Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
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User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
I've only read or watched a couple of those. And I see what you mean about them appealing to a "male romance fan" but- well, does it not strike you that there is a large overlap between the male protagonists of those stories and the generic, uninteresting, personality-less girl being mocked in that /r/romance_for_men cartoon?
I gave Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie a try for a couple of volumes, to practice my Japanese reading comprehension. (The Japanese is very simple, though it's full of idioms.) Anyway, I bailed because the male protagonist, Yuu, is so annoyingly... well, non-masculine. Unassertive, cringing, insecure, less smart, less confident, and less cool than his girlfriend... I kept wondering "What does she see in him?" But you have made me realize I was seeing it from the wrong angle, as a story appealing to women (who I guess in Japan find an unthreatening submissive softboi a turn-on?) But no, it's appealing to men- or more specifically, to boys who feel insecure and unmasculine and unable to compete in traditionally masculine ways, but want to imagine the cute, smart but devoted and affectionate girl will still fall in love with them.
Have you read Haruki Murakami?
His books are usually billed as "fantasy" or "magical realism" in the West, but they all have this theme: a rather dull guy with the personality and initiative of a bowl of oatmeal is kind of dragged into a quest he doesn't really understand, pulled along by a hot chick who's often on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl spectrum and is probably underage or barely-legal, and at some point she will strip off all her clothes and do him for no apparent reason other than that he has a penis. Then a couple of other women including the librarian and the MILF and the MILF-librarian will do the same.
(I am only slightly exaggerating- Murakami bingo is really a thing.)
And now I have realized that you could kind of consider his books "romances for men." An ordinary guy goes on a quest without having to actually do much, and gets laid like pipe without having to put in any real effort or value.
Unironically I recommend him because his stories are surreal and weird and often funny, and really convey a different kind of mindset, with lots of sensory impressions Western writers don't usually dwell on, but the male protagonists always annoy me. And this is perhaps why "romance for men" doesn't appeal to me much. I am hardly a "manly man" who wants to go out and conquer kingdoms, but I guess I am a traditional enough man that I want to see men working, striving, struggling, and earning their rewards. A guy who offers no apparent distinction but has women falling on his dick anyway is not a fantasy for me, it's a mystery.
That said:
I don't see why you couldn't write romance books aimed at men that were similar.
Indeed, it does make me wonder if there is an untapped market there in the West. Maybe someone will eventually tap it. I suspect, however, that cultural differences would make it a hard sell. Boys would have to overcome the stigma of reading "romance" and, let's be honest, a story like I have described, where an ordinary boy wins the love and affection of a hot girl out of his league, would be scorned and mocked across social media and booktock, and become loser-coded.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Well, what would a male romance look like to you? For most men, I'm going to guess it would be something like the classic "Hero goes on a quest and gets the girl in the end." Do men want more "romantic" content (scenes with the girl being cute and sexy and falling in love with him, the two of them having intimate encounters and emotional conversations) or do they want action with the girl naturally falling in love with him because he's so cool and brave?
Basically I think what male-oriented romance exists would mostly be found under another label.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
I haven't stepped into a Barnes & Noble in years, but I understand that it's mostly walls of romantasy and Brandon Sanderson nowadays. But you know, it's a chicken-and-egg problem that has more to do with the ruthless pursuit of quarterly earnings than it does with some malicious cabal of white female NYC publishers refusing to greenlight anything a man will read. What genre has always outsold every other genre? Romance. Who buys the most books nowadays? Young women. Hence Twilight, 50 Shades, Sarah Maas, and so on.
I'm skeptical that there is some breakout male author who could bring in male readers the way these authors bring in female readers (the last truly cross-gender mass phenomenon was probably Harry Potter and even that was a majority female fanbase). I'm very skeptical that publishing would refuse to print it if they actually smelled that kind of money.
The fact is that the publishing industry has changed dramatically in a lot of ways since the golden age of SF. Not just in tilting more strongly towards female preferences, but tilting strongly towards "Only books that are bestsellers and will bump our QEs are worth supporting." (See this phenomenon also with movies, which have turned into a different kind of formulaic slop, but not exclusively targeted at women.) The death of the midlist is I assume common knowledge by now. It used to be that agents and publishers would cultivate a relationship with an author whom they expected to produce books over the course of a career, and if every book wasn't a best-seller, as long as each one paid out, it was good enough, because the cumulative earnings were enough to sustain the author (and his agent, and his publisher). Nowadays, not so much. Publishers don't want a long tail from middling sellers, they want bestsellers and are only willing to invest in a book that has a chance of becoming that, and they are only willing to invest so much in an author who doesn't break out.
