site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

2
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I like your Harry Potter takes much more than I like your Iran takes.

I generally agree with you about the nature of the Potterverse, but one of the reasons people get wrapped up in the illogic, and the "shipping," is that the books made an awkward transition from "children's series where we can accept that magic is whimsical and fairy-tale like and doesn't need to make sense" to "YA series where people are starting to have adult relationships, the story is increasingly metaphorical, and the world is starting to look silly." Thirteen-year-old Hermione being given a Time-Turner so she can take more classes is funny. The Time-Turner is a MacGuffin. Seventeen-year-old Harry fighting wizard Nazis and being threatened with torture and death makes you wonder why he (or Hermione) isn't thinking about Time-Turners.

Rowling is a good author. The sense of wonder, the aliveness of the wizarding world, the investment in characters, is why HP became huge despite neither her world nor her prose being better than many other authors writing in the same playground. But she's very much an author for whom "numbers aren't real" and "worldbuilding isn't a thing," and that means when the audience gets older and starts thinking about the inconsistencies, well, they realize that the Wizarding World only works if you don't think about it too much.

Getting back to Malfoid, I agree that this is gooner slop, even if the visual presentation is chaste. Harry marrying a nice girl next door isn't good enough; gooners don't want a quiet girl next door, they want a hot blonde badass who's pretty and feisty and kind of bitchy but will become submissive and demure (but still sexy) for you... only for you. It's the flip side of the woman who fantasizes about the rough bad boy alpha who reveals his tender squishy heart only for you.

I am kind of surprised to see you praise romantasy, as hereabouts it's often criticized for being basically literary porn for women. Now, I am a literary snob (no, not really, I like Dungeon Crawler Carl and Harry Potter), but I'm also a literary gourmand. I'll try anything. I've tried romantasy. Have yet to find one that didn't bore me or strike me as execrably bad writing. I tried to read Twilight back in the day. I didn't hate it, it didn't give me girl cooties, it just... bored me. You say the bad writing is the point, and maybe that's true (romance has always been a very formulaic, mass-produced product), but I don't know why I'd want to suffer bad writing and boredom if I am not the target audience getting dopamine hits from an enemies-to-lovers alpha story written like a fourteen-year-old's first fanfic.

Do Pern and/or Mercedes Lackey count as "Romantasy"? Presumably at least the latter's 500 Kingdoms series would.

You could probably call it that nowadays, in the same way that a lot of stuff that wasn't originally "YA" is now called that. I've read very little Mercedes Lackey, but my recollection of the Pern books is that the romance subplots were mostly pretty light, not the primary running theme.