GBRK
1mo ago
Whoah, that's sounding awfully like an argument for... representation?
It unironically and unabashedly is (though unfortunately I don't think your downvoters recognized that.) Being represented in works of media is an important factor in making groups of people interested in said media, especially when the people in those groups do have some deep identification with the group identity. Wokism misunderstands representation as meaning that every group (excluding straight white cis and/or males) should be represented in every work, and that's a critical error. Similarly, there's also a lot of ignorance about what's actually being represented, and how important different kinds of representation are to different groups, but the idea isn't totally wrong at its core.
GBRK
1mo ago
Before we agree to disagree... can we actually agree on what we're disagreeing on? Do you deny any of the following statements:
- Most books sell most of their copies closer to their debut than 6 months, 1, 5, 10, 20 years out
- -> This rule applies even to megahits
- Even books that remain durably popular tend to become less popular over time
?
These are the statements that I derive my assertions about popularity being at least linked to (though not wholly determined by) currency.
GBRK
1mo ago
He has a much stronger factual basis than you realize. You see it a lot more in music where older things are more popular than current things. Also very true with movie stars where it feels like we haven’t had a new movie star in 20 years. There are areas in the arts where we basically decided to freeze in time.
I think our respective preferences for media and novelty are just going to make it impossible for us to see eye-to-eye here. I mostly watch new movies, and while I almost never delete new songs from my spotify consistently 90% of the stuff I add was released in the past 5-10 years. (It helps that I have an affinity for screechy electronica created by trans autist furries born post-2005.) I can't categorically deny that men have a preference for older media, and I can't categorically deny that that has zero impact on buying patterns and therefore the propensity of publishers to target men... but the fact that you are asserting this via personal anecdotes instead of providing me proof via data makes me suspect that this effect, if it exists, is small and hard to measure... and consequently strongly dominated by the effect I have proposed, which I can back with independently-replicated statistical results. (Someone else in this thread wrote a script to filter profiles and feed them to their ai for judgement and binning on gender.)
@hydroacetalene this is also a response to your comment here https://www.themotte.org/post/3884/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/470522?context=8#context
GBRK
1mo ago
Yet another banger sci-fi/horror idea from one of the GOATs, that we will unfortunately never see because she understands her target demographic.
GBRK
1mo ago
lmaooo
thanks for the rec mate. It warms my heart to know a former ponyfic made probably on the order of ~$1000. I think it probably suffers from bird-people being insufficiently kawaii tho, the author should have gone for shortstack goblins or dogbolds or something.
GBRK
1mo ago
I would see the difference-- if it was actually something visible in my own life that I could independently verify. Without denying your own experience, it seems to me that there's always some other anecdote either of us can pull out to make this argument moot.
GBRK
1mo ago
but, if you compare mid-century books to what you're going to find on display in your local library, put there by the nice spherical woman with her degree in Library Science, I think I know which one will suit a young man better.
Yes, this is kind of my point. Meanwhile, young women have a endless quantity of "feminist retellings" that not only manage to give them a solid chunk of the timeless core of the old books, but also infuse them with all the new junk-candy ideologies.
GBRK
1mo ago
An obsessive, devoted woman who's too neurodivergent to love another man isn't all that crazy of a love interest. Plus, "tall, hairy, curvy" are neither individually nor jointly particularly crazy as fetishes. Obviously there's an element of exaggeration in there too-- a book has to tell you "EIGHT FOOT WOMAN WITH BICEPS LIKE BOULDERS" to inspire a feeling that even approaches what you would experience in real life if a girl a little taller than you gave you a bear hug.
GBRK
1mo ago
But books being old has never precluded interest in them before, even from kids.
This is factually wrong and you know it. You can defend the bailey that people will not lose literally all interest in a novel simply because it is old, but cannot defend the motte that a novel's age has literally no relationship to the amount of interest people have in it. Yes, kids aren't going to be totally disinterested in old books-- but in proportion to the age and irrelevance of the novels they find on shelves, they will less interested.
GBRK
1mo ago
I am wondering if we are even having the same conversation. Are my messages getting through? Is there some corruption in the database?
