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Uploaded this just in time. For tonight I must go to the Opting - a sacred ceremony that will tell me my Bracket.

Youtube mirror here

Last month a couple people in the comments reminded me that I had a WIP script for a Once Upon A Time video, so I've tentatively resumed work on that. I'm a little nervous because I've never actually watched the entire series - it seems every time I've tried, I'll start out finding much to talk about, and then there's a point around Season 4 where it becomes very tedious and I give up.

Incidentally that's the point I've reached again this time and it really is that bad. (I looked it up and apparently that point in the show also saw the beginning of a viewership decline that they never recovered from. Checks out.) So it feels like a bit of a gamble to be marathoning it blind and hoping there will ultimately be enough/something interesting enough to talk about on the other side. But it would be fun to do another VPD-type video.

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Comments

~Ash~

Yippee! I love the Mike Wazowski hat.

Ellie Linehan

Actually can’t believe it’s already the end of April. Thanks for the reminder Jenny!

Larkin Blau

it’s the best time of the month!

Brack

Make sure you watch the spinoff, Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

mikeymasciola

OUAT is such a great idea for a vid, ik i would be cheering!

ElaineMcgeeeeeeeee

I would do anything for a long Jenny Nicholson OUAT video. That’s literally what I was wishing for when we got the VPD vid.

Lisa Smits

Please don’t sleep on an Europa Park/Efteling video! Sincerely, a girl who grew up 30 minutes from the Efteling so it’s imbedded in her youth. Also adore Europa Park!

ash

Yess I just got Panda Express and was trying to find something to watch! I rewatched TVD video yesterday bc it's a classic. I watch a lot of crap media but I don't think I could survive Once Upon a Time. That said, I'd definitely watch you talk about it for several hours lol.

Brooklyn d

The Giver movie was so bad but I love the source material enough that the movie still makes me cry and I have an okay time… kind of how I feel about the Beauty and the Beast remake come to think of it

Troy Paiva

A OUAT video would be a dream 🤩

Eric MacMillan

Jenny please write a comedy dystopian YA novel

Chris Oakley

i'd just like to add my voice to the chorus of support for a jenny nicholson once upon a time video

Jacinda Ferguson

Jenny, I truly think you'd get a kick out of the 100

Abi

oh boy! my very specific and kind of niche current hyperfixation!

Saracha

SO hyped to hear OUaT might still be on the table! I'm a huge fan of, like, every project that's been on the channel- but OUaT was such a comfort show to me in high school and I love hearing people talk about it. With only love in my heart, it's the stupidest show I've ever seen

Erin Everton

oh i’m SO excited for this

emchovy

Your Vampire Diaries vid is one of my favorites, so I'd love to see another in that vein! Hopefully OUAT gets funny again, if they can't manage good.

Tara Foster

Thank you for The Video.

Taylor

hard agree. I was one of the viewership that petered off towards season four and I would love to know what happened

Elle

OUAT is one of my comfort shows, but it really does go off the rails around season 4. Which honestly just made me love it even more

Angelica Nyneave

Haha I kept up with once upon a time religiously up until season 4 so that checks out

admeus

this is MY niche thank you so much

Brooklyn d

In Divergent, Candor is actually the honest faction, Amity is the peaceful faction. They very much could’ve been combined, those books/movies were so dumb

Austin F

dumbest dystopian character name competition: Four from divergent vs America Singer from The Selection

Luigi

Nothing better than a video release when I'm just about to eat lunch! This food is gonna taste so much better now 😋

Helen Tung Yep

Stephanie Meyer has written another novel actually, The Chemist, not read it but like a spy falls in love with a hit woman or something

Michelle McCartney

Ohmigawd a ouat video would be so cathartic after what that show put us through, yes please! 🤣🤣🤣 Also considering the 10/10 costuming on that show the outfit potential is off the charts.

Bag of Tricks

I saw the first Maze Runner and remember that it was in fact really, really boring. I've also seen the sequel but hardly remember a thing about it, not even the fact that it has Aidan Gillen in it as Jenny mentioned. I didn't even know there was a third one. Honestly would have been worth a hate watch for the purposes of making fun of it. I think it's got to be the ultra-processed Wonder Bread apotheosis of this trend of movies. There's just absolutely nothing to its world or plot or characters. The whole premise of the first movie is "it's just kids trapped in a maze and they don't know why" before the end of the movie is like, the reason they were trapped in the maze is because of a Sinister Dystopia, no further explanation given. We will decide on what happens next sometime before we release the sequel.

Lina Salwak

I visited Efteling last year and it was amazing! Right up Jennys alley, too

Peyton

Is the blonde former Disney channel actress the same one who was mean to you at a party once Jenny? Like this comment if yes. Also very excited for a potential OUAT video!!

Lisa Smits

Yes she’s been, I’m sure! I just now realise when I’m visiting more theme parks how impeccably themed Efteling is. To know I took that for granted this whole time haha. Also so glad you liked it! My brother works there so I’m sure he’ll be proud :)

CosmicSharkGal

Sometimes I feel like I missed out by having never been into Hunger Games and its derivatives when I was in that age bracket, I jumped straight from Warrior Cats to John Green novels

Human

Trust me, the last three seasons of ouat are fascinatingly bizarre

Angelica Nyneave

Omg I watched the 5th wave in theaters with my friend who read the book (it was fine, nothing to write home about), no one who I’ve ever brought this movie up to has ever known what I’m talking about!!!

Olivia

I read enough of the first Divergent book on the author's website to learn that three of the factions' names are nouns and two are adjectives and I thought I was going to cry

Mady, you know, from TV

I love that the prompt didn't mention script doctoring but Jenny can't resist the urge to make bad movies more interesting (and usually evil) 😆

G

For the Once Upon a Time topic, I think it'd be very interesting to hear your takes but I also wouldn't blame you for not doing it. I watched it back in the day and also lost interest around season 4 but think watched another season or so put of habit before finally completely losing interest. Honestly I didn't really like any of the show beyond season 1. I recently researched that season and thought it held up really well but had no desire to go beyond it. I think the first season just worked so much better when they could focus on tieing different fairytales into single episodes that helped intertwined to help the plot move forward. After the curse is broken and the moved onto more general season arcs, everything became a lot more bland and uninteresting, especially because the main mystery was over

Sebastian Payne

Nyeheheh delightfully dastardly, your disgustingness 🐌

CosmicSharkGal

I fear that if Jenny did find the Toy Story Alien headband she’d sorta have to cover the one with Logan Paul

Tiny Ann

Ah, yes! Pink pilates instructor Mike Wazowski! My favorite dystopian character 🫶

Austin F

im so obsessed with the fact that the squad in that dumb color movie has one character of every power type like they're a balanced team of 6 pokemon LMAO

Gianna McCardell

Lost could make a great VPD-type video 🫣 there's 3 (I think) actresses who were also mains on OUAT so huge crossover potential

Alice Lastname

Please do not read if you don't want a potential spoiler for an old Black Mirror episode, but the goggles from The 5th Wave instantly reminded me of the twist in Men Against Fire. Both did come out on the opposite ends of the same year, funny enough.

Peyton

on behalf of all Peytons everywhere I apologize

JG

To be fair about Divergent the author just kind of wrote it as a fun winter break project while she was in college and it blew up completely unexpectedly. I heard that the author has still been writing but she’s trying to get actually good at it (and given her financial success she can basically just take it slow), and that her later books are actually a lot better than the Divergent series

Rhys Parry-George

Fun fact: Stephenie Meyer did publish another book in 2017 called The Chemist. It’s a spy thriller 😂

Karyn Shane

I've always secretly hoped you'd to an OUAT video!!

The Latter Day Autist

That always seems to happen with TV shows... It always amazes me that House (the TV show) was really only good for 3 seasons (until the original doctors *spoilers* and then *spoilers* *spoilers* the *spoilers* and before you knew it *spoilers* went to *spoilers* and eventually *spoilers* out a *spoilers* man). The other 5 seasons were just okay but it got so weird by the end.

Brooklyn d

I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO TALK ABOUT THE DISAPPOINTMENT OF A MOVIE THAT CHAOS WALKING WAS

Scrum Diddely Umptious

Jenny, if I ever start publishing YA books/movies, please let me send you a copy so you can tell me if I'm writing stupidly. I quipped, tossing back my hair, messy after a long days work. Everybody smirked at my very funny comment, and nodded their agreement. Jenny rolled her deep blue eyes, hand hovering over the block button. It would be so easy... but decided against it. "Stupid, but harmless", she said to nobody in particular, drinking deeply from her onyx goblet of G-Fuel. "Now bring in more of those leftover children, I need to see if this plague is expired" ...

sarah

I would looove a ouat video in the style of the vpd video, it’s one of my favorites

Michael Wyzard

Jenny, didn't you tweet back in the day about how Elsa in OUAT was in the movie costume just in case kids were channel surfing?

Charlie

OUAT is my biggest comfort show, i would LOVE to see a video on it! especially a critical one. i’ve also never gotten past season 4 (maybe 5?). the introduction of more distinctly disney IPs (frozen is the one i remember most clearly) completely turned me off

Brooklyn d

“I like fridge, fridge keeps things cold for me” is immediately getting added to the vocal stim rotation

Mary Dedrick

I haven’t watched this yet (waiting for the YouTube mirror), but this timing is perfect because I am just about to start planning a (potential) dystopian novel study for my middle schoolers!

Mary Dedrick

Also I know it’s probably not on the table anymore, but I may be going to Disneyland Paris this summer and I wish you would post a video or vlog about your time there!

Joel Eblin

My experience with watching the Giver was thinking "wow, that actress sounds just like Taylor Swift". And then was surprised it was her during the credits

Brooklyn d

That’s how I felt about Chaos walking! I loved the books as a preteen and literally no one has seen the movie, probably because it sucks so bad

Sqand

I still can't believe they decided against a US film adaptation of Battle Royale because they were afraid audiences would think it was a knockoff of Hunger Games. As if that would have mattered at all.

Silky

I just looked it up and I fell off OUAT after season 3. I think I saw some previews with Elsa and they just looked really dumb. Though now that I think about it, I can barely remember any "plot" from the previous seasons either – I think it really didn't have a plot, just a bunch of characters that the writers didn't know what to do with. Just throwing darts at the wall like "I guess Belle and Rumpelstiltskin will... get a divorce? Sure why not!"

Maggie

I had no idea Stephanie Meyer was a Hunger Games fan.

Lotte

News dropped recently and Veronica Roth (the author of divergent) is actually releasing a rewrite of divergent set in an alternate universe. I assume it’s because she either wants to redo a terrible book series or as a cash grab. Either way I’ll probably pick up the audiobook versions once they come out

Marcel H

I liked Songbird and Snakes but I also couldn’t take as seriously as Hunger Games. Unfortunately once she started singing I laughed out loud cause it didn’t feel real. It was also a bit corny? I don’t know if that makes sense though.

Scrum Diddely Umptious

I want to go so bad, I'm going to Germany but its over a 6 hour drive away from where we will be and I don't think I'll be able to convince my partner to do it 😭

Katie Bertola

Jenny, I truly believe that listening to your critiques has made me a better writer. And your critiques make me laugh. So, thank you! And please do OUAT!

Marcel H

Long Walk was SO good. I read the book before the movie and I did think the movie ending was a bit rushed but at the same time I don’t know how else you could do it. I’m so glad the usual King shenanigans were removed though.

Spira978

I envy you for giving up on the 100 early on. What a headache of a series.

picarat

new jenny video dropping during finals week is my oasis in a desert

Max Truty

Your themed outfit could have just been a side braid and wearing all black and suddenly you’re Katniss!

Maerose Pepe

Literally could not have dropped this at a better time. I’m having an operation tomorrow that I desperately need to get my mind off of, and this is exactly what I needed. Genuinely, thank you.

Scrum Diddely Umptious

Ok but imagine if you could actually just opt in to go live on a farm where all the failures live lmao I love that for me

Hippy Pants

This video was so fun for me because it unlocked like a half a dozen properties I found in middle school from googling "teenage dystopias" and then completely forgot about because they sucked so bad. I really need to re-watch The Darkest Minds - when you mentioned I shot up from my couch like a movie where a character wakes up from a nightmare.

Kevin Morris

I haven’t read The Giver since I was a kid but the trailers for the movie confused me so much because I could’ve sworn in the book they were like…Amish-esque? I never had the impression it was set in a high tech futuristic world.

Dee Juniper

Gather 'round kids, Jenny's on! My kids that I don't have:

Hippy Pants

I did read The Selection growing up but I didn't really care for it, probably because I wasn't interested in men... however I did read many other teen dystopia books including one called The Program. In this book there's like a fungus that grows in teenagers' brains that makes them depressed and so if a teen is acting depressed they get shipped off to a mental hpspital and effectively lobotomized... horrible experience that probably made teen mental health worse TBH but it was quite memorable to me. although the title is so basic I couldn't remember it for the longest time until one night I was trying to find it just googling the most insane keywords ever.

Neil Dutton

Thank you revolutionary hacktivist 'Theme Park' for releasing this voxvid to entertain me while I partake in The Vaccuming.

Monica McFadden

This wasn't aimed at kids and I don't _think_ it was inspired by The Hunger Games (but it did come out in 2012 so maybe a little?), but the Transformers comic "More Than Meets The Eye" created a great dystopian origin for the Transformers. Although I guess it's more "what happens after the dystopian government is overthrown?" since the Functionist Council of Cybertron (that shunted Transformers into various castes based on their alt modes--including a caste called "Disposables") is long gone by the time the story takes place. Unlike a typical YA novel there isn't a single progatonist, but an ensemble cast. Anyway, I thought it was so refreshing for a Transformers continuity to do a deep dive into what their society was like millions of years before they arrived on Earth. So much of the Earth stuff is like "Wow! From a human perspective Transformers are Very Big!" and it's like yeah . . . I knew that already . . .

Hippy Pants

reading a plot synopsis it's not that interesting beyomd the premise but tell my why there's a main character called Realm? everyone else just has normal names. the author just couldn't resist i guess

J Arnold

Idk if this is inconvenient for you, but when the YouTube mirror is finished pending, would you be able to please add the YouTube link but not embed it in the Patreon? If it's not embedded, then the Patreon features (PiP, download, etc.) are still usable, which is really nice.

