#one man's florid ultraviolet nonsense is another man's delicious trash pile

[glitterdustcyclops]

i think those posts pointing out the unrealistic nature of the common rhetorical devices in modern fiction are hopelessly cinemasins pilled losers but also are reacting to a somewhat valid critique and doing the thing the internet does where it sands off all nuance in favor of easy dunkings

phrased like "his eyes darkened" or "he smelled of mountain air and sin" certainly could be annoying if they are overused or used incorrectly or not being used to actually communicate something valuable to the work and its themes. there *is* a lot of amateur prose out there (romantasy i'm looking directly at you) where authors have learned that "These are the things Good, Deep, Literary Writers use, so i'm going to use them too" without thinking about why those writers might be using such devices, and what effect they might be trying to achieve apart from "Sounds Deep" and that can absolutely lead to some buckwild incomprehensible tedious purple nonsense

but just because a tool can be used to annoying effect by amateurs does not mean the tool itself is inherently flawed, and the important point is not to wildly overcorrect into this idea that all prose must be logically structured and indefensible, written like a twitter thread being read by the most bad faith audience imaginable, because that writing style fucking sucks