There's definitely some sort of miscommunication going on because you remain convinced that I'm trying to prove that reading the classics is totally ineffective at getting people to read, when in point of fact I'm merely saying that while that may work for some people, the fact that it hasn't worked for everyone suggests that we should try and adapt a different tactic.
If you are already not a child, or not a kindergartner, there is no point in starting with children's literature to cultivate an
I literally never suggested that? I suggested people read slop. Meaning-- I suggested that people prioritize finding books that are enjoyable to read even though they lack serious literary quality. That doesn't mean specifically children's literature. There's slop for all ages of people.
GBRK
1mo ago
Oh, I see-- you did things slightly differently from me, then. I was asking it to classify the relative proportions of each profile dedicated toward genres and concepts that were more likely to appeal to men or women, as a proxy for the relative preference of the agent/editor for each kind of book.
GBRK
1mo ago
Why are you making a moral argument instead of addressing my mechanical one? I'm not saying that reading old books is bad or worthless, I'm saying it's going to be much harder to get kids and men to read good books without first instilling a love of reading, which is very likely to take bad-but-entertaining books. I absolutely loved Eragon as a kindergartener. Was it the absolute peak of literary achievement? Absolutely not. But it hadn't been for books like Eragon, I never would have been interested in reading books like the Dragonriders of Pern, or from there Foundation and I, Robot, or from there Anathem and Void*Star.
GBRK
1mo ago
on an individual level there's plenty of avenues for men to read and write literature if they so desire,
For men who already have an established and voracious love of reading, maybe. For young boys, I think, not so much.
and on a societal level would we really be better off if the romantasy equivalent (Dungeon Crawler Carl?) was getting marketed aggressively to men?
When reading books is causative of reading proficiency is causative of educational and professional attainment, absolutely.
GBRK
1mo ago
Me, my brothers, my brazilian cousins (who live in brazil) and my brazilian cousins (who live in abu dhabi) all independently discovered litrpg webtoons, fanfiction, and webfiction xianxia. The monoculture still absolutely exists, it just cuts along personality rather than geography.
GBRK
1mo ago
That argument doesn't really make much sense to me, considering that Hugo and Shelley are considered classics of literature that many people (young or otherwise) enjoy to this day.
Given the ever-dropping number of young and old readers, I would say that this isn't the argument you think it is. "Everyone I know who saw the supergirl movie is woke!" "Everyone I know who likes books is fine with reading old ones?"
Well, who are you catering too?
GBRK
1mo ago
This is basically baiting angry comments on Reddit. You realize that using the word "DEI" will essentially label you as a chud and render the rest of your post irrelevant even if it was interesting beforehand?
I'm pretty sure most everyone in the thread pegged me as a chud based on the title alone so I'm not hugely concerned. (And to be perfectly honest I was perfectly happy to stir the shit. I much prefer 0-upvotes-109-comments to 120-upvotes-10-comments.)
GBRK
1mo ago
To be perfectly honest I am actually extremely averse to most wish-fulfillment narratives on a personal level-- this is a case of me very much not practicing what I preach.
GBRK
1mo ago
Weeds are always the first plants to colonize barren ground, and in their wake less hardy plants flourish. Thus as it is with gooners and media.
But no seriously, very few authors are going to invest years of work to stake their mangum opus in an unproven genre-- and even fewer agents, editors, and publishes will support them. The modern flood of romantasy wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the endless twilight and harry potter smut fics. Monsterfucking is a necessary step on the tech tree.
Well, it's not exactly appreciated here either. If I wanted to hear Claude's "unbiased" analysis, I would direct my browser to claude.ai instead of themotte.org.
I would like to point out that, to this point, no one has actually contradicted me on the fact that the applicable MSWL profiles were more oriented towards attracting books that are interesting to women than men. Maybe "appreciated" was too strong a point, but it definitely made my point for me.
Isn't this just a genderswapped version of the SJW complaints about representation from a decade ago?
Yes, and frankly the SJWs were basically right. Where they failed was that assuming every story could fit an unlimited amount of representation without pissing off previous fans.