Egon

So not only was there a movie for Chaos Walking, but it also sucked???? MY favorite YA series got a crap movie??? 😭

Emil

I have a softer opinion on most of these, probably because a) I've only read the book versions, many of which were better or at least more coherent because they weren't being retooled into HG knockoffs and b) I was in middle school when I read most of them. Some of them do make more sense in book form (for example, spoilers, but the 5th Wave actually reveals the aliens had a similar plan to the one you suggested and reveals that there actually aren't any aliens on Earth at all at any point, it's all an effort to turn people against each other and return to the Stone Age for, like, the environment or something), but like not much in many cases tbh. The real problem with almost all of the book-versions imo is that while they're usually better than what the movies sound like, many of them have this kind of concept sickness. Like the author thought of a cool or scary image or idea of a society but couldn't tie it to a social critique and had to awkwardly reverse engineer a dystopia to make it work, and it comes across as contrived. So weirdly enough I think the bullshit YA love triangle movies are actually a step in the right direction because they're abandoning the point the books were only vaguely trying to make in favor of the spectacle that the creators actually care about. They're more honest versions, somehow?

Emil

Also I was smugly nodding along during the list of the tropes, really feeling superior to these teens and their silly names and revolutionary zeal, but when you gave the random name as "Slice" it hit me like a shot bc I knew in my heart of hearts I would 100% try to make Slice happen as a nickname if I was in a Mad Max wasteland. Devastating thing to realize about myself

Krista Borst

Thanks for the new video Jenny! Perfect timing I just finished rereading the first Hunger Games!

Ruby Wishnietsky

Yes!!!! OUAT feels so perfect for your review and reflection. I hope you feel inspired enough for us to enjoy in the future.

qitty

"oh my god coachella!" had me CACKLING lmfaooooo. also spackle is an especially terrible name for aliens jfc. To defend Maze Runner (was hoping you'd cover it but alas), all three I thought are at least fun watches, namely because the directing is pretty good, the actors are great, and the action scenes are pretty well done imo, especially as it goes on. And at least it wraps up cleanly and in a way that still loops back to the first despite how much the sequels kind of deviate from that initial premise/setting. The sole girl in their group becomes much more interesting in the second and third movies and actually offers basically the only semblance of societal critique you'll get out of these movies a la "should we sacrifice a few for mankind" kind of approach. And it's kind of funny how many recognizable actors are in this series, aside from just Aidan Gillen (Giancarlo Esposito shows up and for once gets to play a character that isn't Gus from Breaking Bad lol) because I feel like most of these movies would get one big name to play a parent or villain and the rest of the cast would be noticeably young, green actors. I'd say it's worth watching all three at least once. If you didn't like the first one, you might like the other two more. Some people only like the first one because the other two are more tropey dystopian films (albeit, there's barely a love triangle and they amp up the action so much you could probably just call the third one an action film lmao). Overall I think they're good, with a perfect amount of cheese, and a major improvement over the books because my god I hated those books.

Tash

I feel like they rlly missed out with exploring gender in Chaos Walking. Why is it only men? Because of hormones? What about ciswomen with PCOS? What about intersex people? Trans people who don’t have access to HRT because it’s cowboy times. Is the noise very progressive and recognizes gender ≠ sex? And then they could have made some factions for those groups of people. Maybe colour coded.

Ysabela Golden

I originally subscribed to Jenny's Patreon specifically to see her monthly video where she talked about visiting Efteling so I feel that 😅perhaps someday......

AW

i think the funniest part of the divergent factions is not just that they each center around one singular character trait but also that the canon reason for the creation of the factions was that the original founders couldn't agree on what caused The Breakdown of the World and the name of each faction is what they thought would have fixed their problems (ie erudite thought that people should have been smarter, candor thought people should have been more honest, etc). So they decided to run their society by having semi-segregated little groups that only exemplified one of the virtues they thought the world was lacking, I guess. I remember reading Divergent as a little preteen with no taste or understanding of the world and even then thinking that was a dumb way to structure your post-apocalyptic dystopian society and that it didn't make any sense

Colleen Ritchey

chaos walking was such a good book, I'm forever annoyed they fumbled the movie (especially starring Tom Holland and Daisy Ridley!!)

Jacob Yeavello

For the OUAT vid since the show just sort of went on and on maybe an idea would be to cover the earlier seasons where they were trying a bit harder in depth and then fly over the later seasons covering how/why the show took such a decline. Just spitballing.

LW

As a book fan, the first Hunger Games movie is my favorite. I feel it better captures the intent and themes of the books than the later movies, which, in my opinion, dwell too much on the love triangle without the depth that is present in the books, cut some of Katniss’ best and worst moments, and don’t do nearly as much work on the relationship between Katniss and Haymitch.

LW

Oh, and agreed that the new movie felt cheaper. And like it just didn’t care about the book’s themes or messages. I say this as a certified Rachel Zegler lover, she’s great, but the movie was confused and costumes looked like they came from the gap.

Tabby

Not to fully nerd out (she said, fully nerding out), but the lack of emotions in The Giver was the result of tight social control and conditioning. People can feel things like frustration or concern, but no one is ever allowed to experience anything that might elicit a stronger feeling. Death is carefully tucked away -- there aren't even animals aside from fish raised for food -- families are government-assigned and structured to limit interpersonal bonding, and any "imprecise" language that might lead to forming an opinion is immediately squashed. There is pain, but it's always anesthetized away immediately so no one even has to experience a scraped knee or a headache for more than a minute or so. The daily pills are actually repressing sexuality (which of course is far too scary a subject to be mentioned in a movie for teens) as another form of limiting emotion by limiting experience and bonding between people.

Seessie

Could you do Once Upon a Time up to a certain season so you don't have to feel tied down to the full thing? I would be up for hearing about it in its prime for sure! I love hearing people talk about it because I have to keep asking them if like, Pinocchio was really a gangster and how Captain Hook became a sexy bad boy. It's so fascinating to me. I watched an episode out of context once and there was so much going on

Natalie Roy

The Darkest Minds definitely feels like a Hunger Games knockoff but also sounds soooo inspired by Children of Men -- cannot recommend Children of Men enough if you want to see this concept done well. It focuses less on kids and more on the politics that a childless world might result in -- basically all the interesting stuff that it sounds like The Darkest Minds didn't show at all LOL

Zak

I'm surprised enders game was on the honorable mentions since it didn't seem at all related to hunger games knock offs. Especially since the book was written so many decades ago. Though they did cut out half the plot of the book when they adapted the movie so maybe the parts they kept made it fit the catagory of Hunger games knock offs.

Silky

I do like to sort beads

kepler

agreed!! I think they didn't even need candor. why the hell would you need 1/5 of your population to be lawyers? they don't even have like... a concrete legal system. the two main punishments are factionless or death

Aaron Fontes

"good luck overthrowing the government when you're too busy being Amish" how are you always so effortlessly funny lmaoooo

Silky

49:40 he's of course recognizable because he's not bald

Silky

Man, the little black girl being like "Color?" and then the white man keeps talking about what color she is... that sure makes for a very weird and uncomfortable scene!

Chase Hayes

i will not tolerate this By the Great Horn Spoon slander

Kinetics Video

Prayers up for getting through season 4

Luis

The only one on the list I saw was Chaos Walking and the only thing I remember about it was that it came out during covid. I was so desperate to eat movie theater popcorn again I would've watched anything and yeah the popcorn was the only good part of that movie! Now The 5th Wave sounds so crazy I want to watch it to see if it's as weird as Jenny describes it lol.

Chelsea Sanders

I personally would like to join the bead sorting faction...I am neurodivergent.

Lauren Minaker

I’d be so stoked for a OUAT video!

Jess

Mentions of both The 100 and OUAT? I feel personally attacked. If only I gave up on The 100 after a few episodes instead of religiously watching it for years, only for it to all end in the most BONKERS, stab-in-the-back way possible . . .

Omidae

Let’s go!! Birthday watch! Thanks Jenny

Maddie Arnautov

What if I told you there’s a new Divergent book coming out in this, the year of our Lord 2026. What then?

Holden S

oh my god…. the once upon a time video… this means everything to me….

Holden S

and that’s the fun thing about ouat. it’s batshit and ultimately worthless, but it’s disneyslop so it just kept going and going… even merida was invited!

Neil Dutton

Earth has fallen to the aliens known as The Peers. Rebecca (Reb) must survive The Squishing in order to find her family amongst The Diamonds, the elite human servants of The Peers. Also there's two hot boys. Coming to theatres Summer 2015: Carbon, Book One of the acclaimed series Peer Pressure.

jerry

I never watched the Maze Runner but Aidan Gillen hissing "You're not prepared for THE SCORCH!" (prob not the acutal line I know) in the trailer for the sequel has imprinted strongly on my memory. It's like the first thing I think of when I see his face and I watched all of The Wire and GoT.

Joe Bloe

My memory of The Fifth Wave was 1) all that stuff you said about the plan not really working and 2) why is this adult stalker the love interest for this 15yo girl? I was surprised when you said he was 19, I guess they must say that in the movie, but I was just looking at them and making that judgement. So I looked it up. For filming he was 24 and she was 17. I guess I just see her as younger because she was a famous child actor.

Hector

I've watched all of Once upon a time, and I would love a video about it, but it does become difficult to watch at some points, I still kinda enjoyed some stuff even after season 4, but yeah, I would understand if we don't get the video Also, a Riverdale video someday would be amazing, just saying...

Grady Wiehe

“Good luck overthrowing the government when you’re busy being Amish” 💀💀💀

J Arnold

Related to the Giver montage of humanity's experiences, the scene from the Barbie movie where she closes her eyes and feels the joy of the human experience was a really beautiful example of this. I feel like that scene got overlooked in light of all the meme potential in the rest of the movie, but I unironically adored it.

Katherine C

I was genuinely wondering about the hat for 10 minutes. Thank you 😊

thistle_flowers

One of the weirdest things I realized when I saw the movie in theatres was how little like… blood there was. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the original movies so maybe that’s also true of those, but I was remembering the brutality of certain scenes and just thinking… wow, that guy just died and the most blood I’m seeing is a trickle. It made it feel very sanitized in a way that felt odd to me

Mark Young

I remember liking that trailer for THE 5TH WAVE, but damn, that shit was a lot more complicated than I thought it would be

NF

The 100 turns into shlocky fun nonsense. It's enjoyable.

jamezilla

A starring vehicle for Logan Paul... I can barely imagine a worse idea for a movie.

Grace

I would love a ouat video. It does get better in season 6. Personally, I think there’s a ton to unpack about ouat.

jamezilla

Wait... in the SCI-FI novel, The Host, there are "souls"?

Andrew Ward

In the books, the new body that the protagonist gets at the end of the book is a 15/16 year old girls and she gets we with her 20+year old adult boyfriend. Yikes

Kavi Montanaro

Trapped On A Dystopia With Jennifer Lawrence

Grace

Wasn’t there a twist in the third book that the reason there were factions was because they had genetically engineered people to only have one of those traits, and the outside world realized they messed up, so trapped everyone in Chicago until enough generations had passed that they had regular personalities again, and the divergent are just regular people? Which, it’s important to note, is not how genetics works.

Cammie

My sister and I used to quote the maze runner all the time. "Don't you see? We're already dead!"

Chareth Cutestory

By The Great Horn Spoon! would be a proper noun phrase in dystopian California

Katie E

I also thought the Songbird and Snakes movie felt cheap and bad, so I read the book thinking it'd redeem itself. I'm sorry to report that it didn't

AW

I didn't get to book 3 as a child (I think I gave up like halfway through book 2), but my god is that ridiculous 😭

snapdragon

The Uglies book series actually came out several years before Hunger Games! One of my favorites as a kid- not sure how much it holds up today. I haven't even attempted to watch the movie because I've heard how awful it is.

OctopusGrift

I like that Jenny's idea for The 5th Wave is the Twilight Zone Episode "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street"

jamezilla

I don't think that's competitive Jenny, it's having a healthy amount of self-respect.

Ontario Traffic Man

You know an actor is famous when they get referred to by their real name in a Jenny Nicholson film review

jamezilla

Presumably new kids are born who are normal again.

Angelica Nyneave

Oh that’s a bummer, I’m sorry the movie sucked!

The Earth Hotel

The tainted meat plan! (evil tittering) Excellent idea Your Hideousness!

cady

i was so obsessed with the giver as a kid and i remember being so excited to see the movie when it came out but 10 year old me was not buying the changes they made lmao 😭

Billy Campelo

A Once Upon a Time video would be iconic, but the watch through admittedly would be tortuous. I’ve seen it all the way through a few times because I hate myself, and there are some things that are still funny bad up to the end, but so much of it becomes so convoluted and just outright bad. To my memory season 5 was the absolute worst but 6 and 7 were also pretty dumb. I also just have to comment on the lore that the dwarves hatch from giant eggs as fully grown adult men because it lives rent free in my head. Where are they coming from? Who is laying them?

jamezilla

My mum LOVES Chaos Walking!!

Brooklyn d

Chaos Walking suffered an opposite problem from most others on this list- instead of optimistically setting itself up for a series in hopes it would do well, it tried to shove plot points from the entire trilogy of books into one movie, and that, among other things, lended to the dumpster fire-ness of it all

god’s favorite sacrificial lamb

jenny….i can’t believe you failed to mention that in THE HOST, the alien species had, prior to conquering earth, conquered and body snatched a planet of GIANT SPIDERS.

a.s.

nyyeeesss your travesty i love when you hatch evil schemes

Rachel

At least half of these movies are based on books that I unironically loved as a teen, but I never finished any of the ones that had a full series. The drop in quality from the first to second books in these trilogies was MASSIVE.

