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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23431 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 1, 2024

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Hmm… I mostly only recognize his name as one of those authors that for some reason is discussed a relatively fair amount in the nerdsphere but for whom’s writing I could never get into, like a minor case of Stephen King.

However, that’s not necessarily a knock upon him, as it’s tough for me to sit through a book.

That being said, obligatory “she was only 21, you sick fuck.”

its_all_so_tiresome.jpg

Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Palestine have nothing upon the forever war that is the #Fightfor35

The usual Schrodinger’s Feminism: Young women are Strong and Indendepent #GirlBoss Queens that should be listened to, yet vulnerable damsels in distress that can be groomed at a moment’s notice like children.

I read Coraline and enjoyed it quite a lot, although my understanding is it's something of an outlier in his oeuvre.

#Fightfor35

Can you expand on this hashtag?

Raising the age of consent to 35, one of the funnier troll ops of the last few years. There is or was a website for it.

The original was Fight for 25, a campaign to “End adult grooming. Raise the age of consent for women to 25.”

However, it got quickly rendered obsolete by stories such as this, where a reknown cancer researcher was Canceled for grooming a 29 year-old researcher and seasoned carousel rider*:

Knouse, Sabatini remembers, had ongoing flings with men who she referred to with nicknames like “anesthesiologist fuck buddy,” “finance bro,” and “physics professor,” and she wanted to keep it that way.

Reality outjerking satire once again.

Chuds and Noticers, being the kind, Decent Persons they are—and wanting to join hands with progressives—eventually started a grassroots campaign for 35 as a more appriopriate age of consent for women to protect them from the manipulations of men and their pedophilic shittiness.

* She was a definite WOULD, aside from the hoetry (other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?). It’s a shame. For the uninitiated, it should be kind of black/red-pilling, that even the nice-looking, pretty red-headed cancer researcher is taking dick left and right and has thousands of miles on the odometer.

That's why I couldn't find the website! Thanks, for a few hours there I thought I'd gone nuts and imagined the whole thing.

Due to the lack of website nowadays, there are probably quite a few poor souls who think the original website was “Fight for 35” all along, like a Berenstein/Berenstain Bears situation.

Berenstain still looks wrong to me.

However, it got quickly rendered obsolete by stories such as this, where a reknown cancer researcher was Canceled for grooming a 29 year-old researcher and seasoned carousel rider*:

She was a junior employee in the department where he was a lab head, and the Whithead Institute had an explicit policy prohibiting consensual sex between lab heads and junior employees. He wasn't cancelled for grooming anyone, he was cancelled for violating a black-letter rule. You may think it is a bad rule - I, personally think it is a good one. But there is a big difference between "sex between old men and younger women is inherently abusive" and "sex between powerful men and women whose careers they have a high degree of control over is inherently abusive."

The fight for 25. Linked archive because it's registration lapsed.

Sandman was good. I liked Good Omens (probably I liked the Terry Pratchett parts more than the Neil Gaiman parts). Most of the other stuff of his I've read has been "meh," and struck me as a bit on the pretentious "Look at me, an Artist, making Art" side.

As far as people digging through his "problematic" material, he got some flack even back in the 90s for the character of Wanda, a transwoman, who was positively portrayed, but at one point couldn't participate in a magic ritual because the moon goddess or something didn't recognize her as a woman. (Transphobic goddesses!)

I did kind of notice that in American Gods, the main character's wife dies while blowing another guy in a moving vehicle. Like, that's the sort of narrative detail that is, um, a choice. And it was not the first or last time I noticed that Gaiman makes these sorts of choices in his stories, so him turning out to be a little skeevy doesn't surprise me. That said, I admit to being rather skeptical of these "abuse" allegations (which sound to me a lot like "Never meet your heroes and definitely you shouldn't fuck them"), and finding considerable irony in that it seems to be the TERF brigade who dragged them out and is currently boosting them most heavily on social media (because Gaiman has been quite vocal about being pro-trans rights).

And it was not the first or last time I noticed that Gaiman makes these sorts of choices in his stories, so him turning out to be a little skeevy doesn't surprise me.

