domain:questioner.substack.com
stuckinbathroom
5m ago
Yes
ABigGuy4U
5m ago
The right has begun to sour on Capitalism for a few reasons. The current iteration of the “free market” has so much government intervention that it’s basically corporate socialism already, making calls to preserve the free market ring hollow. Libertarians burned too much of their conservative cachet and are now fringe group without much pull. Also the right realized that “all that is solid melts into air” includes religion, nations state and families.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
8m ago
Worm was written by a man, and it shows. So was Practical Guide to Evil. It shows so hard that you can clock the author's sex just by reading the book, even when they use a totally sexless pseudonym and write an opposite sex protagonist.
A quick check confirms that Samus was created by a man as well.
If you've ever read chicklit, the difference is obvious. A female author of a female protagonist will linger on her interactions with every remotely relationship-appropriate male, to make sure the reader knows how desirable he is, and the flavor of his desire for the main character. Is he a good friend who respectfully hides it? A burning frenemy who offers aid even though he shouldn't? A simp?
As a man, reading that sort of book is alien in a way that few other things in sci-fi or fantasy manage. Like, you really go through life keenly aware that most men you interact with are at least some level of interested in you? Just because? As the default?
There is a male version of this, called "glazing", but it takes the form of gratuitous reaction shots to something impressive the male character has just done.
But women can more easily imagine being showered in attention and praise for doing something impressive than men can envision a world where they are loved and wanted just for existing.
Disclaimer: I think that last category might actually exist in anime, but I don't watch enough to know for sure.
phosphorus2
12m ago
Evolutionarily speaking, a woman's worth is largely dependent on immutable physical characteristics (modulo things like plastic surgery), so these sorts of stories tend to psychologically resonate with women.
"worth is largely dependant on immutable physical characteristics" is true evolutionarily speaking about all forms of life
PreformancePertension
19m ago
I guess that's a valid question these days - do we even want national legislators to represent a specific geography? My big-city House rep I can see is a party line liberal; that represents the district and I don't begrudge it, but when I look up her votes the single thing she broke with the party on was HR3633 (cryptocurrency regulation framework). I look up her social media, and 90% of her posting is on national issues, boosting other national politicians, Gaza, etc. My impression is that the idea of truly local representation has been broken for a while and that this dates back to the late 00s with the start of political nationalization and the decade-long earmark ban.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
19m ago
Could a similar line of expectations dissuade other prospective male readers?
The last major intended-for-girls cartoon that didn't have this, that being MLP G4, had an absurdly large male following precisely because it lacked this.
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
25m ago
Lol. Those were jokes, not serious statements of analysis. The crocodile penis thing was a riff on a silly joke I myself made -- she works in science, and understands very well that this was not how taxonomy works.
NewCharlesInCharge
29m ago
Young boys also enjoy Bluey.
gattsuru
35m ago
Sounds a bit like Bujingai or Asura's Wrath? Sounds like worth looking into.
Crowstep
39m ago
Age of Empires II, except terrain matters, troops don't immediately break rank and jump into a mosh pit when you click attack and walls are both tougher and more expensive, so you have to put your farms outside the city.
gattsuru
41m ago
I'd argue vanilla WoW is pretty unserious (and willing to throw random stuff that wasn't there historically, from goblins to kobolds). But to answer the question:
Fauns and satyrs, harpies and sirens, sphinx. The dog-headed ones were kinda universal myths in the Old World, but they existed long enough ago in European mythology that Augustine debated their historical existence. If you throw in shapeshifters, kelpies and selkies. If you include mere behavioral anthropomorphism, Reynard the Fox (and his whole company) and Puss-in-Boots, arguably Br'ers Rabbit Fox and Bear (1880s) -- which makes the 20th Century Disney variant more of a conversation with folk legends than you'd expect from first glance.
Some of these have Warcraft equivalents, but very few are furry bait even where they're fan bait (eg, there's a lot more Draenai fandom than burning-legion-proper-as-a-whole fandom).
Thoroughlygruntled
41m ago
And judging by the size of the Star Wars toys section at Target compared to 10 years ago (or even when I was growing up in the mid-90s, more than a decade since the last Star Wars movie came out), it seems the golden goose is well and truly dead. When I was a kid, Star Wars had an entite aisle all to itself, literally every boy I knew had a lightsaber and dozens of action figures. I can't remember the last time I saw a kid playing with a Star Wars toy.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
43m ago
like the heroine actually had the power to solve all the problems in her if only she realised her own worth
Evolutionarily speaking, a woman's worth is largely dependent on immutable physical characteristics (modulo things like plastic surgery), so these sorts of stories tend to psychologically resonate with women. They don't have to go wrest their value from the external world like men do.