Sardonic

For what it's worth the book series Mortal Engines was great. Shame about the movie itself

Emma

The Selection feels like such a niche reference omg. Those books are so rough. THG series will always be top tier

src-img

I read the maze runner series when I was in middle school, and I'd somehow never heard the name "Jorge" before. There's a major character in the second one named Jorge, and I spent the whole book reading it as a really emphasized "George" in my head.

mango

OUAT does become quite the slog to get through but I would absolutely love to hear your take on it !

Fletcher Sanderson

As someone who was in middle school when Hunger Games was published, I remember Divergent the book being a pretty decent one-off story that completely fell apart once they tried to expand beyond the one city. There was actually some pretty decent stuff about self-repression and how it manifests as fear, and sort of a commentary on the reductive nature of Hogwarts house-style personality definitions.

rhizzo

OUAT's switch from Season 3 Neverland storyline to bringing in the Frozen characters should be studied honestly. there's a girl on TikTok doing costume analyses and she looks at the difference between all the previous characters' looks and how they're inspired by their Disney film counterparts but have a unique beautiful flair to them... and then there's Anna and Elsa looking exactly like their cartoon version is so sad

Captain Langosta AKA The Yellow Dart AKA Kyle

I still can't believe they changed the name of the fifth Hunger Games movie from "Burning Down the House" to something about snakebirds or whatever. True fans stan the OG!

Kara

I'm sure a dozen people have said this but Mortal Engines is an adaptation of a 2001 book series that predates Hunger Games. idk if it's "Good" but I enjoyed reading them in school. It was very His Dark Materials, steampunk london/england, classism and social critique of capitalism as Big Cities like 'London' roll around eating Small Cities to fuel themselves.

Molly Pullin

The aliens call themselves souls.

brenda

yk what i didnt even connect chaos walking with the buzz of the hunger games so i thought that was crazy. I really enjoyed the books which are soooo good

car

Jenny if you do a once upon a time video it will genuinely change lives just saying

god’s favorite sacrificial lamb

also there ARE two distinctly different selection pilots — one is still available on youtube in full and the other comes up on dailymotion. i’m excited to dive into that mess.

Katie Kraynak

my favorite weird selection lore is it’s actually a retelling of the story of Esther from the Bible— the author has another series that’s a retelling of Ruth

Katie Kraynak

I think that’s why the dystopia is kind of forgotten because biblical Esther just becomes queen and operates for her people within the system 😭

Fluorite

They did Chaos Walking so dirty, that trilogy was my favorite YA series growing up and I was anticipating the movie for yeaaaaars. I could only stomach watching it once, thank you for talking about one of my favorite niche things turned stinky💚 the book series reflected on humanity, what’s makes you who you are and how your choices can change you forever. Also a big anti war sentiment, that’s always cool. (Edit) also in the books, Todd IS only like 12, it’s the whole point of the first part of the book that Todd is the last ‘boy’ in town and that his next upcoming birthday he becomes a ‘man’ and learns about the secret (that they killed all the women). The books are also written in a way to emphasize his immaturity and illiteracy because no one in town is allowed to read or teach. So I get what they were going for, but it also felt very silly coming from a 25 year old Tom Holland.

Fury

Holy smokes. By The Great Horned Spoon. Never met anyone else who mentioned this book - I went to school in SoCal so I guess that's another data point for the CA exclusive hahaha Thanks for a really fun one, Jenny!

Kingdon Radio Hour

Your note on Manacled at the end made me lol. I loved the fanfic but the book adaptation was poorly done (she changed so many iconic lines to be worse in a very “find and replace” way) and it’s so aggressively niche that I think a movie is a BAD IDEA. It should’ve stayed a cult classic fanfic, ughh

Fluorite

ME TOOOOO. The movie has left a giant Manchee poo shaped hole in my heart, the fact that Jenny of all people gave us a critique of it makes me feel just a little better

Fluorite

I’m not alone 😭😭

David A Behlman

Yeah. I only finished Once Upon A Time because I had a very determined friend. For at least the last two seasons I was constantly thinking “are we really doing this?” But Lana is always awesome and for half the last season we get the girl from Reign but the show is different at that point it’s almost unrecognizable aside from the same nonsensical writing. As for this video why is orange the top of the danger triangle of child sorting and not red?!

David A Behlman

Once Upon A Time in Wonderland is a real spin off. I can’t tell if this is a typo or a funny joke.

Zachary Jurbina

First time hearing about Manacled/Alchemized and wondering what dignity do you have to publish a big HP fanfic in 2018 right when The Problem with JKR is really taking off.

Ted Koutz

They planned but never made a movie, but I have to recommend The Forest of Hands and Teeth. It's set years after a zombie apocalypse, there's a girl who's handy with a bow, humanity lives in walled cities or Ewok Village Tree Forts, there's rules she has to rebel against, and so on. It's been years since I've read it but (looking at Wiki) they do the ominous capitalized terms thing too, like there's the Sisterhood and the Guardians. I never got around to reading the sequels tho. Also just re-learning they call the zombies "The Unconsecrated" which is the worst "can't use the word zombies" term I've ever heard

Gleeman and Artist

Yeah I stopped watching ouat in the middle of season 5 because I felt like it was the same conflicts happening over and over, so I feel your pain. I'd love a ouat video even if it was just about the first four seasons

Tucker Nix

Checked my email for a work thing but then saw the words "Patreon Jenny Nicholson hunger games" and immediately went feral and forgot what I was doing

Nadine S

Kind of sad, you didn’t watch the 100. I would have loved your take on the series that starts with "100 kids being sent to the nuclear wasteland of earth to check, if it's inhabitable" and ends with "an alien species has them all transcend to a new plane of existance by turning them into glowing trees inside a giant outdoor-indoor forest".

noor

as someone who’s watched all of OUAT maybe 5 times i would love to see you do a video on it !

J

i recently was watching a video, i think it was about horror movies, where you mentioned you were thinking of doing a video about hunger games knockoffs. and i was stoked, but it was from so long ago i figured the idea was graveyard-ed. and now here it is pet semetary-ed, we cheered

jamezilla

Oh, the way Jenny explained it, I thought she was talking about human souls in the metaphysical sense.

Will Huynh

Jenny mentioned once that a blonde former disney channel star was mean to her at a party once, do we think it’s Peyton List from The Thinning?

Sam Hetherington

First Wave: disable electronics Second Wave: earthquakes Third Wave: pandemic Fourth Wave: mind control sleeper agents Fifth Wave: child soldiers Sixth Wave: tainted meats Seventh Wave: car alarms at 3am Eighth Wave: stink bombs Ninth Wave: swapping peoples shoes with the same shoes but a size smaller like in the movie Amelie Tenth Wave: killer bees

Sam Hetherington

Honestly would love to see the alien pitch meeting for new waves

Tris

The most annoying thing about Divergent is the way they keep referring to the lead character by a boy's name. I'm not saying they can't do that, I just find it annoying when it's my name.

Josh

I really want to see a video where you talk about Saw. As an OG fan of the franchise I feel there is a lot to say.

S G Matthews

I feel like I know I’m in Jenny’s intended audience because I spend the first few minutes of the video distracted by plushies. Dudunsparce!?

Austin F

now that i'm finished with the video, i will say: the divergent books are soooo bad (almost as bad as the movies), to the point that even 15 year old me recognized how much they sucked, but unfortunately they have the same problem as 50 shades: they're funny-bad like 20% of the time, but they're mostly just really tedious, so even hate reading them is kind of a miserable experience. i don't recommend it. also in retrospect, the hunger games aged really well, a lot better than twilight and harry potter (and certainly better than any of its knockoffs). i'm glad it's having a comeback (even if songbirds and snakes was a letdown; i didn't see it so i wouldn't know) just because it's nice that teens have good books to read that respect their intelligence.

Austin F

hi my name is Jenny Dark'ness Dementia Raven Nicholson and I have long brown hair and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like The Money Tree (AN: if u don't know who he is get da hell out of here!)

Maud

The thing about The Giver is that it was meant more as a metaphor for learning to see the world in a more complex and critical way as you grow up. The dystopia was mostly there because it allows the protagonist to realise that there are Problems with his world without having to make things political/explain things that would fly over a twelve year old's head. I think the colour blindness thing is a very good example of that. Obviously it makes absolutely no sense in a world building kind of way, but it's a very good metaphor for how encountering new concepts can make you SEE things in a new light and have a more NUANCED understanding. And since you're in the main character's head, it plays out as a really cool twist to realise the whole world had been in black and white the whole time. But like... If you need it explain why it wouldn't work in a movie, I think you might just be in the wrong industry, smh

Jack B

omg the idea of a manacled video 🫡

Aiden Cordon

For real! I was in 7th grade when they were popular and I was like this is actually so bad but none of my peers agreed. The Turdish middle school boy in me started telling my classmates tris died at the end of allegiant because I hated the books so much. Keep in mind I LOVED hunger games in middle school (enough to take archery lessons lol) so I think I just had good taste for a 12 year old.

Veronica

holy shit is Pluribus just…..The Host!?

Vee Thorn

The videos of yours that I rewatch the most is definitely the Evermore series, the SW hotel, and the VPD video, so I'm pro any plans you have whether theme park or tv show related.

CeCe

Yesss perfect for my 1.5 hour flight! Thank you, ma'am!

Sideshow Bob Stepping On Rakes

I didn't even question why Jenny was wearing a Mike Wazowski headband until she brought it up. She's got us well trained at this point.

Pixel-davis

Teens + Dystopia + Romance + Action seems like such a "normal" combination of attributes since we're so used to it, but it's actually a pretty weird combo when you take a step back from it.

Zoey

Ngl I was holding out hope until the end that you'd bring up uglies. I've never seen it but the premises is just so funny

Natalie

It's ham fisted, or heavy handed

Katia

An underrated hyperspecific cash-in trend in the 10s was the (checks notes) "teenagers with terminal illnesses in love" boom post-Fault in our Stars. I don't remember if this was a movie thing or just a publishing trend, but it was definitely a thing.

Christian Colado

Jenny please please I’m begging you please do a once upon a time video PLEEEEEEASE I will watch it a shit ton

Katie E

I wonder if the "hidden memory" aspect of Manacled inspired Black Moon Rising at all. But that's just a theory - a fanfic theory.

Andre Evans

The thing about Chaos walking is that it feels like they got a big studio note that said ’Women Should Not Be Damsels’ so there’re a bunch of scenes where Tom Holland comes to save Ridley the many times that she’s damseled but whenever he gets there she’s already taken care of the problem/escaped off screen.

J

re: the maze runner and their characterization of the only girl from what i recall of the books, they surprisingly didn't fall into the typical mary sue tropes, instead she was written to be hilariously standoffish - and i don't think that ever materially changed either i feel in YA it's common to see a character (most often a love interest) initially act cold and overly serious, followed by the development of trust and rapport, with which they start to feel comfortable and relax some of their instinctive weariness they didn't really go in that direction with her character, i don't even think she was particularly friendly. the vibe was always reserved and mission focused. also they didn't write her to individually have special superpowers or exceptional skills (technically, the main character and her can communicate telepathically with each other, but every girl in the series has this power so it isn't exclusive) which leads me to how they handled the all male characters thing - pretty simply actually - they meet up with a group who's the inverse (all girls, one boy). kind of a clunky solution, and an obvious one, but it's serviceable despite it's contrivances id say the main flaw of her character from a storytelling perspective was the indestructable plot armor, naturally they couldn't risk the optics of killing off the only female character, but that quality was hardly specific to just her final verdict, the series was a decent, but derivative, premise. like plenty of the ones on this list, it really struggled to stay engaging as the story continued. i'll give it to the author that it at least seemed like the culmination was planned from the start. they built to the reveals and resolutions naturally enough, the journey to get there really dragged under the weight of padding out the story. it would have really benefitted from fleshing out the group dynamics and individual personalities more. i wouldn't necessarily say they made them all perfect, moreso just generic

Natalie

I never read them but they came out at a point I was going to Barnes and noble a lot so I'm always like !!! Those!

Natalie

Happy birthday!

Natalie

It's also been a long time since Ive seen them but I had to stop watching the series after like movie 2 because it was too intense for me. Like I had to come home and watch cast interviews to remind myself these were regular people not in peril. But! I looked it up and apparently there was quite a lot of blood in the first movie, and subsequently less with each movie after it

Alex the Naysayer

These aliens would give you the pants off their ass they’re so benevolent

E.K. Young

Honestly, the Once Upon a Time video can stop at season four. That you don't want to finish it is relevant commentary alone.

William Palmer

The thing that amazes me about these movies is how they get so many A list actors to sign on for such obviously terrible scripts.

NotSoSamWise

So The Host is basically Pluribus then, but more angsty.

Jamie Tadlock

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is one of those frustrating adaptations - faithful to the source material but so poorly put together that it ends up not mattering. The main thing I remember is that the guy they got to play Snow just spent the whole time smoldering, like he’s Zoolander. Just one face the whole movie. I thought the book was good though. It’s almost a deconstruction of the themes of the trilogy; very bold to follow the Hunger Games with a story where true love conquers absolutely nothing.

Blinky

The Giver book is my one true reading love and hyperfixation. I cannot agree on your stance there but I can agree that the movie is horrible. I laughed so hard at you describing the memory flashes because you’re dead on. Gonna be saying “Oh my god Coachella!!” when I think of them from now on.

papa-divertida

What are you sewing with that red Gutterman 1000m thread and those pom poms Jenny?

Bryan Sutton

Don't forget The Thinning, the Youtube Red original where Logan Paul has to pass a test or he dies.

Jenny Nicholson

Mind blown, that explains so much, and if that's because the author is religious/trad, that also would explain so much

Lindsay

I was listening to this (not watching it) and when you were talking about your outfit and mentioned the alien headband, I knew EXACTLY which one you meant—one of the Toy Story claw machine aliens?—and assumed that's what you'd be wearing because I feel like you've worn it or shown it before. The Mandela effect, maybe?

aphajime

the host section made me die laughing. i remember hating twilight but loving the host as a kid and I think it’s just because it’s the closest thing to body horror a middle schooler can convince their parents to let them read

Momo

Is divergent not just the giver?

Louis Z

I would like to offer a sincere apology to Miss Hayley Mills. She didn’t shoot Cyrus.

