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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34493 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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"Depth" is just what people call it when they don't understand bad writing. "Character" and arguing over why your wine tastes like cat piss is likewise an exercise for the middlebrow strivers trying to look sophisticated. Most (not all) of both literature and wine (and whiskey, and film, and painting etc.) is bullshit marketing and nobody really enjoys most of the work. They claim enjoyment to gain supposed status, and entrance to those "elitist" groups of middlebrow, midwit, middle class schlubs aping a cartoon of old-timey rich people.

On the contrary, "depth" is a quality of good writing. What happens is that bad writers try to emulate the the motions of good writers without understanding the mechanisms behind them and thus mistake obscurantism and "shocking plot twists" for depth.

See the old copy/pasta about Sherlock vs Anton Chigurh

Why is Sherlock so bad? Because it's a show about smart people written by idiots.

Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men is a smartly written character. When Chigurh kills three people in a hotel room he books the room next door so he can examine it, finding which walls he can shoot through, where the light switch is, what sort of cover is available, etc... This is a smart thing to do because Chigurh is a smart person who is written by another smart person who understands how smart people think.

Were Sherlock Holmes to kill a hotel room full of three people. He'd enter using a secret door in the hotel that he read about in a book ten years ago. He'd throw peanuts at one guy causing him to go into anaphylactic shock, as he had deduced from a dartboard with a picture of George Washington carver on it pinned to the wall that the man had a severe peanut allergy. The second man would then kill himself just according to plan as Sherlock had earlier deduced that him and the first man were homosexual lovers who couldn't live without each other due to a faint scent of penis on each man's breath and a slight dilation of their pupils whenever they looked at each other. As for the third man, why Sherlock doesn't kill him at all. The third man removes his sunglasses and wig to reveal he actually WAS Sherlock the entire time. But Sherlock just entered through the Secret door and killed two people, how can there be two of him? The first Sherlock removes his mask to reveal he's actually Moriarty attempting to frame Sherlock for two murders. Sherlock however anticipated this, the two dead men stand up, they're undercover police officers, it was all a ruse. "But Sherlock!" Moriarty cries "That police officer blew his own head off, look at it, there's skull fragments on the wall, how is he fine now? How did you fake that?". Sherlock just winks at the screen, the end.

This is retarded because Sherlock is a smart person written by a stupid person to whom smart people are indistinguishable from wizards.

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