#literary demerit

[klanced]

Good morning besties, I’ve been listening to this amazing podcast @literarydemerit , and I heavily recommend listening to Literary Demerit if you enjoy examining and analyzing (bad) fan fiction.

I’m currently listening to Literary Demerit specifically because the two hosts are in the middle of covering ‘Dirty Laundry’ which LOLLLLLLLL. if you were around in 2016 this will be the voltron throwback of all time. If you missed DL’s heyday, Literary Demerit offers an excellent retrospective perspective on how DL rose to fame and also the myriad reasons it exploded upon entry into the atmosphere.

I’m currently only on part 4 of a 10 episode (which is still ONGOING somehow????) deep dive into DL and so far this podcast has been a total delight. Siobhan and Kester are an excellent duo who play off each other well. Both have clearly done an intensive amount of research into DL, and Kester even apparently watched Voltron with Siobhan just to prepare for this podcast (Spotify’s Bravest Soldier fr). They offer amazing insight into both DL as a fanfiction, and also insight into what does (and does NOT) make a fic actually good. (Honestly my largest takeaway so far is that I need to stop reading fanfic and start reading real books more often.)

I am not great at listening to podcasts, but I’m really glad I put in the effort to listening to Literary Demerit :) Since we’re in a Voltron Renaissance and all, I think this is the perfect time to offer a podcast that has an ongoing series dedicated to Voltron’s most (in)famous fanfiction.

You can listen to @literarydemerit on Spotify, Patreon, and Audible.

[literarydemerit]

here's the actual klance height difference btw.

[realian]

mutuals for my birthday you have to listen to my podcast

my podcast Literary Demerit (on Spotify but you can find it anywhere podcasts are found)

and follow @literarydemerit

and also talk to me about it and tell me what was your favorite part and what you liked about it and also how great I am and what your favorite thing that I said and also @nyadversary is there.

previously we’ve covered:

My Immortal, the most infamous fanfiction of all time

Forbiden Fruit: The Tempation of Edward Cullen, a personal favorite of ours, a Twilight fanfic that satirizes Twilight and self-insert fanfiction in general under the guise of being a My Immortal parody

Blood Raining Night, a multi-crossover fanfic that comes with its own fanime, and we’re not sure if it’s a trollfic or not

and right now we’re taking a look at Dirty Laundry, the Voltron Keith/Lance (Klance) fanfic that faced controversy for being racist, ableist, and misogynistic yet is still highly regarded as one of the greatest fanfics ever by Voltron fans who clearly know what good writing is. what will our opinion on it be? is it as good as Voltron fans say? (it’s bad)

here’s an image

[leenfiend]

Trying to do more loose warmup sketches

[mintcaboodle]

hey hey hey. what do u mean anon has never read dirty laundry. u reblogged klance right before so like- i swear there was some fic with them called that that i saw like 4 years ago but i may be hallucinating- is that what you’re referring to??? the site pops up some uhh. messed up undertale fic so i guess that’s the alternative i just. i need to know .

please

oh god. anon.

I think you just need to listen to the podcast breakdown

[kerryweaverlesbian]

Allegedly. According to my cursory research. There was an alleyway in London called Holywell street in the mid 1800s which had. Allegedly. 27 pornography shops. And one Lord was so pissed off with convicting this one guy so many times (the guy was dubbed "the ogre of holywell street") that the street and the ogre sparked off the creation of The Obscenity Act. And I found a newspaper article from a year later of someone going to Holywell street and they said the Act hadn't done anything and in fact even MORE shops featured erotic art and books now bc (the article posits, author information unavailable) the law wasn't very clearly defined so people were like oh okay so if my INTENT isn't to be corrupting then it's okay? Cool!

The law was eventually clarified in a case where the appropriately named Lord Cockburn stated that all published materials (for profit or not) must be appropriate. For a man to read out to his family. Which is a wild thing to expect. But this was the case until around 1960.

[voltronrenaissance]

thinking about klance on the clock again

[nothingenoughao3]

Victor Frankenstein-Reanimator

Since whether or not a thing is a fanwork, or fannish, or fanfic has been doing the rounds lately, I thought I'd contribute my take.

