#fourth critique

[rustchild]

one of the wild things about people’s stubborn insistence on misunderstanding The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is that the narrator anticipates an audience that won’t engage with the text, just in the opposite direction. Throughout the story are little asides asking what the reader is willing to believe in. Can you believe in a utopia? What if I told you this? What about this? Can you believe in the festivals? The towers by the sea? Can we believe that they have no king? Can we believe that they are joyful? Does your utopia have technology, luxury, sex, temples, drugs? The story is consulting you as it’s being told, framed as a dialogue. It literally asks you directly: do you only believe joy is possible with suffering? And, implicitly, why?

the question isn’t just “what would you personally do about the kid.” It isn’t just an intricate trolley problem. It’s an interrogation of the limits of imagination. How do we make suffering compulsory? Why? What futures (or pasts) are we capable of imagining? How do we rationalize suffering as necessary? And so on. In all of the conversations I’ve seen or had about this story, no one has mentioned the fact that it’s actively breaking the fourth wall. The narrator is building a world in front of your eyes and challenging you to participate. “I would free the kid” and then what? What does the Omelas you’ve constructed look like, and why? And what does that say about the worlds you’re building in real life?

[ofbreathandflame-archive]

With the rise of booktok/booktwt, there's been this weird movement against literary criticism. It's a bizarre phenomenon, but this uptick in condemnation of criticism is so stifling. I understand that with the rise of these platforms, many people are being reintroduced into the habit of reading, which is why at the base level, I understand why many 'popular' books on booktok tend to be cozier.

The argument always falls into the 'this book means too much to me' or 'let people enjoy things,' which is rhetoric I understand -- at least fundamentally. But reading and writing have always been conduits for criticism, healthy natural criticism. We grow as writers and readers because of criticism. It's just so frustrating to see arguments like "how could you not like this character they've been the x trauma," or "why read this book if you're not going to come out liking it," and it's like...why not. That has always been the point of reading. Having a character go through copious amounts of trauma does not always translate to a character that's well-crafted. Good worldbuilding doesn't always translate to having a good story, or having beautiful prose doesn't always translate into a good plot.

There is just so much that goes into writing a story other than being able to formulate tropable (is that a word lol) characters. Good ideas don't always translate into good stories. And engaging critically with the text you read is how we figure that out, how we make sure authors are giving us a good craft. Writing is a form of entertainment too, and just like we'd do a poorly crafted show, we should always be questioning the things we read, even if we enjoy those things.

It's just werd to see people argue that we shouldn't read literature unless we know for certain we are going to like it. Or seeing people not be able to stand honest criticism of the world they've fallen in love with. I love ASOIAF -- but boy oh boy are there a lot of problems in the story: racial undertones, questionable writing decisions, weird ness overall. I also think engaging critically helps us understand how an author's biases can inform what they write. Like, HP Lovecraft wrote eerie stories, he was also a raging racist. But we can argue that his fear of PoC, his antisemitism, and all of his weird fears informed a lot of what he was writing. His writing is so eerie because a lot of that fear comes from very real, nasty places. It's not to say we have to censor his works, but he influences a lot of horror today and those fears, that racial undertone, it is still very prevalent in horror movies today. That fear of the 'unknown,'

Gone with the Wind is an incredibly racist book. It's also a well-written book. I think a lot of people also like confine criticism to just a syntax/prose/technical level -- when in reality criticism should also be applied on an ideological level. Books that are well-written, well-plotted, etc., are also -- and should also -- be up for criticism. A book can be very well-written and also propagate harmful ideologies. I often read books that I know that (on an ideological level), I might not agree with. We can learn a lot from the books we read, even the ones we hate.

I just feel like we're getting to the point where people are just telling people to 'shut up and read' and making spaces for conversation a uniform experience. I don't want to be in a space where everyone agrees with the same point. Either people won't accept criticism of their favorite book, or they think criticism shouldn't be applied to books they think are well written. Reading invokes natural criticism -- so does writing. That's literally what writing is; asking questions, interrogating the world around you. It's why we have literary devices, techniques, and elements. It's never just taking the words being printed at face value.

You can identify with a character's trauma and still understand that their badly written. You can read a story, hate everything about it, and still like a character. As I stated a while back, I'm reading Fourth Wing; the book is terrible, but I like the main character. The worldbuilding is also terrible, but the author writes her PoC characters with respect. It's not hard to acknowledge one thing about the text, and still find enough to enjoy the book. And authors grow when we're honest about what worked and what didn't work. Shadow and Bone was very formulaic and derivative at points, but Six of Crows is much more inventive and inclusive. Veronica Roth's Carve the Mark had some weird racial problems, but Chosen Ones was a much better book in terms of representation. Percy Jackson is the same way. These writers grow, not just by virtue of time, but because they were critiqued and listened to that critique. C.S. Lewis and Tolkien always publically criticized each other's work. Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes had a legendary friendship and back and forth with one another's works which provides so much insight into the conversations black authors and creatives were having.

Writing has always been about asking questions; prodding here and there, critiquing. It has always been a conversation, a dialogue. I urge people to love what they read, and read what they love, but always ask questions, always understand different perspectives, and always keep your mind open. Please stop stifling and controlling the conversations about your favorite literature, and please understand that everyone will not come out with the same reading experience as you. It doesn't make their experience any less valid than yours.

[vaguely-concerned]

rook x lucanis: romance with a commentary track! solas and spite contribute with their thoughts and opinions along the way whether anyone wants them to or not. it's like a MST3K episode up in here as you try to get hot and heavy. in. in the pantry. love among the radishes at the end of the world (rifftrax version)

[lunabug2004]

Guys, I don't want this to seem like I'm just being negative or mean, but I really don't understand some of the complaints I've been seeing about MLMU(TH).

