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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35581 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Bridgerton is pure fantasy, it's taking the romance novel genre of Regency Romance and dialling it up to eleven (it's not even based on Jane Austen, though the Pride and Prejudice TV adaptations clearly have an influence).

So if the author wants to put in black nobility and everyone is race-mixed and so forth, that's fine - it's not pretending to be our world and forget all the blah about representation and diversity, it stands or falls on 'do the romances work, does the audience find the characters attractive and interesting?'

"What if the biggest issue when dealing with aliens was defeating gender binaries?" could be done well, but by the sounds of it the novel is one long lecture (the heroine has to be gay and Jewish and anti-capitalist and so on and so forth). Honestly, if they had the Marines out of Aliens being the ones to do the lectures about defeating gender essentialism (while being kick-ass with big guns and the aliens are the hippy commune free love poly matriarchal society) it would be ten times funnier and I might even read that!

Okay, that’s one I might actually enjoy. Play it straight (ha!), no irony, “make the galaxy safe for liberalism.” Wait, we’ve reinvented some of Banks’ more militant Culture novels.

For a less extreme example, this might be what I liked about Ancillary Justice.

Putting the "WARRIOR" into "SJW" 🤣

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