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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17290 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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The point is that it's not easily digestible enough when you're starting at a level where you don't read recreationally at all.

All over the internet you see how quickly people say "tl;dr" for any post that's over like three paragraphs. People don't read articles, only headlines. To take a lifting example, if you try to lift 100kg without any muscle training, you won't lift anything at all, or at least most you'll lift it for a few cms, drop it and become exhausted from that alone. And then you won't want to do it again for a while.

RoyalRoad stories are easy to consume, more appealing because they provides an escapist fantasy, and usually have contemporary themes and references. Once you get used to reading, once you can read a few chapters a week, and do that for a while you'll be able to start reading other things too.

You're seriously underestimating just how easy RoyalRoad is to read.

his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white.

This is an excerpt from Treasure Island. Commonly on RoyalRoad is that often character descriptions are rarely given, or if they are they're spare. Which speeds up visualization because you don't need to build the full image in your head. Now I'm good at visualization, and I can do it as fast as as I can read pretty much, but again, that's a skill that's built by doing. The prose is far more spare as well. The more I read this excerpt the more this is just way beyond average RoyalRoad.

How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house, and the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares. And altogether I paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies.

Meanwhile for comparison from Primal Hunter Ch 6:

The tree was more than strong enough to take the hits, having barely taken any damage. With its circumference easily being large enough for 7-8 grown men to stand holding hands around it, he saw no scenario where it would be falling over. So, to sum it all up… if he had been alone, he would have gotten solo experience and TP, and no one would have gotten seriously hurt, though the fight would have taken longer. On top of that, Jake had an inherent unwillingness to ignore his own instincts and intuition. As most people would, he assumed. While he in his work-life before the system was very calculating, always taking an analytical and data-based approach, he also relied on his guts a lot. The same for tests in university. He trusted his intuition to an almost unhealthy degree.

There is a drastic difference between the two. I would bet that if you give the average kid the latter he'll read more of it than Treasure Island.

That's why I do think more people should be given slop to read. Babies aren't given hard meat to chew through to eat, they're given food that's easy to digest. And that's what more people need to consume before they can take on something more.

I quite simply reject the premise. Simple syntax wasn't invented on royal road.

The Old Man and the Sea:

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.

Of Mice and Men

A FEW MILES south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees - willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter’s flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them. Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of ’coons, and with the spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark.

The Metamorphosis:

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.

Slaughterhouse Five:

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war.

The Lord of the Flies:

The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon. Though he had taken off his school sweater and trailed it now from one hand, his grey shirt stuck to him and his hair was plastered to his forehead. All round him the long scar smashed into the jungle was a bath of heat. He was clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks when a bird, a vision of red and yellow, flashed upwards with a witch-like cry; and this cry was echoed by another.

I could, in fact, go on.

That's why I do think more people should be given slop to read.

Indeed, it's a wonder that anybody learned to read before royal road became a thing. In fact, the correlation between the existence of royal road and the apparent masculine reading crisis is surely just spurious, we just need to get more people to read slop and then they will surely stop reading slop.

It's not just a masculine reading crisis, reading is down for everyone, however it is worse for men.

Most people (both men and women) already basically read something that's a level about the RR slop which is romantasy and thrillers.

Every single book you mention could be put into a literary fiction which is read by a minority of the minority who reads in the first place. I've read a lot, but I haven't read a single book of on that list, and so I'm curious if you have read them, and not for a school assignment, but pleasure out of your own free time.

As it is reading is basically somewhat of a dead hobby. Like there's obviously communities where reading is valued like in the rationalist adjacent communities like the Motte. But for the majority, reading is just not popular. This is a pure hypothetical, but I would guess that audiobooks will become more popular than actually reading books, which is a damn shame.

My and @GBRK's point I think is that more people should try to read, even if it's slop, just because reading is something that should have more people doing. There's a ton of great literary works that will never be read by the majority of people because they just don't care to read in the first place, let alone read demanding works, where as at least more would've watched classical movies.

Like I would easily recommend Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 to someone who doesn't read a lot, because it's not at all difficult to read and quite funny, and could serve as an introduction to a great author. But the fact is that most people will never read in the first place, but if they do, they would probably rather read some RR slop than that.

I've read a lot, but I haven't read a single book of on that list, and so I'm curious if you have read them, and not for a school assignment, but pleasure out of your own free time.

Some of them I've read for school, but I've read other works by the same authors for pleasure (e.g. A Farewell to Arms). I take it you concede the point that RR is not easier to read than many actually good works of literature?

My and @GBRK's point I think is that more people should try to read, even if it's slop, just because reading is something that should have more people doing.

You both equivocate between this and the claim that reading slop will read to not reading slop. Here's you, not long ago:

Once you get used to reading, once you can read a few chapters a week, and do that for a while you'll be able to start reading other things too.

Please pick a lane. If your claim is that reading slop will get people interested in reading slop - I don't have a stance except that I don't actually care about people reading slop for the sake of reading. Time spent at words on a page (or, realistically, a screen) is not something I think people should optimize.

Every single book you mention could be put into a literary fiction which is read by a minority of the minority who reads in the first place.

I wasn't aware that royal road is nonfiction.

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