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There is a phenomenon i notice in media but never hear named. Call it, "Representation As Inherently Problematic."
Examples: There are no mentally handicapped people or trans people on shows that are not specifically about these topics. The reasons for this for mental disabilities are fairly obvious: mental handicaps are considered intrinsically undignified. If you show a mentally handicapped person doing or saying something dumb on a show, this counts as mocking a protected group. Thus: total absence.
Similarly: If you have a trans person on a show you need to make it clear to the audience they are trans, which either requires it to be a plot point (making it a sort of Very Special Episode) or making the trans person not pass (which is undignified and thus opens the writers up to criticism.) Thus: total absence.
Similarly, morbid obesity is undignified, and the morbidly obese are close to being a protected class (being as it is a physical disability). Thus, having them on a show is undignified and opens up the writers to criticism. Thus: total absence.
Another example: land o' lakes mascot, a native American woman, gets criticism for being stereotypical, which is synonymous to being visually identifiable as a native american. So she was removed from the labeling.
Another: Dr. Seuss gets criticism for visually identifiable depiction of a Chinese villager; book gets pulled as a result.
A similar-feeling phenomenon is This Character Has Some Characteristics Of A Protected Group, Which Is Kinda Like Being A Standin For That Group, Making That Character's Poor Qualities A Direct Commentary On That Group. Examples: criticisms around Greedo and Jar Jar Binks being racist caricatures; criticisms of goblin representation in Harry Potter as being anti-semitic caricatures.
Some of the (very left/progressive) authors I follow do talk about how sufficient representation is necessary for them to have more complex diverse characters, as opposed to aggressively averting tropes/stereotypes. To the point of one author saying they definitely were never going consider killing off $SPECIFIC_REPRESENTATION (in a book where the majority of the named characters died) because meeting those representation points was so rare. Having characters match stereotypes too closely is a lot less problematic if there's enough characters around in those categories that there's some around that don't match those same stereotypes.
This is part of why "token" representation is considered problematic, although calling representation "token" usually also implies that no real though has been put into the representation past sticking a label on a character that would otherwise be indistinguishable from a character without that label.
Are you talking about Wildbow? I remember him saying something along these lines a little while ago, specifically his breakdown of the backlash he received forthe "Avery is dead" arc in Pale.
Also, if there's sufficient interest in it, I have a jumbled mess of thoughts I might be able to kludge together into a top level post describing why I think he peaked with Twig, from the angle of someone who is very much in the visible1 minority (not trans, not a furry, not squeeing over various characters, not socially liberal) of his fans.
1Based purely off of a cursory examination of the online communities that bother discussing his writings in the first place.
That was sad. On the one hand he has a great attitude (in some ways) towards representation, believing that characters need to be real characters etc. and not perfect cookie-cutter superheroes.
On the other, despite what he said I knew that none of the characters were in real danger. Even knowing that Wildbow has killed viewpoint characters in the past, Pale has just gone a bit too far for that. The main characters (14 year old girls) are always talking to each other like you'd expect characters in a modern therapy textbook to talk, including frequent discussion of boundaries by name. Maybe to him this seems like good communication, but to me they seem like aliens born from Milquetoast Modern Progressivism vats rather than from mothers, who will continue gargling the detritus of their own afterbirth for the rest of their lives in order to train themselves to never have any opinions not exactly 100% conforming to the party line.
I have many other objections, but what it boils down to is that Wildbow is a fantastic author, but chooses to make his story a vehicle for progressive ideology without meaningfully challenging even its smallest detail.
Some examples:
They live in a universe where all gods exist and are quite powerful and genuine faith is a strong protection, but there are no Christians to be found anywhere. I get that this can be a tough issue (you are essentially "fictionalizing" God by lumping him in with greek gods etc) but you'd expect at least one Christian character given all the much more fringe types of people being represented.
The universe in general seems perfectly fine with sexual progressivism where I would expect it to be extremely strict. For instance, the universe is quite traditional in interpreting a sword as "masculine" and a chalice as "feminine" and will partially define your role in the universe according to which of these you choose, and the corresponding gender, but then has no issue with anything else you'd expect. A universe so rooted in tradition would have little patience for female breadwinners, let alone something like transgenderism.
There are no caricatures of any kind--for instance, no native american shaman practitioners--even though I'd expect that sort of archetype to have a lot of power in this universe.