This started because @andalusiapunk and I were debating the merits and demerits (mostly demerits) of classifying "Frankenstein" as fanfic. This led us to consulting different academic definitions of fanworks. I was technically the devil's advocate, but not because I believed "Frankenstein" was a fanfic--it had to do with a related point, which I'll make by asking another question.

Why isn't Lovecraft's "Herbert West-Reanimator" fanfiction?

"Reanimator" was openly labeled by Lovecraft as an homage/pastiche/parody of "Frankenstein"... terms now often used to describe fanfic. He wove references to literary works Shelley quoted/relied on... a tactic also used by fic writers to ground their works in the original canon. The cultural impact of "West" primarily lies in "Frankenstein" adaptations, for 'Victor as a total madman with a slavishly-devoted assistant who hates and fears him for reasons unclear in the text' is not even slightly justified in the original work... but that is the plot of "Reanimator". Similar to how Kirk Drift will occur in fandoms where headcanons displace the original characterizations.

So what gives? What makes "Reanimator" an original work? It can't just be "capitalism", my original answer, because "Frankenstein" was very much licensed back in its day.

The difference, I feel, is that writers used to have a sense of ownership over their words, but not their ideas.

Lovecraft didn't own the Cthulhu Mythos, and he didn't originate a lot of its ideas. Most of what we refer to as the "King in Yellow" aspects of the Mythos actually originated with Robert W. Chalmers... who also borrowed and reworked terms, such as the name Carcosa, from other writers of weird fiction. Much of what we think of as codified and settled canon in the Cthulhu Mythos also came from August Derleth's works.

IOW these weird fiction writers considered publication to be something they could profit off of, but also the moment where their own ideas became available to inspire others. It does not seem to have occurred to any of them to sue, or threaten to sue, someone else who worked the Necronomicon into their story--for that was the point, tricking readers into thinking the book was real because so many disparate authors claimed it existed. (Which, for God's sake, actually worked.)

This relates to some of the action we saw on the Holmes front in the past few years. For decades, the Doyle estate claimed (incorrectly and illegally, IMO) that they controlled the ideas behind the later parts of the Canon, and not just the words. Accordingly, you could write original fiction featuring Holmes, Watson, et al., so long as you didn't refer to or rely on those later works without permission. If you wrote something for that part of the Canon, it was fanfiction.

Recently, their hold expired. Now you can publish original works referencing the latter part of the Canon. (I'm going to get around to publishing mine, which is, funnily enough, a Sherlock Holmes vs. The King In Yellow tale.) But there was nothing meaningfully different between one year and the next--solely the perception that, legally, the estate could no longer force people to label their works as fanfiction.

The strict definition of "fanfiction" involves writing based on works that are licensed to another entity--meaning, somebody else has the publishing rights. But again, Shelley had the publishing rights to "Frankenstein", and Lovecraft had the publishing rights to "The Festival"... but it never seemed to occur to either them or the holders of their literary estates to demand that publishers quash anybody writing pastiches, parodies, or works referencing corpse-construction or the Book of the Dead.

Whether or not fanfiction is forbidden by license holders is immaterial to whether or not fanfiction exists. We see Gaiman approving of fanfic all the time, which (not to accuse him of anything untoward, because it's fine for him to do this) does have the convenient effect of nobody trying to profit off tales of Aziraphale and Crowley. Notoriously, Anne Rice used to send cease-and-desist letters to fanwriters, -artists, and archivists who produced works related to the Vampire series. This did not stop fannish works from being created. But it did create a category of "fanfiction", which could be defined as "anything related to the Vampire series which was not produced by or approved of by Anne Rice". Conveniently, Gaiman has the same definition of fanfiction for "Good Omens": anything not written by or considered canon by Gaiman is fanfic.

"Reanimator" is not fanfic because the license holders of Shelley's works didn't think of it as fannish. Because, in part, the category of "fanfiction"--despite attempts at legitimizing fics by retconning various stories as such--was an invention of, primarily, Paramount to differentiate between "legitimate" Star Trek-related writing and the "illegitimate". Which stories they were willing to take a cut of and which stories were banished to the shadow realm of zines.

What makes a work fanfic, then, is whether or not the license holders consider it to be fanfic.

Which, when you think of it, is a sobering thought.

