#just really hamfisted and overwrought

[wellthatwasaletdown]

I wasn't trying to say all artists who interact with sm are playing the same game. They're not. There's a big difference in tone between how say Ariana uses SM to how Hozier does it. Hozier seems down to earth, grounded, a bit quirky but he's uses sm in, imo, a healthy way - not to perfirm his life for the world, and not to establish an emotional overwrought connection with fans.

Its the whole 'we're doing this together, you and me' , 'I'm doing this for you guys' schtick that is looking to create this totally hollow idea that 'getting your fave' to number 1 is like a community project. Its just fan hysteria but it seems grosser to exploit that than the usual exploitation of teenage crushes on hot popstars. J Monae is seen as a serious creative talent but then 1) her creativity is remarkable and 2) herfanbase isn't a big part of her fame, so if she does play that game with fans, most ppl probably just don't see it.

Obviously all musicians can do the whole 'I love you guys' bit during concerts and at awards - but thats a bit like saying during sex - everyone knows its just the moment involved. But some popstars, and their pr teams, just take it to a whole other disingenuous level. Adele, for instance, will create an emotional sense of togetherness at concerts but she's not out there trying to make herself into a sports team, or God with true believers called the Adelians. Cos she doesn't need to.

But there is something cult like about what certain popstars act. Its like some pr lizard studied what cults exploit in young people and thought 'Hey, I gotta super idea'. So they create these quasi religions but unlike Scientology which focus on exploiting the desire for personal improvement that draws people to religion, these popstars have just gone full on for the whole personality cult, with these popstars who play up how much they 'need' their fans in a personal way etc. SM enables it.

I totally agree with anon, about how Harry is just being packaged as a serious artists but I dunno.. I guess to me its just less immoral to deliberstely exploit people's vanity or shallowness for $$ than it is to trade on people's empathy or desire for connection in a cynical or dishonest or unfulfillable way. Also I very much think most adults can see right through the very hamfisted repackaging of Harry. He's not exactly reached Sheeran levels of success now has he?

I guess its because I don't really care what shallow vain people are at, whereas when I see people who are full of empathy funnelling that 90% energy towards just making one popstars get even richer, or people looking for connection focusing so much on a relationship that can never give back, it makes me feel angry at what's being wasted, especially s it drags on for years. This is not about fans who aren't vulnerable and can step back, but the knowing exploitation of those who can't.

[cumbersome-apparatus]

Ughhh, I finished it like forever ago, but my soul won’t rest until I finally say it once and for all... What I fucking thought of 1984.

I thought it was... Bad. I disliked it. I knew I would. But I said that already and it can’t be my WHOLE ENTIRE THOUGHTS.

So I guess I’ll say it had its good points, and that, actually, its good points could be really interesting. It’s just a shame they had to be part of 1984, which was written by a guy who wanted to gloss over that stuff as quickly as possible to get back into the “but what if the government was... Bad? Bad like This? Hmm?” stuff. Which I found insufferable. Tbh, it’s one of my bottom five tropes and nothing turns me off a story faster. Which doesn’t mean Bad Governments are a trope I dislike. I just don’t like stories that are about them and seem to only exist as a Dire Warning. I hate stories as Dire Warnings and Bad Examples (or even Good Examples) in general. (It’s why my eyes roll all the way back into my head when people start up with that “As LoNg As YoU CoNdEmN iT iN tHe TeXt” bullcrap. No! I won’t! I’ll write bad situations and unlikable people and let the audience sort it out and there’s nothing you can do to stop me!)

One thing I did really like was the prison arc near the end of the book, or at least a lot of the aspects of it. I mean, most of the book listlessly oscillated between hokey and dry, and then, holy shit, the writing got really viscerally emotional and evocative right the fuck out of nowhere. This is a weird thing to say about a book I don’t even like, but the descriptions of both physical suffering and complete no-exits hopelessness, and the depiction of knock-down-drag-out person-on-person dehumanization, actually stick out as standards to hold myself to when I’m writing awful things. And like... Okay. I’ve never been a naysayer in a dystopia, and have never experienced anything to that degree, but I was an autistic kid in abusive educational and therapeutic settings, so a lot how the nuts and bolts of behavioral conditioning were written about and explained rang really true to me. There was an exchange that went something like “look at yourself!” “what are you talking about? You did this to me.” that punched me right in the gut. And my favorite part of the whole book was probably the line about how it isn’t enough that people obey you, they have to suffer while they do it, or else you can’t know they’re following your will and not their own. It honestly felt like time stopped when I read that, because, holy shit, that’s spot fucking on, it’s intentional and it always has been. That concept was an unthought known of mine, I’m pretty sure. And it probably also was for people who did all that shit to me, too, or maybe they actually were aware of it, at least in some awful euphemistic sense, and holy shit, I’m so not surprised I came out of that with probable PTSD.

