#but you can just have tumblr shorten long posts now and they don’t circulate the same if someone has to opt in

[foldingfittedsheets]

Can’t wait to be Tumblr Famous for Do You Love the Color of the Comic.

[femmedaltia]

@haunted-radishes Sorry for the delay! I started writing a response a few days ago, but it snowballed into a multi-page screed that feels a little beyond the scope of your ask (I guess I had more feelings about this than I thought). So, here’s the shortened version. I’ll preface it by saying that I admit that in the grand scheme of The Discourse™ that this fandom is capable of the takes I’m referring to ARE pretty lukewarm. They escalated from mildly annoying to TERRIBLE for me personally mostly due to the frequency at which I saw them circulate at the time and the lack of any…IDK counterarguments? meaningful examination? consideration of really obvious information? Even in my little circle of Tumblr fandom where Wen Ning feelings ARE generally neutral to positive—i.e., not typically bad by any stretch of the imagination, he’s just not the classroom blorbo—but where he is mostly engaged with based on his relationships to other, more popular characters and rarely in his own right. And as so often happens on Tumblr.hell.com, even a lukewarm take can start to simmer if you let it stew long enough, and somewhere along the way I went from ‘oh this is a disappointing take on a character I generally like’, to ‘okay this is the fourth time I’ve seen this increasingly annoying post”, to ‘fight me, this is my guy now!’ about it. Suffice it to say your mileage may vary.

So, how do people get Wen Ning wrong? Well, pretty much all the takes I’ve encountered that have made me go (O_o ) involve the core reveal at Lotus Pier and some flavor of Wen Ning was just soooo SUPER mean to Jiang Cheng!!!!! With the connotation that this is a) a uniquely bad or uncalled for transgression and b) confusing, out of character, or otherwise had no motivation behind it other than being a dick to this one guy in particular just cause and 2) that Wei Wuxian NEEDS to get mad at Wen Ning in response to breaking his confidence and being cruel to his shidi!

The obvious response to the first is ???AND??? SO WHAT???!! It’s not like a major theme of MDZS/CQL is about being on the shit-end of somebody else’s bad day whether or not you deserve it or if the response is fair or proportionate or anything, right? I think the fierce corpse of all people is allowed to read one guy to filth one time over the course of a 1800ish page/50-episode series, you know for a treat. AND have perfectly understandable, engaging, and multifaceted reasons for doing so that don’t just boil down to ‘because Wei Wuxian or because Jiang Cheng’. Wen Ning managed to have a perfectly terrible, horrible, no good (except for that ONE thing), very bad day all on his own, thank you very much. And that scene is built on and about so much more than either a plot device or ‘fuck this one guy in particular’ (It’d say it’s ‘AND ALSO, fuck this one guy in particular’ if anything). Wen Ning is as juicy a character to sink your teeth into as any other character in the cast (maybe even more since so much is left to the reader’s imagination), so it’s a shame when he is not afforded the same degree of complexity.

As for the take number 2. IDK, some of it is just harmless plot bunny generation in the vein of ‘wouldn’t it be fucked-up/funny if’, some of it is more tongue and cheek, and then some of it is dead serious. Personally, I’m not generally a fan of’ this character NEEDS to do’ anything takes, but this one just kind of rubs me wrong in particular since it’s so explicitly punitive toward Wen Ning and/or de-centers him from his own character moment. Like, if you’re going to have Wei Wuxian and Wen Ning unpack the core reveal, then they should UNPACK the core reveal and everything that surrounds it and leads up to it. Frankly, I would fucking love that (these two have a lot to talk about in this regard), but that’s not generally what I take away from these NEED posts, so here we are.

I think what it boils down to is a) people getting over zealous in defending or validating their favorite characters to the point of being myopic about it, b) the need for that validation/defense to be ‘correct’ or morally in the right which often necessitates flattening character conflict into very easy dichotomies of things like ‘mean vs nice’, ‘good v bad’, etc., in which case, having to admit that the ‘other guy’ might have their own messy, complicated, motivating factors is inconvenient, c) the need to have their own feelings validated by other characters in the narrative, and d) just a general disinterest in affording ancillary characters the same level of complexity as more fandom popular characters.

And to be charitable, fans who have only engaged with the story through Untamed/CQL canon are missing critical information that I feel greatly informs what’s motivating Wen Ning during the core reveal scene and even WHY the core reveal scene happens at all, i.e., the omission of The Blood Pool Scene, i.e., the BEST scene in the entire story. But that’s a different rant. Anyway, I hope this sates your morbid curiosity somewhat.

Hey, you seem to be a Wen Ning enjoyer, can you tell me what you like best about him? I feel like he has a lot of potential that isn’t really explored enough for him to be a fave so I’d like to hear your POV on him!