[jeannekmele]

while it's true my buddies and I can't get through smut critique roundtable without cracking several dick jokes and laughing, I break out the newspaper roll if people get too embarrassed or dismissive. first step to normalizing and stoking respect for literary sex is to take it seriously in your own circles. it is a craft, and a difficult one. purity culture and misogyny have attached major demerit baggage to sex and romance, and flat romantic b-plots have made it all very easy to handwave and/or deride. do y'all know how hard it is to write a good sex scene?? have you ever tried?? my porn is poetry, people.

[kutputli]

Focussing on the merits and demerits of the art and whether to consume or not also distracts from the very real solidarity that all fans can demonstrate with the victims - deplatforming the abuser.

"Don't like don't read" works fine for a book you think has misogynistic themes - you can write a scathing goodreads review but you aren't going to write to the publisher.

But fans absolutely should be writing to publishers and streamers and con organisers and university employers and saying strongly that we don't want a rapist in those spaces. Because Neil Gaiman used the status of those spaces to lure and bribe the people he abused.

It's not the quality of our literary critique that will help people here, its the commitment to community accountability.

I’m so tired of posts about how the OP never liked the thing made by [creator who turned out to be an awful person], they always knew it was mediocre, and now, aha, vindication.

This isn’t just about JKR, for the record; the specific instance that set it off was about someone else, though of course I’ve seen it with HP. 

It redirects the conversation onto the quality of the creation, and the quality does not matter. 

Keep reading

[ramrodd]

What are the merits and demerits of "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand?

The essential merit is the triangulation of Dagny Taggart, Barbie and the shower scene in Starship Troopers. The essential demerit is the glorification of the domestic terrorism of John Galt.

COMMENTARY:

The singular merit of Atlas Shrugged is Dagny Taggart. She is the most fully realized female character in literature. She is a masterpiece of characterization. If Ayn Rand had any useful capacity in objective personal inventory, she would have cut the novel by a third around her and written a third novel to complete a portrait of the “sense of life” at the core of her collage of sound bites and syllogisms she assembled around the Virtue of Selfishness. Dagny Taggart is the Princess Leia hologram her narrative created in my mind. Dagny Taggart springs in Technicolor from the drab industrial environment of Pittsburgh when its rivers caught on fire.

There is an important cultural consequence of Dagny Taggart in the popular imagination of the Boomer Generation at the moment birth control became safe, cheap, effective and legal along with Barbie and actual women like Audrey Hepburn and Jackie O and Lauren Bacall and a whole range of Hollywood women. Ayn Rand didn’t understand sex until she took what amounted to a straight Twink as a lover when she was in her 40s and married. She was married, but her marriage to Frank O’Connor was a desperate strategy to remain in America by marriage. Frank is one of the people she sincerely loved, but it was a very porcelain relationship, a sort of running New Yorker cover. But she was entirely submitted to getting fucked on her living room floor on a full length mink coat by Nathaniel Branden, a psychologist who isolated Self-Esteem as a significant structure of the ego when he was in his twenties and married to his college sweat heart, who was later murdered by post-hypnotic suggesting during a telephone conversation with Ayn Rand. Rand fucked with her mind in some way Rand knew Barbara was vulnerable to strobe paralysis, that thing that happened in Discos from people becoming dazzled by the light display like a deer in headlights. Barbara apparently was dazzled by light flickering off the water of an indoor pool and she checked out, mentally, and tripped into the pool and drowned.

And Dagny Taggart was who Ayn Rand was when she was fucking Nathaniel Branden Dagny was an active California Sport Fucker and Ayn Rand wouldn’t have know what that meant until the day she died.

Now, I need to go see Barbie. The connection between Barbie and Dagny and the Cosmo Woman is inescapable. The Sex in the City was the adventures of pre-Reagan Sport Fuckers in a Joffrey Ballet/Studio 54 Tucker Carlson-free Woodstock Nation play ground.

You see, the third of the book I would cut out was when John Galt appears and she becomes her BDSM dungeon master and all the Technicolor disappears and becomes the grubby industrial black and white of the dystopian universe of Donald Trump’s business culture.

John Galt is a domestic terrorist committed to dismantling the administrative state.

