#Christian fiction discourse

[marietheran]

See, everyone is saying that the problem with most Christian art is that it's afraid to talk about difficult things, but I'm not actually sure that this is the crux of the issue? Certainly, there are many people who seem to expect "Christian art" to 100% positive, but at the same time, art doesn't have to be dark to be good, and many Christian books do showcase some quite grim stuff -- and still suck.

Either it's that maybe they're only setting the book in a dark place, and that isn't enough (perhaps it's internal conflict that is needed here, not just difficult external circumstances), or it's that the writing is simply poor. And I'm beginning to think it might be the latter, but I don't know what causes it.

Does the problem lie with too-lax editors or lack thereof? Surely there have to be Christians capable of writing well in the right circumstances?

[tiny-huts]

Really fun how many time Matt tries to do anything with the gods or religion the fandom refuses to engage with the narrative and starts foaming at the mouth in barely concealed unprocessed Christian religious trauma.

[brown-little-robin]

.

[fictionadventurer]

It sounds like Joe and Ken focused on telling stories, stories that being stories focused on the world and characters they knew. While Pete's were more focused on delivering a message with story flavored wrapping.

This is very much the case, but the difference seems to go even deeper than that, to a fundamental difference in worldviews that affect how they approach story.

Episodes written by Joe Fallon and Ken Scarborough respect children as people. Children have been shaped by their experiences and have unique personalities. Children are curious and have brains--they are driven to explore new things and can draw conclusions from what they see and do. Children are already people who deserve respect, and like all of us, they're growing into different people as they learn new things and have more experiences. The child characters can thus be the drivers of their own stories and come to learn lessons for themselves. The child audience can relate to those characters, be drawn into the story, and learn what it's trying to teach without having every detail explicitly spelled out.

Episodes written by Peter Hirsch seem to approach children as people-in-training. They might have one or two personality traits, but instead of coming from and interacting with other elements of their background, they're just pasted on, like a sticker you can put on your Generic Child Prototype. These blank-slate children need to have knowledge poured into them so they can become Properly Educated Adults. So in his episodes, these child characters will go through their story with a question, and the adults--the real people--will tell them the information in great detail so these characters--and the watching audience--can go off into the world knowing what the writer has decided they need to know.

In Joe and Ken's episodes, flaws are funny, and can create funny conflicts that will teach the children better ways to approach problems. In Pete's episodes, flaws are horrible things that need to be pointed out, labeled, and sanded away, so these children can grow up into the perfect model of what a Good Adult should be. The first approach is engaging, and celebrates diversity of personality in a community, while the other becomes bland in the interests of shaping all the members of a community into the desired mold.

Comparing the two approaches provides a shockingly thorough lesson in how one should and should not approach writing and education. Story and character and message are all intertwined. Trying to force the message onto the story and characters makes for something bland and generic and unrealistic. Letting the characters shape the story and letting the story bring out the message makes for something much more unique, organic, engaging, and real. And yes, maybe I've come to this conclusion by spending far too much time thinking way too deeply about a bunch of shows for elementary-aged chlidren, but that doesn't mean it's not fascinating to see how, even within the same show, an writer's personality and approach to the audience can make such a vast difference in the quality of a story.

[holdharmonysacred]

Of course the real spicy discourse Versus is Nero Fateseries discourse VS Egg Guard discourse. Because 99% of the time the people talking about Nero Fateseries are fucking normal about it, everyone understands that her character writing tends to go down the toilet for fanservice and Waifu Marketing’s sake and we all hate the character shilling and borderline apologia going on with her, whereas it’s such an absolute struggle to get people to understand how bad the Egg Guard’s writing is and way too many people are unironically gung-ho for justifying every single horrible thing she has done ever to the point of spewing IRL reactionary arguments. But then there’s that extremely hyper rare 1% of the time where someone does get weird about Nero, which takes on a very special undertone given that she’s a fictionalized version of a very real and very horrible IRL person, and OH BOY

[centrally-unplanned]

My take on Dante Theology discourse is that the book is obviously an impressive piece of literature dealing with wide themes of man and morality, that never claimed it was making any concrete theological claims. Any criticism of the book itself on that axis is bogus.