Hence Brandon Sanderson (whose fanbase is large male) doing fine, and Stephen King and Haruki Murakami and a few others, but only if they are huge sellers with already established names. Meanwhile, while even the John Scalzis and Larry Correias are making a decent living, you will not usually find them occupying premium real estate in a bookstore.
I am not denying there is also a "publishing sneers at white males" problem, but it's not happening because publishing is unwilling to pick up money that's lying on the table.
Your links, are, unsurprisingly, also rather distorted views of reality.
The Sad Puppies/Rabid Puppies affair was a reaction against leftism and SJWs in science fiction. Female-coded, to be sure, but their complaint at the time was not "Nobody is writing books men want to read" but "Nobody is writing books we want to read." Seriously half of it was Vox Day's abiding hatred for John Scalzi.
That /r/romance_for_men cartoon: well, I am not really a romance reader, but I've read a few (so I could at least say I had some understanding of the genre) and while I realize meme-cartoons aren't meant to accurately reflect reality with high fidelity, the Alpha Male Wolf Pack Mafia Boss Billionaire is basically a gross exaggeration of the most formulaic and traditional romance story ever, the one that has been the stock romance story for as long as there have been romance stories: women want to read about an impressive and desirable man falling in love with a woman who is plain and generic enough that any (female) reader can imagine herself in her place. It's no more complicated than that. No, that doesn't leave much for the male reader, but I will say that if you want cute love stories with actual functional couples, there seem to be quite a few that do not feature Chad Thundercock or BDSM.
Yeah, it's unfortunate that there isn't much real "romance for men" outside of indie publishing, but again, that's because men don't buy romance.
As for your beloved idol Dread Jim, I almost literally laughed out loud that he thinks John fucking Ringo is not right-wing enough. Apparently if you don't have women literally in chains... oh wait.
Well, there's always Tom Kratman.
As for this:
In “Lucifer’s Hammer”, written in 1978 by Niven and Pournelle, civilization collapses, there is famine, and people start eating people The cannibals are not especially black, even though realistically, it is likely that the cannibals would be disproportionately black. The only guy who suggest that there might be a correlation between cannibalism and blackness is the horribly prejudiced ignorant hick.
In Lucifer’s hammer the authors are careful to make the proportion of blacks among the cannibal army exactly and precisely the same proportion as blacks are a percentage of the US population, nonetheless today the book is deemed utterly outrageous and horribly reactionary for having any black cannibals whatsoever. Observe that in today’s collapse of civilization books, all cannibals are white.
It's been a while since I read Lucifer's Hammer, but he's really glossing over how much the theme of that book was "When civilization collapses, white people become farmers and engineers and rebuild, and black people turn into rampaging cannibals." Yeah, the cannibal army wasn't exclusively black (and ironically enough, it was led by a messianic white man...) but I am pretty sure it wasn't 13%. Basically the majority of blacks in southern California joined the cannibal army, and any white people who didn't want to get et joined them. I don't think Niven and Pournelle were intentionally being "racist" (they threw a few black characters in with the good guys as well) but like, I am Niven fan but yeah, he knew what he was writing. (Including the motorcycle gang who takes a girl scout troop as sex slaves, but fortunately a boy scout troop rescues them and now every boy scout has his very own girl scout clinging to his feet, Frazetta-style.) You're taking at face value rants from a guy who thinks a book is too leftist if there is even a hint of female agency.
So yeah, where we are now is indie publishing for anything outside the mainstream or a very few Sanderson- and King-level big names. And that's because publishing (at least the industry as it is today) is dying a slow death.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Values are fundamental. To a first approximation, no one actually wants values diversity, whether in their fiction or anywhere else. Good things are good, bad things are bad, more bad things are not good.
I think this is more true today than it used to be. Zoomers seem incapable of enjoying a story in which a character has values different from theirs, and furthermore they are prone to assuming that the author is endorsing those values. (This is a generalization and I hope I'm not right, but it's what I gather from most young book reviewers nowadays.)