Going back to point #1, no paladins or priests even though they should be quite powerful.
No extremely traditional / homophobic / transphobic / etc. Others, except for perhaps some misogyny, though I'd expect the other categories to be much more rooted in tradition
Lots of hand-wringing about pedophiles going after 16 year olds, but also celebration of a 14 year old's sexual awakening, as well as countless references to extreme sex acts around a character who is mentally ~10 years old.
No in-universe attention, no matter what, given to the possibility that someone could use Practice to change their mind rather than their behavior, even though things like "spirit surgery" are major plot points so it's clearly possible. Zed sacrifices a lot to be a man rather than a woman rather than just snipping that desire in the bud. Given the book's internal logic I don't think that doing so would be a good idea, but I do think the possibility should at least be mentioned even if rejected immediately.
If I'd kept a list while reading through the book I'm sure I'd have dozens to hundreds of better examples, but for now this will have to suffice.
I'd say this is consistent with other established themes. Do you expect the group of entities literally named "Others" to care about tradition and fitting in in the way human society and human establishment does? Being -phobic is the bread-and-butter of the old Practitioner families. Don't confuse sticking to tradition and sticking to symbolism.
What I dislike about Pale is that the way Wildbow explicitly minds the audience diminishes 2/3 of the protagonists' personal struggles in my eyes. Verona's pet issue is her detachment and lack of trust between her and adulthood. Lucy's is being a racial minority. Avery's is being a sexual orientation minority. All of those are hammered over the reader's head quite a bit.
But while Verona's issues are repeatedly and blatantly justified, Lucy and Avery mostly have to resort to wondering and imagining if their issues are even real. The worst Avery actually got about her being a lesbian is her Finder family ally (briefly) flipping out on her because she kinda sorta led them to believe they have a chance of arranged marriage. I don't recall Lucy actually encountering an explicit racism moment. I'm quite confident that given Wildbow's current main audience, and perhaps his own shifts in political opinion, he will not choose to write the word "nigger" again even inside the head of the most racist character in the novel.
I do not have to see the word nigger in a novel to like it. But I do wish Wildbow was writing for a wider audience than people who "don't want the story to be about that" (referring to explicit examples of minority struggles and -isms as opposed to vague Institutional -Isms).
The Others don't come up with the rules though, it's the spirits (mostly) that do that. And in many ways they seem willing to change--they're adapting OK to new technology--but in matters of morality, they seem utterly set in stone except in whatever ways are most important to "modern audiences". Whoever is coming up with this morality (whether spirits or Others) I think it's silly for them to be totally inflexible on swords being male, but totally flexible on whether a person is male or female. These spirits should be totally racist as well, trying to stick people into well-defined roles based on the type of magic their practitioner ancestors did.
To be clear, I'd be fine with them not being like that if they were not portrayed as so inflexible in pretty much everything else.
I somewhat disagree with this, I think that the intended takeaway is that the issues are definitely real, but so insidious that even their victims are fooled into thinking that maybe they're overreacting. If anything I am a bit annoyed that their issues are so ubiquitous. For Lucy: Paul definitely left the family due to racism, her love interest also stopped trying due to his mom's racism, there was a racist teacher at the magic school, even the primary antagonist (Charles) has done some racist stuff unintentionally; I'm sure there are plenty of other examples. Avery has similarly had plenty of issues, though thankfully her magic stuff is so interesting that those issues get less attention.
I think Wildbow is trying to walk a tightrope because he wants those minority struggles to be a big part of the book, but doesn't want to include anything too cringey or unrealistic, so rather than having a few scenes with deplorable antagonists he litters the entire book with more subtly racist and homophobic characters. I get what he's trying to do but it kind of turns into the worst of both worlds, where you both get tired of all the attention given to these issues, but also don't have any exciting struggles or grave injustices you can watch the characters deal with.
That's... pretty much just isn't true. The spirits don't come up with the rules, they observe patterns and do their part in passing them along.
You're contradicting yourself now. I originally said
To which you responded
I'll grant that spirits "pass rules along" if you'll grant that spirits care a lot about tradition, which was my original point anyways.
I'm saying that what humans call tradition is only a fraction of patterns in reality. The existence of deviations from traditions is just as much a pattern. And Others, aside from those who explicitly represent human tradition, represent deviation.