But also that there are many people out there - more than have read The Inferno probably! - that do kneejerk treat its concept as theological canon, and that is both a fair enough thing to criricize and in fact it is difficult to explain why its criticism-worthy without admitting that all Christian conceptions of hell are equally fictional. And not just because Christianity is wrong inherently; Christian traditions have constantly vagueblogged and flip-flopped over what hell actually is. That is why Dante's tale so easily slipped into canon, it is filling a vacuum.

[countess-of-edessa]

2024 predictions:

• new musical about Richard Nixon sweeps the nation

• Elizabeth Holmes gets out of prison

• there’s a Beatles movie and girls lust over the four guys playing the Beatles, one of whom is harry styles, who is far and away the worst part of the movie.

• the Sebastian Stan Donald Trump generates initially ironic and increasingly non ironic fan edits and thirst traps for young Trump. There is frenzied discourse around whether or not it’s ethical to find young fictional Trump hot and people worry that teenagers making fan cams of Stan will create a new generation of MAGA fanatics. It a little bit does.

• Leonardo DiCaprio gets married to whatever 24 year old he happens to be dating at the time

• Taylor Swift comes out as heterosexual

• Regime change in France

• Sam Bankman Fried is sentenced to 20+ years and claims to find Christianity in prison

• like Shia laBeouf another celebrity will undergo a public conversion to Catholicism

[anonymous-witness777]

Sorry I can't agree with that last addition. I'm admittedly cringe, and love cringe. People will bash what they bash. You can't do a thing about it. Spiteful movies are one thing, but genuine, earnest cringe often contains a beauty lacking in more self-aware "nuanced" affairs. Neutrality is overrated. Haven't you ever encountered preachy media whose message you disagree with entirely, but find yourself being nearly won over by its sheer conviction? The lack of eloquence is almost a plus.

To add to that, my own experience is that younger artistic people seem to enjoy my more dogmatic works. The older people may look askance but the people my age seem to crave conviction.

Please don't take away the crayons from low-budget Christian horror films. It's genuinely one of my favorite genres at this point.

"He has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise."

"He has chosen the foolish things of the world to shame the wise."

Not encouraging making bad art on purpose, to be clear -- encouraging a release from anxiety and from the expectations of the secular market. So the Christian artist is a fool. So they're no C. S. Lewis. So what? The clunky animation and questionable narrative structure of The Crippled Lamb speaks a word no Disney movie can speak. James Hampton built an altar from cardboard and tinfoil, and the Lord is honored on it. A certain ten seconds of the messy, terribly-made The Coming capture the cosmic terror of God in a way no mainstream horror film has even attempted.

Don't make art defensively, but don't make art fearfully. Protagonists are allowed to be vanilla. Sometimes you'll get bashed. Sometimes you'll make things that are cringe. It still glorifies God when made in earnest, I promise. It's okay.

LISTEN! CHRISTIAN MEDIA DOESN'T WORK IF IT IS MADE OUT OF SPITE FOR THE LACK OF MEDIA FOR US TO ENJOY! YOU NEED TO ACTUALLY WANT TO MAKE SOMETHING, NOT JUST AIR YOUR GREIVANCES ABOUT NOT HAVING ANYTHING YOU LIKE! STOP IT! THEY MAKE FUN OF US WHEN WE DO THIS! PLEASE!

[cokicito]

Tw: talk of csa (I'm gonna be VERY crass about it, please protect yourself if it's not something you're ready for), proship discourse

As someone who had the j o y of experiencing csa multiple times throughout my childhood, I just want to express how much I fucking hate antis. My experiences are not comparable to a fucking drawing. I WISH the predators that came after me had resorted to drawings and fantasies. Like, they can't tell the difference in morality between some drawing of a loli and me being forced to give a forty year old man a blowjob when I was eight... really? You seriously think these two are at the same level of 'heinous'?? Fuck right off. Defending lines on paper while telling actual victims how to cope with their trauma. You have more empathy for fictional beings than REAL HUMANS.

