okay lol according to twitter people are deffo not listening to my disclaimer in the beginning so perhaps a pinned comment - this video (and all my other videos) are not shaming anyone for liking the books i choose to giggle at. if the bully/assault trope is your kink, own it. if the forced marriage trope gets you going, more power to you! people read AND write tropes to help them deal with things happening/have happened in their own lives. i have a lot of fun making these because its like talking about bad movies with friends. if you unironically like the movie, okay! we have different taste! i am just giving my reactions to popular books that people have heard of but dont have the time/interest to read and am having a fun time sharing the experience. until this particular series, it was all in good fun. for me though ZA was very much not fun lol. now, if you're upset because im telling people your favorite book series is about trying to make assault hot, i suggest working on self acceptance! we all have differing colors of freak flags - dont be scared to fly yours high. but shout out to the subtle racism tho, good work caroline and susanne 🥴 love always

Water, earth, fire, air. Long ago the four sex offenders lived in harmony, everything changed when the pick-mes arrived

I’m _really_ hoping the name “Tori Vega” is a coincidence, but it’s so funny to imagine this series as Victorious fanfic written by someone who was hot for the unhinged teacher

The book is basically: two girls are sent to a school full of magical sex offenders

Sometimes I see books like this and I'm like...okay author, you have an unexplored humiliation kink. Why are you making me a part of this though

“Bella where the hell have you been loca” is a better example of Spanglish than anything they wrote lmao

"It gets good at book 5" has "you need to play 100 hours of this game to review it" energy.

The whole plot feels like a weird spin on a Winx Club fanfiction. There’s so many elements of the world and backstory that feel like a worse version of Winx 💀

So the girls are suuuuper powerfull prodiges with all 4 elements but once someone is bullying them they just stand there...?

Between the weird interruptions of social media posts and the character literally being named _Tori Vega_ I can't get the thought of this being ridiculous Victorious fanfiction out of my mind

The whole concept of magic boarding schools did irreparable damage to YA romance and it’s hilarious

it’s fascinating how they’re all called fae but none of them are actual fae. they’re all mythical creatures that don’t even fall under that umbrella. this sounds like something thirteen year old me would write. at least younger me knew what fae actually were

The authors being sisters kind of makes this feel like a self insert story

IF HARDIN WAS FOUR NEPO BABIES WITH SUPER POWERS I AM SCREAMING

These kinds of books give me hope. Not about literature, but hope that I’ll actually get published one day. 😂

This whole series feels like the authors poorly disguised humiliation fetish

so they're faeries, in the world of *solaria* , where magic mixes with technology and one of the characters is named darcy. someone definitely watched a little too much winx club

I'm discovering new stages of grief the more I listen to this summary

I love how the authors took the concept of zodiac signs, a system known for having TWELVE different ways to categorize characters-- plus four if you add the elements, plus three if you add the whole Cardinal/Mutuable/Fixed thing, plus twenty-four if you add moon and rising signs-- and still decided "yeah this book is also about faeries and stuff" All the zodiac signs have Greek myths behind them, why didn't they retell those? A few of the stories are decently well known (Aquarius is the myth of Ganymede, Virgo is Pandora's Box, etc), so it would have been pretty interesting, and they mention the creatures offhand, like the Minotaur (Taurus) but that's it?The main characters are TWINS and they missed the opportunity to retell Castor and Pollux

To everyone who tricked me into buying this book by calling it “adult Harry Potter” you have me crying, shaking, throwing up. I couldn’t get past the hazing because WTF I was so angry and triggered. Thank you Cari for making me feel not so alone in my opinions :)

I saw a TikTok saying that said you have to “just wait until you get to book 5 and then it gets really good!” Girl, it’s not gonna happen if i have to get through 5 whole books for it to get good.

I'm baffled at how the authors made their two leads simultaneously so overpowered while also disempowering them to the extent that they did. All the powers in the world and then some and they're assaulted every .5 seconds????

(sees that Cari posted an hour long video about a book series I’ve never heard of that I will never ever read) alright it’s go time bitches 🏃‍♀️

These books sounds like someone watched Victorious and Winx Club on Nickelodeon, came up with the other elements in half an hour, and thought “ok, this can all be combined into a novel series!”😂

I am only at 22:28 and already the thought of young girls being exposed to these horribly misogynistic messages through a narrative that romanticises them and will ultimately redeem all these male characters.... it makes me want to cry for real

i'm sorry i don't care who i upset by saying this but so many books like this are so obsessed with grossly misogynistic and predatory tropes that it's extremely hard for me to come to terms with the fact that they're not all written by dudes who write women in the "her breasts bounced boobily" way. please can fanfiction stop getting published 💀

it’s just the fact that the writing literally says “i jogged in my nike sneakers while listening to lizzo” LIKE HOW IS THIS CONSIDERED GOOD😭