So yes, spirits do care about tradition, but not exclusively like a human ultra-conservative would.
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First, there is absolutely an effect on how Others see you based on who your ancestors were. Second, you're making a mistake of assuming the spirits are 100% on "sword means dick, no arguments" based on the Implementum book, which is written by Practitioner society who love their rigid categories. Having a bias towards "sword is male" does not mean "totally inflexible".
I disagree, I think they are totally inflexible towards having that bias. It's not like some famous female warrior or even a god will ever convince the spirits that "sword means female". Similarly I would expect them to always say "penis means male" and "XY chromosomes means male" which would always be a handicap towards any trans practitioner attempting to adopt a female role. Not saying it would be impossible, but it would be impossible to lose that handicap entirely.
If anything I think that strategy would also make for a better story because it would mean more needs to be sacrificed to pursue your convictions.
Enough female warriors will. If anything, the fact that it's a bias and not a mandatory requirement even after thousands of years of precedent and symbolism speaks against it being "total". Your "penis means male" example is much more inflexible.
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There's an entire team of kids from a Christian school, as well as I think a Witch Hunter who scolded someone for taking the name of God in vain. I suppose you'd be correct if you meant "no identifiably hardline Christians".
Exactly, and not one of them is Christian at all, or IIRC even references Christianity in any way a single time.
IIRC they all explicitly had a weird view of God that was not Christianity, I'm not sure though, that was a while ago. I put in a few minutes and couldn't find the chapter--if you know where it is, I'd love to see it.
Anyways though, it's pretty clear that those are both pretty big stretches, right? One fifth of Canadians are young earth creationists so you should have many more characters like that in your Canadian story than all LGBTQ(4%), polyamorous/in open relationships (4%), and black (3.5%) characters combined, especially since this is set in a rural town.
I mean, it's pretty par for the course at this point, and I get why he's mostly avoiding the question. The bigger issue I have is that everyone in the story is essentially in total agreement about all things that normal people consider political. The single counterexample I can think of is Grumble, a mostly-paralyzed elderly widower recovering from a stroke who is nevertheless victimizing his granddaughter by watching hateful TV. I think probably 5-10x as many words at this point have been devoted to just how hateful his TV watching is as have actually been devoted to him onscreen.
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What's funny is, in the loose pantheon of supplemental writing and even a brief mention in one of his interludes, there are actually "paladins" or Christian style priests who hunt down and bind and/or exorcize literal demons in the name of God. It's just never been brought up again or made relevant to his Pactverse stories.
Yeah, there has been some mention of that, but do they exorcize demons in the name of God? My recollection was basically that they have all the trappings of Christianity but mostly believe in Christian virtues and traditions rather than the actual Christian theology. Like, they will gain holy power by remaining celibate, but without any admission or belief that the Christian god actually exists.
I think generally part of the issue is that modern priests do not jive well at all with the setting. Every other type of priest can literally channel divine power, but we expect modern-day normal religious priests to lack similar power? Nah, if it were consistent, normal Christian (and other religions, but there's a Christian church in Kennet) priests would literally have divine power, and more of it than they could use.
The problem with representing monotheistic religions is that they're, well, by default not quite true in a universe where there are gods, plural. Also, you can argue that a God that encompasses everything is so bound by that definition that he might as well not be defined. When everything is
superGod, nothing is.That's why we have Architects/Angels latching on the Judeo-Christian aesthetic, but no big G.
Also, normal people don't get magic in Pactverse, that's established. Sometimes normal people go through weird and/or intense shit and walk the line between mundane and Other, but that's it. Not something every small town pastor is going to get. Melissa had to suffer a grievous injury that detached her from mundane life to an extent in order for her repeated attempts at replicating the spellcards to have any effect.
See that's kind of what I'm complaining about though. Anyone who falls too deeply into a rut of any kind will become Aware. I forget the name but a good example is that Aware who was so skeptical that she had an anti-magic field. People who get too depraved (probably) become vulnerable to imps, people who become too separated from reality become Other, people who get too lost get Lost. Totally separate from the existence of gods, you would expect the same kind of effect with faith--people should be made stronger by sincere religious conviction even if the target god doesn't exist at all.