I can tell you what it felt like. I can describe every single incident in vivid, excruciating detail. I can explain how this affected my development. I can tell you how this trauma continues to influence the way I interact with people, the way I see myself, the way I view society, it affects every single fucking part of who I am. I've had to deconstruct my entire psyche and put it back together piece by piece. I can tell you all of this. A drawing can't.

And this is without mentioning the fact that most artists, professors, and authors are 'proship'. Being an 'anti' is such a chronically online thing, it's so staggering to me to realize there are people IN REAL LIFE who don't see the issue with censorship.

"So you support pedophilia??"

If this is your first argument, congratulations! You have the same reasoning skills as a fourth grader, making leaps in logic based on wild assumptions fueled by emotions. What YOU find upsetting is not universal. Problematic content is how I cope with my trauma, who the fuck are you to tell me I'm wrong?!

Every time an anti pretends to know me better than I know myself, I can't help but think of my dad. He's an amazing liar and an even better manipulator. This condescension antis bring into the conversation give me such violent urges. I know who I am. I am telling you who I am. And you shoot back with "actually, you're THIS way". HELLO??

I'm TELLING you I don't like this shit irl

I'm TELLING you I don't condone this irl

I'm TELLING you this helps me process my trauma

Why the FUCK is your first response to assume you know best?? Who the fuck are you to me?

Antis' perception of the world is so fucking narrow they can't even fathom the possibility of someone experiencing life differently.

I could go on and on about how anti sentiment is rooted in conservative Christian extremist beliefs but I am tiiiired

[catholic-character-tournament]

Round 5 - Catholic Character Tournament

Propaganda below ⬇️

Pope Pinion IV (Cars)

HELLO. IT IS I. THE GREAT AND ALMIGHTY ITALIAN TOURNEY. PLEASEPLEASE PUT HIM IN THERE WAS SO MUCH POPE DISCOURSE ON MY ACC AND HE WAS SOLOED IN THE FIRST ROUND BY LUIGI😭😭😭💔💔💔💔💔💔💔💔 PLEASE AVENGE HIMMMM

The existence of Catholicism in the Cars universe implies that there was (or at least there was believed to be) a car Jesus who died for the cars’ sins, and I for one would like to see how a car gets crucified or sins. I guess the blood/wine here would be gasoline, but what would the body/bread be? How did they sit at the last supper? What is the layout of car church? How does a car build a church? Do other human religions exist in the cars universe? How does a goddess with the body of a human and the head of a cat translate to a car? Do Buddhist cars rein-car-nate? Do cars have souls?

he lost the italian character tournament, he will win here

Harrowhark

I'm pretty sure you've already got plenty of submissions for her so I'll just say she was raised in what is basically a cult (technically a nunnery but let's be real) dedicated to keeping the body of the thing that will kill God behind the rock. One of their prayers is actually "I pray the rock is never rolled away". Harrow is extremely devout as penance for her earlier heretical actions in the tomb as a child (spoiler!) so the Catholic guilt really comes through

imagine being a catholic nun and you meet god, but it turns out he’s a twitch streamer from new zealand who became god because everything got a little bit out of hand. and just before you met him you gave yourself a diy grief-fuelled lobotomy with the help of your best frenemy. imagine how insane you’d be. now multiply that insanity by nine. that’s the fictional love of my life right there.

she meets god. she’s not inspired

she’s number one practitioner of space Catholicism. The locked tomb is chock full of Christian (catholic) imagery themes metaphors etc. just look at her she’s got a bone rosary

They're Catholicism with extra bones. Everyone is a nun. They have what is basically a rosary made from knuckle bones. They technically worship the same God as everyone else, but they're waaaay more focused on The Body in the Tomb (Mary) and we get a moment where we find out that while everyone else prays the equivilent of The Lords Prayer, they're doing the equivilent of Hail Mary. And they paint their faces with skulls.