Every time Diego speaks Spanish I just imagine him speaking it in an American accent. Like full frat-boy. It makes his dialogue far more entertaining to be honest-

The Pegasus stuff is particularly cracking me up. Crying at "it's embarrassing to be a horse"

Parent 1: How should we name our 2 daughters Parent 2: i like Gwendolin and Roxanne Parent 1: No, those aren't fancy and magical and "old-timey" enough. These are the two heirs of the faethrone after all. Parent 2: Ok, so how about we make it Gwendalina and Roxanya? Parent 1: Perfect!

no girl, you are spot on with the spanish being way off. as a bilingual whose first language is spanish and whose primary language at this point is spanglish, i’d never speak like that. we tend to say things in the other language when we don’t find a more accurrate equivalent, we forget the word or it’s the way something’s called. we don’t throw words in spanish while speaking english just cuz. this feels forced and stupid tbh

cari at the start of this video: full of hope, making jokes, expecting a fun time cari at the end of this video: suffering, embattled, trying to prevent others from making the same mistake

Super weird that Vampires are just included in the hierarchy with their weird lack of magic but Nymphs are The Enemy of the State for not having their own magic. Would have been much more interesting if vampires were also magical outcasts tbh.

I love that you previously got 50 pages into the book and then realized you could only read something so terrible if you were getting paid 🤣 boss move

Is it just me or is this book very 2012-core? Like every trope that was popular back in the day shoved into one book. It's got a magic school, chosen one(s), elemental magic, characters divided into houses, hot boys that feel pulled out of a one direction fan fiction... Edit: also justice for Capricorns, I love Capricorns! - From a fellow earth sign.

The vibe of the bullying and everything feels like, if you took the concept of “torture porn” but you made it high school bullying instead. I’m not sure how anyone could enjoy reading multiple books worth of two girls being treated like shit, harassed, assaulted, and abused by pretty much every single other character in the book.

"I hope to god this isn't a teacher/student supernatural romance" The way I started laughing IMMEDIATELY when you said that. You were in for a ride man.

so they're siren fae zodiac queens with elemantal magic and family fortune?? that's camp honestly dedication from the writers

I appreciate your pain tolerance. Also “Everything bien?” broke me and I accidentally threw my dog 😅. She’s fine

The descriptions of what these girls went through made me ✨physically ill✨

'Air, Water, Fire, Earth? Nobody has ever harnessed all four of them.' Of course, only the Avatar can master all four elements.

So glad someone else was as angry as me!!! This series was so hyped. I read the first book and was SO CONFUSED. Whyyyyy? I don’t know how it can possibly get any better. The bullying was…the whole plot.

this reads like a middle schooler’s wattpad work after just hitting puberty. like, i genuinely remember being ten and reading fanfics where the self insert main character was excessively bullied and the romance characters were creepy as hell- literally every time. brings back only painful memories LMAO

wait so tori's real surname is vega? man, the plot twists are crazy. i really hope at the end of all this she's...victorious.

The hype around these books has been insane and I've been seeing people SWOON over them for months on Tiktok. There are way too many people who have rape and SA fantasy fixations and it makes me incredibly uncomfortable.

I've never heard of this series, but it sounds like a nightmare. I salute you

There’s so much to talk about but I can’t get over the terrible awful so very bad codeswitching. “Muy cliquey” and “Everything bien?” personally came into my room and beat me over the head with a baseball bat. I hate it here Edit: OH MY GOD THERES MATES. I need a drink Edit 2: okay there’s alphas and omegas now? I was joking about the drink but now I’m going through the liquor cabinet. What in the wattpad fanfic werewolf smut mom sold me to one direction is this??

For once, just for once, I'd love it if, when the Magically OP Heir(/s) rock up to the creepy school full of creeps and assault, they used their powers to level the place. Just. Nope! No more institutionalized abuse for you! It would be so cathartic.

Can we please appreciate the fact that in a book full of zodiac references all the surnames are names of the brightest stars from every constellation EXCEPT THE ONES IN THE ZODIAC?! Genius writing /s

This series is the kind where you hope the tone makes a 180 and the MC(s) snap and start getting revenge on everyone who was torturing them. Because no way am I gonna root for a romance that started with massive amounts of assault.

