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The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy chapters 16-18 We have never been more 30 years old. We spend our first segment chatting about appliances, time management, and how far we've come since our exploding microwaves from goodwill days. This week's reading is... surprisingly okay! Or at the very least, it's splashy and indulgent, with a lot of over-the-top gore and a fish-out-of-water dinner party scenario. Finally, we round things out with a lesson in branding from a guy who came up with a really, really good pun.

The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy chapters 13-15 This week we discuss the natural law of forum community drama before learning way too much about Osric's anatomy. Not like, size, or shape, or anything like that; more just like what it's up to, how it feels in different kinds of fabric, that sort of thing. It's a truly baffling chapter this week, including a frankly alarming plot thread where... Fairhim maybe forgets what they did? And Osric notices that? And doesn't say anything? There's really no getting around the weird vibe the story gives off here, but we do our best to meet it where it's at and imagine what it might've been trying to do and what a more interesting version might look like. There's also some stuff about zombie soldiers! Finally, we take a trip to Orlando and learn all about the Booktok-inspired "scare zone" that features guys doing awesome kneepad slide tricks on the sidewalk and one (1) fog machine. Content note: there's a decent chunk of episode devoted to picking apart this book's depiction of consent. We keep it light, but if you'd rather not hear any of that skip from the end of the chapter summary to 34:10, where we start talking about the Dreor plot instead

The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy chapters 7-12 We're back at it with a double-length reading this week! Thank you for your patience. Yes, we read twice as many chapters this week--although you wouldn't really know it, because the real meaty segment this week is the news. We've got a lot to cover (and more we'll get to next week!) as we march towards Pottermania 2.0. Casting drama, product announcements, and Dobby's grave... a lot's been piling up. Meanwhile, over in TETOLYE: We read twice the chapters we usually would on accident, but perhaps it was for the best. We're square in a patch of awkward characterization and plodding table-setting, but hey,! At least we have a sex scene.

The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy chapters 4-6 With the 25th anniversary of the first movie and a new show bearing down on us, it's Brands Week on the pod. We take a look at the first volley of press releases for cross-promotional products aimed at 30something Potter fans before getting into our reading. TETOLYE has certainly gone all-in on the adventure story aspects we picked out as the saving grace of the first novel--can it keep up the momentum? And perhaps more importantly: can it make a magical adventure story about bad guys who secretly conspired to invent a disease not as collar-tug-worthy as it sounds? Finally, we attempt to dig into a few more products in the third segment but get very, very off track.

The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy, chapters 1-3 It's new book day! It's a short but sweet one this week: we convened at late-o-clock to make sure to get this one recorded, because the prospect of covering a book while it's (relatively) new is too exciting. Given our dim view of the first novel, what sort of first impression does the sequel make? It turns out... hey, not bad! We're as shocked as you are. We discuss the refreshingly brisk opening of the novel, the stylistic changes apparent in the opening chapters, and the odd situation the book finds itself in as a piece of fiction that seems to be trying to escape the Potter orbit while still being marketed directly to Dramione fans. big ass thunderclap is at 6:05

No reading this week! Just goofing off. Our next book just released the night before we recorded, so we had a bit of a gap episode this week. There was still plenty to talk about though, including an exhaustive breakdown of how to throw the best party ever, a very 30something rant about pop media, and a second round of last week's fanfiction guessing game.

Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ideal of Being In Love After finishing TIUTFFYE, we dove straight into another extremely long acronym. How does the fic that got publisher attention hold up compared to its descendant? Would you believe... hey not bad! We discuss the differences between fanfiction and fiction, the ways characters are warped by popular perception, and ponder what it is that matters to readers who seek out fanfiction. We'll have more to discuss next week once we've read more, but until then we've also got a poorly-conceived game that puts Liz's ship recognition powers to the test.

The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy finale We finished the book! Or rather, the book just sort of finished. We discuss the strange, sudden ending of TIUTFFYE and gather our thoughts on the novel as a whole. Speaking of hole, there's one last explicit scene for the road in these chapters, and it sends us on a quest to understand what "spice levels" are. What makes a book spicy? Who defines the different levels? Have you shared a low-tongue-description kiss with a partner lately? It's so good to be back! Thanks for listening. Notes: we don't talk about it in detail but peppered throughout our book discussion are references to domestic abuse in the story; we mostly just talk about how tasteless we found it without going into detail but it's there. This is also, just generally, a pretty explicit episode!Lots of bodily function talk in this one.