She thinks leaving dry bread in a drawer is taking care of someone. She's in love with a 10,000 year old corpse (the same one they worship). She spent ALL NIGHT digging with her bare hands to make sure a field had bones every 5 feet so she could fight her girlfriend - I mean, greatest enemy. Spoiler territory: She's been puppeting her parents corpses since she was 8 years old. Instead of grieving her dead girlfriend, she gives herself a lobotomy. She makes soup with bone in it so she can use the bone IN THEIR STOMACH to try and kill them.

The author is/was Catholic and the entire series had heavy Catholic overtones. https://www.tor.com/2020/08/19/gideon-the-ninth-young-pope-and-the-new-pope-are-building-a-queer-catholic-speculative-fiction-canon/ A good breakdown of how it's Catholic

Anti-propaganda (spoilers)

I love the Locked Tomb series but Harrowhark has daddy issues with God, had a childhood crush on God's cryogenic partner, and is in love with God's daughter, not to mention that she's essentially a bone-bender. The religion on her home planet exists in a way that is technically against the will of the canon in-universe God, even. All of this to say, Harrowhark is heretical at minimum if not an outright witch. Terrible Catholic. Burn her.

[puc-puggy]

i mean this good naturedly but @dieinct this response is making me howl. like laugh out loud in real life a few tears came down my face. the iceberg of discourse is colonization.

in the post, when i wrote that colonization is as deeply horrifying as the holocaust? i was underplaying it. there were up to 85 million people in north america when europeans arrived. because of intentional destruction of food sources, intentional spread of disease, violent displacement, theft of children (residential schools), and constant exposure to hazards like nuclear radiation, the genocidal effort wiped out millions and most usians and canadians now believe indigenous americans to be largely extinct, despite ongoing protest for environmental and civil rights like the water protectors. 85 million people. 85% of the world's biodiversity is protected by indigenous people in the here and now. it's not a historical issue, indigenous rights are a right now climate change issue.

the frozen boys were active participants at the height of the british empire. all of them except hickey were volunteers, right? they wanted to find the northwest passage, believed it was was ordained by god.

the show, the terror, is an anti-imperialist show. the colonizers, the frozen boys, are literally the bad guys. the narrative tells you that it's an incredible tragedy that the terror and erebus arrived, that they were frozen in due to the hubris of a blue light captain (Extremely Christian-God's Dominion-Colonization As Right Of Might In Glory And Conquest ass bitch), that they kill silna's father and forced her into a role that she had not yet fully trained for, and most of all, that they killed tuunbaq in the course of their unnecessary and fatal invasion. there is a reason crozier refuses to see his friend and tells no one to ever come back.

all of these themes are explicit in the show, and this Discourse is caused when some people would like to over-empathize with the actual real historical figures fictionalized in the show and in so doing, dismiss, undermine, or erase the crimes of colonization that the show was designed to show light on.

anyway, historically, the franklin expedition arrived to king william island expecting it to be abundant because it always had been before. unfortunately, a previous expedition overhunted and cast the entire region into famine, scattering the inuit inhabitants that survived and the trade networks the discovery service relied on. just add unbelievable ecological hubris on top of the scurvy, the lead poisoning, and the refusing to turn back.

the discourse is how much to empathize with imperialists and colonizers who died terrible deaths that they brought on themselves. i'm little inclined towards empathy beyond obviously fictional tobias menzies in a wig accompanied by his beautifully homoerotic performance. actual real james fitzjames helped establish the routes for the opium wars and the century long imperialist oppression of china, of which he was incredibly proud. the historical figure is a racist, brutal man who was proud of british conquest, and making excuses for a fully adult and extremely wealthy and influential man is a bit like saying "well he couldn't possibly have refused to jump off a bridge with his friends or he might have less money and wouldn't that be a terrible crime." if 'jumping off a bridge' was subjugating a foreign nation and brutalizing its populace.

anyway. love gayboy tobais menzies in a wig. no empathy whatsoever for commiters of war crimes no matter how far in the past or how painfully they died. imperial victims suffered worse fates for far longer, and ones they did not remotely seek. fitzjames had and utilized the privilege of acting on his and his peers' hubris, however many lives it cost. and his peers were not his crewman anywhere else but in fiction.

