Love is a battlefield

This will have to be quick, I have next to no battery on my iPad. Sorry.

So, I read a lot of YA distopia, and I've just finished the delirium series by Lauren Oliver (sorry if you're reading and nowhere near ending requiem, but I will spoil the shit out of it here).

There's the usual themes you find in these books, 1984-type world with a government going beyond the line of what the masses can manage and causing an uprising, narrated by a teenage girl who through all this, has wuv pwobwems. Now, delirium gets away with it because it's about love being a sickness which requires a partial lobotomy to treat, but only around your eighteenth birthday. People showing signs of love are pretty much tortured. She can talk about her wuv because she is fighting for the chance to wuv who she wants.

But Oliver falls flat. She has the start of an epic battle scene, and then she Twilight (Eclipse)'s it. Lena, the main character, leaves the battle to find her young cousin, so we get all the drama of finding a six year old and then the battle's over. One of her friends might have died, and she maybe kinda loves two guys. But we get no resolution, just the author's message in about five paragraphs, which is basically implied throughout the books. So thanks for messing the ending and implying I'm a fucktard Lauren Oliver. Just when I thought we could be friends.

See soon, my fanfic with a decent fucking ending in which we know whether Raven lives and see Lena dump the nerdy guy for Alex. Or else, she gives Alex to me, that's okay too.

**edit** Okay, I'm finally on my laptop to explain myself a little better (never try and do anything on an iPad with 2% battery!). Okay, so for most of Delirium, Pandemonium and Requiem there's a constant undercurrent of fear and violence between those who want people to feel the deliria (Oliver's name for love in the series) and each part of the fight (the Invalids who love, the Scavengers who hate the order of the treated, and the Treated who think they're living the ideal because they are rational and logical without love) tries to undermine the other. The Invalids seem well organised and able to communicate in unusual ways, but you never see that, because Lena basically only ever lives in a cave. The Scavengers do deals with the Treated to eradicate the Invalids, thus proving that emotions are fickle beasts that you should have removed as soon as you're legally allowed.

The tension was built up well, and I thought that the Invalids you follow - Lena and her friends Raven, Tack, Bram, Hunter, Julian, Lu, Coral and Alex - showed all the different, wonderful ways you can love. Bram and Hunter are gay, and therefore ostracised, and called Unnaturals; Tack and Raven are the couple who love but bicker; Lu has loved and lost, and Lena has the conflict of loving someone and not being able to express it. For a lot of Requiem, she settles for second best (it does my head in, like Oliver set up a potential love triangle but rather than Twilight it, she made it look like one of them won despite the other waiting in the wings) but comes to her senses at the eve of battle. So well done for that, Lena.

And the battle is pretty epic, what you get to see of it. They use rope ladders to scale the walls of a city, despite being shot on the way up. Bodies are falling and I'm picturing something akin to an action movie, and you see Raven get shot (she may be pregnant. You see her react, but it's not clear if she dies, even at the end) and then Lena decides to visit her family in the city instead of, you know, fighting for love like the message of the trilogy has been thus far. She runs into her best friend (who was jealous of her relationship with a guy and sold them to the authorities in the first book. She's since had the treatment, and actually, this is her wedding day to the sadistic mayor. God, it sounds so good in summarising, right?) who helps her find her cousin, and then when she does ... there's no more fighting. Even the Treated are tearing down the wall around the city. There's chaos, a hint that Lena is no longer settling for second best, and then Oliver writes on the last page about tearing down the walls, so you can let in the good, as well as maybe the bad (because if you didn't get in somewhere around 1000 pages, that was the point of succumbing to the deliria) and then it ends.

She commits two of the biggest crimes in my mind that an author can (and they're bigger because her other 999 pages are fabulous) - she does not wrap up the ending, but leaves it to interpretation (so ... the Treated bazooka all the idiots on the wall remnants. There you go Oliver) and she does not write what she sets up. You set up conflict, you show the war, you set up violence, you describe the spray of blood from the exit wound. Do NOT Meyer the fuck out of your story.

It hurts, you know? That it was so, so good, and now she's left me hanging. Like a really nice chocolate bar you only get a mouthful of. I deliria-d you, Oliver, why'd you Julian me? (If you've read, that'd make sense, honestly)

I'm reading the Hobbit now. I started yesterday, and I have like, 100 pages left. I am in love with this book (Gollum was pretty graphically presented, just FYI Oliver) and I don't quite get why others don't? Is it because pretty much anyone who could chase the 14 long-term just give up at convenient plotpoints or because you just haven't had second breakfast yet, or you secretly love Bombar and can't take the fat jokes?