Every writer who is trying to be edgy, particularly ones who are trying to be both literary and edgy, is going to put something like that in their work.

(Especially for a writer who learned his trade writing comics, where the medium has traditionally been for kids, so writing like that is subversive and artistic and an especially good signal of literary merit.)

Hmm… I mostly only recognize his name as one of those authors that for some reason is discussed a relatively fair amount in the nerdsphere but for whom’s writing I could never get into, like a minor case of Stephen King.

However, that’s not necessarily a knock upon him, as it’s tough for me to sit through a book.

Me too. My feeling about Gaiman is that he has a very uh... "feminine" approach to writing. Highly emotional, lots of beautiful imagery, very little focus on what the hell is actually going on. There seems to be a lot of scenes like "woah is me, I'm trapped by the cosmic horror of a malevolent demon and there's nothing, absolutely nothing I can do to save my soul from this beast!"

...So yes I can see how that kind of guy would attract a lot of teenage female fans and potentially end up in some sketchy situations with them.

For conventional writing, Coraline and Good Omens (collaboration with Terry Pratchett) are some of the easier ones to get into, maybe followed by MirrorMask and American Gods. Much of his influence is elsewhere, though: he's been massive part of the comic sphere. Pretty much every worthwhile Endless (aka Sandman) comic and a majority of the not-awful Constantine ones are his work or related to one of his works, and that's had downstream effects on a lot of writing and tabletop spaces (eg Exalted and especially Nobilis/Chuubo's).

On the flip side, his long presence in the tumblr sphere as one of the few authors that Just Shows Up in fandom mentions was always unusual, as was his pronounced defense of Alan Moore's Lost Girls; the man had been holding a lightning pole up in the rain for a while.

I've been playing Sunless Skies again after playing Sunless Sea for the first time and deducing it's just an inferior early version of Skies, really, and the Gaiman influence shows strongly there too.

The game play is much better in sunless skies, but the writing was way better in sunless sea. Funny enough I think the OG writer, Alexis Kennedy, got pushed out of the company in between games for sleeping around the office.

I played Sunless Sea some time after it came out, and found it epochal.

Sunless Skies was fine, I guess. Better than 'a house of many doors', which was also ok.

But going from "you and your crew are living on some steam boat on a subterranean ocean" to "you and your crew are living on a steam locomotive driving through the void without tracks" somehow broke my suspension of disbelief.

House of many doors felt like a first draft of a game. I liked the world and the characters a lot, but so much of the game just plain old lacked polish. The combat was very rough, and the mechanics barely made sense. The vibes powerful at least, though not as good as Sunless Sea.

Good Omens is Pratchett book, at least 51% if not more like 80%. I'm not sure what Gaiman ever brought to the book. The four horseman are already in Discworld, although I notice they left out Mr Soak the milkman.

This is praise. Pratchett is one of the best to ever write and the high quality of his prodigious output is astounding.

If you don't like fantasy, the Long World with Baxter is fantastic.

But now we're in the Friday Fun thread, What Are You Reading.

I felt that you could usually tell whether you were reading a Pratchett section or a Gaiman section by the tone of the writing.

Pratchett is essentially a satirist and a humourist, and nothing really terrible ever happens to the people in the Discworld books. Even when people do suffer (like the murdered dwarves in Thud!) it happens offscreen or is skimmed over.

Whereas Gaiman is a dark fantasy / horror writer. When something really grim happens, like the telemarketers being eaten alive by worms or people ripping each other to shreds because War is in the room I'm pretty sure that's Gaiman.

Telemarketers being eaten alive is "I fantasize about my outgroup getting hurt".

Oh, sure. But one of the things that made Pratchett so readable (until he started losing his touch near the end, around or just after 'Going Postal') was that he didn't usually feel the need to indulge in those fantasies. I'm sure he had them - he had a lot of pent up rage against the world - but he was self-aware enough not to let them come out in print. Even Lord Rust, who is usually treated as an absolute buffoon, has a way of dealing with problems that makes Vimes "darkly impressed". He's not humiliated, or cast out from society, or eaten alive.

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