Honestly, right from the beginning he has always just made me happy :D

But to delve into it, the first thing that struck me about him was how kind he is. He's a sweet guy! I started with The Untamed, only reading the novel later, so my primary impression of him is the version that sneaks down to the dungeons to take out the evil dog and give Wei Wuxian some medicine, so he's going behind his sect's back to do what's right as soon as he has the opportunity to do so. I love how he's timid and gentle, but has the backbone of steel to risk it all to do the right thing.

But he's also kind of. Odd. Sometimes it ties into his hidden nerves of steel, like when he drugs the entire cohort at Lotus Pier to help Wei Wuxian and co. Like, it was an incredible act, but he just. Fucking. Drugged them. No hesitation. Absolutely wild behavior. Especially in the novel where he had only met Wei Wuxian once before this! I do prefer the drama version where his actions make more sense, but his devotion is at least a little unhinged no matter the version. But also, even besides the obsessive devotion, his energy is just. Endearingly strange and off-putting. Like when he decides that the best way to quietly contact Wei Wuxian is to dangle upside down outside his window. Or feels absolutely no need to make himself less terrifying when he power walks towards the tied-up juniors with a sword.

And then! The unexplored depths and unexamined tragedy! You're left to wonder so much about him! How DOES he feel about the whole fierce corpse thing? About his compromised autonomy? Would he have turned against his sect even if Wei Wuxian hadn't charmed him? Does he regret any of his actions before killing Jin Zixuan? How deep do his grudges run? Is there anyone from the Wen sect outside his established circle of family and cultivators who he misses or secretly mourns? What does he think about the other great sect members, especially the leaders? Plus so many more questions we'll never truly know the answers to, because he tucks his problems away and never speaks of them! The closest glimpse we get of his inner turmoil is his verbal evisceration of Jiang Cheng with the core reveal, and that does show us some interesting things about his character! For the first time, we see him choosing to be as hurtful as possible, showing how much he clearly resents Jiang Cheng, but how much of that is personal dislike, how much is anger on Wei Wuxian's behalf, how much is blame for the deaths of his family, and how much is gall at him benefiting from dear late Wen Qing's genius and service without even knowing it? Also, what is he going to do after canon? What is left for him?

Also he's relatable, lol. That awkward uncertainty he always carries with him is very endearing in an "oh, me too buddy" kind of way. He has so much going on inside his head, but all that comes out is, "oh! Excuse me >.<" People are having massive emotional moments right in front of him, and he's just..... There.

Anyway, Wen Ning! Love that guy! Makes my brain go "brrrr"

[isitfake]

A list of rejections of famous authors was circulating on Tumblr awhile back and, because Is It Fake was in exams at the time, Is It Fake got really into debunking them. It has now been more than a year and Is It Fake is just gonna put it up and let this roll.

See, they’re all or almost all from Rotten Rejections, a book written with a marvelous disregard for facts, and they’ve therefore been in circulation for more than twenty-five years. Some of them are entirely true; some of them are totally fake; a lot of them appear only in Rotten Rejections but can’t otherwise be disproven. Many of the stories behind them are fantastic.

As a general note, although this was only really useful for Plath, if you enjoy this we recommend “Publication is Not Recommended: From the Knopf Archives,” which is available on Project MUSE if you’ve got access and is just… it’s wonderful. Blanche Knopf was a riot.

Okay, let’s get going!

TRUE

Sylvia Plath: There certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.

Not only true, but actually much worse than depicted here. Internal rejection only. The editor, having been told that this is contest-winner Sylvia Plath’s book, rereads, and is marginally nicer and 500% more patronizing: "maybe now that this book is out of her system she will use her talent more effectively next time.” Accurate text available here: http://cloudyskiesandcatharsis.tumblr.com/post/57272275430/sylvia-plath-originally-submitted-her-novel-the

Emily Dickinson: [Your poems] are quite as remarkable for defects as for beauties and are generally devoid of true poetical qualities.

True! Thomas Niles to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, June 10, 1890— the brackets are wrong, because he was addressing another possible publisher, to say that he thought it would be “unwise to perpetuate” the poems, oh my STARS.

Ernest Hemingway (on The Torrents of Spring): It would be extremely rotten taste, to say nothing of being horribly cruel, should we want to publish it.

True, and directly to Hemingway himself. To F Scott Fitzgerald he managed to get up an “I am less violently opposed to Torrents of Spring than anyone else who has read it” but to Hemingway himself, nope, full no.

William Faulkner: If the book had a plot and structure, we might suggest shortening and revisions, but it is so diffuse that I don’t think this would be of any use. My chief objection is that you don’t have any story to tell. And two years later: Good God, I can’t publish this!

True. Both are true. They are so true.