[dearorpheus]

hello, your blog's vibes are absolutely impeccable! I was wondering if you could recommend me some nonfiction reading on eroticism, religion or fear? I'd love to read about any of these topics, but I never really know where to start looking for good theory books or essays, so I usually end up reading fiction instead. any nonfiction recs would be deeply appreciated (and on other topics too if you have particular favorites). have a nice day!

hello! thank you for the kind words♡

hm! some reading might be: - Erotism: Death and Sensuality + Visions of Excess, Bataille - Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs, Deleuze - The Sadeian Woman: And the Ideology of Pornography, Angela Carter - Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose, Leigh Cowart - Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson - A Lover's Discourse, Roland Barthes - Uses of the Erotic, Audre Lorde - A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932-1953 - Foucault's Histor[ies] of Sexuality - Being and Nothingness, Sartre - The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson - Aesthetic Sexuality: A Literary History of Sadomasochism, Romana Byrne - Pleasure Principles: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado - "The Aesthetics of Fear", Joyce Carol Oates - Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing, Isabel Cristina Pinedo - "On Fear", Mary Ruefle - "In Search of Fear", Philippe Petit - Female Masochism in Film: Sexuality, Ethics and Aesthetics, Ruth Mcphee - Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva - Hélène Cixous' Stigmata (i am thinking esp of "Love of the Wolf") - Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis - anything from Caroline Walker Bynum.... Wonderful Blood, Fragmentation and Redemption, Holy Feast and Holy Fast - excerpts of Letter From a Region in my Mind, James Baldwin - Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche (re: Christian morality, death of God) - Waiting for God, Simone Weil - The Myth of Sisyphus, Albert Camus - Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Carl Jung - "The Genesis of Blame", Anne Enright

do know as well that Lapham's Quarterly has issues dedicated entirely to these subjects you've mentioned: eros, religion, fear ! there's also this wonderful ask from @rotgospels on biblical horror theory

other non-fic i will always rec: - "On Self-Respect", Joan Didion - Illness as Metaphor + Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag - The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, Maggie Nelson - "The Laugh of the Medusa", Hélène Cixous - Ways of Seeing, John Berger - The Faraway Nearby, Rebecca Solnit - The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry some non-fic things i've read lately: - "Mary Shelley's Obsession with the Cemetery", Bess Lovejoy - "Horror Lives in the Body", Megan Pillow - "The Cruel Myth of the Suffering Artist", Patrick Nathan - "The Rub of Rough Sex", Chelsea G. Summers - "The Lost Art of Memorizing Poetry", Nina Kang - "The problem with English", Mario Saraceni

[themainspoon]

If you are a WoD fan and you aren’t aware of how fucking wild White Wolf’s strategy for marketing Demon: the Fallen was, that changes right fucking now, get ready.

So, the year is 2002, American Culture is still moving past the Satanic Panic, and your job is to market a Table Top Role Playing Game where you play as literal demons who were aligned with the Biblical figure of Lucifer. The book has a big ass pentagram on its cover, and is filled with information on fictional demons and their demonic powers.

How do you market this?

Well, isn’t it obvious?

You satirise Chick Tracks by making a fake one about how the game you’re supposed to be promoting is satanic. I’ve linked it below, it’s only 23 pages long;

But you may be thinking: “Ok, that’s a funny concept, but why is this such a big deal to you?” Well, buckle the fuck up kiddo’s, because I want you to look at that last panel again:

Do you notice anything about it that could prompt further inquiry? What about that URL?

You see, the chick track was only one part of this little marketing stunt.

And so, I ask again, how do you market Demon: the Fallen?

You create an entire fake Evangelical church website called the Eternal Grace Evangelical Church, and write a fake sermon in which you claim that the brand that hired you is producing games that turn children into drug addicts and sexual predators, also claiming that Vampire: the Masquerade was involved in real world murders including the fucking Columbine School Shooting.

Below is a link to the site from the Internet Archives Wayback machine, the main bulk of the interesting stuff is in the sermons section.

