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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1416 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.

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.

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