The first refers to Sartoris/Flags in the Dust, and the story is really funny and sad. Faulkner sent it to Horace Liveright (his publisher) with enormous confidence: he called it the “damdest best book you’ll look at this year” and tried to ensure at this early stage that the printer not screw up his punctuation (“he’s been punctuating my stuff to death; giving me gratis quotation marks and premiums of commas I dont need.”) He also insisted that the title was perfect and that he had designed his own dust jacket which he would send by separate cover. Anyway, bye, he was going on a hunting trip, he looked forward to Liveright’s glowing acceptance!

Liveright did not exactly… do that. Besides the quote above he also noted how much he hated Mosquitoes, Faulkner’s last book, and how disappointed he was w/this one and how much he really wanted Faulkner not to submit it anywhere else, in case he got blacklisted, because the book was so, so bad.

WHOOPS

(Thanks to "Flags in the Dust and the Birth of a Poetics” by Arthur F. Kinney for those quotes.)

The second is about Sanctuary, a book Faulkner hated and described as a “cheap idea…deliberately executed to make money.” The full rejection, according to Faulkner in his introduction to the book, was “Good God, I can’t publish this. We’d both be in jail.”

Edgar Allan Poe: Readers in this country have a decided and strong preference for works in which a single and connected story occupies the entire volume.

Not quite the exact quote, because “(especially fiction)” should appear after “works” and “entire” should be “whole”— but true. Harper & Brothers rejected Tales from the Folio Club in 1836 with this phrasing, the second of their three reasons for turning the stories down. The first was that a lot of them had been printed already, and the third was that the papers were too “learned and mystical,” like spooky bonbons.

http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psbbooks/pb19781c.htm

Poe responded to this by writing The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which he privately referred to as a “very silly book”, and which is a classic of American literature.

MIXED TRUE/FALSE

Jack London: [Your book is] forbidding and depressing.

Sort of true. This rejection is from the Atlantic on the 3rd of May, 1900, it’s about “The Law of Life”, and it was a lot nicer than this, because according to Ellery Sedgwick’s "A History of the Atlantic Monthly, 1857-1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide”, this was a period in which the Atlantic was being very ruthless and cynical about what would run, because depressing things didn’t sell commercially.

The full quote is, “We have heartily liked the vigor of it and the breadth of treatment with which you have written it. But the subject is forbidding—in fact seems to us depressing, and so the excellent craftsmanship of it has not changed our mind."

Stephen King (on Carrie): We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.

True, but not about Carrie. It’s from Donald A. Wollheim at Ace Books and it’s about the Richard Bachman book The Running Man, which King had written after Carrie got rejected basically everywhere in the world. “The book, unfortunately, was not fantastic,” he later commented, which might’ve been because he wrote it over a weekend in a “low rage and simmering despair.” Thanks to the Stephen King Companion for this one.

UNATTESTED (AND, ONE SUSPECTS, NOT REAL)

Rudyard Kipling: I’m sorry Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.

Unattested. ID’d as the publisher of the San Francisco Examiner or Call writing in 1889, or is it 1899? Yeah, probs not, and Is It Fake couldn’t find it.

That said, the Call fucking hated Kipling. For example, the San Francisco Call did write about Kipling in 1899; it castigated him for his poem “the White Man’s Burden,” saying, “the white man’s burden is to set and keep his own house in order. It is not required of him to upset the brown man’s house under pretesce of reform and then whip him into subjection whenever he revolts at the treatment.” (Among other sources, can be found here.)

Another review of “The Lesson” from 1901 opens "KIPLING'S latest poem, 'The Lesson,’ must be very gratifying to Mr. Alfred Austin, for, if it does not confirm Austin's right to the office of Poet Laureate, it at least shows that Kipling has no better right.” 

Dr. Seuss: Too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.

Unattested. But he was indeed rejected 27 times for his first book. 

The Diary of Anne Frank: The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift that book above the ‘curiosity’ level.

Unattested. The diary was rejected by 15 publishers before publication, but Is It Fake can’t find any of them who specifically said this. Here’s one from Knopf:

In the summer of 1950, Alfred A. Knopf Inc. turned down the English-language rights to a Dutch manuscript after receiving a particularly harsh reader’s report. The work was “very dull,” the reader insisted, “a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions.” Sales would be small because the main characters were neither familiar to Americans nor especially appealing. “Even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject was timely,” the reader wrote, “I don’t see that there would have been a chance for it.”

Joseph Heller (on Catch–22): I haven’t really the foggiest idea about what the man is trying to say… Apparently the author intends it to be funny – possibly even satire – but it is really not funny on any intellectual level … From your long publishing experience you will know that it is less disastrous to turn down a work of genius than to turn down talented mediocrities.

Unattested. Catch-22 (or as it was called at the time, Catch-18) was rejected over and over again, but this exact language is just vapor.

