All The Feels by Danika Stone

TL;DR fandom takes no prisoners

TBR #1627, added May 27 2016

finished 7/30/16

I'm so torn about how I feel about All the Feels. (Ha.) I'm really enjoying this more recent trend of fandom-related YA books, and I think I finally found one that I didn't agree with.

Now, my first disclaimer is going to be that I am a cartoon-fandom person. Specifically, children's cartoons. I never got into Harry Potter or SuperWhoLock or Star Wars / Star Trek. I have a 20 minute attention span, which still leaves me 2 minutes short of the standard running time of an American cartoon. 

My second disclaimer is that I couldn't connect with the intensity of Liv's passion for Starveil. I know there are a ton of other people that could no problem, but I've never been so passionate about a single fandom like that. I think part of my problem is also that I tend to pick smaller series, like Sailor Moon well before we got any re-releases or Crystal, or Danny Phantom about seven years after it ended airing. Miraculous Ladybug is the only fandom I've joined recently that's actively airing and has the assurance of new content. 

(Starveil is described as a space opera and apparently is not based off any books, unlike any of the popular movie series I'm vaguely familiar with. Or did the Star series' books come after the movies? Does Star Trek even have books? I don't know.) 

My point with this is that Liv's passion came off as immature to me. I can appreciate her drive and her love for Starveil, but to me she felt more like a high school underclassman (or even a middle schooler) than a college freshman. And I'll admit that this might be heavily biased on my end because of the people I went to school with. Don't get me wrong, I love being a part of fandom culture, but I have trouble wrapping my head around letting it define your entire life. 

It's also possible that this is because of Liv's characterization. I never got any sense she had interests other than Starveil, even other fandoms, and her general disregard for school was hard to accept after recently finishing my own freshman year of college. College is expensive, and I can't believe that she would blow it off the way she did based on her position. 

All of the other characters felt similarly shallow. They felt more like puppets to the plot than real people. We got a hint of depth from Xander towards the end, but it was never developed. There was so much potential. We could've seen more about Liv's mother's struggle of being a widow with a fandom daughter, and how her dating after her first husband's death affected both her and Liv. I would've loved to see more of Xander's personality outside of his steampunk facade (which, honestly, would be really grating in real life) and how he became Liv's best and closest friend in a period of about five months. I especially would've loved to see more of Arden trying to be Liv's friend, instead of her only acting through Xander and only when it made it inconvenient for Liv. 

I don't like how Liv's love life was handled over the course of the book. Xander and Arden push her too hard out of her comfort zone, and their attempts really didn't do much to advance the plot or her characterization. (Xander says Liv got better at small talk, but we don't get much evidence of that. The one person she does kind of hit it off with never comes back in the story.) I think she and Xander were also too close at first for him already having a girlfriend, and then their relationship towards the end of the book felt pretty rushed and the fight they get into isn't wrapped up; it just jumps into the epilogue where they've already made their peace. What fun is that? 

I think the pacing of the plot could've been tweaked as well. I'm sad that we missed so many of the details between Liv agreeing to Dragon Con and her actually going. There's so much that goes into con prep and I think that would've been nice to explore, but all we got was a few paragraphs of her "working hard to earn spending money". We don't even see all too much of her working on Xander's cosplays. 

I do think Dragon Con itself was executed nicely. I've never been, and I've only seen a little bit of it from the cosplayers I follow, but it expanded on the little bit of information I knew (and my anime con experiences) and made me feel like I was really there with Liv. Cons really can be overwhelming like that.

(I could argue about the industry-specific aspects of it, but that goes into an argument about the plausibility of #SpartanSurvived as a whole, and I do not feel qualified to argue that here. I'm even more of a fandom lurker than Liv is and I have no experience with movements like these. My only point is that it felt too convenient for the plot.) 

(Also, I know there are cons in Denver. Why hadn't Liv or Xander gone to any of those? Those would've been much easier to handle as a first con and would've been so much cheaper. I can't imagine doing Dragon Con for your first con and wanting to go back the next year unless you're really a people person.) 

I have some minor complaints about the narration in that I think it should've been more mixed-media. Some pictures were included, though in black and white like school photocopy handouts, and an instant message interface that put Liv's responses on the left rather than the right (where Google and Apple put the senders', though maybe this was on purpose by the editors). I really do think the IM interface could've been expanded to include the senders' names and time stamps, instead of leaving it ambiguous and including "..." chat bubbles that initially made it seem like the other person's response rather than a lack of one. Real messaging is rarely one person then the other; it's usually six messages in a row from one person and then five from the other. Or accidentally interrupting the other person's thread of messages by replying to a specific bubble before they have their full thought typed and sent. 

This is actually a really tame example. I think we were talking about a thunderstorm.

Some of the text messages read more like older adults than teenagers, but I'm willing to give it leeway since some of them were from adults, and the messages are likely easier to read by the general public than teenager chatspeak. (One good thing: "bb" was used as a term of endearment, and I was very *o* to find it.) I do think the narration included some jargon that might be hard for non-fandom people to understand, though I can't think of any specific examples. 

TL;DR I was disappointed by the shallow characterization and plot railroading, but I think it could be enjoyable for people in fandoms of series that utilize film (ie, real life people rather than animation). 

I bought my copy off Amazon Prime because it was ~$5 and I was already buying The Hidden Oracle and Gena/Finn. I will admit that I'm planning on passing it on, either to a friend or to a secondhand book store. I will also admit that this was better than waiting an undetermined amount of time for it to show up at the library, letting my hype build up, and then coming to these conclusions. That would've been super disappointing. I'm glad I got to knock it off my TBR but I think it had so much more potential.