Tea

I'm surprised Mortal Engines made the list of possible choices, since the book predates the Hunger Games. The film is not very good but I don't remember finding it similar to the Hunger Games either.

Seemly Tablespoon

As someone who has never seen Divergent, I did meet someone with a toddler named Four, and I thought "huh, interesting name." I guess maybe they were huge Divergent fans?

sappho's scullery maid

oh my gosh please please please do the once upon a time video (no pressure obviously I'm just a random commentor) my and my friend have been rewatching it and there's so much to unpack, we've been saying all along we'd love to hear how you'd break it down!

Emily Dahl

Great video this month, Slice!

Katie Kraynak

oh absolutely 😭 never forget that Americas dad was literally named Shalom and the rebel symbol was literally a Jewish star — astounding world building truly

Nyan Saik Krat

Chaos walking makes me so sad because I quite liked the books.

🌌Cosmic Giraffe🌌

There likely will be a Twilight revival, as there's an animated series in the works!!

TEN0R_CL3F

'damn i didn't study for the test that kills you if you fail!' might sound crazy but, in all honesty, i think i would absolutely be in that boat

Maddy

the strangest thing to me about divergent is that it feels exactly like what a soulless corporate cash-in to the YA dystopia trend would be, literally beat for beat, especially having it be based on single personality traits. but, when i was really into the books when i was younger it really seemed like it was a small passion project of the author’s and i believe she even had a personal tumblr account where she would passionately promote it and reblog fanart and fan posts

pants

I remember loving the Chaos Walking books when I was a young teenager. Very bleak, but a great coming-of-age adventure story. The Spackle play a much larger role, (especially in the sequels). Like The Giver, in the film the characters have been aged up but not the way they’re written.

Dirizia

Omg ouat mentioned, my favourite part is how every time the writers needed a new thing, the forgetting curse thing would just show up and the same guy would yell "oh my god it's the curse!!! Again!!!!" and we the audience members would just sigh and sit down to watch the same story reheated once again

Dirizia

Also the bit where they reveal peter pan is rumplestiltskin's dad, or something

Matthew

I remember watching Divergent in theaters with friends, and while I was expecting to roast the hell out of it for all of the stupid stuff, I wound up getting really sucked into it due to the strength of the directing and acting. The plot and concept were still asinine BS, but I still wound up liking it.

Nate Ford

Red Rising is a book series that used The Hunger Games mania to get the first book published, but pretty quickly abandons that initial concept. It's an amazing book series and I recommend it to everyone

Brain Girl

NOOO, you got the factions wrong (i'm not actually upset, im just kidding)

Amber L.

I have thought this for years, like what do candor citizens do all day??

Amber L.

Yes! That series may not be well written but it's so iconic tbh!!

Kay

I'm sorry, but the when you talked about Amity, the Honest farmer Faction, I immediately started thinking about Divergent in My Little Pony terms. Amity is clearly the Applejack Faction, Eriudite is the Twilight Sparkle Faction, and Triss joins Dauntless because Rainbow Dash is her favourite pony.

Jamminonjay

A lot of people point out how divergent is stupid because the author wrote it on her free time as a college student but i think that's doing a disservice to both amateur writing and just the whole concept of youth

Eve Miller

will someone reply to this comment when the youtube mirror is uploaded!! i want to watch it on The Big Screen like its a movie premiere

Shiny Skunk

Shout out to the Dudunsparce plushie! Three segment form and everything, wow.

Becca Yaga

I went to the same church as the guy who wrote the Maze Runner growing up and babysat for his family. His wife was a youth leader and one Sunday the lesson was on Thinking Before You Speak and she said that her husband had asked her to read the first draft of his book (the Maze Runner) and the very first thing she told him was that she hated the ending instead of starting with all the things she liked about it.

Becca Yaga

Also God help us all when Jenny finally becomes a leader of her own dystopian society because we'll be screwed

Ramona

“Good luck overthrowing the government when you’re too busy being Amish”

Michael Apgar

Divergent was written by a college student, and I believe it was like the first thing she ever wrote professionally. And the press at the time was very 'wow, can you believe this was written by an unknown 20-year-old who hasn't finished college!' And then you read the book and are like 'yes, that's extremely believable. This has extreme fan fic vibes.'

Hannah R

I like that each example on this list has a secondary theme of “what Jenny would do if she was in charge of the dystopian government”

Doug Targon

Can’t believe you neglected to mention Starving Games or Grace’s stellar Hunger Games reboot

Najeeb Khadim

Honestly I rewatched the host after this. I still really like it, cant justify why.

Andrew Coleman

Songbirds and Snakes is a pretty bad novel too to be honest. The second prequel was a lot better and I expect the movie to be a lot better as well.

Mike Howard

The dads in Chaos Walking died in the movie so that basically confirms they were gay

Patron Skeleton

Still waiting for Jenny to get strong-armed into actually watching the first five seasons of Supernatural (the core, intended original run of the series) and giving her take on it lol.

Pendragon

This is a trick! This video is your 5th wave! None of these movies exist! You are trying to brain-snatch us! (No, for real, learning here about a Meryl Streep + Taylor Swift movie and a Tom Holland + Daisy Ridley one is insane. Were they released in secret?) (And who makes orange, not red, the most dangerous colour?) May I suggest "white-haired villain" as another cliché? Extra points if the villain is a woman with that exact same long, straight wig. Also, as someone who was recently forced to watch the Maze Runner trilogy, I feel like I need to defend it. They're not good, but they are a really nice "popcorn and friends" situation and have every single cliché. The last one is so silly, I was laughing and clapping the whole movie. And it's funny that you talk about the "cast with lots of cute boys" because it backfired and kind of saved the movies? The protagonist is the classic boring one, so now you have a bunch of more likeable guys to root for instead. They deserve a better story... Maybe that's the biggest dystopia, being trapped in a poorly written one.

Cherri

The way I remember divergent being SO big when I was teen and looking back it was awful lol I gave up on the second book out of boredom I think. I remember the author had like an interview at the end of my copy of the first book (??) where her writing advice to young authors was just “write as it comes to you and don’t do second drafts” which…explains a few things lolol. Would love ouat! My sister was obsessed but I also don’t really remember anything past the first few seasons

Seessie

Adding By the Great Horn Spoon! to my reading list because we did NOT read that in school

Louis Z

If you haven’t seen it I would recommend the surreal Japanese film Battle Royale, which The Hunger Games mostly rips off. They don’t bother with any world building or trying to make any sense at all, which works well for this kind of movie.

Meagan Dieckelt

I wasn’t familiar with the plot for The Host until watching this, but the premise is super similar to Pluribus!

Brenna Walton

BY THE GREAT HORNED SPOON MENTIONED!!!!!!

J

i literally thought the same thing! the way she said it was so similar to that story

J

do you have any thoughts on whether the author has improved as a writer in any meaningful way? im seeing some comments in that vein, is there a reasonable chance for a new divergent book to be noticeably stronger from a storytelling perspective

Roni

The Hunger Games love triangle thing is so fascinating to me, because I believe I read it was originally never meant to have one, but was pushed by the higher-ups because love triangles sell (Twilight had just come out, after all). So I always find it funny how THG knockoffs feel obligated to include them.

Steven Johnson

I have really fond memories of “The Giver” as a book and I thought I liked the movie alright but these clips are making me reconsider haha!

Skylar

I desperately need a VPD style video on OUAT

Aj

tw was sexy

Trina Mercado

WAS it a California specific required reading book? Bc I also read it in school and am from California lol

Trina Mercado

YES, but I think Candor would be the Applejack faction, and Amity would be the Fluttershy faction. Abnegation is... idk, Pinkie Pie's Amish family or something

HBirdy

Just have to say, one of my fav Stephanie Meyers books is “the Chemist”. Pick me is a super spy who meet cutes with lovable harmless teacher/chef because his identical twin brother is also a super spy. I don’t know why, but I’ll reread it on occasion when I need some nostalgia and just a sweet romance. If you have free time, which I’m sure you don’t. Read “The Chemist”

Obi W.

The fact that you can't get past S4 of Once Upon a Time is a sign that it's a good spot to stop. Consider it Part 1. You can do a Part 2 if the mood strikes you to finish up the series.

Jacob

The premise of The Thinning sounds a LOT like this book series called The Testing - I'd read it once in junior high and could never remember the name, and when you mentioned The Thinning I honestly thought it was an adaptation of it. I thought "Huh, I thought they didn't know it was deadly in the books?" because the strongest memory I had was that one test asked the students to identify edible and nonedible plants set out in front of them, and then they were asked to eat them. Kids were genuinely getting sick when they picked wrong and the survivors began to realize there were real stakes. So now I'm thinking "Huh, did I just misremember that? That doesn't sound like everyone knew this test was deadly", and then I started googling and found these are just fully different properties. I want to imagine that they were trying to adapt it but couldn't get the rights to it, and the best idea they had to make it different was make it a test everyone has to take and it's public knowledge that it kills you. Realistically I know this is not likely but I'm willing to be a little conspiratorial to imagine funny things. Regardless, the delivery of "What do you MEAN you didn't study?!" is hilarious. Also I'm commenting this like ten minutes in so I hope I'm not just repeating something said later lol

Kate Lawrence

According to the Wikipedia article, yes: "Because of its setting, the novel is recommended by the California Department of Education as a literary selection for classroom use for grades 3-7." Anecdotally, I'm from NJ and had never heard of it.

Jimini

You only mentioned it briefly without specifying if you've seen it or not but I HIGHLY recommend The Long Walk, one of my favourite films of last year

Lukerfuffle

“Mads Mikkelsen and the Evil Cowboys” is a great band name

Katie

Would absolutely love a VPD style OUAT video. I was very into it an then fell off with apparently many people around season 4 so I have no idea where it went from there except to hear that it got really wild.

Dan Gibbins

Me, seeing Hodges from CSI in a clip: "Oh hey it's that guy Jenny is going to know from the Dinosaur ride at Disneyworld!" Maybe the true successor for a VPD video would be the TV series Teen Wolf? Am I saying that because YouTuber and fellow Canadian Uncarley did a video covering the first two seasons then shifted focus to writing her novel, never came back to it, and now I need closure? Yes, absolutely. Does that mean I'm wrong? Only PROBABLY. For serious, given the bedbuggy nightmare Jenny went through for the Furry Adjacent Video, I'd wanna see that so she can get paid for her trauma.

disk-kun, the mascot for the famicom disk system

when they taught the giver in my middle school it was explicitly taught as a holocaust book and like implicitly the memories that were too unbearable for most of the populace to handle were like, the generational pain of jews, especially in the immediate aftermath of the holocaust. so like, in the book at least, them all having names like jonas or whatever felt like it had a point.

Gradual Decay

Jenny's version of the Fifth Wave sounds a lot like Devilman lol

Perry

The Giver is way more like baby’s first “Brave New World” imo

libbydd

i actually cannot get over the ending of divergent 3. i keep replaying it its so funny to me

Fifi

How am I only learning now that the people in Divergent HAD normal names, they just chose additional silly sci-fi ones of their own volition….

Fifi

I honestly thought someone named their beloved son Four in that universe

rae

40:03 For a content warning you should use the full term instead of acronyms because many people don't know what SA stands for (and even if they know, it takes longer to process than "sexual assault" and so they might miss it). You should as unambiguous as possible for your content warnings to be effective, especially in an audio format. Saying the full term is unlikely to trigger people because people are typically triggered by descriptions rather than just terms, using an acronym is much more likely to trigger people because people might not register what the acronym stands for until it's too late.

Alx Windsar

I think saying 'from here the show gets worse and thus I will have less to talk about' is extremely funny though

Nicole Elizabeth

I never had to read "The Giver" in school and I think that's why I always initially get it mixed up with "The Giving Tree"

quanza

why was this a recap of every book i read in middle school

Ryan Chin

The most interesting thing to me about once upon a Time is how Disney uses this Snow White actress now

Callum Moore

“It also depicts a blonde former Disney channel actress” ….OH…

Robert Karnick

Now I’m curious about Jenny’s beef with the blonde former Disney channel actress

tapioca

pretty sure The Giver is just the nostalgia critic. He remembers it so we don't have to

Natterluck

The Giver was foundational to this literary genre-niche twenty years before anything else on this list, and that's why it feels hacky to Jenny, because a lot of foundational media ends up feeling hacky next to its grandchildren. Early '90s middle-grades versus '10s young adult are apples and oranges. (In full disclosure, I haven't seen the movie, out of respect/dread.)

Natterluck

Source: in '93, ten-year-old me wrote my "first book" that was an absolute The Giver knockoff, and this summer, my 11-year-old daughter wants to make a video game that ALSO starts with a birthday sorting ceremony and has corrupted lands beyond your home. Lois Lowry did that before any video game.

Marleigh Pearson

Erudite: smart (doctors/scientists) Candor: honest (lawyers) Abnegation: selfless (the government) Dauntless: brave (cops) Amity: kind (farmers) Factionless: homeless cult

Marleigh Pearson

To be clear, both the books and movies are DUMB but man I loved them as a kid.

kelly m

Applejack: "I'm the element of [honesty]!" iykyk

April Feldman

I'm not sure if it's quite dystopian or if it's more just sci fi, but I always loved The Green Book by Jill Paton Walsh (it has nothing to do with the other Green Book). It's a very short read, and it's about how the earth is dead and humans have all evacuated in various small ships to pre-approved planets in order to establish a small human colony there. It follows a little girl as the main character- young enough to not remember evacuating earth- and the settlers all realizing that their supplies are not actually compatible with the planet. Like they were meant to be able to plant things, but the plants don't grow properly, their equipment can't cut through basic materials, their stock animals start dying, etc. And so it's sort of half fun-exploring-a-new-world and half hopeless-waiting-for-everyone-to-starve. But it was my favorite book as a kid and my first sci fi book! I think it was republished under the name 'Shine' at some point.

ace_faerie

When I saw this month's ramble title, I immediately got excited and hoped "The Jurassic Games" would be on the list. (I knew it wouldn't be as soon as you said one of your criteria would be the movie being about teens.) It wasn't a good movie AT ALL but when I think of Hunger Games knockoffs, that is the first one to come to mind

Magistrissa

Jenny's The Others strategy is basically the one from The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street. Maybe the alien manager who got hired midway through the evil plan caught some of our Earth television programs and was a fan.

