User blog:General Khor/2022 In Review

Hello and welcome to another semi-annual review blog by General Khor. Yet another year has come to an end, so it's time we look back at the developments in Choices throughout the year. Now if you ask me, what do I think of the future of Choices, let's just say, it's ccmplicated, because there are some good news and some bad news. I originally planned to cover The Nanny affair in this blog, but as you saw in my previous blog about the series, there's a lot to talk about, which is why I made a separate blog for it. Without further ado, let's get into it.

State of Choices, 2022 2nd Half
So as of now, the gender of choice wave seems to have ended with this year, as most books next year, especially in the first half, are forcasted to be genderlocked. Still, it was great while it lasted, as we had Immortal Desires in July, Laws of Attraction Season 2 and Murder at Homecoming in September and The Phantom Agent in October. This year also saw the end of the OG VIP era with the release of Slow Burn from August to November. As for the last book of the year, it's the sequel to the first VIP book to be serialised, which I don't want to talk about (In case you don't know, it starts with S).

Talking about sequels, Crimes of Passion is confirmed to be a series! Hooray! This announcement brought great hope to the fanbase for two reasons: Firstly, before the announcement of CoP Season 2, everyone assumed that only books made for horny women with a lot of sexual content are going to be serialised, so fans were over the moon when the announcement came out. Secondy, given that every mystery story in Choices up until this point have been a standalone, this may be Choices' first successful mystery series (then again, horror stories also don't have the best record when it comes to being serialised).

As for the other VIP books, Untameable and The Cursed Heart are also confirmed to have sequels, and here's the bad news: Starting from 2024 onwards, any sequels will go through a VIP phase as well, so we'll be entering the "full VIP era", as the VIP plan will affect all books, not just the first ones. It all started when PB announced that ID will be a solo book due to time allocation and staffing issues, but fans loved the series too much, and kept begging for a sequel, so they decided to renew the series for another season. I was going to include ID in this blog, but because of this announcement, that review will have to wait. Still, you know how some cancelled TV series were revived because of popularity? Well, never before has PB un-cancelled a Choices series, so the announcement of ID Season 2 was undoubtedly met with elation by fans.

Anyway, according to the latest blog by PB, when sequels were released directly to everyone, it created an imbalance of resources for new books and sequels, so in order to rectify this, the had to extend the VIP plan to have sequels have a VIP plan as well. Now I understand where they're coming from, but to be honest, there's a chance this move will backfire on PB, and when that happens, it will be catastrophic for the company, but then again, who knows, maybe this move will pay off instead, only time will tell. As for me personally, all I hope is that more good stories can be serialised.

And now, with all that said, let's get into the reviews.