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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   42111 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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To me, the story is evidence that whatever you might think of Stephen King, he is a literary genius.

This is correct, along with something else; Stephen King is a bad writer. Those two things can absolutely co-exist.

King's exploration of various themes and psychological states can be profound. Misery is underrated as a narrative about the writing or, more generally, creative process.

But some much of this is lost in just godawful writing. I'm pretty sure King was the original inspiration for /r/menwritingwomen. "Her boobs bounced boobily as she walked" was from Carrie, right?

It's not just /r/menwritingwomen, or the fact that King is profoundly porn-brained (although he is certainly both): he also has this pronounced vulgar streak, this urge to include gross details into his stories even when they add nothing:

One of the many ways the film adaptation of Shawshank improved on its source material was omitting the novella's repeated descriptions of inmates smuggling things in or out of prison by inserting them into their rectums. Some things are better left to the imagination. Early on in IT (which I never finished and don't intend to), the narrator recites an anecdote about a man whose car was washed away in a flood, and when they recovered his corpse, his penis had been bitten off by fish. Even as a child I was just like, why did you have to specify that? Just being gross for the sake of being gross.

Not to mention that one climactic scene from IT which neither adaptation has included and which far-right people always bring up when accusing King of being a closeted nonce.

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