AM Voore-Lewis

I just want to say that it's good that you didn't watch the Mortal Engines for this because the movie was absolute ass, but as it was in your honourable mentions I do just want to say that the book series it's based on is absolutely phenomenal and incredibly unique! It also predates the Hunger Games by a lot, and really I would say doesn't fall into that specific Dystopian YA genre of like the late 2000s-mid 2010s, like yes it's YA and it takes place within a dystopian society , but doesn't have any of the other hallmarks of that micro-genre. Like it's much more in line with steampunk and more traditional like coming of age adventure stuff and it's a very developed and fascinating world. Though I won't argue that the making of it into a movie definitely was jumping on the Hunger Games trend (and the success of Mad Max Fury Road). But really really cool and unique book series! 10/10 would recommend!

Magistrissa

I love how literally everything about Divergent feels like it could be a metaphor for being LGBT in one way or another, including the evil schemes that the government could do instead of the more contrived plan they have in place, but it's like it didn't occur to anyone. Or indeed that dystopias are supposed to be metaphors and satires with subtext and stuff. Instead it's just an extremely literal story about being secretly special and doing parkour.

Kayla Dykes

Truly devastated to hear the hate on manacled

Anusha Tandon

there are a bunch that were just books and never made it to film. i really recommend red queen it has grouping by color. also matched is fantastically bad

Magistrissa

As a kid, Uglies always annoyed me because it was a direct ripoff of the Twilight Zone episode Number 12 Looks Just Like You. I feel like it's a premise that works better in a tv episode. I wouldn't say it's a top tier Twilight Zone episode, but I do think there's something to the commentary. It's the idea of stripping away your individuality as a privilege you earn upon growing up, this intense pressure by grinning people acting parental to this teenage girl. It was definitely good commentary in the 50's and 60's US (it's based on a short story from 1952). Watch any of the 1950's educational shorts featured on Mystery Science Theater for a look at how the intense pressure to conform actually worked; I feel like that image has been warped by a telephone game of hacky satire about the 50's. I've definitely been feeling that with the swing away from body positivity culture lately, where procedures, dieting, exercise, medications and shapewear are all framed as unlocking your potential, and staying the same is almost seen as self-sabotaging because extreme and unattainable beauty standards are framed as baseline self care. (Like, with the same tone as if you were objecting to showering). It goes hand in hand with the conservative cultural swing, and I don't think it's at all a stretch to connect it with nationalism's obsession with body image, fitness, conformity, and strong gender norms. But I digress.

Aaron Summers

Forgive my ignorance, what does "WIP" mean?

Erie

work in progress :)

Elisabeth Aaron

The reason the main character’s name in darkest minds is Ruby is not because she is in the red category, but because she is played by Rue

Kevin William Walker

@17:00 if anyone says anything about my precious, dear _Captive State_ so help me Legislators

james dada

i remember reading the first divergent book as a kid and thinking it had potential, but the second book pissed me off so much halfway through i put it under my bed and forgot about it until we moved out years later lol

Sophie!

Oh my God that *content warning* scene in Divergent was so jarring and frightening to me as a kid- I totally forgot about it

Tbing34

This is the SECOND bad movie you've featured starring Dr. Seeker as a different doctor (the first one was Transcendence)

butnotongue

If you like the general premise of The Host but not it's execution, Animorphs has a similar vibe with its "villains"

🤩doves

I didn't get this part could you explain

Richard Reeves

They're making a Manacled (Alchemised) movie??!!? On the one hand, I love seeing an artist get paid. On the other hand...Alchemised was sooo bad--a real chore to get through

Venture

"...one of the only times I've fallen asleep in a movie theater." - Jenny Nicholson There's a quote for the back of the Blu-ray case! Thanks for doing this one, it was so much fun.

Crob

The gen Z who are really doing a revolution are whatever those dudes breaking into Scientologist buildings are doing. Babie's first hostile takeover

Amy Elizabeth Reinhart

Now how about Once Upon a One More Time, the Off-Broadway fairy tale musical using all Britney Spears songs

Aiden

did anyone else read the "legend" trilogy by marie lu? I barely remember anything that happened in it, but I do remember that the protagonist girl always described her and her brother (I think?) as having "brown eyes with gold flecks in them". which pissed me off because that's 1. not a thing that exists in real life and 2. so mary-sue it took me out of the story.

Jake

As someone who made the dubious decision to read The Host when it came out, the ending in the book is so much creepier. The new, brain dead body that the protagonist is placed into is implied to be a very young teenage girl. The human love interest expresses discomfort when he sees her, so she lies about the body's age. Presumably so they can still have sex. The Mormonism really jumps out in everything Meyer does.

Lydia

Be nice to our tall queen Veronica Roth

MW

I'm a big fan of the Ender's Game book series (issues with the author aside) but the movie is NOT good. So I think it's only worth watching as a hate watch if you've read the book. If not it's just a mediocre teen dystopia movie. If you've read the book it'll give you rage. I also remember loving the Uglies book series but that was around the same time (middle school. the 2000s) that I was also enjoying Twilight so I suppose I could believe it wasn't that good. Or that it didn't work adapted to film.

Vergil Angelo

Uglies telling us the main character has squinty eyes and nicknaming her Squint and how she hates how squinty they are while casting Joey King and her massive eyes.

RainyMeadows

I remember seeing ads on YouTube asking "Will Logan Paul Survive?" and thinking "god I hope not"

Angelica Sather Hodgetts

I was thinking about that too. I think in the book it was obvious that the family members cared for each other, worried about each other, etc, just not to an extreme extent. They weren’t supposed to be totally robotic and emotionless.

RainyMeadows

Two things I can't help thinking about with Divergent: - The villains are the Designated Smart People and the heroes are the cop/military-coded Designated Strong People. Um - The main character is inherently special and superior to everyone else because she's Genetically Pure. UM

Obligate Aerobe

Thank you for dredging up my memory of that book, I really loved it as a kid and now I want to re-read it

Kylie

Yes and I think hills were removed because they’re impractical for farming and transportation.

Alyssa

In case no one else has mentioned it, I recommend 3%, a Brazilian series on Netflix. Not because it's a bad hunger games rip off, but because it's got a very similar premise and is actually very good imo. It's a grungy future world where young adults have to compete in a series of trials to earn their spot in an isolated, affluent utopia (and guess how many make it through...). It does have a few random Capitalized Terms. No love triangle or silly nicknames iirc but it's been a while since I watched it.

el126

hi jenny

Beast

Hearing "The Fifth Wave" and getting shivers down my spine of when I watched it a decade ago when I stayed home with a fever and thought it was a genuinely good movie and googled it to find it had a like 11% critic review

EPo

Finally something to watch while I procrastinate on my Thinning Exams! Thanks Jenny!

Jenny Nicholson

My friends and I were consuming it via fanmade audiobooks on youtube lol. It's written like an SCP entry, so much page length is devoted to edgelord overwrought descriptions of how minor Harry Potter characters died. Over and over. And then Hermione will tell us posthumously that that random character had been really important to her even though they haven't been, in the fanfic or in actual Harry Potter

Jenny Nicholson

A few videos ago I said in passing that someone was reported for sexual assault, and didn't do a separate content warning because I was just saying the phrase sexual assault once without any details, and had thought a content warning would be moot since saying "content warning sexual assault" would be the same number of times and amount of detail as saying the phrase "sexual assault" the one time anyway. But then some people were mad that I said the phrase without a warning. So I specifically had that in mind when I did this content warning, because I thought if I said the phrase in the content warning, people would be mad because then the content warning would be a trigger

Giselle Cherbony

I loved The Host book when it came out and still do. A few years ago Stephanie meyer came out with a new book and it was SOOOO boring and dumb. I think it was called the chemist?

Suzanne

By The Great Horn Spoon as california required reading is such a deep childhood memory I didn't even remember I had. I am consistently amazed by your ability to recall so much of the media you consumed as a child... how do you do it girl

EaselEar

My husband and I are trying to manifest this video every month 🫠 we're so happy it's her favorite amusement park!! The highest praise!!!

AM Voore-Lewis

It's funny that you were thinking the guy in Chaos Walking was having like young boy thoughts because while I think they definitely aged up the character in the movie if it was played by Tom Holland, the main character in the book is quite literally supposed to be 12 turning 13

Narissa de Bruin

I read The Selection and thought it was not very good BUT I was very much obsessed with it... that's MY garbage book series!!!

Ao

The giver is really intended to be very metaphorical, not intended to be read so literally. And is one of those books that you really can’t and shouldn’t adapt into a YA dystopia movie. Hence why it was such an insanely bad adaptation

Ao

Agreed! 100%

Nathalie

Chaos Walking is so funny to me because there's no way a single woman would live on a planet where every man's thoughts can be loudly heard, let alone visually manifested

Elle

I read a ton of YA dystopia as a teen and the wildest premise I can remember was a book called Unwinding. There was a civil war over abortion and the compromise to end the war was that abortion is illegal, but when your kid is 13-17 you can have them "unwound", which just means they get killed and all their organs are donated. For some reason, they never made that one into a movie.

Carina McGee

Dude, I read the book of The Knife of Never Letting Go in high school which inspired the second to last movie, and the dog killing scene is so much more brutal in the book. The dog can also project his thoughts, so he and Tom Holland's character talk. I don't remember it being a drowning, I remember the dog being threatened by a knife, and the whole time the bad guy is trying to trade the dog for whatever it is he's asking for, the dog is just screaming the main character's name. So you know he can't give it up to save the dog, but the dog is mentally screaming "TODD!!!!! TODD!!!!!!!" the whole time until he's killed. I did not like that book and stopped there. 🙃 (Edit; I was curious and looked it up, and the dog actually dies by having its neck snapped. So it was yelling up until I think the author literally wrote in the snap sound. I was Not Okay)

Lindsey Keefer

Monsters Inc is a dystopian film, and I stand by this! So the hat fits! Dystopian is my absolute favorite genre so I’m eating well this month :)

Niamh Julian

I wish I could have Jenny watch the really really bad hunger games stage play and then critique it. I think she'd find it so funny

Lindsey Keefer

Her podcast appearance on Sardonicast is one of my favorite pieces of Jenny content, and she talks a lot about Saw on there!

Greg Swain

whoa, a surprise “By the Great Horn Spoon!” mention. I did a bit part voice role for the full cast audiobook version.

Colleen McCusker

The Divergent writer is at it again with a 6th book that “upends” the previous ones. We are definitely having another wave of these movies. Can’t wait for the next related ramble!

Kristen

It's like there's this immaturity, which is sister to "taking things too literally," where people see dystopian tropes and mimic them because that's how we play and learn, but somehow don't tip that they understand what those tropes are for or meant to do metaphorically. More simply, why write a dystopia if you have nothing to say about it or our current situation? I'd hazard because the lessons and things to say haven't developed out of playing with the ideas, so it's just smashing G.I. Joe's together for the fun of it. And somehow I feel like being neurodivergent and taking things too literally actually ends up with the opposite effect in that we get all analytical and always look for subtext and allegory? Like, we overcompensate?

Kristen

Omg using super smart kids as call center slave labor is a satire ya dystopia that writes itself.

Kristen

I thought of the Giver as Baby's First Brave New World. Just now. The Giver book was dark though -- the first Receiver running out of good memories to receive and getting addicted to Tylenol or whatever and asking for unaliving was pretty dark, anyway.

Aimee W

stephenie meyer pluribus

Luis

Found a free stream for The 5th Wave and wow the alien plot was terrible 😬 Jenny was right about the goofy names tho! Zombie, Oompa, Ringer and let's not forget Dumbo 😅

Honoria Valemon

I truly had never heard another human reference the book “ by the great Horn spoon” before. Really took me back to the fourth grade library.

Holly

I was thinking the other day about how I would love to hear your thoughts on OUAT! I'm currently rewatching after failing to get past series 5 so many times

mountain loon

Excellent vid, I rewatched it immediately

Ham

Love "Oops, all premise"

Vanja Perkovic

Pluribus should have writing credit to Stephanie Meyer for The Host :o

Ham

Bead Sorting Faction sounds like a chill gig actually

Kinetics Video

I think with lore-heavy sci fi that is meant to be consistently believable and touches on politics there are essentially two ways to succeed: the Ursula Le Guin way of having coherent politics to map into your setting; this is difficult because most people don't have coherent politics and you are bound to segment your audience with whatever those politics are. And the Star Trek way of strategically blocking off the parts of the setting you don't have satisfactory explanations for; this is simple enough in practice but does require very specifically constraining where in the setting you can go and those constraints not being too visible or distracting. Of course barreling ahead without either of these accommodations to this problem is in the short term funny, but inevitably gets tedious when the stories give up even trying to explain anything.

Kinetics Video

Oh God, he would so take that job too

JoeJoe L

The 100 is amazing it just takes 3 episodes to get there

Setheus

BY THE GREAT HORN SPOON!!! it was required reading for my california class too, I haven't heard people from other states knowing about it either!

ary

If it didn't become too tedious, I would personally be thrilled for any time of OUAT content!

Steve Ray

Bridge To Terabithia! A Girl Called Al!

Steve Ray

Those cover "clumsily brutal" and "brutal," but 'ham-handed' covers "clumsy."

Steve Ray

@Kepler: Were the Factions equally populated? @Amber L.: Members of Candor make reaction videos unless they're assigned a specific task.

Steve Ray

"Inspection" is a *tween* dystopian novel by the author of Bird Box, and it reads like a weird, coded confession.

Eve Miller

The Mirror has arrivened....

Jacob

i thought those were the names of the beatles

Rosie

Sorry, The Giver (the book) slaps. I don't make the rules

Jenny Nicholson

I would love to go if it wasn't so far away! Making it be like medieval times is conceptually so funny

Roxanne13579

The hopeful sequel baits that never end up happening is so funny xD but it seems they all got tragically shut down by The Studio

L Woods

Oh lord, Chaos Walking. A friend of mine worked.on it and was visibly embarassed by telling.people.he had. So bad!