Well obviously not in this story, but honestly I would expect every small town pastor to get some divine assistance. Just consider how many, many Others there are. There's like one for every person. There seems to be at least one Aware per 100 or so people as well. Separately from that, just given the nature of the universe, I'd honestly expect more pastors to have magic than practitioners.
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"Faith" in the Pactverse clashes somewhat with the Biblical definition, at least as laid out in Hebrews 11:1. When you can perform a given ritual, utter the right words, and invoke the might of a higher power it can be difficult to frame that as "belief". One doesn't need to believe when you can know, a problem inherent to the setting and as such one I'm willing to forgive.
The POV of that particular chapter is also one belonging to a literal apostate, so I can accept there being no deference paid to the Supreme Creator, whether he thought there was one or not.
Agreed, but this does make you wonder why gods work at all in-setting. What does belief in a god mean? Everyone in Pact knew that Dionysius existed but I don't think he gained any power from that. Seems like it's something closer to "love and obedience" than it is to "confidence level that this deity is real". If we redefine faith like that then we're back to the issue of "why does nobody love and obey the Christian god?"
I would prefer some kind of in-universe explanation like, obviously he's real, but he hasn't visited in ages and people need to have faith that his reasons are good. This would neatly allow the story to continue without interference from the actual God, but still allow for many different types of belief and genuine religious people, just like real life.
Was it mentioned in Pact/Pale at all that gods need belief? Sounds like they gain power from acts of worship, particularly ones that sacrifice something or give them claim over something (a mark on the body, for example).
Based on the knowledge on Pactverse gods and the divine practices shared in the story, I'm led to believe that the vastness of Abrahamic religions works against their God(s). "I am what I am", what kind of definition is that? Here on this forum, when that kind of definition is applied to the concept of a woman, people laugh it out of the room.
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The relationship Jeremy Meath has with Dionysus, where you don't know exactly how much Relationship Points you've got with your patron and how much would be demanded for the next miracle you ask for (and of course a shrewd god would not give specific promises easily) - that's something closer to belief than to knowledge in my books.
I had the impression that was due more to Dionysus' status as a deity of, in part, madness (introducing a degree of unpredictability) and because his power was vastly diminished due to his now-miniscule base of worshippers. Other god-believer relationships are portrayed somewhat differently, though this is primarily in Pale and are arguably non-central examples. Point taken though.
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I see that a lot in modern fantasy/urban fantasy genre, every faith or religious tradition is true except Christianity. Makes it a bit awkward if you're including any Jewish/Muslim characters, since the idea of the One God is shared in all those traditions, but they get treated more for exoticism points than rigorous theology (Jewish kabbalah for the equivalent of magic-using and so forth).
So everyone from animists to Zoroastrianists can have functional, working divine rituals and miracles but Christianity is only a made-up story. Depending on the particular writer, this can be done reasonably well (if stretching credulity - I'm thinking of a series in which demons and Hell are very real, but the Devil is absent and nobody has any clue if God is real, not real, or what is going on there) to the laugh-out-loud (Bryan
Singer'sFuller's, I mixed up my gay Hollywood Bryans, version of "American Gods" and the Easter episode, where we must take Eostre/Ostara as the real, original goddess and the Christians just stole that. Moreover, there are multiple versions of Jesus, but only One Original Version of all the other gods - so it's not "believers create the gods in their own image, so we can have various versions of any god, the god is not pre-existent" except for Christianity).Why I say that's laugh-out-loud is because it's not the real story, but it's a commonly accepted new myth of our times. Ah, well!
EDIT: I think it's because the writers all accept that the gods don't really exist, so it's easy to use them in their works and treat them as though they do exist, in the terms of their various myths and cultures. Christianity isn't that simple, though, because for Western writers it was recently, and still is in areas, the dominant religion and treated as real. So treating the Christian God as real in your fiction is equivalent to saying "I believe this is real". Which is a problem, if you're non-Christian or an atheist.