The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy, chapters 16-18 RIP Doctor Who. The Tardis crashed into a space embankment at two trillion miles per hour and he blew up. There's been precious little Potter news lately, so we spend some time chatting about how every major tentpole franchise seems to be falling apart these days and how we hope that it happens to Harry soon. Then we discuss our penultimate reading of TIUTFFYE, which... was pretty fun? It's a pleasant surprise, but it's also a tick upward right before the end of the book, so it could all come crashing down next week. We spend a while discussing this surprising turn of events, and then plan a vacation by sifting through a list of wizarding-themed AirBNB listings. NOTES: https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/stays/arizona/themed-airbnb-az https://www.purewow.com/travel/harry-potter-inspired-airbnb

The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy, chapters 13-15 Woof. Remember how last week we thought things might be improving? Forget we said any of that. This week we've got some just plain nasty stuff to dig through, but don't worry! We have some fun chatting about Final Fantasy, James Bond, and Dodgers fan Dobby too. Then we get right with the Lord and learn what sort of people are still writing Potter clickbait in 2026. It couldn't possibly be a conservative Christian getting mad about his kid learning that slavery is bad, could it? Well,, Some notes: -This week's reading features a lot of clumsy, tasteless depictions of sex work and attempted assault, and we spend most of our time going in on it. Nothing too specific, but it's a bit too broad to give a specific skippable timestamp. It's just kinda all bad this week -"Fun" fact: ye olde revivalist preacher in the third segment was not only a slave owner, but I did some idle reading after the show and discovered that he also got fired from his parish for inappropriate behavior. In the 1700s! The more things change, eh?

The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy, chapters 9-12 We begin this episode with an utterly earth-shattering shock! Then we move on to discuss a really gross set of chapters. Only, these might be the best ones so far? Is this book improving, or are we just getting used to it? We chew on that for a while before checking in on another, much more expensive podcast to see what's going on over in Official Content World. Notes: I do spoil The Mandalorian and Grogu in this, so if you want to remain un-Grogu'd skip to 26:30.

The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy, chapters 7-9 We're a little rambunctious on this one. We love genre crap, but there's something in the air that's making us not click with the current epoch of genre crap. Are we just getting old, or is this stuff actually getting worse? Maybe this book just makes us cranky. Who could blame us when this week's reading includes an oddly offensive "crazy" professor, coworkers who want to sit on the floor and eat pretzels instead of doing their paperwork, and an honest to God entire chapter about a drunk guy playing with his nutsack? With apologies to Dungeon Crawler Carl fans, this media landscape has us stymied.

The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy, chapters 4-6 We're getting nasty with it this week. On this episode we roll up our sleeves and stick our hands into a trio of very sexual but oddly unsexy chapters. There are a lot of penis jokes to discuss, but it's also a surprisingly good springboard to talk about what makes for interesting sexual tension between characters, the effectiveness of removing fanfiction from its sources, and the importance of making deliberate decisions when choosing a setting. There's also a lot of boner and cum gags too so sorry about that. And last but certainly not least, the return of Jack Sloper?

The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy, chapters 1-3 It's time. We've been incubating the idea for a new angle for the show for a long time now, and doing lots of research about the early days of the Potter fandom. But we've struggled a little, both with time and with the idea of how, exactly, to structure things moving forward. The answer hit us (to borrow the opening line of TIUTFFYE) like a knife: why not structure it like the same damn show we've loved doing for years now? So! Here we are. And what better way to anchor future discussions of the history and impact of Harry Potter on media and culture than by reading books that were once fanfics with the Potter stripped out? We're starting with The Irresistible Urge to Fall for Your Enemy, a bestselling romance novel unabashedly marketed as a former Dramione fic (Draco Malfoy and the Mortifying Ideal of Being In Love). This first episode will be a bit of a bridge, because the third segment reading I selected is more contemporary. But you can expect our research to start showing up in the first and third segments! Anyway, this week we check out the world of the Grogu meal, attempt to identify original concepts vs renamed Potter concepts in TIUTFFYE, and learn why it's actually activism to read Dramione fanfiction in 2026. It's good to be back! P.S there is a very funny fact about this episode I will reveal after it's been out for a day or two so please look forward to that P.P.S this is just temporary art and a temporary theme song, but if you're curious the music is from my upcoming game 35 Electric

Mockingjay finale We finally did it! We've finished the original Hunger Games trilogy, and boy do we have a lot to say about how little this series had to say. You would think there would be some big ideas in a story that ends with a horrific false flag atrocity, a member of the core love triangle making cluster munitions, and multiple megalomaniacs being betrayed, but... nope! Mostly it's about how sometimes you've just gotta do you. Or something. We turn to the tantalizingly-titled 'Writing About War' interview that's intrigued us for the whole show for insights instead. We also chat about LitRPG fiction, "cozy" mysteries, pulp, and a little bit more about our upcoming project!