...But even the really insightful parts of that leg of the story were kind of ruined because they came out in the context of one guy standing over another guy and ranting like a cartoon villain, because this goddamn book is fucking extra at all times.

The other Surprisingly Good Prison Arc revelation is why I’m not the kind of person who likes this kind of book. I’m not really all that interested in Bad Societies to Avoid on a macro scale as the meat of the story, but I am interested in interpersonal violence and trauma in stories, which might require a Bad Society or might not, but either way, the system itself isn’t the interesting part of the scenario, except as context and motivation for the individuals involved. And the wider context/specific scenario wires just never quite connected properly. The one guy was just... A cartoon villain. Talking up the whole system as if he was the one who instated it and wrapping it up with an overwrought metaphor about a boot.

ANYWAY.

A minor quibble, before I go off on a whole other long tangent about the next thing: this book seriously could not make up its mind about whether it’s good or bad to be stupid. The only conclusion it came to is that lower-class people are the stupid ones, but that makes you either docile sheeple or salt-of-the-earth noble savages who are going to save the world. I guess? Whatever it is, I don’t like it.

ONWARD.

I’ve said before that this book jumps right over the most interesting concept in the whole thing, which is the thought/language relationship. YOU INVENTED THE CONCEPT OF A LANGUAGE SPECIFICALLY CREATED TO ATTENUATE THOUGHT AND THEN DIDN’T GET INTO THE WEEDS WITH IT AT ALL. Which, duh, this a book about how attenuating thought is evil and we shouldn’t do it, not a sink-your-teeth-in exploration of cognition and semiotics. That involves open-ended conclusions on your part and would make it harder for George Orwell to smack you with a ruler!

But then there’s the thing where it did kind of start to delve deeper, which is actually a current pet fascination of mine and relevant to my goddamn Solarpunk thing: the whole premise around creating a tightly self-regulating society by manipulating social norms and letting herd mentality do the rest. Which I always think of as the “all lines are curved in the Velodrome” theory of soft authoritarianism. Like basically weaponizing the Overton Window? It’s actually really fascinating! But (there’s always a but with this book) it kind of loses some of its punch when the society portrayed is also just a regular old dictatorship where people kick the shit out of you and Make You Disappear. It’s like the author took the core concept of the book and didn’t even use it! And I guess you can argue that the setting was in a transitional phase, which is fair, and that actually could be really interesting, but it... Wasn’t. And that’s the whole problem I had with the story, pretty much. Not only was it preachy and hokey, but it was full of wasted potential.

ADDITIONAL GARBAGE THOUGHTS:

-How the heck did the other three Improbably Large Nations keep up the “we’ve only ever been at war with those guys and not the other ones” illusion? I can suspend my belief a little bit for Oceania, where the other two are three letters apart from each other and at least some people would probably just shrug and assume they read something wrong yesterday, but I don’t buy it for a second when it comes to the E*asia countries. People would damn well remember that the guys they were mad at yesterday started with an O and then the whole system would fall apart. People aren’t geniuses as a rule, but they usually damn well know if they read an O.

-Also, how is the whole “thoughtcrime” thing even enforced? I know it has to do with analyzing facial expressions, but... How? You can’t tell me that people know how to tell “bad thoughts about our overlord” from “itchy,” “smelled sour milk,” “intrusive thought about stepping on a nail,” “have to pee,” or “wondering where I put that thing” on every single individual face.

-Oh look, it’s another book that ends with a fictional document talking about the Bad Bad Government in the past tense. Where have I seen this before? Perhaps in another hamfisted trainwreck of a book. Perhaps in one that involves color-coded robes.

-Was it better than The Handmaid’s Tale? Eh. It was less-worse, for sure. But mostly just in ways that pissed me off because there were multiple interesting things ruined by being part of this Aesop Fable from hell, not just the one interesting thing with the vague threats of being sent away to clean up radioactive waste until your nose falls off.

-Did I ever tell you that I’ve considered making a blog where I read and dunk on every book in the “transparently didactic dystopian novel that somehow isn’t usually factored as genre fiction” genre? Because I have, but honestly, I don’t know when I’ll be able to bring myself to do this. Partly because I’d have to slog through THT a third time and 1984 a second, which is bad enough, but also because I’d probably eventually have to read Ayn Rand, and have you seen the size of those things? 1984 felt like it rambled on forever, and those are, like, three 1984s stacked on top of each other and there’s at least two of them. I’m willing to go through a lot if I get to make fun of something, but that’s really pushing it.