Brooklyn d

Honestly I have no idea if they are equally populated, it’s been so long since I’ve interacted with those movies/books

ADarkAllieWay

Uglies was also one of my favorites series growing up! Rereading it as an adult, I still love it. As soon as I had heard about the movie adaptation I knew better than to attempt a watch.

ADarkAllieWay

I watched this video and within the same night, The Fifth Wave aired on SyFy channel. I became interested when they said all the aliens were holed up at Wright Patterson Airforce Base in Dayton Ohio. A place known among weirdos, and locals, to house alien spaceships.

chloe

As a massive fan of the songbirds and snakes book you are right the movie is bad and yes it didnt have as big of a budget

Katherine H

This was pre Hunger Games but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the kid dystopia in City of Ember

David Bleek

As a vegetarian im grateful the evil alien overlord Jenny has spared us with the poison meat wave

Annemarie Andaleon

Jenny getting all the factions wrong in divergent killed me as a target audience member of divergent

Luis

jaja that's what I'm calling them from now on!

fangs4asking

Gregor the Overlander is another series by the author of the Hunger Games, not quite dystopia directly but it does present you with a "would you kill baby hitler" moral

Njord

Just want to recommend Sarah Z’s Teen Dystopia video and Big Joel’s The Giver video, for anyone who craves more YA knockoff discussion. I think most people here will have seen these already, but in case you haven’t! (Also Joel is much less dismissive of The Giver by Lois Lowry.)

Megan Prior

I’d love Jenny to explore manacled more, and it’s strange de-pottered book version. I had no idea that it’s going to be a movie! My friend loved it and asked me to read it so she could talk to someone about it, and I can’t not finish a recommendation that a dear friend gives me… no matter how painful

Muireann McGlynn

I really enjoyed the book the knife of never letting go is based on though its been decades since I've read it. The protagonist starts the book age 12 so the immaturity makes a lot more sense. I think its too hard to convey the premise in film format in the book there's so much noise its difficult to pick out individual thoughts.

Muireann McGlynn

The dads are gay canonically in the novel. The dog dying fucked me up in the book. Its a really bleak trilogy it gets dark.

Dave Ruff

Very happy Jenny didn't put herself though watching a Logan Paul movie. Maybe happier she didn't put us through a mini-review of it.

It's Omar!

I like fridge, fridge keeps things cold for me. 🤓

Kate Dager

I had no idea there was a Chaos Walking movie. I remember really enjoying the book series it's based on. Patrick Ness wrote a lot of really cool, high concept YA books. I only discovered him while working as a youth librarian so I'm not remembering them having read them as a kid, like with The Giver and Uglies, which I also loved but when I was 10-12.

Chloe Cassandra Koons

As the cliche goes: the books are better for pretty much everything you mentioned

Pterranodon

"I'm fighting the war on eugenics, on the side of eugenics"

Cami

Stopped this video when you mentioned the not one, but TWO failed Selection pilots that never aired because I read those books as a teen and I sooooo wanted to see how they’d adapt them. I’m thrilled to announce that I found BOTH (they’ve both been leaked, not just one) and watched them in their entirety. Worth the hour and a half I cannot lie. 🙂‍↕️

Pterranodon

Now I'm feeling left out as a born-and-raised Californian who has NEVER heard of this book 😭

Saya J

I also feel the same way about the Beauty and the Beast movie even though I generally can’t stand the live-action remakes! I still remember Jenny’s “compliment sandwich” video about it.

Pterranodon

It's so funny hearing the premise of "The Selection" with the current rise of "dystomances"- presumably by children who grew up with the Hunger Games and all they took away from it was "love triangle where the girl is secretly special, but make one love interest a fascist" Truly, a fascinating case of convergent evolution between a cynical studio executive and a modern dystomance author.

Fiona V

See also: the “Seinfeld is unfunny” page on TV Tropes

Fiona V

IIRC Jenny has mentioned an unnamed blonde former Disney channel actress being rude to her… I think she said they met at a party or something?

Fiona V

Clearly you need to do two content warnings, first being the warning that you’re about to do a content warning, followed by the actual warning 😜

Fiona V

“my drawer of spa headbands”

Pterranodon

Honestly, I assumed Abnegation was the largest with Erudite and Dauntless being the smallest and most selective. Unfortunately, the other factions suffer from HP syndrome where you have The Important Houses, then... the others.

Talwyn Jones

the host in fact predates the first hunger games book by several months! both 2008, but meyer beat collins with a may release vs. a september release

MagicalGirlShame

Jenny once again proving she has the wit to overthrow us all, but by sheer grace she chooses not to.

Jakub Makalowski

Wait is the fifth wave in anyway related to the first wave tv show?

AshFerraz

The host was my favorite book for a period of time when I was younger. Also, you forgot to mention the best part about divergent, the twist ending in last book where Trish dies. This is what we lost and they canceled the last film.

Lolly Leonard

Omg yes this was def a trend (although smaller than the dystopian boom). Five Feet Apart is one I can think of!

David Bleek

Idk yelling out whatever you're thinking and thoughts like "fridge keeps things cold for me" all sound like standard guy behavior 🤷‍♂️

Rachel Cook

Dr. Seeker jump scare at 49 mins!

rae

Fair. It sucks that people got mad at you for that, since not saying it in full makes the content warning less effective (I also just don't really understand how the word SA is any less triggering than "sexual assault" to anyone who knows what SA stands for? "Sexual assault" isn't a slur, the word itself isn't the issue). I guess you can't please everyone, and using "SA" instead of "sexual assault" works as a compromise, although I think the backlash you faced is misguided and ends up doing more harm than good.

a.g.

The host movie can’t really be used to examine to book unfortunately. The book is surprisingly good with less goofy/futuristic elements. They realize that humans are going to survive because the aliens are so influenced by inherent human empathy that when they have children together, they can’t bear to infect them with alien parasites. The book is long enough for the main alien character to have a great arc and provide info about the other colonized planets. It’s definitely an exploration of Mormon ideology and very interesting!

Jet Puff

The Maze Runner has so many nouns. Greenies get Griefed by Greebers in the Glade!!

UwUwizard

There is a man who occasionally comes into my work (I'm a librarian) and talks extensively about OUAT to a colleague who has seen all of it (or maybe Grim? I get these shows confused). It's always 40 minutes of entirely confusing magical elemental lore about what kind of witch / magical person he would be if the show was real and every time I'm there for it I feel as if I'm inside a Jenny Nicholson video.

Jenny Smaridge

yes, the movie did the book so dirty. as much as I agree that Meyer isn’t great at world building, there was a lot more depth in the book, and the sentient creatures on other colonised planets were really unique (ice bears, singing bats, ‘seeweeds’, sunflowers, superpredatory ‘dragons’ that live in jelly). just imagination running absolutely wild without the constraint of strict scifi rules.

Kate Dager

The dog dying in that book has very strong Artax vibes in my memory. From the book version of the Neverending Story, specifically. There is a reason they did not make Artax a talking horse in the movie.

Sharon M

After hearing you describe The Selection I really want you to watch Ready Set Love

shai

Think that was book-only info lol, they never mention it in the film

shai

I do kind of wish we got your thoughts on the 100 cause it wasn't prestige tv or anything but it was definitely way above average for a cw show, at least for the first few seasons. Pretty standard cast of teens starting out but their cultural and political conflicts w the "grounders", ethical dilemmas, and extreme traumas interacting with normal teen behavior led to some very compelling storylines and character arcs. I was really disappointed with how the show ended, but I still think about those early seasons. VERY excited for a potential OUAT video. It does get pretty rancid in s4 and that's around where i tapped out when the show was airing. The Frozen stuff in particular was such a departure from the prev adaptational ethos and i just really disliked how close they had to make everything to the film. Personally id love your thoughts on the show even if you weren't able to finish the entire thing - not that there are no good moments from s4-7 (or so i hear) but i don't think youd be missing very much.

shai

the film version would also make for amazing video fodder

Cyrus Potter

I don’t know if it was the intent of the author, but for me the ‘noise’ also felt touchingly reminiscent of the awkwardness lots of boys feel growing up where your female peers seem so much more mature, and how that adolescent awkwardness can curdle into horrible bitterness and cruelty if you let it. It felt like (at least when I read it ages ago) a quite moving exploration of male coming of age.

Zach Theberge

I remember sitting in the back seat of a show choir trip hearing the America Singer book read outloud. Like we were traveling bards

Jacob Levitt

would you be open to uploading an evermore supercut? i’d love to be able to watch the whole saga without chasing down each video individually!

Sophie Cleverly

Everything Everything would probably fit into that too - although as a chronically ill person I was really not a fan of the twist in that one

Sophie Cleverly

Chaos Walking is an amazing trilogy - it worked so well as a book series but I remember hearing it was going to be a movie and thinking how the hell are they going to do that? ...well, badly, it turns out 😆

Nathan Lowry

Recognizing the actor from the pre-ride video of the dinosaur ride is an insane pull

Lately Fashionable

Well this was extremely fun! I've seen exactly none of these movies, lol

Bi Zuko

The Mortal Engines were very good books (at least, as I remember), and got adapted badly.

Lately Fashionable

The thing about The Giver book that I remember being weirdly inexplicable (besides the black and white world and the memories reverting back to the community when Jonas leaves) is that they have no such thing as weather. The first memory he gets from The Giver is of sunshine, which he's never felt before. He's also never experienced rain or snow, or any change in the climate of any kind. But then when he leaves, he's just like, walking away. There's no giant dome that he has to escape, and he just eventually comes to a hill in the snow, and there's a random sled at the top? How were they controlling the weather in just this one little community?

Meggy

"good luck overthrowing the government when youre too busy being amish" is a great quote

Evan

By the Great Horn Spoon is some pretty deep 2000's era California elementary school lore. I kinda thought it slapped at the time, didn't it end with bare knuckle boxing?

Jbash31

OUaT was my wife and I’s guilty pleasure watch during the pandemic. It is quite terrible

Odahcama

BY THE GREAT HORN SPOON MENTIONED!

emast

She talks about it in the patreon best/worst plot twists video!

Tori Rittenger

It’s my favorite part of buying new beads.

Tori Rittenger

(Trigger Warning SA Discussion) The freaking SA in Divergent is because she’s SA’d in the book by guys who sleep in the same open floor plan as her. It’s very scary and very gross. I think they toned it down in the movie - which is good - but then the insane SA fear thing doesn’t make sense.

Luziwuzi

Fun fact about my experience with The Darkest Minds: I watched it in theaters on the last day of school because movie tickets were super cheap for students that day. I went with a bunch of classmates, and honestly, I don’t think any of us even planned to see that movie — it was just whatever happened to be playing at the time. At the very end of the movie, there’s a huge explosion. Right when it happened, the entire cinema suddenly lost power. At first, we all thought it was some kind of stylistic cut to black, so everyone just sat there in silence for a couple of minutes waiting for the movie to come back. Then people slowly started going “wtf is happening?” Eventually, a super sweaty and stressed employee came in with a flashlight and told us the explosion in the movie had somehow caused a power outage so bad that the whole cinema was out and they couldn’t get it running again, so everyone had to leave in case a fire would start. To this day, I still don’t know how the movie ends. In my version, it just cuts to a massive explosion and you the viewer die.

Katie Rose

“Everyone gets their memories back and they’re like ‘omg Coachella!!’” 😂😂😂

Samay Gheewala

It's amazing that there was an adaptation of a well-known book like The Giver with Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Alexander Skarsgard, and Taylor Swift, and I never heard of it!

Neither a captain nor a stingray

Man, chaos walking was such a let-down. Even compared to adult books on the subject, it's one of the best post-colonial deconstruction narratives I've ever read, and was really influential to me growing up as a white person living under the shadow of colonisation here in Australia. It's also one of the first books I remember reading and thinking "oh jesus, how the hell could they even adapt this for film"

Grace W

What’s funny is I have a signed copy of the Divergent spin-off book “Four.” I did the math and I read over 15 dystopian books as a teen.

Laura

love the maze runner shoutout because I loved it for the characters but the premise was so obviously just that the author thought it would be cool to have characters in a huge maze and then just made up a stupid reason that they were in the huge maze. "we put these kids in a huge maze to study their brains for a cure to the zombie virus" no you didn't, you just wanted to see kids in a huge maze. RIP newt.

Neil Dutton

It's funny how so much of the world building is awkwardly accommodating decisions the author also has control over. Like the reason the Greens in Darkest Minds do menial work is just so Ruby isn't revealed as a non Green by having them do genius level puzzle solving.

TLaws

if im remembering correctly my curriculum had us read the giver and 1984 in the same year which is a little crazy looking back on it, the movie hadnt come out yet so i took the stories equally seriously and did not see it as the YA story it is lol

swervegriffin

This could be a major leap here but was this craze around dystopian YA maybe an effort to instill Anticommunism in the youth during 2000-2020? Was it like a fear of being far enough away from the Soviet Union and the Cold War that the next generation needed to have it instilled? To that point didnt Ayn Rand write a few of these (the fountainhead/anthem). I’m p sure a conservative/qanon affiliated group is producing the new Animal Farm adaptation

swervegriffin

Wait I think it was just anthem, the fountainhead is more like atlas shrugged

swervegriffin

Omg just got to the part of this video with the Berlin Wall and tiennenman square in the giver

Marie Becker

I hated the Divergent series so much I couldn't finish it, and I finish everything. But honestly, I'm such a snotty jerk the first thing that annoyed me was that they weren't grammatically consistent in the faction names. Choose adjectives OR nouns, you weirdos! And don't choose Abnegation at all, it's a bad descriptor! You could have just been Humble and it would have taken me at least 20 more pages to start hating you, book. I always feel compelled to ask in any dystopian YA fiction conversation if anyone has read the Green-Sky trilogy, which idk, if I had gazillionity dollars I would commission an artsy animated adaptation of.

Eskana Kana

I can't dislike Uglies... It was actually the first dystopian teen series I read, even before the Hunger Games was a thing. I enjoyed the movie because it was like re-reading the book!

