine witches accumulating wealth, knowledge, political power, and social status over centuries because they live vastly longer than the people working beneath them.

Imagine familiars competing for apprenticeships and desperately trying to prove that they're useful enough to be chosen.

Imagine people reaching middle age having spent their entire adult lives waiting for their chance to become something more.

And then imagine a FMC who is a fully grown adult and is angry about spending years spinning her wheels and wasting her potential. She's finally offered a chance by one of those ruling-class witches—not because she is magically special or because he thinks she deserves it, but because he needs her to skirt the rules that have already been benefiting him for hundreds of years. Rules he could easily be done with after another 10 years of taking his non-magic punishment.

And now she has to battle her dislike of him, her distrust of him, and her growing attraction to him while trying to hide her body's involuntary reactions to him.

Imagine a MMC who was framed for a crime he didn't commit, desperate to prove himself, so desperate that he breaks all the rules and puts himself and his familiar in danger. And then he finds out how invasive this "business relationship" actually is to her.

Imagine him realizing that the person he thought was simply an inexperienced apprentice is having an involuntary physical response every time he uses her body as a magical conduit.

Imagine him having to confront the fact that he has been benefiting from something happening to her body that she never chose.

Imagine her having to confront the fact that she desperately needs the person causing that reaction because he is the only person who can give her the thing she's spent decades trying to achieve.

THAT is a book.

It could have been great.

I want to read that book.

And I'm annoyed I wasted my time and I'm annoyed that better authors can't go "Nah, you sucked at this so I'm going to redo it."

I was browsing bookstagram and saw the following dedication and was intrigued, but unfortunately the book it came from ended up being very much not for me.

https://preview.redd.it/ibtsfm9vs7gh1.png?width=930&format=png&auto=webp&s=814a7d5be81f9ab029e39e827e83e0b271b5fd2c

But I do want to find something with this vibe that I can read.

I'm very much into the respectful MMCs, I dislike the domineering, controlling, paternalistic MMCs that treat the FMC like an object they can control. I am okay with the daddy thing as long as it doesn't involve age play, but it's more the caretaking that I'm here for

I am NOT into:

• Dark romance
• Mafia (unless it's self aware and campy like {Hans by S.J. Tilly})
• Romantasy (I can do light fantasy or urban fantasy, but I dislike too much world-building in terms of having to learn the politics or economy or terminology of some fae realm)
• Dubcon, noncon, manipulation, coercion, or abuse
• FMCs who can't function in life without a man saving them
• TSTL FMCs, which includes FMCs whose "strength" is portrayed as brattiness or sarcasm
• Age play

I AM into:

• Respectful green flag MMCs
• Consent
• Caretaking
• Acts of service
• "I can fix that" / "just let me take care of you" vibes
• FMCs who are capable and confident adults
• FMCs learning to accept the love they deserve and that they don't have to always be the strong one

I've read both {Latte Darling by S.J. Tilly} and {Mountain Grump by S.J. Tilly} and both of these were close, but MMCs were a bit more controlling than I cared for, and I didn't think the consent was done well in any of Tilly's books.

I love all of Ali Hazelwood's books and all of her MMCs fit the vibes I'm looking for more of, particularly Jack from {Love, Theoretically}. Jack doesn't push his feelings on Elsie or try to control her. He never acts like he knows better than her or that she should defer to him. He respects her as an equal, and just wants to take care of her and love her.

I've read {Hitting the Wall} and {Against a Wall} by Cate C Wells, and while I liked them, I felt like there are larger societal issues that go unresolved in her books and end up just brushed aside for the sake of the HEA.

Hi audiologists of Reddit!

I'm 10 months post implantation for single sided deafness. My SSD was from early childhood and I was 37 when implanted, so ~35 years without stimulation to that side, and my cochlea was partially ossified as well.

When streaming to the processor with captions I can "hear" the words and can distinguish between the sounds enough to hear that the narrator has an English accent. But if I take the captions away it becomes meaningless sound, I couldn't tell you a single word I'm hearing, even though I can hear the general prosody somewhat. I don't think I hear/recognize pitch well, because I have the Hearoes app and consistently score poorly on pitch games.

Every time I go in for a new mapping it doesn't seem to make any difference. My audiologist mostly does a new eSRT and a new hearing test on me each time (I always get 0% word recognition) and he has done an anatomy-based fitting for my processor.

I just feel like it's stuck at this level of 0% word recognition unless I have captions/subtitles and I feel like the sound needs to be....crisper somehow for me to improve, but I don't know how to get that, and I don't see how the tests and eSRTs are translating into improving anything? It seems like we're more just tracking progress....which is essentially none.

I can't tell if there's more progress that could be made with different adjustments to the map....or if because I was 35 years without stimulation to the nerve and with partial ossification this is just the max I can really get out of it and my audiologist hasn't figured out how to let me down gently.

Any advice?

Looking for a tattoo artist in the SLC area (give or take 50 miles?) that can do botanical style tattoos

Sample photo of inspiration

https://preview.redd.it/4h0y2h6d5oah1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=a277eb1d18b32fcfdf22301678d46d9746ec6e97

I’m trying to get more into romance books, but I’m struggling to find ones that hit the balance I’m looking for.

I LOVE romance tropes and emotional payoff (slowburn, forced proximity, hurt/comfort, reluctant protection, emotional restraint that eventually breaks, etc). I’m not looking for “literary fiction” necessarily — I want something fun, readable, and emotionally satisfying.

But I’m also really sensitive to inconsistent characterization/emotional whiplash. I tend to bounce off books where characters are *described* one way but their actual on-page behavior feels totally different, or where emotions/actions change rapidly just to force drama or tropes. (i.e. The “hardened assassin,” who never actually behaves hardened in any way and only ever fights off screen, needs to be rescued by the man. The “cold and logical,” character who jumps to conclusions and is a hothead, etc), or books where the plot choices seem to only exist to shove the next trope into it, which unfortunately seems to be the case for most of the books I've tried.

I’m looking for:

* strong character consistency

* gradual/earned relationship development

* behavior-based characterization (showing, not telling)

* Emotional tension/subtext over melodrama

* tropes that emerge naturally from the plot rather than feeling pasted in

I’m open to all spice levels, but I tend to prefer spice that feels emotionally/psychologically grounded and connected to the characters themselves. I don’t enjoy very “male gaze” spice where the focus feels heavily centered on the MMC’s experience/reactions while the FMC’s pleasure or emotional experience feels secondary.

Books I’ve enjoyed:

* Attachments

* Can You Keep a Secret?

* Bridget Jones’s Diary

Books I HATED:

* The Shopaholic series

* Throne of Glass

* Anything Colleen Hoover

* Anything by Maggie Dallen

* I Did Something Bad

l'd especially love books with:

* forced proximity

* caretaking/protective instincts

* mistrust-to-trust dynamics

* “I don’t even fully like you yet but I’m still going to protect you” energy

Any recommendations?