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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The Magicians proper has a complex relationship with magic. It's advertised as about an Hogwarts-for-Adults with Bakebill, and Narnia-for-Adults with Fillory. ((The Magician King also adds in not!urbanfantasy with the hedge witches and Underground.)) It's also about how they all kinda suck. That's not necessarily bad as a story decision, but the execution is awful and undermines the central themes of the trilogy (which are at least in theory about wanting things and depression), or the critiques of the original fiction.
This is most obvious with Fillory. No, it's not legally defamatory to have the thinly-veiled CS Lewis stand-in as a literal pedophile who diddles his own male family member into cannibalistic monstrosity, especially as you can't legally defame the dead, but it's doesn't feel like a particularly strong send-up of Narnia so much as an insult for insult's sake. Having his sister turn away from not!Narnia out of misplaced allegiance to your Aslan-analogues is a bit on the nose; having them do so to become a Texan evangelical is just stupid. I'm not opposed to atheist stories, but when you make a story where the crux eventually becomes "what if
lionram!Jesus won't sacrifice himself for the world" (in Land) it runs into the problem where the author doesn't believe it, the author's fellow atheists don't believe it, and the religiousnutsadherents that they're criticizing also don't believe that. It doesn’t really matter if the atheists and the religious disbelieve it in different ways: it doesn’t leave any meaningful discussion ground.About the most clever beat for Fillory involves the Watcherwoman's time shenanigans, and it's still the sort of thing that would get mockery were it written by M Night Shyamalan. There's definitely ways to parody Narnia, and to do it well, just as there are ways to critique religious fiction and do it well. But Grossman isn't really trying a parody or serious critique; he's throwing his characters into a knockoff of the setting and giving them things (things Grossman doesn't like) to emote at.
Bakebill... nostalgebraist has a review that focuses more on it, but the tl;dr is that it tries to send-up the hidden magic school as hard and boring like normal school, and the students being assholes. Which is absolutely something that could happen, but it's neither interesting nor particularly compelling. The ways that they're assholes aren’t even that interesting; there's so many more varied ways even an anhedonic magician could do things that the students come across as prats at best and bullies at worst.
These decisions undermine each other, rather than simply being incoherent. The best defense I've seen describes the first book as resonant for someone with severe depression, as an understanding of the feeling that nothing fixes things and all the promises you've had given were lies. And that could be interesting! There's nothing wrong with a slow-burn drama story about interpersonal interaction. It's even possible to mix it with the sudden existential dread of the botched prank leaving a fellow student eaten, or life-threatening final exams; it's anathema to a story where the protagonist is getting a lot dropped in his lap. Depression's hard enough for focused works like Catcher In the Rye (which became far more famous for 'phonies' and the prostitute scene than for the protagonist have had a cancer death in his family and a suicide literally in his view); without being handled very carefully you end up with a protagonist who comes across as a whiny little sod or cause of many of his own problems, and Quentin definitely falls here.
On its own, this'd just make the story 'not for me'. The trick's that The Magicians isn't a bad book. I want to say it could have easily been a great one! There's a few pacing problems, but overall it's technically very well-executed, and there's a few individual scenes that are absolutely excellent prose. It's just the glue holding these portions together's just missing, in a way that’s far more disappointing than a merely bad or disagreeable piece wouldn’t bug me.
I could believe that.
Then the books must be bloody awful. The only thing I saw about the show were fan posts on Tumblr, and they were more enthused about the four main characters(?) all being in some version of a pansexual polycule(?) but since the enthusiasm dropped off when the show stopped airing (has it?) I don't care.
Even just looking at the photos and clips of the characters, they seemed so drippy that I can well believe book Quentin is a whiny little sod who causes most of his own problems.
As for better opposition takes on Narnia, heck yes. See this artist, who has their own complicated relationship to Christianity from what I can make out of their history, but they get it in ways that I can agree with as well:
https://www.tumblr.com/tomato-bird/674387478831120384/tomato-bird-inexorable-2020-taylor-leong-some?source=share
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link