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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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It wasn't by Laird Barron was it?

How did you guess? Is this a trope of his, because these were anthologies and there were a couple of his stories in them and one of them had me going "yeah, congratulations, I know this is meant to be a shitty world but you just couldn't resist giving that tiny little extra tweak to make it even shittier, even though it doesn't do anything for the story, could you?"

Lol no, Barron does rely heavily on the crapsack world trope, but the reason I guessed is because I remember thinking the same thing after reading that story - as soon as you said "She was awful, he was awful, I had no idea why they got married or stayed married and I didn't care by the time the bad things happened because frankly they both deserved it." I thought of that short story, it encapsulates it perfectly.