You say you enjoy the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Pentateuch because of "values-consonance" but how similar are those characters' values to yours, really? Sure, they fit into the general Western monotheistic tradition, but Bronze Age heroes really weren't much like you and IMO the gap between your values and theirs is probably greater than the gap between your values and the average Blue Triber's.
Conversely, do you not enjoy the Iliad and the Odyssey? The Tale of Genji? The Ramayana? Even though they express very different values? Or, if you want to get Jungian, because they express archetypes that aren't so very different after all.
To the original point, though, yes, it's not just modern writers who cannot conceive of characters (especially heroes) with values different from their own. The Victorians were definitely guilty of this. Probably Homer was guilty of this. But here and there we do so some writers who stand out for trying.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
Re #1: I have tried Russian and Chinese litrpg and Wuxia, and honestly, maybe you don't like reading about people inappropriately spouting progressive values, but a world of power-hungry psychopaths that read like if KulakRevolt were given super-powers is even more depressing to me. What is there to root for? Why would I want any of these people to win?
Re #2: Agreed that the John Carter movie was good and tragically mismarketed, but (seconding @WhiningCoil) the books are fun but if you've read the first couple you've read them all, and this is actually true of a lot of the old pulp stuff (like Tarzan, Conan, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Lensmen, etc.) They all follow a very predictable formula and the writing is often not up to modern standards either. Even some of the more modern classics (Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Larry Niven) don't really stand the test of time, IMO.
Re #3: I see ranting all over the Internet that "No one is writing books (men) want to read" when there is in fact an entire ecosystem of indie-published authors doing just that. Now a lot of what they write is awful, and a lot of it is marketed with not much more of a hook than "This will really trigger blue-haired progs!" but apply Sturgeon's Law and you can still find gold amidst the dross. (Devon Eriksen and Travis J Corcoran come to mind- also plenty of right-wing trad published authors like Larry Correia and John C. Wright).
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
I think you underestimate the degree to which many of these communities (e.g., trans, disabled, "neurodivergent," etc.) simultaneously regard themselves as oppressed and in need of unlimited support and validation, and totally valid and not in need of "fixing" and any suggestion that magic or sufficiently advanced technology would basically "cure" them is equivalent to suggesting genocide.
I am not exaggerating; I've seen disabled activists, for example, when it's pointed out that medical technology that could grow new limbs and organs would eliminate blindness, deafness, paralysis, and many other defects, respond that this is ableist and instead, such an advanced society should reconfigure public infrastructure to be more accommodating to "differently abled" people.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
As a known steadfast supporter of my feminist idol, JK Rowling... it really doesn't bear thinking about too deeply. I am actually an unironic fan of the Harry Potter series, but it's absolutely not the sort of world in which the author spent a lot of time doing the kind of "worldbuilding" that engages with the real world and considers how magic would actually affect it. The Potterverse is less plausible than any superhero universe (which is saying something). It's meant to be English boarding school drama, with wizards. Rowling invented spells because they were clever, funny, or solved a temporary plot hole, and then forgot about them. "But why don't wizards just...?" is a question that will drive you crazy if you let yourself ask it once.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1d ago
I've tried a few LitRPGs and web novels and find very few of them readable. Most are badly written fanfiction-tier slop that could (and soon will) be pretty easily generated by AI.
Your genre complaints are, IMO, applicable to the majority of SF&F today in general.
That said, "Hefting his mace, he swung at her as hard as he could" is not great writing (and noticeable when the author uses that construct over and over, which unfortunately I have seen even some better writers do) but it's neither switching tenses nor ungrammatical. It's a present participial.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2d ago
That's a very absolute statement for which it's very easy to come up with counterexamples.
This is pretty low effort but just below the threshold at which I feel a need to drop a mod warning (people are allowed to make bad arguments and absolute statements that don't stand up to any kind of scrutiny). However, given your track record, I would suggest putting more effort into your arguments if you wish to actually make an argument.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4d ago
Man, do you just bookmark every woman-hating rant on the Internet? I deeply regret learning today what "3DPD" means.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
6d ago
Do not use edits to argue with a banning. You may send us modmail if you want to plead your case, but normally post-ban edits like this are grounds for a permaban.
