robot-bastard.bsky.social
Here we go again. *sigh*
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Oh, I went all the way through that one! (and then tried Dread Empire and Malazan but bounced off of both.)
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I'm specifically thinking about the "Helicopter Story" thing but she's blown up other people as well.
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I mean technically it's Arthurian Legend Fanfic so it assumes some passing knowledge with the Matter Of Britain, but it's not like it's a twelve-book series that expects you to follow the whole thing to the end.
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but how are we supposed to get our rocks off by Deploying Hate In A Righteous Cause if we can't whip up a mob to bully people?!
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...page 1? There's only the one book. (The bit with the roads happens in about the middle.)
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(there were so many people who thought "Jarhead" was an action movie that they made a bunch of sequels that were just regular-ass military-action movies)
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Obama Presidency circa 2009
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(I said this as a cynical joke but now actually I think it's a good idea)
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To be fair copyright worked the way most people wanted to up until 1976, when it was "radically revised" to work the way it did in Europe, specifically because Europe was seen as having a more modern and advanced take on the idea versus our silly American Colonialist "property rights" notion.
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bsky.app/profile/robo...
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Yes, and the protagonist actually *did* tip off the cops - so if you squint and have the proper motivation you *could* describe this text as more true to the original!
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the person who wrote that eventually came out and said it was high-school bullshit that got out of hand:
www.nytimes.com/2021/02/25/s...
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I think a lot of that comes from trying to explain how the Civil War wasn't over in six months and hitting on "let's say The South had military geniuses" because "the US Army promoted some of the dumbest motherfuckers on the planet" was considered too embarrassing.
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(that story did end up getting published in a book, not a "happy ending" but at least it's not Gone Forever)
www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/700576...
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fanservice is as fanservice does; keep in mind we're talking about a book where the characters almost literally turn to the camera and say "a 21st century reader would clearly note the inequalities on display and the acts of capitalism to preserve itself through racism..."
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(I actually do enjoy that "Conan"/"Lieber" mash-up, but it is very funny that a Fantasy Medieval Europe Hard-Boiled Mercenary Adventurer would suddenly engage in a disquisition on the necessity for underlayer consolidation.)
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I certainly wouldn't like a thousand people screaming at me online, particularly when that makes publishers cancel my book deal or delete my story from the internet.
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Yes, one of those times where you need to remember that someone walking in the same direction as you doesn't mean they're going to the same place...
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PTSD response in writers from seeing so many others utterly ruined for the sin of having annoyed NK Jemisin
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of course it does, it's right there in the name, "subtext", that means "below the text"
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Stephenson's first books (The Big U, Zodiac, Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon) were all satire. He then got high on people telling him how much they loved his techno-notebook infodumps and just started doing *that* instead.
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His cyberpunk stuff is satire of the cyberpunk-as-aesthetic movement (which Gibson satirized himself in The Difference Engine) and the people don't understand that because nobody understands satire these days.
Like, you read this book and it's "The High And The Mighty" to Snow Crash's "Airplane!"
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Yeah, "proper men are over thirty and proper women are either under twenty or act like it" has some...not-good implications for how he idealized the power dynamic of intimate relationships!
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*war* yes, but I think he always assumed that young men shouldn't just be sent out on their own, that they needed some kind of father figure / commander / scoutmaster / sergeant until they were at least old enough (as in, "early thirties") to be fathers themselves.
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People claim "Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" was a libertarian fantasy but I disagree, because I think "Stranger..." was his shot at that idea:
bsky.app/profile/robo...
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it's always funny seeing posts like this because everyone has a very clear idea who they think the poster was talking about, and no two people have got the same idea...
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I liked David Drake's "The Dragon Lord" where the characters stop in the middle of the action so that one can give a monologue about Imperial Roman road construction.
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"Please don't think I'm bad, *please* don't think I'm bad, I had a sensitivity reader and I did a lot of research on all the identities and I've got *so* much Representation and everything!"
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Like he was very pro on the idea of young women having sex. (I think he figured that young men should join either the military or a hierarchical quasi-military organization and go die overseas.)
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It is impossible to write satire so well that nobody will look at the straight reading and say "yes that's awesome let's do exactly that just as you've written it"...
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I think that the biggest mainstream usage was in "Top Gun", rewritten as "son, your ego's writing checks your body can't cash".
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I think this comes from very basic methods of teaching schoolchildren, where they see examples of "art as moral-instruction message" and get the impression that *all* media is art is messaging is moral instruction.
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This has been a thing Online for a long time, I think; the need to establish that you're Not Just A Hater Actually You Have Objective Morally-Neutral Reasons To Dislike The Thing. The obsessive need to categorize, to rank, to list, to identify Tropes.
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and also people are just too used to media where the characters really *do* turn to the camera and say "I am a Communist" and go on to explain that they are the exact same kind of Communist as you are.
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(It doesn't help that so many creators get too excited about making the straight reading look awesome, cf. that Onion bit about "ironic porn rental leads to nonironic ejaculation")
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That "narrowly literal way" explains why satire doesn't work anymore, because nobody's able (or maybe *willing*) to go past the straight reading of anything, so they miss the fact that it's supposed to be *critical* of the subject.
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90s alt-media (and despite what it's become Games Workshop in the 90s was very much alt media!) often took a tone of "anything popular is bad and there's a moral imperative to mock it". Satire of the time was generally not Specifically Aligned To One Side, it was more like "we rank on EVERYONE".
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GOODFELLAS with a scene added where there are a number of police officers in full dress uniform having a conversation about how Crime Is Bad And Hurts The Community.
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like when people say "I don't want politics in my [entertainment]" I think what they really mean is "I don't want the production to halt for a clumsy, moralizing sermon"
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Give all the kids a shirt that says "WHALE TEAM" on it, it'll be one of those Things They Remember Forever.
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Nice presentation!
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particularly when they decide to re-scan the original footage in 16:9 and A) include things that weren't supposed to be in the shot, and B) cut out things that *were* supposed to be in the shot!
x.com/i/status/166...
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put a blue filter on the camera (or, these days, digital-grade everything towards blue) so that it "looks like nighttime"
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and a lot of people here are doing their level best to make biskey suck the same way Twitter does!
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Someone on Tumblr wrote "as far as the fanbase went, Gundam Wing was like Supernatural with more lead characters and less incest"
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"I just have not figured out how to do that"
which puts you in good Marxist company!
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let's also ask chattel slaves in the pre-war South whether they were happy to see the Cotton Gin roll into town
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and yet when I go in the bank office now there's eight desks and two clerks