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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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I have two. I'm not a good writer, and a lot of my better writing I'm not really comfortable linking under this name, but I think they say something about what could be useful to good writers.

This is the all-audiences one: reviewing the review of the re-view. Not every recommendation here is good or even correct (Grok either can't or doesn't notice that I mention that the "Matryoshka doll" story is explicitly fictional and couldn't be known to be true in Mahaffey's version, and probably doesn't have access to the original book; it also handwaves errors in fatality numbers in an aircraft crash are actually pretty damning), but it does catch errors I didn't notice after multiple rereads ("opposites side") and that I definitely mirrored Mahaffey's approach far more heavily than I'd intended or even recognized, along with a few good style recommendations.

((Uh, and the recommendations about asides, nested parentheticals, and being a pedantic hater might be correct, but not exactly useful given that they're kinda my intentional tone.))

[cw: nsfw text and themes below, though nothing worse than you could put on YouTube]

My other example is from a bi furry piece, albeit an except stripped of the actual bedroom activities. So that may make it unusable for examination. If not...

This isn't perfect. There's a good portion of it that's either blowing smoke up my skirt ('cheeky'), or only finding corrections that are trivial (duplicated words, comma errors) that I or a beta reader would probably have caught on a re-read, or that are amadan's extremely generic your first how to write advice (slow pacing). Some of the tone emphasis between flirty and platonic is arguable or even just, imo, plain wrong, as is one of the comma errors where it recommends a 'fix' that's already in the original text. Others are pretty clear good advice, such as on rising tension and characterization, but probably an artifact of my limited experience as a writer and .

(and, tbf, that this is a small excerpt).

By contrast, the problems with the wristband themes would be very hard to figure out with a beta reader: they're a moderately common convention in bi furry stuff, such that almost anyone who'd want to beta read would be so familiar with it as to take it as a given, but they're not so common that I should have assumed every reader or even every experienced reader would have gotten it.

But this is a subgenre-of-a-subgenre-of-a-subgenre piece. I could believe that grok has enough (mmf) furry smut in its input to avoid being absolutely one-shot! There's not really enough orientation play involving multiple male characters, furry or otherwise, for me to think the stochaistic parrots complaint applies, here. And this particular version of that subgenre focus is defined in no small part by a logical inconsistency. Even in the long-form, grok could 'recognize' it was being 'confused' that the character's self-identifications didn't match up with their behaviors, even if it came up with the 'wrong' response; that's about as good an evidence that you'd need to clarify what's going on as available from human reviewers.

and this is Grok's two-generation-old model.