Now, everything about Atlas Shrugged is fantasy. When I first started to read it in 1962, I thought it was science fiction like Frank Herbert but with the promise of a lot more sex, with Dagny Taggart the literary come-on of a sideshow bait and switch. I had read Anthem before my sister had a paperback version of the book and encouraged me to read it because it had some interesting ideas. Her idea of interesting ideas were totally elusive to me over the years, but she was a serious campus intellectual and lived that way her entire life.

I don’t think it was her. Most of Women’s Literature is lost on me. There’s a real Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus thing going on for me in terms of women’s literature, but there it is.

So, I’m not sure what the interesting ideas were for her in Atlas Shrugged, but I wasn’t hooked and decided it wasn’t ever begin to work as an adventure story like, say, Robert Heinlein. And, except for Dagny Taggart, there wasn’t enough sex explicit for my pleasure. By and large, everything sexy happens off stage, sort of like Dezi and Lucy sleeping in twin beds. I mean, i figured out John Galt was the mysterious friend of Dagny’s brother. I quit reading in 1962 when I realized that the play date between Dagny’s brother and the mysterious stranger, was supposed to be a pericope of great subtlety and artistry.

I read it completely in 1995, during a market adjustment when Clinton’s economic policy shrugged off the speculative foam lingering from Vietnam and Stagflation and we almost became the Green New Deal. If his election hadn’t been stolen by the butterfly ballots, Gore would have extended Clinton’s sallt water economics another 4 years that would have completed the paradigm shift from the Military Industrial Complex to the Green New Deal and we would have a permanent lunar colony by 2010,

And during this market flat-line, I discovered that Alan Greenspan was a disciple of Ayn Rand and I was trying to understand what he said was goin on in the markets, which I now know was the Fresh Water economics of the University of Chicago. I could tell that he realized the Fresh Water models weren’t working and was trying to find the language for what was going on.

As a consequence, I had to read Atlas Shrugged. Her collection of essays describing Objectivism didn’t connect with any dots I could discern in Greenspan’s economic modeling. They didn’t share any map sheet with each other nor with anything I found useful. Paul Krugman’s Salt Water economics in the dynamical economies of scale in his Peddling Prosperity is pretty much what I was seeing in the NYSE in 1994 after the Triple Witching in March. Because of electronic trading, there is always a certain level of “chatter” in the markets that didn’t exist before 1979. Nixon’s banking and securities policies anticipated electronic trading and created the structures that created Silicon Valley. During August of 1994, virtually all the speculative and inflationary froth lingering from the financing for the Vietnam war was flushed out of the NYSE as everyone went to the beach and let the programs keep the markets open. In addition, Clinton’s salt water economics fixed a great deal of what Reaganomics had fucked up with the Fresh Water economics of Supply Side Free Market class warfare.

But people who embrace Atlas Shrugged as the operators manual for Reaganomics don’t have any more idea how the economy actually works than Alan Greenspan did in 1994. What no one saw coming was Newt Gingrich as Speaker of the House and the transfer of the legislative processes from elected constitutional officers to Grover Norquist, who began dictating economic policy to the January 6 Republicans-in-training as MAGA service dogs.

If Dagny Taggart had exposed John Galt as a domestic terrorist seemingly determined to dismantling the administrative state but actually enthralled by the enchantment of an evil cabal of Criminal Fascists and that she and Hank Reardon embarked on a quest to free John Balt from CAW, the evil cadre causing the social collapse of Atlas Shrugged . She could have ended Atlas Shrugged as a cliff hanger, as thy are bale to co-opt John Galt’s television address that stalls the CAW insurgency from achieving the constitutional overthrow at the end of Atlas Shrugged,

And the third volume in the Sense of Life trilogy would have Dagny saving John Galt and turning the whole world to Technicolor and ending in the Pink Dream House of Barbie, the Movie, on the beach at Malibu with a naked, coed beach volley ball court out the patio in the back. The subtitle for the trilogy would be “Escape from the Parable of the Cave”..

So, the essential merit of Atlas Shrugged is Dagny Taggart.

The essential demerit is is Objectivism is total Free Market, Fres Water Economics, Commercial Fascism crap. It’s the Harvard MBA program business model that the Studio Executives are trying to shove down the throat of Fran Drescher and SAG in opposition to the superior Salt Water Quality Assurance business model of organized labor.

