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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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I'm hesitant to engage with these year old necro comments and am skeptical of any productivity, but I read slightly more of this terrible fanfiction after the original comments and am more affirmed in my criticism.

Litigating the specific fact claims back and forth are kind of meaningless, obviously either of us can easily pull up sophistries based on one weak line, a misuse of a phrase, or technical issue etc. Others have also done that well and you can read it.

The reason I dislike it is because the dialogue is wooden, cliche-ridden, hackish, frequently offputting, and the characterization is inaccurate or implausible at different times.

Many are familiar with the tropes and discussions around the phrase "The Curtains are blue" speaking to over-analysis by literary critics [or their lower-functioning cousins, proponents of 'Media Literacy'] of minute and unimportant details, and there is also push back by those who think Blue Curtains complaint style discourse is thought terminating and glosses over real meaning. But in either case that's close to the level of intro literary review you would do in an literature class, you find symbolism, explain what it means, and then maybe relate it to the pacing or tone of the story or experiences of characters themselves, some will go further and map it to the social and historical circumstances of the author to learn about what it says about 1820s Spain or Russia for example, and that follows into Death of the Author discourse which has also become more popularized. A more advanced literary review will likely move past the symbols, and try to mesh out why and where they were used to specifically understand exactly what the author was trying to say when they picked them. [Most university undergraduates will never move to this stage and beyond]. You also have some people who evade this, and are more simulationist [to borrow Pathfinder terminology] and err more on the side of explaining what would likely happen in their interesting fiction, but not trying to tell you what this means for you, albeit still likely being colored by their personal beliefs or historical circumstances [Think Brandon Sanderson's worldbuilding]. Here's Tarkovksy on Symbolism:

Everybody asks me what things mean in my films. This is terrible! An artist doesn't have to answer for his meanings. I don't think so deeply about my work - I don't know what my symbols may represent. What matters to me is that they arouse feelings, any feelings you like, based on whatever your inner response might be. If you look for a meaning, you'll miss everything that happens. Thinking during a film interferes with your experience of it. Take a watch into pieces, it doesn't work. Similarly with a work of art, there's no way it can be analyzed without destroying it.

I apologize for that long sidebar of how I perceive the modern state of literary criticism. But amazingly the writing of this terrible piece sidesteps all levels of it entirely. The characters just speak cliched platitudes, never having any depth beyond the most cursory, nor any satisfying growth or understanding of eachother. A modern person encountering someone from middle-earth or wherever would have more preconceived notions because of our media tradition, similarly if Superman was real, people would have an easier time digesting it since we have 100 years of Superman media, as opposed to if we had none at all. The prose makes Ayn Rand look like Shakespeare. It is barely half a degree better than something like

#1: I prefer social democracy because more people can get what they want

#2: But they might want bad things. That would be bad

#1: I don't think so