Any time you would mention something these boys did I was just so shocked the twins were still talking to them. And then it happens again. And again. And again.

this feels like someone read the cruel prince and was like "oh. people like it when fae are mean" and just went as far as they could with that

the beast boys imo are like if the author watched boys over flowers, took one look at the f4 and was like “oh i can make them worse”

"because he's a pervert..or in Diego's words" and then the cut to pervertido I SCREAMEDNDKDNJD

this is definitely fanfiction, the way they write a character speaking spanish, the very obvious smut fan service, the fact you KNOW they are going to get together with one of them?? yeah idk what fandom but it’s most definitely fanfiction

How does this get published but it took Sanderson like 14 novels to actually get published? And his writing is pretty darn good. While this is just a Winx fanfic.

Being Irish when I first heard 'Orion' I thought the name was 'O'Ryan' and it made me laugh- the only thing in this series summary that made me feel like that

The amount of suffering you go through just for us 😂 your dedication is very much appreciated cari

I'm so suspicious of books labeled "dark romance". To me, that label connotes a level of maturity. This just reminds me of the "dark and edgy" Wattpad books where the mmc tries to kill the fmc a bunch of times because "dark magic"

"give me a fuuuuUUUUcking break diego" slaughtered me

i feel like the author tried to pull a cardan from the folk of the air series except cardan wasn’t bullying her for shits and giggles and had actual character development.

so if a siren transfers their powers through kisses that means that the other person technically becomes a siren for a second there? so that person could just kiss someone else and transfer it again and so on? the first fae pyramid scheme i've ever heard of love it

I understand people like to read about abuse in fiction but--holy shit, the fact that this isn't an ultimate revenge story where the twins very painfully ruin those literal monsters is making me really upset.

Ive read a lot of enemies to lovers, bully trope, and even romanticized abuse books but god does this take the cake, the pie and the cookies as well.

i choose to believe when authors say "designer clothes" that they mean heavily monogramed.

has anyone pointed out yet that Tori Vega is the main character of the nickelodeon tv series Victorious? it's a problem because i can only picture her as victoria justice now

All the highly detailed bullying is giving me trauma-porn right off the bat. Also, I think bullying only works for me when the target makes good smart ass remarks and gets there underdog jabs every so often to show they aren't totally crushed and it's sort of cathartic for me the reader.

I'm a trans guy watching this while doing my T gel in the morning and I fucking lost it at "testosterone fuelled wall of muscle"

Cari is not shaming people who recommend and enjoy this but i am

"any time I say anything, you say yes Alpha" Yea, that'll do it, that's enough. Keep this book away from me.

Those books are so overwritten, long and terrible and all of the characters are awful BUT the mystery and main story is actually… intriguing?? I’m only reading to get to the end of it at this point 😭😭

As a French person, that 'pan au chocolat' really hit the feels (in a 'so bad it's good' way lmfao) Maybe the authors confused it with the Spanish word? Or yeah, they might've just spelled it wrong

Dawg imagine someone writes it so the main character actually hates their abuser (the teacher at first) and the end is killing them THAT WOULD BE SUCH A PLOT TWIST..

I legitimately had this downloaded on my Kindle and was going to read it until you posted on your Instagram that you were. THANK YOU FOR SAVING ME FROM THIS HORROR. Also as someone who is Latina. I absolutely hated how they had Diego talk. The Spanglish was so bad and the few Spanish sentences you showed definetly looked as if someone put a sentence on Google Translate and threw it in there! I DEFINETLY DELETED IT FROM MY KINDLE.

I wanna watch you read magnolia parks so bad

These books sound, LITERALLY EXACTLY like the fantasy games me and my friends would play in primary school, we would literally play fantasy novels precisely like this.

Just the thought of seeing recruits getting waterboarded like it's a normal Tuesday cracked me up. TBH, I would rather that than whatever the heck Seth was doing.

If the bully trope is your thing that’s great, but I am with Cari on the fact that I don’t feel this series is talked about in a way that warns you what you’re actually about to read and I say this as a person who saw it recommended so many times on tik tok leading me to go into the first book blind which is not a very fun time when you don’t enjoy the bully trope

I specially love the fact that one of the fae types is medusa, just straight up medusa, not a gorgon, but THE Medusa... I dont want to live in this world anymore

the zodiac academy honestly sounds like wattpad fanfiction

As someone who speaks a lot of Spanglish, Diego infuriates me so much because literally no one who switches between the two ever does it like that !!

every book of a series should be an enjoyable experience, it should not take 5 books for a story to get good thats just plein bad writing. thank you for putting yourself through this torture cari lol. also i feel in this series the authors liked too many things and didn’t know when to call it enough. definitely feels like a 2012 wattpad fanfic with the photoshopped collage of 3 different series that aren’t remotely related as a cover, brings back memories.

