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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1427 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 15, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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A few things which irritate me about the LitRPG genre and web fiction in general. You may picture me as comic book guy for purposes of this rant.

  1. Switching tense within sentences. This is rampant and incredibly-obnoxious once one notices. "Hefting his mace, he swung at her as hard as he could." I don't know how this got to be such an entrenched institution but to me it occurs as about on par with having "Like" at the start of every sentence. Is the book still readable? Yes. Does my eye twitch a little every single time? Also yes.
  2. "Whelp I don't immediately understand what's going on so let's just not talk about it at all; let's not even try to figure it out until later in the plot." No use thinking about it now!
  3. Reflexive denigration of 'religion' even in contexts where this is obviously and absurdly inappropriate. "Oh are there literal gods walking the world, enacting their wills and communicating with humans? Well I want nothing to do with that because religion is dumb and stupid and icky and only for low-status people."
  4. "No don't bow to me or call me 'sir'; I don't go in for things like that." This one is everywhere and I find it especially puerile. Hierarchy is crucial in human organizations and we developed the systems we did for a reason. Particularly outside the modern context, public displays of respect and deference are both necessary and for the good of all. People need structure and boundaries to function. Refusing to take on the mantle and respect of authority, if that is your calling, does not serve anyone. It just confuses and scares them.
  5. Related to the above, modern progressive attitudes everywhere. Of course men and women are exactly the same. Of course everyone is having casual, consequence-free sex. Of course anyone who finds meaning in faith is secretly cynically corrupt or else a psycho child molester.

I could go on but I feel better getting at least this much off my chest.

Regarding 3/4/5, there has to be a name for this trope. No matter how alien or unusual the scifi or fantasy setting, somehow the main character is a Perfectly Modern Progressive with all the Correct Opinions on race/sex/religion/whatever, all the good guys share those opinions, and all the bad guys oppose them. It's not quite A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court but along those lines.

Present-mindedness. It’s annoying. It’s like we cannot wrap our heads around the idea that people exist or even could exist that think in ways that we disagree with. I like the Mist Crown series by Sarah Maas, but its so annoying to read a medieval peasant acting like a modern, feminist, atheistic modern American as though the author literally couldn’t conceive of a premodern woman in a premodern world.

It’s like we cannot wrap our heads around the idea that people exist or even could exist that think in ways that we disagree with.

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.

People like reading about things far away in time or distance because they crave novelty, but they want some recognizable values-coherence to bridge the gap because novelty is not terminal, but values are. Victorians write poems about Brave Horatius at the gate and I enjoy the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Pentateuch for the same reason: because all these deliver a perception of values-consonance across vast gulfs of time and space; we have our cake and eat it too.

The elements you highlight are there because the people generating them consider them terminal, and so their fiction cannot do without them.

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.

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.)

One of the other commenters here recommended the book Middlegame some years back, and I bought it and read it. I was disappointed and edified in roughly equal measure; the concept and writing and worldbuilding seemed quite excellent, but the villain was a naked ideological caricature to a degree that it deflated much of the climax for me, to a degree that the experience was itself likely worth the price of admission. The author was writing a wild fantasy, but they very clearly wanted core elements of both the heroes and the villains to be intimately familiar to both themselves and their audience, and so they wrote what I presume to be their ideological worldview straight in. Not sharing that worldview, the dissonance was sufficient to shake the whole narrative apart for me. Then again, maybe it's no worse than confirmed atheists experience reading Narnia.

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?

I may be deceived, but my assessment is "pretty close". See various discussions of the Cardinal virtues versus the theological virtues; we Christians hold the latter to take precedence, but prize the former as close runners-up, indispensable, intertwined and of extreme importance. With regards to the Iliad, if you haven't seen it and don't mind video, this this seems a good summary of the consonance. for those who prefer text, the real kicker:

Priam is an old man, and one night he with a colleague get into a wagon, puts some ransom in the wagon and quietly goes out to the enemy camp. He takes this tremendous risk, going out to the enemy's camp and finds Achilles' hut, and he enters it, kneels at his feet, and kisses the hands that murdered his son. He says, "I a man old man, and I had fifty sons once, but most are dead now, many by your hand... and I had the greatest of sons. I had Hector, who was magnificent, and you killed him. Please, may I just bury him? Please, can you just give me this one thing? Give me my son's body, so that I can take him back and bury him."

And Achilles is absolutely stunned; he marvels at him, confused at first: "who- what... You've walked into my tent. Do you know who I am? Do you know how much danger you're in?" And then: "oh he's at my feet, he's kissing my hands? What?" And he marvels at the bravery of this king, this old man, and he finally gets peace by saying to the man, "yes, you may have your son's body back," and he even negotiates a truce of 12 days, so that they have enough time to gather firewood and go through all the various rituals and give Hector a proper burial. And the very last words are: "thus held they the funeral for Hector, Tamer of Horses."