Eskana Kana

I only watched the Wondeland spinoff... I'd love if that one got a little appreciation!

wheeliescoot

Jenny this is already one of my favorites I’ve rewatched it so many times

Emil

It's with deeply mixed emotions I tell you that they actually *were* trying to make that in a movie but decided in 2020 to make it a TV show instead that I believe they are still trying to get greenlit

Mac Monkeyhat

50:49 Okay this pyramid is annoying me why is orange above red it goes in rainbow order until that point

Emil

Would it make it more or less funny that the Noise (and also other social developments that I can barely remember) prompted women to form a female-only terrorist organization called the Answer in the book?

Mel

they resolved the maze runner love triangle by crushing one of the girls with a huge rock in like the last chapter of the final book. great because the main character does not have to pick between them now

Felicia

The Uglies books are actually really solid, they're written for a middle school-aged audience so they're simplistic but a lot of the series was genuinely interesting worldbuilding (although I think it doesn't feel worthwhile as an adult before you've read all 3 of the originals, because you don't really know what they payoff will be like). Instead of "magic tubes that make you hot", it emphasized how horrific the procedure was (and WAY more invasive than in the movie), but also how brainwashed everyone was *before* surgery into believing that getting absurdly invasive plastic surgery to be hot is essential to an equal society because there'll be no prejudice, yippee! It's very intentional by the author that this is an obviously ridiculous belief but it's facilitated by both cultural brainwashing and physical brain damage. My favorite things about the series were completely absent from the movie, though. It talked a LOT about overconsumption and environmental destruction and it says a lot that, in the age of Shein and Temu, those plot lines were totally scrapped. I wouldn't call the books High Art but I do recommend them.

Jaz Mei Luo

iirc, for the Plot Twists ramble video, someone in the comments pointed out that Dr. Seeker was also the doctor in the movie Transcendence. I love seeing Jenny get excited about finding Dr. Seeker in random movies.

Erin G

I actually paused this video to go look for the Selection pilots bc I did read those books and they were so funny. BOTH are on yt rn and they both really deliver on the dumbness factor! Would recommend! I laughed out loud at both and it's fascinating to see what they changed from the first one to ostensibly make it "better"

Hector

Season 5b is my personal hell, but I actually liked 5a iirc

Juliana Born

And existed before Fault in our Stars through the books of Lurlene McDaniel with titles like Don't Die, My Love. Pre-teen me was obsessed with these.

Ly Montesino

My 12 year old self died at the selection part

Bryony Pyke

Oof first time I disagree with you outright, I rather liked Alchemised (the published version of Manacled.) It works a lot better as an original novel, with the characters developed outside the HP constraints. It’s miserable and harrowing and deeply melodramatic but I enjoy that sometimes.

Erris Barrett

the trashing of chaos walking is so cool because i read the book and it was completely unbearable it's one of the only books i've ever just not been able to get through

Wren

As someone actively in the HP fandom today (but who is not in the Dramione ship) I’m embarrassed beyond reason about Manacled and everything to do with it. 🥲

Blck 7

i love that Jenny doesnt curse because when she goes out of her way to call someone stupid it has the same weight as executing the person on screen

Spencer Hastings

I really wasn’t expecting Jenny to come after middle school lit favorite the giver

Bryony Pyke

I’m the opposite, I liked Alchemised but read Manacled in a state of horror haha. It would make a weeeeeiiiird movie.

Bryony Pyke

I was wondering if Jenny had seen Pluribus during that section!

Joey Guidry

So hyped for the ouat idea! The vpd video is one of my favorites!

Song-Kinsley Productions

ME TOO I was slightly too old for them and so this was legitimately the biggest twist of the video to me

Ziede

on the Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes - the book is only interesting because Snow is an asshole and he has such awful thoughts that you're like "oh my god!" while laughing because oh my god! the events themselves weren't that interesting. Also, it was such a bigger book compared to any others that this like nearly 3 hour movie felt both too long but also too short because you get to the final confrontation and all I can think is "There's no way you know her birthday" like you two barely know each other

Alanna Macree

Would you mind explaining what similarities the book has to Mormon ideology? I know only the broad strokes about their beliefs and it'd be interesting to know how they influenced the book!

Alanna Macree

Wait she got bedbugs due to the video she's working on?? How?

Quinn

I have a distinct memory of having a class reading of Maze Runner in middle school and right around the time we finished the first book the first movie came out and the English teacher was so excited to see it, she was so disappointed the next day she and a few other students who also went out to see it just spent the whole day trashing it

a.g.

Yes I can definitely elaborate! I read the Host only a month ago so it's still fresh on my mind. I only knew the broad strokes of mormon doctrine but from the very first page I was already noticing similarities so I googled a lot about mormon beliefs as I read. Here's the similarities I noticed: Spirits are separate from bodies and live first in a pre-mortal world before being born in bodies on earth, similar to how the Souls are conscious beings who enter different host bodies. Jehovah is a spirit who volunteered to be the savior on earth and suffer for our sins to encourage righteousness so he was born into the body of Jesus, similar to how Wanderer requested to come to earth for her next life only to be chosen for Melanie's body which had endured extreme physical suffering and mental anguish, putting Wanderer in a constant state of turmoil but allowing her to become Wanda. Wanda finds herself in a violent group of humans and becomes a teacher figure, teaching them about the journey of the Souls across planets and encouraging non-violence. She then sacrifices herself to save the human Melanie, only to be resurrected after a short period of time. After death, spirits join the spirit world while they wait to be resurrected. This is similar to the cryotanks that hold Souls until host bodies are ready for them. There are three tiers of heavenly kingdoms (star, earth and heaven) that spirits can reach based on their actions in life, and they can also move up in tier once they're there, similar to the different planets the Souls have colonized. In the kingdom of heaven all spirits lack physical reproduction systems making them gender neutral like the Souls, however some gender norms still exist because you are still married to your spouse from your mortal life. This can result in plural spouses (if you engaged in polygamy or remarried after a spouse's death), similar to how Wanda struggles with being already in love with Jared through Melanie's body but in love with Ian through her own autonomy. Women are eternally "increasing" aka pregnant without sexual reproduction which produces spirit children, like the dividing reproduction that the Souls can choose to do. I don't know if Stephenie went into writing with the intention of exploring mormon beliefs or if she only meant to explore the human condition and her upbringing naturally influenced her writing, but I think the connections are there regardless which makes it a really unique sci-fi book with a lot of depth

notgerardway

i had a really good time hate-reading the selection for the first few books and then it became painfully boring

Dave Coleman

Be sure to look up why Thomas got his name in the Maze Runner franchise. It's really funny. I know you'll bust out laughing, I think it's really only explained at the very end of the fourth book, The Kill Order (prequel), as sort of an epilogue. It's so corny I remember it a decade later. I think they had kind of explained the overall reason for everyone's names in like the third one? Anyways that's what made me stop reading them in high school. I was like I'm done.

Kyle Franklin

i went to a small evangelical liberal arts college and served as an editor for their annual literary anthology for a few years. one of the pieces that was submitted one year was a YA dystopian short story about a world where the government had extended the window for abortion up to 18 years after birth. the protagonist was a teenage girl running away from an evil flying abortion robot. she has flashbacks to her boyfriend who disappeared telling her about the christians in the woods who don’t abort their children and how he wants to go find them. at the end of the story the abortion robot catches her before she can get to the woods and the author went into painstaking detail describing how she was still conscious as the abortion lasers diced her up into a soupy mess. another person submitted a slenderman fic.

Bryony Pyke

Omg I wish I could read both of those

Kyle Franklin

i still have my submissions folder and admittedly i do go back and reread them from time to time. probably not super ethical to share them, though, haha. in a way i think it’s kind of nice that some of the other editors and i still read and talk about some of the submissions we didn’t accept. i doubt most of the ones we published have stayed with any of us for as long or have been reread nearly as much.

Kyle Franklin

i just remembered that the title was schrödinger’s child

Donovan

I can't imagine reading 1984 as an adult and thinking it's the 'adult' version of anything - it's not only crudely written but its allegorical mechanics are laughably corny. The only reason it's so popular in western high school curricula is because its anti-communist propaganda can be gleaned and internalized even by a the sub-literate American teenagerium.

Simon Fox

Wait! At the 26 minute mark. Jenny just described the twist ending of the Twilight Zone episode "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street"! Which is one of my favorite episodes! Aliens plan an invasion, but instead of directly fighting the humans, they just lightly fuck with our power and stuff. Which eventually leads to a small friendly suburban neighborhood murdering itself out of paranoia and distrust.

Marie Becker

OMG I made a similar comment a few days ago--that made me SO MAD. (With a bonus of "Abnegation" feeling especially stupid--Humble would have made way more sense, grammatically and in-story).

Marie Becker

Haha, one of Lois "The Giver" Lowry's very first books (like. . .in the mid 70s? she has been AROUND) was this genre--A Summer to Die. Honestly, if you've only read The Giver and Number the Stars, you don't REALLY know Lois. (pretentious hipster hair flip).

StarIsALittleWeird

nooooo hahah, her cool new nickname would def be Rebel

Megan Lange

A-Tier ramble you truly never miss (I am 25 minutes in)

Snugglyclaws

I’ve only seen the first maze runner, but it has a tone of the dumb tropes that you like. All the little boys name themselves I’m pretty sure

Meaghan Duncan

It bums me out so much that Wallace Langham is in that bad movie. I love him.

Rebecca Reese

As I recall the Uglies books also had a lot of weirdly pro self-harm messaging

Shea B

As someone who was very deep in the OUAT fandom as it was airing I will say that even for extremely dedicated fans it becomes pretty unwatchable post season 5. Season 7 I believe straight up takes place in an alternate universe/time line and follows almost an entirely new cast because so many actors left. It could still be really interesting to analyze the rise and fall and compare the more and less effective ways they adapted disney properties (and then later on just public domain ones lol).

Ryan

Bridge to Terabithia (book and movie) predate TFIOS.

Michelle U

Stephanie Meyer wrote a thriller called The Chemist. I actually enjoyed it, which thoroughly shocked me lol, I did have pretty low expectations so that may have had something to do with it.

Hanna Landrith

Haley Whipjack has made videos dissecting seasons 1-6 (with a season 7 video in the works I presume), all of which are over 2 hours. They're great, definitely something to check out if you love hearing people talk about OUAT

Zephyrus

I feel like there isn't actually that much of a love triangle in the hunger games. Like catnis doesn't actually have feelings for peeta, right? (Idk if they did make it more ambitious in the movies, its been a really long time since i watched them.) She cares about him as a friend and pretends to be in love with him because snow makes her, but she always views her relationship eith him as a performance, or as very close friend. Is it just cuz twilight had it, and its played up in the movie? Or like is it cuz with out her inner monologue her actions read different?

Zephyrus

I couldn't finish the 5th wave book, i think i got pissed off by the male author writing a teen girl.

Elyse

Omg this reminds me of the Unwind book (series? idk) about teens being organ-harvested.

kelly m

she talked about that episode in the patreon vid on "favorite plot twists" i believe

kelly m

having been a book loving tween at the height of the hunger games trend, i have vague memories of reading so many of these sorts of books but not enough details to differentiate because they are so formulaic

Abby M.

The Giver unfortunately holds the title of Most Lifetime Movie Watches for me because I'm a middle school English teacher who shows it every year to multiple classes after we finish the book. The silver lining is that historically most of my students love the book and are horrified/entertained by the stupidity of the movie, so we have excellent discussions afterwards! Other commenters have already articulated some thematic stuff with the book, but I just wanted to add that you are so right that it's "baby's first dystopia," and I think that's exactly why it is taught so often. It's easy to understand and kids generally find it engaging, so it's a perfect "training wheels" book for teaching foreshadowing, symbolism, themes, etc. I've always had a soft spot for it!

Addison C

She realizes she loves him around catching fire/mocking jay but for a long time it’s just an act for her and she thinks it’s an act for as well! Finnick realizes she loves him while they’re in the catching fire area, but I think it takes a good minute for her to realize too after that but it’s been awhile so the super specific details are fuzzy Katniss and Peeta do end up having children, something there was no obligation to do and she wouldn’t have done if she didn’t feel safe and love him

Patricia

Thank you for the vid!!!

Saracha

Omg yes I love their series. Their patreon is actually the only other one I'm on 😂

Jen Henderson

Mortal Engines is definitely worth a watch, it's so funny! Hugo Weaving is overacting his heart out, there is inexplicably a zombie man running around? And then there's HESTOR SHAW - a very conventionally attractive young woman who everyone calls HIDEOUS because she has the tiniest scar across her face which is supposed to convey the she is Horribly Disfigured. And the cities are on wheels.

G. D. D.

I remember reading the Fifth Wave books in high school, and some of the weirdness makes more sense when it's revealed that they were never aliens to begin with and actually this was just all the US government all along. Which also made a bunch of other things not make any sense and I don't even think the characters understood most of what was going on at that point.

Jenifer Joseph

The Giver is more than you give it credit for. It is simple because it's for a younger audience, but it touches on themes in a delicate and mature manner that in some ways I prefer to 1984.

Eric Houge

I love how in the Escape From Tomorrow video, Jenny is so apologetic about having developed a problem with Randy Moore as a person, and carefully provides ample evidence to support her disdain, while in this video she's just like "These authors are stupid."

Tabby

That is a *beautiful* punchline.

Marloetta

I was gagging when you mentioned Taylor Swift, this is my favorite recent video of yours. Now planning my Giver and Divergent rewatches <3

Maddie Arnautov

I have no idea but these days I’m down for enjoying any media uncritically that will remind me of being 13 lolllllllllll

Rylee

Unpopular opinion but I thought Alchemised as a book was great and deviated away from the hp universe really well. It should NOT be adapted into a movie though and if it is, I don’t know how they can market it to teens?! It’s similar to how ACOTAR is super popular but can’t seem to get green lit for a production because they can’t take out the smut and stay true to the source material, but they also can’t not indulge in the obviously large teen audiences.