But that’s another story.

[klanced]

Literary demerit probably just got so many new subscribers because of you so when’s your guest appearance??

honestly i would love to be on literary demerit or even any podcast/youtube video that does a deep-dive into the voltron fandom because i have so many Thoughts About Voltron As A Phenomenon but idk if i could offer an actually interesting or informative viewpoint </3

[literarydemerit]

Episode 53 will be up Saturday night, with episode 54 planned for early September!

[kafkaoftherubble]

Aye!

I think it's hella important to also remember how what's being shown fits into the larger narrative or thematic context. Even if it's for shock value, then to what service? Are there hints of an author's endorsement of certain ideas or perversions, or are they written as something the characters are doing due to their circumstances in the story?

Some people will argue that since the author writes these circumstances beforehand, you can argue that they wanted to write these questionable scenes. I still don't think that immediately jumps to an endorsement from the author—because, again, what are these moments in service of?

I'm big on calling authors out for their bullshit and especially bullshit ideologies or ideas (ask me about any stories I hate, and you'll realize that it's mostly because I disagree with the inherent themes undergirding the stories rather than with the literary/aesthetical demerits). But I don't think immediately reacting to unsavory feelings a story incites, without engagement with the larger narratives or themes the story presents, is a foolproof argument.

I think it's valid to decry a story for making you uncomfortable, saying, "This thing makes me uncomfortable and I hate it." But I don't think one should mistake that as a legitimate, hard-hitting, strong criticism against a story. A story wasn't written just for a single individual alone. Yours is just one opinion among many. A personal opinion—with only yourself as a reference for judgment/morals/values, etc.—can only carry that far if you're hoping to participate in a discourse involving different people with diverse perspectives.

In philosophy and especially ethical discourses, one commonly comes up with rather unsavory examples—both imaginary (ie. thought experiments) and sometimes lifted from the real world—to help explore your ethical commitments and choices. These questions often invoke unpleasant feelings from participants. But they are nonetheless important and connect to a bigger theme or goal.

I say one gives far more quality criticism, thoughts, and arguments when they see things from an entire web—the cause-and-effects in the story, the larger themes, the characters' personal narratives—than when they focus on just their personal, immediate feelings and reactions toward an event with a limited scope. How well can you study an area if you only focus on a tree and not an entire forest?

With the recent CSM and JJK chapters it has definitely showed me that there seems to be a problem where people think that if a story causes negative or unsure emotions, then that is the fault of bad writing or an almost moral failing on the writer’s part.

This is not always true- a lot of the times writers use uncomfortable topics or taboo subjects to intentionally make readers uncomfortable, as a way to show just how upsetting the action that is happening truly is to the character or characters that said action is happening to. Uncomfortable or negative emotions can get us just as engrossed and interested in a story as positive ones, and if anything, if a story is stirring emotional concern to the point of being uncomfortable for a character then it shows just how much you may be connected to the story or a character! I think that’s a good thing and that being able to put yourself in a character’s shoes is a key part of media analysis.

The problem is when people seem to not be able to disconnect from that character’s POV and stop viewing said character as a part of a larger narrative, where conflict and themes and plotting does arise. And these things can be uncomfortable to read-

It’s important to be able to decipher if something makes you uncomfortable because the author wants to make you uncomfortable (because what’s happening IS uncomfortable)- or if something is making you uncomfortable because maybe the author did something that does just make you feel icky or did something you may disagree with (and you’re free to criticize or disagree with an author! I read things all the time that make my eyebrow raise because I may not like how a POC or disabled character is treated). But even then, I still keep a level head and my criticisms constructive because at the end of the day I’m not judge or executioner, just a reader lol.

[leenfiend]

i’m listening to those literary demerit episodes on dirty laundry feeling like a klance scholar rn and also shaking my fist at the fucking sky because clearly a lot of klance fic was influenced by it and god.......i wish i could live in a different timeline......we gotta do better this time soldiers. give me in character fic im on my knees begging. 

[voltronrenaissance]

thank you katie klanced for the podcast rec the d*rty l*undry dissection on literary demerit is such a throwback