Quick note, they used EVERY part of the evangelical bullshit playbook to make this site look legit, they went hard on this. So, the site is satire, but it still feels like it would be a good idea to mention that they satirise everything about Evangelicals, including their homophobic, transphobic, anti-catholic, and anti-pagan beliefs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031205191032/http://www.father-ramos.com:80/

If you don’t want to read it yourself, here are some actual quotes from this fake Evangelical site that was, and I can’t stress this enough, MADE BY WHITE WOLF TO PROMOTE DEMON: THE FALLEN: (above disclaimer applies here too)

“Eternal Grace Congregation Church is a community of Christians who seek to love, worship and praise Him and to communicate the Word of the Gospel to the world around us while exposing the lifestyles and and recruiting prctices of those deviants who would make this world a place of horrors. Among these are homosexuals, gamblers, drug addicts and role-players.”

“You may find it useful to tell role-players about the Dallas youths who were burned to death in the steam tunnels of Southern Methodist University (of course it was the Methodists) while exploring them for treasure. Tell them about the syphilis-related insanity of Jimmy Cox, a Tennessee teenager who used role-playing games to build around him a coven of homosexuals. Tell them about Michelle Sikes, the Montana role-player who had a sex-change operation. The more perversion you can ascribe to involvement with role-playing the better. You may even wish to fabricate some of your own, to better illustrate the point to your specific at-risk individual.”

“Listening to accounts of the role-players’ games is either the height of tedium (it must be said, pardon my air of judgment) or evinces strong feelings of pity, […] Invitations to participate, if accepted, place the individual in a precarious position himself, and will probably expose him to the scourges of drugs, fornication, homosexuality and Catholicism/paganism in many cases.”

“point out to them that the activity borders on delusion (“You are not an elf, Tommy!”) and heresy (“If God intended for you to act like a demon, he would have made you a demon, Jenny”).”

“In addition, rumors (which is why I relegate this to a side note instead of including it in the main body of my discourse) link the activities of the Columbine high-school “trenchcoat mafia” with Vampires Masquerade.”

“As good Christians, it is obviously our duty to prevent our youth from learning the corrupt ways these books and games teach. Sex, suicide, drug abuse, homosexuality, “golden showers” and many other behaviors proscribed by the Lord and the Good Book come as a result of players taking their games too far. In particular, the moral execration contained with the Demon book takes these aberrations to new levels by openly encouraging players to act in the interests of Satan (or Lucifer, as he is depicted herein).”

“Additionally, role-playing games teach that violence is an acceptable and even admirable way of solving problems. Significant portions of their rules are devoted to combat and weaponry. Demon, for example, also contains systems by which the satanic characters can attack or use magic upon their enemies, with dark arts spawned from Hell itself. These are not unlike the gay community’s reactionary “straight bashing” in response to the more physical efforts of their loving fellows (but loving in the Lord’s intended way) to bring them back into the fold.”

“This Week: Pastor "Father" Ramos discusses the Catholic Church and the 68 Million deaths its evil has caused throughout the world! You won't read this in the history books! Father Ramos also discusses why he has chosen to reclaim the Holy tile"Father" from Catholocism.”

White Wolf was frequently quite edgy, and often wasn’t great at dealing with social issues (you could argue this is still true of the modern World of Darkness in some cases). But honestly I think this is a fun stunt. It mocks evangelicals for all their insane bigoted beliefs, and for basically giving all the stuff they call satanic free advertising. No matter what though this is an unhinged marketing stunt, and it is so wild that they actually did this.

