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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2282 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 31, 2026

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Personally, I still think INCEL felt more "real" than The Feminist, just because The Incel is using real arguments you see on the internet, whereas The Feminist hides it under cutesy satire ("narrow shoulders"), and even though the ending isn't satisfying, it's both true and also within the very same incel discourse the book is dealing with (whereas The Feminist is, as the title would suggest, much less about actual incels and much more an intra-feminism argument). ARX-HAN's cowardice is in wrapping things up with a neat bow, but he did tie a neat bow.

What I thought was the weakest part of INCEL is that the protagonist is the least interesting part of the book. He's basically just there narrating what more interesting characters are doing. Felt pretty clear to me that ARX-HAN wanted to write a book about the guy's jacked misanthropic Korean friend and some of the other cast members, but hung it all on the protagonist because that gave it a consistent voice/theme/etc.

Even if you’re cribbing notes off the Internet forums that incels use, you still need to craft a character that is more than just a collection of ripped quotes.

Writing personal growth and change is a big challenge for a lot of modern indie authors. Some of them, like ARX-HAN and Jordan Castro, just... don't really do it. Others try too hard, like Madeline Cash's Earth Angel (her short stories are very good). I was impressed by Juan Ecchi's Dryback and Justin Lee's A Prisoner's Cinema, in that respect, and you can also 100% write stories that don't need it, like Andrew Edwards' Crowbar, if what the characters are doing is interesting enough. Probably the hardest thing to pull off is DFW's "the hero of non-action"; I think the only book in this category I've seen do that really well is John King Spezio's Something of the Springtime.

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