Introducing Acrimonius Annotations

Hello and welcome, I'm Kestifer, esrtwhile writer/grad student/adventurer, and none of that matters here in internet land.

This little project sprang from a couple inspirations. 1. I read a lot. A LOT. For school, for pleasure, for personal enrichment. So much so that I can’t begin to remember every little detail of everything. 2. I made a study guide for Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy which did a good job of summarizing the plot, characters and so on. So good, in fact, that I wanted to write more of those summaries for myself so that I’d be able to look back on them in the future instead of reading through the play again if I didn’t want to.

So that brings us here. I’ve decided to continue those study guides. Spoiler filled recaps, reactions and highlights of action, dialogue and author-message. A kind of bare bones plot & character guide with a dose of humor and sarcasm. If I find something that makes me throw the book against a wall, it will be mentioned.

If you haven’t read the books themselves, you’re doing yourself a disservice in reading this, because it’ll be full of spoilers. You’re not my audience. These are intended for people with at least some High School level of education or higher. Just because I'm infantile doesn't mean I'm going to dumb things down for you. Also, the more familiar you are with www.tvtropes.org the better.

Don’t think that this’ll be a good way of getting out of reading the actual stuff for class, because the analysis herein will not be in-depth. Its meant to be a refresher for people who actually HAVE read it in the first place and maybe forgot the details over the years. At best, it should provide some kind of context for when you're reading and confused by old timey words and or make things interesting/amusing. At worst, you'll be able to physically see my agony as I struggle through a book that makes me want to sign up with the Firemen of Fahrenheit 451. Either way, here's hoping its amusing.

The working title for the project was originally going to be called “Snark Notes,” but I was never very thrilled with it for a couple reasons. First, while it may seem clever at first glance and does convey the basic tongue-in-cheek gist of the matter, I don’t want to be getting sideways glances from the folks over at SparkNotes. I’m just sayin.’ Second, that title made me feel derivative and pretentious in an uncreative way. Change one letter and “dur-hur-hur, ain’t I clever?” So "Acrimonious Annotations" is what I settled on after cruising some thesaurus/dictionary sites for sarcasm. Now “acrimonious” is a word to get legitimately pretentious about!

Be aware (as though it hasn’t been abundantly implied), there WILL be spoilers. With that thought, on with the show.