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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38250 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Ok I have no knowledge of this show, but you mentioned my people - are these people members? They don't have wikipedia pages. If they're putting woke stuff in shows, it may be possible that like many a show-biz member, they've fully been subsumed into the successor ideology and calling them "mormon" is a stretch.

I only quibble (just a bit!), because my tradition has produced the Battlestar Galactica guy, Orson Scott Card, Brandon Sanderson (is he good? Feels like people like him). I'll admit to having little knowledge of fantasy or sci fi literature but at least my impression was that we typically punched decently well above our weight class, perhaps not so

I'm trying very hard to avoid religious controversy here, but there has been an amount of publicity around Payne and McKay as Mormons. I read one article about Payne, and Googling brings this one up about Payne and his wife, in what looks like an official Mormon website.

There's nothing about McKay, so he is either lapsed or isn't a Mormon.

Their writing so far for the show has been pedestrian, and when they try to go profound and meaningful, or copy what they think is Tolkien's high style, it comes out like a lead balloon. The difference between stones and ships? Fermenting wine? Dogs and the moon?

It's tushery, as in this extract from a letter of Tolkien; they're trying to copy, without really understanding, a particular style:

The proper use of 'tushery' is to apply it to the kind of bogus 'medieval' stuff which attempts (without knowledge) to give a supposed temporal colour with expletives, such as tush, pish, zounds, marry, and the like. But a real archaic English is far more terse than modern; also many of things said could not be said in our slack and often frivolous idiom.

...I am sorry to find you affected by the extraordinary 20th.C. delusion that its usages per se and simply as 'contemporary' – irrespective of whether they are terser, more vivid (or even nobler!) – have some peculiar validity, above those of all other times, so that not to use them (even when quite unsuitable in tone) is a solecism, a gaffe, a thing at which one's friends shudder or feel hot in the collar. Shake yourself out of this parochialism of time! Also (not to be too donnish) learn to discriminate between the bogus and genuine antique – as you would if you hoped not to be cheated by a dealer!

Twilight author is Mormon too.

If they're putting woke stuff in shows, it may be possible that like many a show-biz member, they've fully been subsumed into the successor ideology and calling them "mormon" is a stretch.

It seems far more likely to me that their personal beliefs had little to do with it and they wrote in whatever Amazon's audience analysis told them they needed to.

I think you're right except it was more likely an analysis of Amazon's executives than their audience.

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