This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Happy New Year to all!
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of December 1, 2025
@gog:
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Flattered as I am by the kind nomination, I'm also laughing. This seems to be how my participation here goes; awarded AAQC one week, getting into argy-bargy with another commenter and told to knock it off by a mod the next!
Happy New Year to one and all, it's already kinda crazy and it's still just the first week of the month. What odds Greenland as a satrapy of the USA?
Glad your Tolkein comment got nominated, I wouldn't have seen it otherwise. I do really like Tolkein's approach to writing fantasy / fiction. "No this is not a complex metaphor for the real world. I wrote a different world and I tried to make it internally consistent."
People who don't believe him on this point confound me. Most authors that write in metaphor whack you over the head with it. And if they don't whack you enough within the chapters of the book, they certainly do afterwards in their interviews and explanations. The most straightforward clue that Tolkein was not writing in metaphor was that he says he was not writing in metaphor.
People still do it. Yes, often authors do write from their own experiences and yes, we often don't realise the influences things have had on us. But I think if he clearly said "This is not about the war (except insofar as my physical experience of marching etc. went towards plotting out routes and how much ground the Hobbits could cover in a day)", then it's no good to go "Okay, he said it's not about the war, but it's really about the war".
We like interpreting things which strike a chord with us as "ah, this must be about the thing it reminds me of!" even if the author says "No". I remember in Stephen King's "On Writing" he talked about how people were always trying to get at the hidden motivation which caused him to be a horror writer, and after one session of such "but surely there must have been some traumatic formative experience?" questioning by an interviewer, he dredged up a memory of his mother telling him that when he was a kid, he had seen a railroad accident (I think). King said he didn't remember this and only was going by what his mother told him, and it honestly never affected what he wrote, but the interviewer was delighted because aha! now we have the real reason he writes horror!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link