Mainly the ones about the changes that were made from KH (& the novel but I haven't seen those as much). I just don't get it, did people just want to watch the exact same show but with different actors and in a different language?

As a person going into the story blind and really enjoying it: I think that the cast is doing amazing and the story is cute (it's actually so adorable wth), so surely these changes can't be too drastic or awful?

Can someone pls help me understand this? Are people just finding things to complain about?

(I understand some complaints that I've seen, don't get me wrong, but some of them seem like stretches to me bcs I really don't understand wanting to keep everything exactly the same as other adaptations of the same story. Does that make sense?

Maybe I'm wrong for this but I also just don't see why people are comparing the two shows when they are two completely separate adaptations from two different countries?)

[violencewithwings]

.

[uzumakiheart]

idk if this is an unpopular opinion or wtv but like naruto and sasuke’s respective traumas are super integral to their stories because their entire personalities would’ve been completely different if they hadn’t gone through what they went through. it’s fine when ppl write their families to still be alive but then they write the two of them to be the exact same and it irks me sometimes idk

[opold]

idk man i get where this is coming from and all but i really don't think all the decision-making process on what gets published/made/filmed/etc rests on the backs of queer people all the time like the sanitization/ selection of only fluffy feel good books is probably coming from an editor/producer/similar industry term deciding what is and is not marketable.

[geekwiththeglasses]

Let me tell you, nothing makes a book exhausting like feeling the author beat you over the head with a 2x4 like ARENT THEY THE WORST DONT THEY SUCK HATE THEM HATE THEM HATE THEM

[lacnunga]

Once again recommending youtuber julian greystoke for all your 'snarking at booktok darlings' pleasure

[boltlightning]

im gonna be so honest.. thought i would hate fourth wing because booktok loves it but i actually found it pretty decent?

hey i'm happy for you!! pretty much everyone i know who read it enjoyed it, i'm definitely the odd one out on that front. i did enjoy the dragons, it was just the...the everything else...that i couldn't get around

[sleepssonicsideblog]

Almost completed Sonic Forces this might be an unpopular opinion but I love it so much 😭😭😭😭😭

[ofbreathandflame-archive]

My real problem with the New Adult genre as a whole is how similar these stories not just at a concept level, but the prose level. This is the biggest reason why New Adult always reads much younger than Young Adult or Middle Grade novels. Say what you will about the Hunger Games era — and even the Twilight era, but those stories were always only identical at the idea level. Divergent obviously comes in to capitalize off of Hunger Games, and those stories mirror each other on the surface level, but the writing of those novels reads completely different to one another. Shatter Me reads different from both of those novels, even if I can opinions about the writing decisions. The tropes might be similar, or diluted down from Hunger Games, but the stories still read like their own.

New Adult, as it is now, reads exactly the same not just at the idea level (courts, dark romance, magical Faeries, dark-haired love interest) but literally on the prose level. I remember when I reviewed Serpent and Dove for the first time and I realized just how similar the writing was the author who will not be named. These stories make the same grammatical mistakes, the same sentence structure, the same exact plot points. They’re ALL copying the same author’s prose and it’s so jarring. It’s the same narrative voice, the same syntax/sentence structure, the same exact character descriptions. Even when the story is trying to delve into the complex themes the stories all lean into the same moralistic, simplistic style of telling instead of showing.

The dystopian era of YA was always heavily generalized, but a lot of the stories always deviated at some point from one another. At some point these stories became their own narratives. And there was some very good literature to come out from that era. If you look you’ll find wholesome, original content. We’re not even getting that now. It’s literally so similar that if you give any random NA book that’s popular on TikTok any person could guess the plot points down to a T. All the way down the the ending of the story. Even down to the ‘plot twists.’ It sort of feels like insanity.

I could find a YA or MG book that reads much more mature in a heartbeat. Fourth Wing may be explicit in terms of sexual content, but it reads younger that Middle Grade. I was reading A School of Good and Evil and even that reads more mature than that book. I think authors need to really give themselves more time with their editors, because even when the books offer interesting ideas they end up being written in a way that’s exactly the same.

[juliangreystoke]

Don't forget to catch up on this nonsense that dropped on Friday! Will we finally have dragons in this dragon book?!

[lordsardine]

.

[greengianturanus]

Also, going in the other direction:

“This work has representation which is good! And I understand that their intentions were good, but I also understand that some of the ways they portray it were not ultimately correct or kind”: reasonable premise for media criticism

“All representation is good representation and anyone who disagrees is evil and/or ignorant”: do not pass go do not collect $200

"this work is problematic because of how it handles [subject]": reasonable premise for media criticism

"this work is problematic because it depicts [subject]": do not pass go do not collect $200 this is, as a general rule, a functionally reactionary and conservative argument

[esonetwork]

Creature From The Pit | Earth Station Who

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Creature From The Pit | Earth Station Who

Embark on an intergalactic journey with the Earth Station Who Podcast as we delve into the fantastical world of Doctor Who! In this captivating episode, join our hosts as they dissect and analyze the beloved Doctor Who story ‘Creature From The Pit.’ From thrilling encounters with alien creatures to the Doctor’s ingenious schemes, we explore every twist and turn of this classic tale. Whether you’re a die-hard Whovian or a casual fan, our in-depth review promises to unravel the mysteries of this iconic episode. Tune in now for an entertaining blend of sci-fi analysis, witty banter, and nostalgic reminiscence!

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