I am baffled that they didn't at least base the Houses in the 12 Zodiac signs. It'd even excuse the four elements thing and give you a way to flesh out the magic. Like maybe Taurus Earth magic could be different from Virgo Earth magic with Taurus being more Aggressive and Virgo being more Defensive, and maybe Capricorn could have some kind of Animal Earth magic.

The fact that all the characters are college age but act like middle schoolers may say something about the authors.

"The four elements alone are weak, but together... they form the strong fifth element... Boron."

The probelm with Fate the Winx Saga is that they took a cartoon about magic, friendship and fashion and turned it into a bleek colorless Riverdale clone with sex and drugs and no soul

The idea of a magic college doing middle-school level education gave me an idea to twist the plot; the twins are heirs to the royal bloodline, but fairy world has been post-coup for a while and the royalists have basically no power or funds. They need to educate their new queen-heroines on magic and the world's rules, but they have no way to pull strings to get them a fancy private education or put them in the school system. So they sign the girls up for a GED class at a remedial school. All their classmates are former/current delinquents, immigrants, or desperately poor. Their teacher could have an interesting history but be down on his luck. It would all be a great springboard into all the world's conflicts while surrounding the protagonists with interesting characters, and give them something to prove.

all this time i just assumed without reading the books that the zodiac academy's magic system was based on the ... zodiac system. wtf...

The JK Rowling lurking in the background is the scariest thing I've seen all year.

zodiac academy is great! i always put the audiobook on in the background while im cleaning the house, completely zone out and then get shocked back into it whenever something unbelievably stupid happens. one of the twins gets pissed on at some point... i wasnt paying attention

If I wrote the plot: Eldest twin has more magic then the younger twin. Everyone fawns over older twin, younger twin is bullied. Older twin stands up for younger one at first but has to do special classes to prep her for her coronation. Younger one is separated starts to feel resentful. Gets involved with antiroyalists in the school. The older one mean while just sees younger one able to run off and have fun exploring outside the school. Older one is suffering from the expectation. And then she is told her sister is hanging out with dangerous people. The girls fight over it. They are angry. An attack/event/thing happens. Younger one saves older one. Older one puts her foot down and says she won't do anything unless her sister can do it too. They both get crowned and co-rule taking on the why there are antiroyalists and addressing their issues. There is much rejoicing.

i've used an ice mug (at an ice bar where the whole thing is ice) and lemme tell you. you don't want to be touching that thing with bare hands lmao

Every generation we need a 10+ book series like house of night and now zodiac academy to keep the balance of the world

Got to give the writers credit, the second twin didn't join house water.

I was shocked how chill you are until you said you only read the first book. There’s apparently like a dozen of these things and they get wilder and wilder.

Also from what I heard, the authors did write each POV separately which is why chapters are repetitive, inconsistent and kinda try to one up each other. I assume neither wanted what they wrote to be edited down or merged so it just got cleaned up and stapled together.

Ah yes judging by the second star to the left and looking on till morning, with Jupiter Rising and Mars attacking the Earth as it stands still. I predict I will not read this book.

The more of your romantasy reviews I listen to, the more I wonder if there’s some generative AI program for romantasy that all these authors are using. Surely a human author would show more creativity than this.

And Harry Potter was just famous for his name not because he had extraordinary powers or abilities. In that sense he was like everyone else.

as someone whose read all 12 books, it drags on for what feels like forever and has some genuinely baffling writing choices later on.

The most irredemable thing to me is that this book series is somehow TWELVE PLUS BOOKS. And each one somehow gets over like, 500 pages?? Like you do NOT have that much content about the same 2 people. This feels so cash grabby and cheap, honestly.

12:29 Just realized something, if you are going to have twins in equally "desperate" circumstances in your narrative, you could have them diverge. One regrets being a PoS while the other doubles down.

I haven’t read it so I don’t have an opinion, but I watched an interview with the authors a while back and the one thing I remember was that at least one of the authors had never read any “bully romance,” the book’s romance genre, before writing it. Don’t remember much else, but that stuck with me.