I concur with @FCfromSSC that regardless of how you "intended" it, this post was clearly a direct attack on @thejdizzler, and it did not strike me (nor him, apparently) as good-natured at all.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
To be honest, I don't actually recall any instances in which someone we knew to be a previously permabanned member came back, was identified, but was behaving well enough that the mods decided not to ban the new account for ban evasion. Possibly it happened before I became a mod, but as far as I know, it's kind of like the case of "We'd consider it if a permabanned member petitioned us to unban him": to date an entirely theoretical policy.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
His grievance was that we talk about things instead of planning to murder our enemies and burn it all to the ground.
He got a timeout for his screed, but he's not banned currently.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
He hates Christianity because Christianity places importance on concepts like "mercy" and "forgiveness" and not hating, which he despises. I don't think it's much more complicated than that, and certainly not theologically deeper.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
You know, your record is pretty awful too, and for exactly this kind of low-quality growling and contempt. The discussion was "Who was Hlynka and why was he banned?" not "Take free shots at Hlynka because he's banned."
No. In order for the mission to be fucking accomplished, you have to accomplish the fucking mission, which is to reform sufficiently to go unnoticed.
TequilaMockingbird had already drawn attention repeatedly for being antagonistic and obnoxious. If Hylnka actually managed to create a new account, behave himself for a year, not get repeatedly modded for being his usual jerk-ass self, and then say "By the way, it's me," well... we (mods) would probably discuss it.
Same for any past troublemaker who actually comes back and shows better behavior. It is not (as @The_Nybbler keeps dishonestly claiming) that we want to see someone "hat in hand" and begging, but that we'd want to see evidence of change.
You can't create a new account, be your old antagonistic self, and then make a pikachu face when you're banned as soon as we realize who you are.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
This would be a request for @ZorbaTHut, but while it's annoying when people go on deletion sprees (and we have banned people for it), I don't think we'd want to prohibit deleting a post you had second thoughts about.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
Darwin was never actually banned here. When we moved off of reddit, everyone started with a clean slate. Darwin and Hlynka and everyone else had a blanket amnesty.
While we will sometimes let someone we suspect of being an alt stick around if they are behaving themselves, we're still going to whack ban evaders when it's obvious, because we don't want people to think they can just spin up a new account and carry on like before. (Some people do this anyway, but they at least suffer the minor inconvenience of having to keep creating new accounts and being unable to establish any kind of reputation or history.)
Also worth noting that Hylnka did not exactly come back "reformed"; @TequilaMockingbird was temp-banned three times and warned many times even before I clocked him (and this was not his first, second, or third alt).
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7d ago
If your understanding of "permaban" is "The mods are never allowed to consider rescinding the ban" then sure, mentally substitute "permanent except in exceptional and so far purely hypothetical cases" if that satisfies your need for literalism.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8d ago
I dismantled this claim before but you're going to keep repeating it, I guess. And I will keep pointing it out every time you insist on being dishonest.
You understand what words mean.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8d ago
No, it is not. It's not a formal rule. And no, we're not going to rewrite and rename things just to satisfy autists.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8d ago
Really? I've defended people I despise against attacks I consider unfair. As for five adults on the planet enjoying her books... what?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8d ago
I'm going to pretend you're not being a bad faith ankle-biter here.
The only way back is by promising you will follow the rules and not continue breaking the rules. Under those circumstances, we will consider unbanning someone.
No one should consider this unreasonable.
The alternative is no forgiveness ever.
You can disingenuously characterize this as "Begging can save you from banning" but you know that is not remotely the same thing.
We've never rescinded a ban because someone begged (and once or twice someone has tried).
Also worth noting that as far as I can recall, no one has ever actually petitioned us to be unbanned other than the ones who pleaded for leniency as soon as it happened (and then flew into a rage when we said no). Quite a few people have complained that their banning was unwarranted, and a few times someone else has petitioned on behalf of a banned member, but this scenario in which someone genuinely asks us for amnesty (whether you call it "begging" or not) is to date entirely hypothetical.
IMO, the appeal of paranormal romance is two things: (1) A man who is a werewolf or a vampire or something is just that much more Alpha (and allows the whole "taming the beast" theme to become much more explicit- I mean, if your love can tame a literal werewolf how desirable must you be?). (2) A lot of women (especially on the nerdy spectrum) don't want to admit they are the kind of Basic Bitch who likes romance novels, but if you dress it up with fantasy elements, then they are "fantasy" fans.
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