Wattpad Pet Peeves

Ichor (Rant)

Book: Ichor

Author: Trish D.W.

Reads: 3.4m

Synopsis: In a world where mortal humans are slaves to the Greek gods and goddesses, a girl is captured by Ares, the god of war, before she's saved by Hermes, who names her Saffron and becomes her lover. Later on, the gods and goddesses discover that Saffron is a demigod, and war begins.

*This book essentially got deleted from Wattpad and published on Amazon. I read most of it while it was being published here (I got to the final fight scene). The only thing that remains of this book on this website is a preview version.

Concessions:

The premise is creative. Although it essentially ends up being a fanfiction about Greek mythology, I can tell that Trish D.W. put a lot of thought into it. The world building is pretty good.

The writing is competent. I'm sure you know what this means by now. Compared to other stories on this website, there weren't as many spelling errors, and based on the technical aspects of the writing, it wasn't a total headache to read.

Rant:

Saffron is the worst. She's so vanilla, but Trish D.W. tries so hard to make her seem quirky. If you haven't read the chapter I did previously called "Trying too Hard to Make Characters Seem 'Quirky'", you should read it, because that whole chapter is largely based on Saffron.

There's this one sub-plot where one of the other servants in Hermes' house is being really mean to Saffron, and obviously it's because she's jealous of her, but the way Saffron handles it is so annoying. Instead of getting angry and frustrated at the servant like any reasonable person would, Saffron just gets unrealistically intuitive and annoyingly cheerfully tries to make friends with her bully. Saffron is just a total Mary Sue.

Why does Trish D.W. constantly have to describe Saffron's beauty every chapter?? Even in professionally published books, I have a tiny bit of a pet peeve when it comes to authors constantly making their characters look super hot. But Trish D.W.'s portrayal of Saffron is the absolute epitome of this. As a very average-looking person, I have to roll my eyes every time Trish mentions Saffron's "heart-shaped lips", or her luscious figure, or just her beauty in general, which brings me to my next point:

Every single character looks like a supermodel, which is unrealistic. I know they're gods, but Trish constantly describing every character as "beautiful" reminds me of when my sister and I used to make Sims together, but we used the same face template every time. I just imagine that all of the characters looked like boring, plastic, carbon copies of each other. It's not like their personalities really added to them either.

If you've read plenty of bad fanfiction in your time, this book won't seem very unusual to you. It seems to me like it's just a self-insert fantasy about dating Greek gods. That's certainly how it feels from the writing.

bye