Men can always write their own stories that suit their own proclivities if it means that much to them.
And they do, but without the infrastructure provided by publishing houses those stories remain at a poor state of editing and advertising that keeps them out of the hands of what might have been the next generation of readers and writers.
There's nothing intrinsically ennobling or salutary about the novel
why don't they deserve a turn at being catered to for a while?
In point of fact, reading purely textual material for fun is highly associated with the development of greater reasoning skills, more educational attainment, and as a consequence greater success later in life. When we already have structual inequalities in favor of female attainment among Gen Z and Gen Alpha, that means in effect encouraging an explicitly matriarchal and female-dominated society. Is that your position?
and a backlog of decades worth of Western and Japanese material that could fill multiple lifetimes
That exact statement would still be true if we instantly deleted every book written in the last two hundred years, but do you still think your reading habits would remain totally unchanged?
GBRK
1mo ago
No this is a terrible idea and will make your son retarded or, worse, end with him poasting here. Thankfully, there is a simple solution: read old books. Start him on Hardy Boys and Biggles, get him to John Buchan and James Bond.
Every time I see this variety of argument, I think it's notable that people still point to fairly contemporary novels instead of, say, The Cantebury Tales and the Epic of Beowulf. Despite explicitly calling for reaching backwards in time, your recommendations are still influence by a massive recency bias. Without even realizing it, you argue for reading novels that had currency and applicability to the era of your life that you read them in, and yet are completely out of touch about how changes to culture, technology, and in general the state of the world make those novels more and more irrelevant to the experience of children growing up now.
GBRK
1mo ago
I've noticed, meanwhile, that girls are more interested period novels and traditional styles of medicine and mythology (ref: astrology.) To be frank, I don't think we're going to get anywhere talking about which gender likes old stuff more. I can display numerical inequalities at every level of the publishing industry in favor of women, and have-- I think-- compelling a priori reasons to believe that inequality should cause a disparity in reading levels. I don't think the "likes old stuff" position has any argument that isn't fully generalizeable to, "then why don't publishers just release more new things that harken back to the old stuff?" Which in turn points back to the gender inequality issue.
GBRK
1mo ago
Your argument is essentially that since you saw a panda in a zoo, pandas must not actually be endangered. "Boy books exist" does not disprove "there are fewer boy books." In particular, the paucity of male editors, agents, bookstore owners, and librarians mean that even the boy books that do get selected tend to be selected for acquisition or display get selected by people with a less discerning taste for what makes books interesting to boys. It's like the difference between the kind of comic book a grandma would buy for a little boy as opposed to the kind of comic book that little boy would buy for himself. Brainrot, poor attention spans, and tiktok thirst traps also afflict girls-- but the relatively higher quantity and quality of books available to them make them more likely to read anyway.
GBRK
1mo ago
As written, your response implies that you disagree with the position that "old books aren't necessarily unreadable"-- meaning, you think old books are unreadable. Responding against what you actually mean to say-- that "old books are interesting"-- I would counter, "nuh uh." Well not actually, but c'mon-- are you totally incapable of seeing how a person might enjoy recency and currency in the media they consume, and thereby prefer to look for classes of media where they can find it?
While this is tautologically true and I'm not trying to deny that, my argument is that even if you have a definition of "slop" that makes it instrumentally incapable of holding intrinsic value, many people will still find it instrumentally worth reading because any sort of reading is going to practice the reading comprehension skills that not only directly lead to more educational/professional attainment but also make reading genuinely good books more accessible and therefore more likely to influence them. There's a reason kids start with Dick and Jane before Pride and Prejudice, and in that same vein I think trying to fling The Brothers Karamazov directly at avowed nonreaders is going to work less well than easing them through Big Titty Slave Elf World War.
Virtually every american schoolchild gets dragged through a school curriculum that involves exposing them to at least some of the classics. Far fewer get put through a curriculum that deliberately tries to pair them with non-edifying but highly entertaining nonsense. I think we should at least try things my way before declaring it impossible.
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