I always appreciate a story that is up front about what it is lol. Two minutes in and we already get "I'm ✨different ✨" 😭

mentioning the cruel prince made me think of one of the big differences that feels similar: while both series revolve around twins getting bullied at school, Cardan actually had moments where he stopped Locke and Nicasia, and if you read it back he was always keeping an eye on Jude (even though he hated that he cared about her). additionally, Jude (and Taryn a bit, but not until later), always fought back, so at least the escalation from Cardans crew made sense? (like if Jude is going to insult and physically attack them, sure that makes sense that Cardan would through them in a river) but Tori and Darcy dont seem to be doing anything?? like the boys are just batting them around like cats and its just making them upset, like why are their actions getting progressively worse?? its just digging them deeper into the dislikeable bully trope instead of the "misunderstood love interests who are just like that because its their environment" (this is being said from someone who hasn't read the books and all of my info is from this video lol)

As a native Spanish speaker… that dialogue was KILLINGGGG MEE. Not even in a funny way, just painful😂

The similarities between this series and The Winx Saga is WILD

the saddest part is some girls will really think that being mistreated/bullied/assaulted equals to romance. those books are a caricature of a wattpad fanfiction written by a 13 year old in the worst way possible. you're braver than the marines for reading all of those.

The writing of this book to me feels like the writing of a book for young children but with adult language and sex 💀

Started watching this, thinking it would be a fun thing to fall asleep to... But hold up, wait, I need to be awake so I can embrace the full train wreck. Pausing this until tomorrow. 😂 Thanks for this as always, Cari! 🫡

ok, the last name Vega CAN be just like Crave, but... Tori Vega?? Why won't Dan Schneider ever leave us alone

the frustrating thing about books like this is that it feels like the author wanted to write enemies to lovers but wanted to do the bully trope too and maybe this is just a personal feeling, but good enemies to lovers involves mutual antagonism. both parties need to give as good as they get. the power dynamic has to be balanced. it, to me, requires a specific mentality from the pov character. i just feel like enemies to lovers and the bully trope are . . . incompatible. in my opinion, they require different power dynamics and they don't work within the same relationship.

I'm so happy that I finally decided to watch this before spending $14-$25 per book. I love a good enemies to lovers, but this just crossed so many personal boundaries for me 🙅🏻‍♀️. No thank you, I'll spend my money on books that are actually worth it

The way you rattled off your zodiac sign had me SCREECHING omfg

Little note on the whole Sagittarius thing: it’s literally the sign under the ZA logo. The zodiac wheel on the cover is accurate, as in all the signs are in order. It wasn’t intentionally left out, it’s just that they put Gemini at the top (because of the characters) and so Sagittarius is at the bottom. Could the cover design be better so that none were covered up? Yes. But it’s not like they just randomly placed them all and oops for Sag.

My friend read these books longgg ago, and every lunch at school she'd get out her notepad and would update it/us on HOW insane it was with diagrams. It was awesome. Haven't really seen anything about it since then, so happy to see a video about it lmaoo.

This is the first video of yours that I watched, without ever getting into "booktok" and "dark academy" stuff before, and I have to say I didn't regret putting the autoplay on where it led me to this video. Thank you for putting yourself through all that, but also sorry that you had to go through that💀

Why am I so excited to watch this 1hr+ video about a book series I’ve never heard of and probably will never read 😂

"faebook" sounds like the punchline of a pun I would appreciate the first time, but there is definitely a limit to the amount of time it's amusing

I'm not a Spanish speaker but Swedish is my first language and English my second, so I was hoping I could throw in my two cents. The only time I throw in random words of another language in my sentences is whenever I speak my native language and saying something in English that's relating to memes or just because it sounds cool. It's quite common in Europe to throw phrases like "so crazy" or "it is what it is" in our own languages. The times I say a Swedish word when speaking English is whenever I don't know or remember a specific name for a fish, bird, plant etc. Don't know if Spanish speakers agree, but if I were to speak English the way Diego does it it would sound oförståeligt and svårt att följa in my opinion.

To clarify the book design and why signs are missing: 1) The first book was Gemini, which is on the opposite side of Sagittarius, so it wasn't present. 2) Leo was the theme of the second book, opposite Aquarius, so it was removed. The signs being removed are on the opposite end of each book's central zodiac theme. PS: Half-Mexican and a former Spanish teacher here. No, Spanglish doesn't work like that. People usually start substituting words when they're more complex and harder to recall in the target language. I have put books down over this writing sin and much less. In the Maisy Dobbs series, one character is described as having a hybrid French-Scottish accent. Unless this child was locked away from his peers, this doesn't happen, and he should take the native accent of the people he interacts with most. Usually, students develop a unique accent to speak to each parent if their accents differ (the keyword is "usually").