TW/CW: I have some startling news. I request that you hold on to your butt and possibly fetch your blood pressure medication if necessary.
Harlequin is releasing a hardcover of Heated Rivalry in September – a special edition of a book that is doing moderately well right now in terms of sales and borrows. LOL.
This is the cover.
Y’all.
Y’all, what is this.
Are those…robots? Robots and some hockey sticks?
I ranted about this on Bluesky because my own blood pressure was about to max out and my Losartan was about to rise up out of the bottle and slap me into next week.
My head is tilted so far my cranium is about to bounce down the hall like a macabre cat toy.
This is embarrassing. The secondhand embarrassment is measurable on multiple scales, including the one in my bathroom. WAHT IS THIS.
Is this an AI textbook? Heated Rivalry: AI vs. Humanity?
Why are they robots? Which one is Ilya?
Why is this the cover image? Why is one of the hottest properties adapted into one of The Hottest Shows Ever being released in hardcover with…line robots?
I cannot get over the TRON of it all.
My nature is of course to question myself: maybe I’m not the intended audience? Maybe this doesn’t appeal to me for reasons I won’t understand.
But for WHOMST is this? To what readership does this appeal?
And, again, how is there not a tie-in cover? You know, just one image featuring those two people who portrayed two random bland ass characters that absolutely no one is writing Tumblr posts and AO3 fic by the metric ton about?
What is happening?!?!?!
If I had to sum up in one image:
So I ask you: what genre do you think this is? If you’d never heard of Heated Rivalry, what kind of book would you think this was?
Nonfiction? Corporate spy thriller? AI textbook?