Blake

(it doesn't matter but in the book rosemary doesn't euthanize herself due to the memories she received; she does it when she learns that being released means being killed, so it's horror with her present society and not with the past)

Aaron Reese

I'll never forget "Randy Moore and his HACK body!!"

Aaron Reese

Especially if you read the entire quartet!! The Giver is just one piece of a larger puzzle. The movie adaptation is actually really interesting. It was a movie Jeff Bridges tried making it for 30 years. It was a movie he wanted to make for his father. Lois Lowry was so impressed by it that she wanted to rewrite her original book to better match the movie!

Luthien Tinuviel

I feel like the creators of of Chaos Walking absolutely did not consider this but how does the thought thing work for trans people. Do you stop having audible thoughts when you're a trans girl, do you suddenly start having Noise when you're a trans boy? Is that how people can tell you're trans? How do nonbinary people fit into this?? Like i said I dont think the writer thought of this bc its painfully cis but as a trans man I wonder

GenghisKunt

Anyone else feel like the Stephanie Myer Dystopia Y/A sounds similar to Pluribus 😭

GenghisKunt

I feel like I can kind of understand abnegation? Cause the whole thing is them giving up all worldly pleasures, like a king abnegating the throne? I don’t know it’s a very loose explanation but honestly all the Divergent factions are pretty silly.

Jesse Priest

“Ham handed” or “ham fisted” it’s actually “ham over fist.”

HeyImTrash

I have watched all of Once Upon A Time and I don't exactly remember what happened after Season 4, but I remember thinking the show just gets more and more insane and dumb um until the end. (Spoiler Alert) the final Season does a Vampire Diaries and makes them fight the Devil (Hades from Hercules, Obviously). If you made a Video I would hope you would keep up with the insane Family Tree, because that's my favourite Observation on the show

Madeline Monk

Once Upon a Time gives me the exact same feeling as The Vampire Diaries and spinoffs, where watching it at first is just horrible (well, season 1 of Once Upon a Time is simply mostly competent and boring, I just skip that part in rewatch), and then the fever hits the brain and I obsess over it compulsively, trying to make the interior logics that do not match make sense, and then the fever passes and the show is unwatchable again. But I have made it past season 4! I'm stuck, probably forever, at season 6, which is unwatchable even by the standards of the rest of the show. And season 7 barely even counts, it's apparently a soft reboot with Henry as the new main character. But I do think season 5 is pretty fun! Emma gets a plot-related wardrobe change and looks like a cruel Russian ballet mistress and the town stuff is pretty good, though everything that happens in the Enchanted Forest or whatever kingdom they're in is unspeakably boring and can mostly be skipped without missing anything. And then the Hades arc involves a recoloring of the Storybrook set and some good use of old characters (and some less good use, but it is Once Upon a Time). But I think season 5 is better than season 4 since no one told them "just remake Frozen" (not that the back half isn't even worse ...)

Madeline Monk

9:24 note: Stephenie Meyer wrote one more non-Twilight book! It's called The Chemist and it's a ... spy novel about someone who used to work for a secret government agency on the run? I could not make it through the free sample while it was on sale, the thing about a spy novel is that you don't want it to be written in an extremely long, meandering, navel-gazing fashion and Meyer didn't really change her style of writing to fit the genre at all, but I do think that's a funny genre for her to write just one book in.

Landon J

Agreed, I thought I was the only one who thought that lol 🤣

david morales

"Good luck overthrowing the government when you're too busy being amish."

Sarah Robertson

You're spot on about Maze Runner and what they try to do with the female character being annoying, I stopped watching when she "put her hair up" but it left almost of all her still down

Scottee

ik I'm 3 weeks late but that spinoff genuinely had some juice to it

Ambrosine Mercer

PLEASE do a post paranormal activity found footage boom ranking

Selina

this was so fun!! tbh as bad as the book was i do enjoy the Maze Runner films, the cast is solid and they're competently directed i think... might just be my Dylan O'Brien bias tho

Arbys on McKnight Road

Easily one of my worst qualities is that if you put a montage of human achievements over an orchestral score, I will absolutely get emotional over it. Even if the film did nothing to earn that emotion. I’m just a sucker for humanity.

Ronald Gruhlke

i read The Darkest Minds cause of this and the first one is really good, great group dynamics and really really charming or fantastically hateable characters, and the author is great at pulling on heartstrings, plus i think the plot is given much better in the longer format 😭 starting the second now!

gentlecurveofeggs

The dog thing in the Tom Holland movie is oddly similar to something that happens in Naruto 🤔

Raymond Bell

The most powerful headbutt. 🤣

Pierce Johnson

Imagine you lived in a society and everyone was happy go lucky - everything was great. Then you learned something horrible that was happening in the society right beneath everyone's noses. Insert social/world issue you care about that the majority of society doesn't. If you've had that experience, The Giver will probably resonate with you.

Amanda Hall

My brother and I both loved the books for the Hundred because we were deeply delighted by how teenage the teenagers were. I like to say that there is one point where a character is like "I know I'm the only one who can repair the spaceship and if I don't EVERYONE will die, even innocent non-teenagers, but BRADLEY took JAMIE to prom INSTEAD OF ME and I just CAN'T RIGHT NOW," and my brother always interjects, "She's not joking."

Jim P

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (the novel) is really good actually. Haven't seen the adaptation yet, it sounded awful, as you have now confirmed yet again (and I loved the Hunger Games adaptations, until the very last one)

Cinnabon

This is not a qualified addition in any way but your question "who is laying them?" just made me laugh out loud, thank you for that!

Crescent Minor

As I recall, they didn't have to conquer the Spiders because the Spider species didn't mind their presence, seemed to be able to ignore the brain worms successfully controlling their actions because of a nebulously defined relationship with their own free will that made them take pleasure in the brain alien's orders so much that they were 'glad for the extra direction, if they noticed at all'. As ever with Meyer, intriguing but vague. Conquest is so glazed in Meyer's writing, she barely writes about it even when the humans are being conquered in the world outside their isolated personal drama hideout cave. With some other aliens, there was not even an implication of violence.

Aubrey P.

The first Uglies book actually came out 3 years before The Hunger Games! Bro was doing all that for the love of the game

Kay Claire

I really enjoyed the Host as a book and a film when I was a teenager. I at least liked it WAY more than Twilight. I don't know if I'd still like it if I reread or rewatched it now, but maybe I would. Divergent and Maze Runner though. I love the first films for both of those when they first came out so I read their books, and the first book for both are good (well, not horrible at least), but wow the second book onwards for both were so bad. For Maze Runner, I couldn't even understand what was happening with the second book, and gave up and didn't even try to watch the other films (and one of the films was filmed in my home city, so I was really tempted to watch it just for that), and Divergent.... you could really tell the author never had a plan for where to go with those books. Spoiler for the Divergent series but Triss ends up dying at the end of the books (and the author made a bonus epilogue from Four's perspective where he'd so sad his girlfriend died) and it made me SO MAD that I refused to watch the rest of the films after that.

Carson Solaz

Jenny! My favirote video in so long tysm

Jackson Barton

The Stephanie Meyer concept sounds a lot like Pluribus

Mike M.

I realize this is a comment that will never be read, but one minor correction: the main girl in Divergent doesn't get a tattoo of birds because she's afraid of birds (well, not JUST because she's afraid of birds), but because the number of birds in her tattoo represents the number of family members she left behind in her old faction. That's... only explained in the book. I did read them. I regret it.

Liam Byers

I remember there was a brief gag indicating that their society had a religion worshipping the Minions as gods.

mountain loon

Now, because of this video, I DO say "I like fridge. Fridge keeps things cold for me." when I open my fridge.

Cassie

Just to be clear, the world building in The Host is actually kind of great in the book. But the movie is way more flat. If you haven't read it in a minute, the amount of world building she does about the other alien species is kinda crazy. But the main character does get unnecessarily beat up a lot in the book and that always puts me off.

meowlord

did anyone else read that series where everyone gets a government mandated boyfriend except for the main girl who gets two boyfriends by accident and then she like runs away to go to war? what was that called or did i hallucinate it

Jana

Are you thinking of the Matched trilogy maybe?

Jessa Nather

On Amandla Stenberg-- do you remember that time she was in a movie where she fell in love with a Nazi? (Where Hands Touch.) That was a pretty special one

Alexandra Flores

I gasped at the By the Great Horned Spoon mention. I read it in elementary school in South Florida, so it can't be exclusively Southern Californian!

Jyle

I really liked the book The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, because it expanded on the universe and characters. The movie I wasn't such a fan of, because as you said, it felt quite a bit cheaper and simplistic (though I did like the casting choices of Lucy Gray and Sejanus). However the latest prequel book (Sunrise on the Reaping) really made me doubt that Collins is in it for the story anymore. It reads like a cheap (worse) copy of Mockingjay with some Ballad-elements thrown in. It was a pure cameo/nostalgia-fest and I really disliked it. Idk maybe the movie will be better, but it kinda made me lose hope in the franchise.

The Dunce

The 100 is so funny you should just watch the first episode, you’ll get everything you need

anya k

sprinting through the alien military base to find your brother is soo giving ‘the bus to machu picchu leaves today’

anya k

i don’t like divergent because I think it’s fake-profound but to be fair to the worldbuilding it’s not as bad as it seems here. candor (honest faction) is the judicial branch, amity (peaceful/happy) are farmers/agriculture, dauntless is the army, abnegation (selfless) are the government, erudite is science and tech but trying to take over the govt using dauntless as the army. looking back it does seem like dauntless didn’t have a job prior to being the army which is weird and an obvious oversight. but everything else makes sense when you consider that the govt is supposedly genuinely selfless and not trying to kill people (and preserve the illusion of free will via the choosing aspect of the ceremony)

anya k

ok I guess pre-brainwash dauntless were supposed to be like the police but it still seems like a poor decision to make the police force a self-governing institution

anya k

the actual sensible thing to do would be to stop sending people to be factionless bc you’re basically guaranteeing that you will have a rebellion on your hands but I guess that’s explained by the factions being self-governing? idk it’s not bad worldbuilding the author just never does anything genuinely interesting or political with it

Tavz

okok so i LOVE your idea about the factions being automatically assigned, but what if Tris wasn’t even told they were divergent? what if she is told she’s going to Dauntless because that test figured it out and randomly assigned her there. And now she is TEERIFIED of it instead of feeling daring, but then she starts to love the faction over time, and THATS how she discovers she’s Divergent.

Snugglyclaws

Oh! There’s this underrated Netflix series called Sweetooth that fits this genre

Nikki Kish

Almost as soon as I saw that guy I was like “is that the guy from the dinosaur pre-show?” And I can’t BELIEVE I was right

mundanemagic

I feel like The Giver suffers from the "Seinfeld isn't funny" problem. It was such a trailblazer that it's really influenced a lot of the YA dystopia written since, so it seems painfully trite now that its style has been done to death.

mundanemagic

The book doesn't really hold up IME. It's not horrible, it just has enough plot holes to be distracting and the writing isn't amazing. But I loved it as a kid, so I'm glad it exists!

mundanemagic

I loved the books for the same reason. I wanted fan fiction of what happened next! (Doesn't really hold up as an adult but I loved it as a kid.)

McKayla Hall

the host could’ve been such a good concept. too bad the mormon wrote it

McKayla Hall

big joels book on the giver was so good and made me reread the original book

McKayla Hall

you having thought through how you should phrase your content warning so people wont be mad at you again, only for someone to immediately say that they think your phrasing, the one you’re using so people dont get mad, is stupid and will make people mad at you makes me impressed with your will to do anything around here

Abby Kimball

Stephanie Meyer also wrote a book called The Chemist and it’s SO good!!! Seriously…

wild blueberry muffin

Greatly enjoyed this video and it prompted an idea—curious for the thoughts of Jenny or anyone reading this haha. Do you think that this era of movies could lowkey be considered conservative propaganda? Hear me out! There’s been a long running thread on the right about how “you can’t trust the government or each other, and have to lone wolf it.” It’s true we’ve (especially those with marginalized identities) always have had legit reasons to distrust the gov, but Reagan strongly pushed the idea that the gov is not ever here to help us, and tried to starve necessary fed agencies. It was under his admin that the term “welfare queen” was invented. But then Clinton massively reduced the national debt, Cold War had ended, stem cell research was blooming, technology becoming amazing, gov was finally on a good trajectory. Never perfect, but could serve the people and become even better. Single payer healthcare was being looked at. Republicans *hate* when gov is functioning well because they want the good parts they hate defunded. Now today we see the end result of long periods of paranoia and lone wolf messaging, all vilifying the gov and the concept of community with each other—with stuff like Jan 6, covid denialism, anti intellectualism. This year we literally have “the patriot games.” They wanted a dystopia, feels like. Dems are complicit now but you can tie that to monetary greed, citizens united.

Thirdcrow

It's a truly great trilogy, imo

Thirdcrow

Mortal Engines is an excellent book series, and very unique. I really recommend it.

Thirdcrow

Was he the fourth child in his family, and his parents ran out of names

mountain loon

I have to defend my fifth grade fave, The Giver. It's not baby's first 1984--it's baby's first The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas! It blew my 12 year old mind to analyze the extremely obvious themes about the cost of eliminating pain from society-- which is I think why so many schools used it. There's another book (Gathering Blue) set in the same world but in a completely different type of distopia. It's a primitive survival-of-the-fittest society. Gathering Blue has some top-tier capitalized nouns, including The Beasts. Who live in: The Field. I also read By the Great Horned Spoon for class and loved it lol.

Chelle

You’re not missing much with The Maze Runner. I reached a point in the third book where I was like “okay, there is absolutely no explanation that would satisfy me” so I called it quits. The explanation for putting kids in mazes was zombie plague. Obviously.

Clara Kowalski

I read the 5th wave books years ago, i think they used kids bc they seem less likely to be a threat to the remaining humans

Clara Kowalski

There are 4 giver books! The forth is my favorite.

bethany

ITS DR. SEEKER AGAIN! He was in that weird Ai depp movie, and this one too!

bethany

I love dr. Seeker

bethany

“By god we’re gonna make that boy tumble”