On the other hand, we have some of the language of acceptance, thanks to Vanity Fair:

“I … love this crazy book and very much want to do it,” Gottlieb said. Candida Donadio was delighted by his enthusiasm. Finally, someone got it! “I thought my navel would unscrew and my ass would fall off,” she often said to describe her happiness when negotiations went well with an editor.

And this incredible rejection from Evelyn Waugh:

Dear Miss Bourne:

Thank you for sending me Catch-22. I am sorry that the book fascinates you so much. It has many passages quite unsuitable to a lady’s reading

You are mistaken in calling it a novel. It is a collection of sketches—often repetitious—totally without structure.

Much of the dialogue is funny. You may quote me as saying: “This exposure of corruption, cowardice and incivility of American officers will outrage all friends of your country (such as myself) and greatly comfort your enemies.”

George Orwell (on Animal Farm): It is impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.

Unattested. It was rejected for a lot of reasons, but most of the ones I can find histories of were basically for it being anti-USSR at a time when the Russians were war allies. One publisher was basically ordered not to run it so as not to hurt the war effort, by somebody who later turned out to be a Soviet spy, like a lot of people in wartime Britain.

If you want to read T. S. Eliot rejecting Animal Farm for being too pro-Communist (not a joke) (jazz hands), you can find that here. 

Vladimir Nabokov (on Lolita): … overwhelmingly nauseating, even to an enlightened Freudian … the whole thing is an unsure cross between hideous reality and improbable fantasy. It often becomes a wild neurotic daydream … I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years.

Unattested. Could be real and internal, but it was never given to Nabokov, because Nabokov gave us a recounting of his rejections, and this wasn’t in them.

Is It Fake’s fave bit: "Some of the reactions were very amusing: one reader suggested that the firm might consider publication if I turned my Lolita into a twelve-year-old lad and had him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, in a barn, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, realistic sentences. (He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy. Etc.)"

Richard Bach (on Jonathan Livingston Seagull): will never make it as a paperback. (Over 7.25 million copies sold)

Unattested, and Is It Fake doesn’t even have anything interesting to say about it.

H.G. Wells (on The War of the Worlds): An endless nightmare. I do not believe it would “take”…I think the verdict would be ‘Oh don’t read that horrid book’. And (on The Time Machine): It is not interesting enough for the general reader and not thorough enough for the scientific reader

Unattested. It is the personal opinion of Is It Fake that they’re both false. The Time Machine was actually commissioned as a novel, so it’s hard to see why it’d receive a rejection like that, and both stories were serialized before publication, not run in book form, so the War of the Worlds one doesn’t ring true. Fun supplemental fact--War of the Worlds was immediately pirated upon release and rerun as “Fighters from Mars,” localized to New York and Boston respectively and run with a story called “Edison’s Conquest of Mars” about how Thomas Edison took over Mars and Is It Fake is not making this up.

Herman Melville (on Moby Dick): We regret to say that our united opinion is entirely against the book as we do not think it would be at all suitable for the Juvenile Market in [England]. It is very long, rather old-fashioned…

This must be false (no one ever appears to have been under the delusion that Moby-Dick was a children’s serial, and in fact he got it printed kind of as like an art book, a 500-book edition with great critical acclaim and no sales) but since one can’t actually prove that it is, “unattested,” but Is It Fake would like to register the strongest possible objections to anyone who would bother to make up a reason for Herman Melville to be sad, dude was like high king and priest of making his own ass sad in the desert, leave him alone

If for some reason your life has been missing negative reviews of Moby-Dick you can find the full spectrum of praise to castigation here. Personal fave goes to the writer who said “There is nevertheless in it, as we have already hinted, abundant choice reading for those who can skip a page now and then, judiciously....”

PROVABLY FAKE >:(

Oscar Wilde (on Lady Windermere’s Fan): My dear sir, I have read your manuscript. Oh, my dear sir.

False. Is It Fake can’t believe even people talking about Oscar Wilde are getting the Oscar Wilde effect. It’s attributed to a bunch of people, but the oldest attribution found was to John Clayton, from Albert Chevalier’s autobiography of 1895, as

“My dear sir, I have read your play. Oh! my dear sir! Yours truly, John Clayton.”

As Albert Chevalier was a comedian & music hall performer and this is part of a collection of anecdotes, one is perhaps not super convinced this was ever real, from anyone. (There’s also a fwithout the last line: “My dear sir, I have read your play. Yours, Fred Thompson.”

Gertrude Stein spent 22 years submitting before getting a single poem accepted.

Possibly true, in that Is It Fake can’t find the date of publication of her first poem, but not substantively true, in that Three Lives ran when she was 35, so unless we’re counting whatever she submitted at 13, this is false. Stein was constantly and continually rejected though. Like just absolutely constantly, and crushingly too. This rejection letter is particularly amazing.