It just stops there. That is how Achilles finally finds peace, through forgiving an old man and taking pity on him, seeing almost a fellow spirit in bravery in some ways, seeing the tragedy of what he's done. And it's it's almost... I mean I'm not a Christian but you could say that it's almost like a Christian message in there somewhere: it's "forgiveness brings peace", not glory in war, not killing people, it's suddenly seeing the humanity, appreciating the humanity of your enemy and just extending that Mercy to your enemy. That's what brings Achilles peace and that's what the Iliad is about.

...And from the other side, I am a Christian, but recognize the glory in war and so on which he argues is the other half of the Iliad.

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.

I've had a bunch of really good conversations revolving around this question and my own thoughts on it; I'll refrain from the usual link spam but this dialog seems on point, at least to elaborate my own perception. Suffice to say, I believe my thinking and values is in fact much more similar to that of a Bronze Age perspective (and a classical perspective, medieval perspective, and so on) than it is to what I understand to be central examples of Blue Tribe thinking and values. One of the reasons I think that is the contrast between my own belief that the wisdom of previous millennia has more-or-less undiminished relevance today, compared to the belief which seems normative among Blues that human thought has progressed, such that the things we know now have made the wisdom of previous millennia trivially obsolete. Likewise, their attitude toward perceived historical enemies, and their judgement against historical populations and their sins and crimes. I may be wrong about this, but I've put a fair amount of thought into it and really don't think so.

Conversely, do you not enjoy the Iliad and the Odyssey? The Tale of Genji? The Ramayana? Even though they express very different values?

I haven't had the pleasure of the last two, but I'm saying I do enjoy them because I don't believe their values are very different. I reference Macaulay, who published his verse in 1842, near two centuries ago and an ocean away, written about a man two thousand years ago and an additional continent away; It seems to me that Macaulay wrote the verses because he perceived values-consonance with Horatius, and I quote him because I perceive values-consonance with both Macaulay and Horatius. Maybe this perceived values-coherence is an illusion, or maybe not. For what it's worth, I've dabbled in Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and as far as I've gotten the values there seem much more foreign; there's plenty of what I might call "common humanity" still visible, but there seems to be a strong emphasis on a flavor of might-makes-right pragmatism that I don't recognize in western material till, say, Machiavelli. Those parts feel much more modern than the rest.

But this is what I mean by "having our cake and eating it too"; in general people love novelty, but are comforted by the idea that while the details can vary wildly, there's a core nature that remains the same. It seems obvious to me that when Blues write feminism into a post-apocalyptic fantasy, they're aiming for basically the same thing.

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.

I have more general thoughts on your post that I may flesh out later. Responding to this specifically, I think the dirty secret of 2016-2023 is that most woke callouts and twitter mobs were directionally accurate. People are actually pretty good at making friend/enemy distinctions and picking up on hidden feelings. Obviously the actual content of many of the accusations were bollocks but I strongly suspect that most people who ended up having trouble with the woke (including me) were genuinely reluctant or fake converters to the cause and thus, by woke standards, enemies.

The same is true for authors' values. Seen from a purely political, non-artistic perspective, putting badthink in your books is transmitting it to your readers. Rooting for the Empire is a common issue. To quote Blake re: Milton's Paradise Lost: "[Milton] was of the Devil's party, and never knew it". Even putting this aside, you run into the problem that in a hostile society lots of authors do deliberately assign their real views to a villain, to give their grievances and fantasies an airing with plausible deniability. In pre-liberal times, it was common (I am told) to write long volumes of risque smut before the heroine abruptly realises her mistake and spends the final chapter as a fallen, repentant woman.

One might believe that the artistic merit / enjoyment engendered by a book massively outweighs its potential for spreading badthink with plausible deniability, or one might not. But I will put forward that these positions are both preference choices rather than one being correct and the other being a fallacy.

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.)

I have seen the inane "you choose what to put into your story and therefore creating a story where X' controversial thing happens which is kinda like X controversial thing that happens in reality makes you literally Hitler" criticism more than enough for my lifetime.

E.g. "putting generically evil goblins/orcs/demons into your story mirrors xenophobia". Although I suppose this is less about having values different from theirs and more about assuming Xenophobia to be a Sin, rather than a reaction that's bad when it's based on the wrong assumptions and good when it's based on the correct assumptions.

Yeah, David Chapman writes a lot about how value has collapsed all into one set of 'good' versus 'bad' where it used to be a lot more distinctive. https://meaningness.com/systems-crisis-breakdown

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