To take the Chesterton quote from "Heretics":
I could write about Thor or Sekhmet or Nuwa and treat them seriously within-universe, because I don't believe in them. It would be like inventing my own pantheon and writing about them. But if I write about the Blessed Trinity or Jesus, I'm writing about a living belief. If I share that belief, I'm going to treat God differently than the gods. If I don't share that belief, then writing in tune with how Christians generally express beliefs will leave me open to "but do you believe/support this? don't you realise that it's all homophobic [tick off bingo card of bad things]?" If I don't write in tune (Jesus is the hippy peacenik commie revolutionary who is against The Man but doesn't claim to be any more divine than the rest of us who all have God within us) then I'm still doing something that is going to be perceived as a challenge to orthodoxy and will be treated by some as "yeah, stick it to those bigots!" or celebrated by some as "now this is the kind of Christianity I can accept/I believe in" or criticised by some as "this is all hogwash". This is likely to get me dragged into arguments I'm not intending to have (unless I'm Philip Pullman, writing my Why Yes I Am An Atheist, Take That C.S. Lewis! anti-Narnia novels).
Frankly, it'll be a lot less hassle for me to write about Thor. Nobody is going to get bent out of shape about that, except maybe a few revivalist Norse pagans, and how many of them are sensitivity readers?
Your comment made me think: there's an essay here, somewhere, about how grand scope secondary world fantasy is a fundamentally Christian impulse. It allows one to imagine things that are facially inconsistent with Christianity but elucidate it. I think that it's no accident that Tolkien was a Catholic.
Whereas most fantasy (I except traditional faerie-stories, slightly[*]) stories set in the real world are at best uncomfortable from a Christian perspective, because Christianity itself is a thing in the real world and you have to fit that in somehow. Does anyone remember that old HPMOR meta-fanfic with the wizard-Christians? I felt that, as really awkward as it was, it was more honest than the original HP in that way.
[*] Obviously many faerie-stories have a pre-Christian origin and skate by on that. But people tried to wrestle with these things in ways that would make moderns very uncomfortable; IIRC there are some stories about Irish saints converting faeries to Christianity...
You're not thinking of this, are you? It's satire. Read the last chapter if you want to be sure. Pretty hilarious premise though.
Nope, not that one. I was thinking of this one which was posted on /r/rational some years back.
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Well, if you have a religion that explicitly claims only their God is real, and all other gods are fake or demons, then someone writing an urban fantasy where "gods" are real pretty much has to decide whether or not the Christians (and Muslims and Jews) are right in this universe. I've seen some fiction and RPGs that kind of tried to handwave this, but Christians will inevitably be offended at Jesus being treated as just another source of exorcism points, while pagans will be offended at any implication that their gods aren't real. And the best reaction you can hope for from Muslims is that they don't read it.
I mean, yeah, this is kind of a central premise of fantasy in general. It's simply set in a world that's not accurate to real life. I don't care about that, I just care that the world follow its own internal rules rather than break them in order to make certain groups even more wrong. In a world where people's belief creates gods, you have to justify why the largest group on earth somehow hasn't created a god. In a world where gods are powerful beings that people believe in, you have to justify why (at the very least) no god has filled in for the (for some reason) nonexistent Christian god in order to gain more influence.
EDIT:
I think the big thing is that if you are trying to set something in the modern world, ideally your magic system explains to an extent why the world exists as it currently does. If Jesus is just another source of exorcism points, why is Christianity by far the biggest religion with a strong tradition of exorcism? Why is Christianity so much bigger in general, with such different beliefs? Presumably if gods were real then religions which believe that multiple gods exist are going to outcompete religions that assert that there's only one god; adherents to the latter are going to be getting smitten left and right.
I don't attribute malice to these authors at all, I think they just have stories that they want to write that aren't 100% internally consistent, which is fine. The issue is when they build these worlds which aren't accurate to reality, then use them to make points about things which are accurate to reality. In a world where all gods are real, Christianity would be vastly different than it is in real life. But take your world where all gods are real, then plop Christianity down in the middle of it unaltered, and of course it will look silly because that belief system wouldn't have grown in that world organically.
Well, it's more than that. If you use the popular trope that "gods are powerful in proportion to how many believers they have" then yeah, you would expect a world with Christianity to have made Yahweh into a really powerful god.
Except - you are implying that the Christian God is really just another god among many, and not qualitatively different from Zeus or Astarte or some ancient forgotten Slavic bog-demon, He just happened to go viral at the right time and now He's got really good ratings. Christians (and Muslims) believe in the One True God who is Alpha and Omega. The idea that if Christianity as a religion became fringe, God would become just another wispy little godlet competing with the likes of Quetzalcoatl and Tiw is literal heresy.