[dandelionjack]

re: the post below. fantasy vs reality

a discussion in the notes got me thinking about the recent trend (perhaps not the right word, maybe “tendency”) of communist/marxist bloggers on here, especially those concerned with decolonisation (as we all should be), to blanket-condemn all media which “romanticises” pirates, cowboys, knights, outlaws, and other “historical” (in quotes because, let’s be real, it’s more legend than history when we talk about the modern portrayal of these lifestyles) morally dubious yet immensely alluring occupations. there’s been this discourse spreading: the idea that somehow indulging in art which presents these figures in a generally positive or fun light is the same as being uncritical of manifest-destiny expansionism (i.e. the notion of the ‘wild west’ and an ‘untamed frontier’ is colonial), christian imperialism (since knights participated in the crusades) or even an apologist of the slave trade (because some pirates engaged in it).

to which i say, plainly, bollocks. if you’re 16 or younger, your critical thinking faculties are an untrained muscle, your media analysis capacity not yet switched-on, then yeah, you’re allowed to be susceptible to the inability to distinguish between what’s cool in fiction and what’s permissible in reality. any older than that, i start getting doubts. i question the frankly patronising notion that an adult with a basic understanding of history and politics is incapable of recognising when something fictional doesn’t map one-on-one onto the modern world, whether that be the mechanics of a story, the interactions between characters, the beliefs and goals which drive them, or the social mores and cultural norms (hierarchy of gender, race, nobility etc) which they accept as fact.

you should be able to hold (more than) two truths in your head simultaneously. you should be able to cheer when the knight pulls the sword from the stone and reclaims his long-denied royal heritage to become a well earned leader, and, at the same time, recognise that we live in the 21st century where monarchy is a long-obsolete, unjust and inhumane system of government. same as you’d readily accept that somebody in a novel can cast a spell, but you wouldn’t believe that a real guy could set a tree alight with his mind.

all fiction is fantasy because we don’t live in history. yeah, we have sources, but they’re not perfect. even the author attempting to be as accurate as possible will inevitably sneak in some tiny anachronisms, even if in language alone. medieval europe didn’t have potatoes. you will find potato stew boiling in every tavern in the fantasy pseudo-german towns your protagonists take a rest stop in. that’s fine. that’s normal. pirates in reality were mostly cruel hardened criminals with no respect for human life, which is why they gladly partook in slavery as well as pillaging and looting, anything for profit. pirates in a show can be kind, considerate, a rag-tag team of outcasts and freedom fighters with views that most correspond with modern anarchism. as long as you know the difference, as long as you’re not pretending that this fantasy is how historical events actually happened, it’s fine. you’re good. go watch your bridgertons.

make sure to stay prudent and always tell the difference, though. never ever fall into the trap of wanting to ‘retvrn’, and that goes towards ever cottagecore homesteader. let fiction remain fiction, and work to better the world.

[olderthannetfic]

I definitely think there are people who use those "diverse reading challenges" to show off, but I also think you can have a truly genuine desire to diversify your reading habits, and challenges can be a good way to incentive yourself to do that and keep track of it. And I'm not sure there's a go-to standard for who is "tryhard" beyond if they act cringey and show-offy about it on social media. I was going to say something like "do they genuinely seem like they're trying to branch out, or just reading the same things as they usually do but with a black lead" - but honestly, I want the people who are "just reading YA" or "just reading romance" or whatever to read more diversely, too. Like for romance readers specifically: Read more romance with COC or written by POC, read more M/M and/or F/F if you primarily read het, read more stuff written by people from outside of North America and Western Europe, etc. And if you primarily read serious "classic" literature, try reading one from Africa beyond the lit-class staples like Things Fall Apart rather than another white British author, just to give an example. I think everyone should do more of that. I think those can all come from a genuine desire to try new things, not just show off to your followers about how open-minded you are.

Actually, I think the big way to tell if someone's being "tryhard" is, yes, their reaction on social media, but particularly how they talk about the book when they're done. The one big Tell I see on Goodreads about people who want to be seen as "reading diversely" but don't really appreciate diversity is when they read a book about, say, Muslim characters and then leave a 2-star reviewing whining that they didn't like that the book expected them to know 101-level things about Islam like what Ramadan or the hajj is. (Or alternately, are mad that it DID explain that stuff "too much," oblivious to the fact that in Christian-majority cultures, that's a publisher expectation that you do that with any other religion, because of ignorant readers who will whine if you don't spend a paragraph teaching them what Ramadan is because apparently these supposed "diverse readers" can't be assed to learn literally anything about the best-known Muslim holiday.) I saw someone complain on Tumblr about Goodreads reviewers getting mad at all the "Jewish stuff they were expected to know" to read Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver, and this person was like "I'm a goy and I understood all of it because it's stuff you would know just from having seen Fiddler on the Roof. If all the Judaism you need to know for a book is stuff that you can get from watching Fiddler on the Roof, then maybe the issue is not the book, it's you for not having such basic information about a major world religion and then reading a book about it."

