Reviews with content warning for Sexism - If We Were Villains

Reviews tagging 'Sexism'

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

56 reviews

mellowreading's review against another edition

dark emotional mysterious reflective sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

Give me dark, tragic, gay academia and I’ll give anything 5 stars. The ending. I don’t know how to feel 😭 also making Fillipa date the Professor was so random and unnecessary.

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jelliestars's review against another edition

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dark mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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haleymk's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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star_oats's review against another edition

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slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

Wasted my time with this book. I had to slog through the endless sexism and slutshaming only for none of them to have any semblance of character depth and development and for the plot twist and ending to be so underwhelming.

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scifipunk's review against another edition

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dark emotional mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Honestly, when I first started reading this book, I expected to spend my review tearing it apart.
Interestingly, now at the end, my opinion changed completely.

It is remarkable that a lot of things that annoyed me at the beginning, regarding plot, characters, and some choices the author made, almost all of them improved or at least became ignoreable by the later chapters.
Especially in the beginning, I had the impression that a lot of the characters were extremely flat and one-dimensional — I feel like in many, many scenes, the reader is told about all these different, vibrant personalities, and yet I still had the impression that Filippa and Wren could be fused into one character without any relevant change to the plot or group dynamic.
I still think so, but it somewhat justified by the characters’ in-universe theater obsession making them think in tropes rather than individuals, and in the end, the plot managed to immerse me and I found myself not as bothered by the characters as I thought I would be.

The author is amazing at describing atmosphere and creating tension in her writing — once the pace picks up, it works well, and this book does have a couple of paragraphs and scenes that stand out for simply how elegant and beautifully phrased they are.
The protagonists, as theater students at an elite university, also have the habit of speaking in shakespearean verse in otherwise casual conversation.
This comes off extremely pretentious at first, but seems to be by design — in at least one scene, a character shows awareness of how he and his friends must sound to regular people, and critically reflects about it for a bit. It flowed into the narrative well and seemed natural, and honestly, I would have liked more introspective like this throughout the novel.
I am absolutely torn on the amounts of verse in this book as a whole, however. There are many great scenes, where as a reader, you can see even with minimal knowledge of the original text, that the author means to highlight a certain dynamic or subtext, foreshadow, or give some characterisation. And if it works, it works well.
But on the other hand, there are just as many scenes where it feels excessive or much longer than necessary.

I did. enjoy the book as a whole, and the main plot definitely felt cohesive and satisfying in the end. About the subplots, I’m not so sure. Some major plot twists and entire characters, especially some that are relatively important later on for example

Spoiler

a character’s struggle with addiction and near death experience, a girl’s mental breakdown, the narrator’s jealousy of another’s relationship, people questioning their sexuality, someone’s sister developing an eating disorder, people getting into fistfights on stage,

and so on… are established in a major scene and then just, never brought up again, let alone become relevant.

I thought that was really a tragedy, since so many plot threads actually seemed interesting and worth exploring. The author, in my opinion, clearly has talent and put a lot of thought and effort into her work, so I really would have liked to see where all these subplots go… but well.
I enjoyed reading “If We Were Villains” a lot, but it did not quite leave me satisfied in the end.

If you are looking for a captivating, well-executed mystery with a great, immersive atmosphere, then this is for you. The book clearly deserves the “dark academia” hype it got. If you are, however, the type of person who is very annoyed by excess drama, pretentious characters, handwaved details and so on, then you should probably give this one a pass.

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giulsfloris's review against another edition

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medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No

1.0

To me, this book was just… boring, predictable and pretentious. The characters weren’t well developed, they were annoying and overall badly described. They lacked depth and fell into a bunch of stereotypes. The women were used as a plot device more than once and didn’t have anything interesting to add.

It baffles me that this book has such good reviews since it also contains racist slurs and is filled with misogyny and sexism. Even worse, there’s no actual redemption or growth for these people. I personally don’t like static characters who don’t take opportunities to grow and change. This is narrated by an adult man’s point of view and yet it lacks the maturity and understanding of what a bunch of almost-adults did.

I considered DNFing this so many times so I skipped a bunch of boring parts in the second half of the book (especially since half of it is basically just Shakespeare dialogues copied and pasted into the story, you could really say he co-authored this thing), and I eventually finished it but boi was this disappointing. I don’t dislike Shakespeare, I studied some of his works at both high school and university, so I was convinced I’d like this book, but I did not.

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