Of course the sort of Christian (or Muslim) who reads urban fantasy or plays RPGs could probably handle this in a fictional world. But mainstream fantasy series or games that demote Jesus to Just Another Demigod are often accused of mocking Christianity. (And nowadays I wonder if anyone would dare giving Mohamed a stat block.)
Sure, but the alternative is to deny God's existence, which may be even more heretical. Authors tend to skirt around this question, and that's fine, but if they don't address it then I'd prefer they not address adjacent issues either. If your world is "All gods exist except for the Christian God, but people still believe in him and follow the Bible anyways" then that's fine so long as you mostly ignore that side of things. But if your story has strong themes revolving around homosexuality and homophobia, and all your in-story homophobes are Christians, that feels to me like you're cheating. Essentially you're obliquely asking "Assume your religion and its teachings are false. Are your religion's teachings false? Let's explore that question!"
Even that would be OK if this hypothetical universe's new rules were consistent, but they're not; they seem to go out of their way to also directly contradict Christian beliefs even when it wouldn't be internally consistent. So all I'm asking is that if you decide to cripple your magic system in order to support your ideology, you don't go way further out of your way to also center your book's themes around the part of your magic system you just crippled.
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Solomon divided the Other and the Innocent worlds, like, several thousand years before Christianity appeared and spread (mostly among the Innocent).
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Iirc, the reasoning was explicitly Doylist. Wildbow mentioned at some point that it seemed likely to turn into giant flaming culture wars and so he decided to just kind of ignore the entire glaring topic.
I figured, and he's done a pretty good job with that aspect of it altogether, but he's still very much fighting against Christian morality without really addressing the source of that morality. As one example, how about marriage? Marriage is literally a vow, generally to love and protect your spouse, but I haven't heard of a single practitioner getting forsworn due to a divorce. So maybe practitioners don't make the same vows? It raises all sorts of questions because you really would expect marriage to be just as if not more significant than a familiar. People should get forsworn for cheating on each other all the time.
As another example, hospitality is a big thing in-story, and to break hospitality is to invite loads of bad karma if not worse. How about responsibility to your family? This should be just as important but the universe seems to care very little for it, not penalizing parents for mistreating their children or children for rebelling against their parents.
So, totally separate from the whole god question, the nature of the universe should be inclined towards very traditional morality but isn't, and my assertion is that this is simply because Wildbow created an internally consistent magic system and then slanted it slightly to be more progressive. There's no way that a magic system that wants people to fit into clearly defined roles would like people being genderfluid or polyamorous.
btw I edited my previous comment just as you added that one, if you want to respond to the edit.
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No, but I'm not surprised there's more than one example.
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Heck. I haven’t read much of Pale because it felt too humanly depressing. The apocalyptic nightmare scenarios of his books are fine; it’s seeing shitty people make worse interpersonal decisions that gets to me. Whichever protagonist has the narcissistic but useless dad, I did not want to deal with that.
That said…I ended up thinking Twig was his best work, too. But I’d be more interested in seeing a post about all the reasons it works rather than the reasons Ward and/or Pale didn’t, if that makes sense. Partly so I can read it avoiding spoilers, partly because I think it will invite more interesting discussion and less bashing.
Interesting. I agree to an extent but then after a certain point I just write those characters off. Verona's dad became less of a character to me and more of an obstacle, so it was easy to mostly ignore all of his terrible behavior. Much worse to me is when the main characters make bad decisions.
I think the biggest reason is simply that the characters and dialogue got a LOT of attention. Pale seems to have better worldbuilding in many ways, and more interesting ideas, and a more coherent and interesting plot, as well as a more fleshed-out setting, so for those reasons I prefer it to Twig. Twig, though, did have an absolutely fantastic main character, with extremely engaging dialogue, motivations, and character growth throughout the story. I think it was simply the better-written story, it's just that it had less of what I want from a story (compelling ideas competently explored).
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A book review of Twig sounds kind of fun and might even be within my capabilities (I might have to reread it, so if I were to work on this it'd be a while before posting). And I agree more or less with
though my intention with critiquing his recent works would be to have something constructive, coming from a place of love, and most importantly IMO from a perspective I'm pretty sure he doesn't have in his life (could be totally wrong about that, don't know him personally and it is better to not assume stuff like that) that could be shared with him in a digestible, non-wordpress-comment format.
Agree, I think that accounts for approx. 40% of the problems I have with his recent stuff.
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