Or as another example, when people complain about how the particular set of lingo this person who is oppressed in a way you are not used to describe their oppression is not the exact thing that Twitter discourse has told you is "correct" to use or that it is offensive. When they get mad that a book where a black person is talking about their life experience with police brutality has "too many descriptions of violence" and "I'm rating this lower because it might be triggering." (In general, when people seem to conflate "this triggered me" with the kind of "productive discomfort" that relatively privileged people NEED to confront in fiction about marginalizations they don't experience in order to grow as humans. But also it's just like... there are some topics where it would be doing readers a disservice not to describe them graphically. Not everything can be communicated in a way that would earn a G rating on AO3. That might mean the book is inaccessible to you, but that's on you to deal with, not on the author to censor themselves.) Or when they, as in the American Fiction example, expect it to fit some stereotypical ideas of "authenticity" and are mad that this POC or LGBTQ+ or disabled person's lives are more like their own rather than feeling like a museum exhibit about an exotic Other culture.

To me, "tryhard" is when you don't actually value diversity FOR diversity. If you're going to read diverse media, you can't get mad when it actually is diverse. If you want to read about stuff about/from other cultures and identities, then a) you need to be okay with being challenged, b) you need to not expect the author to hold your privileged hand all the time. You can look up unfamiliar words like "hajj" or "Purim." It's 2024. You have a tiny computer in your hand that is several times more powerful than the big computers that put astronauts on the moon. You can use it to go to Wikipedia when you see a word you don't understand, it's not that hard! Expecting authors from other cultures and identities to patiently explain every aspect of that to you like an elementary school teacher is the ultimate sign of entitlement and privilege, especially if you're reading, say, a book by a Congolese author about the Congo, not one that they wrote specifically for Western audiences!

When people make a big show of reading "diversely" but then seem to be upset that those books are actually, you know, DIVERSE, that's a big flashing sign that it's performative tryhard nonsense to me.

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It's pretty sad when we'll go google some xianxia thing to watch The Untamed, but we can't manage to look at a ten thousand times more commonplace wikipedia article on a major world religion.

[idreamtofmanderleyagain]

The thing that I'm not a fan of when it comes to discourse surrounding monsterfucker or adjacent media (particularly when we are talking about pre-2000s media) is that I feel like a lot of the subtext of social transgression gets erased.

I think some of this comes from this misconception that we are a sexually liberated society, or from young folk's lack of cultural memory of sex as a much bigger taboo than it is now, particularly for women and queer folks. Because so many of these monsters in pop culture were sexy in subtext for a reason. We lived in a society where sex = danger, particularly if it's not the kind of sex or desire approved by white christian heteropatriarchy.

I don't know if the more wholesome image of the monster lover that people try to sell now is really a symptom of us healing from that. Because it's clear that we have absolutely not healed from our sexual anxieties, we've only focused that anxiety on heavily policing images that we feel "represent unhealthy or abusive relationships." And sure, sometimes these images do. However, in some ways, it feels like that effort translated into this image of the non-dangerous monster, which unfortunately feels like a monster that is made to be acceptable to the status quo.

All the best stories I have experienced about monster lovers (or stories that dance around that subtext) are stories with monsters that are vicious, frightening, unapologetic. Stories with blood and gore and/or a primal darkness, hedonism, etc.

Monsters in fiction are not DnD creatures. Monsters are more often metaphors for something society fears.

To be honest, I often don't see much of a difference between fandom's monster lovers and the deeply Mormon Edward Cullen in his khakis and a volvo, preserving his virginity until marriage. It's a repackage of sexy monsters into something acceptable and unchallenging. But like Edward Cullen, I don't know that defanging our monsters really ultimately avoids the problem of abuse at all.