I once asked my mother why so many Hallmark movies copy the "It's a Wonderful Life" plot where a woman makes a life-altering wish, gets transported to another timeline, and then realizes she doesn't like it and has to find a way back. She responded, "oh, the movie is telling you that actually everything is great for you already, and you're just too stupid to realize it!"
or there was a solution that involves using emotional intelligence and likeableness to dissuade the villain from his villainous ways instead of defeating him
That one strikes me as perfectly reasonable and not necessarily anticlimactic...
Skulldrinker
46m ago
What are some examples of "girl" stories that aren't cringe pandering softcore-relationship-porn wish fulfillment only women find appealing?
That isn't a leading question, it's an honest one, I'm sure they exist. But the people who write those don't get jobs at Disney. A lot of these girl stories seem to be made completely independent of everything that's been learned about basic storytelling structure, like they've been made up from scratch instead of being built on a foundation of previous works.
I Think the only woman author I've read extensively is the Dragonriders of Pern books by Anne McCaffrey, which was back in high school. While I remember those having female protagonists, they did heavily feature men, many of whom were genuinely loved by the author and characters in-universe (the master harper), for being men. There was the full spectrum of heroes and villains of whatever gender. I suppose some of the male characters had realistically male flaws that stuff written for dudes would normally leave out, almost like the author had, you know, known men in real life. But in McCaffrey is very obviously some kind of spergy horse girl, and wasn't writing to be in line with 2020s corporate intersectional feminism.
Oh and Harry Potter. Those are at least competently written, and are generally appealing to everyone without pandering to one gender or another.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
58m ago
So, you take a work of fiction with a male main character. It falls into the "Men want to be him, women want to be with him" tropes and everyone is happy. You try to do the same thing with women? You create a woman that women want to be, and men don't want her or you create a woman men want, but women don't want to be her.
Ioper
1hr ago
Not a game but have you guys heard the Japanese VA for FFX? I thought the very inconsistent VA for the English version was a due language barrier during production but apparently not..
Ioper
1hr ago
Have you tried any roguelikes/lites? Easier to just get one to couple of runs in when you feel like it and then do something else. You don't have to stay super engaged for extended periods of time.
Crowstep
1hr ago
It would be interesting to know why this is
My gut says that it's something very profound and evolutionary. In the ancestral environment, a boy has to earn his place as a man (by hunting, fighting etc) whereas a girl grows into a woman without doing anything per se. It would make sense for boys to seek out male role models for that reason.
07mk
1hr ago
I saw on Twitter someone comment that the idea that the company that owns Marvel, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones would need to look for a new IP to help draw in young male audiences in their teens & 20s is pretty hilarious and absurd. You could probably have put any random 8th grade boy in charge of any one of these franchises back when Disney acquired them and turned them into at least good draws for that crowd, if not great. Yet the actual executives in charge appear to have less competence than that (or, perhaps, different incentives than making the best product or most money).
Makes me think there could be a modern remake of Big where he becomes a studio exec instead of a toy store VP and greenlights hits over the adult execs. Would have to be a longer timeframe and also, I'm guessing Big probably won't get a remake anytime soon given the implied statutory rape.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2hr ago
It would be interesting to know why this is. My intuition is that, if I picked up a mass-market piece of adventure literature with a girl protagonist, there would be a greatly increased likelihood of there being some point in the story where the dramatic arc is sabotaged in the way that is so typical of female-protagonist stories - like the heroine actually had the power to solve all the problems in her if only she realised her own worth, or there was a solution that involves using emotional intelligence and likeableness to dissuade the villain from his villainous ways instead of defeating him, or whatever. I would find this disappointing and anticlimactic, especially in literature of a tier so low that I have no expectation of the victory-by-leveraging-wonderfulness-of-women being written in a remotely interesting way. Could a similar line of expectations dissuade other prospective male readers?
Indeed, it doesn't seem like boys avoid e.g. the Metroid series of video games; even if the protagonist is revealed to be female, the genre guarantees that Samus will still only defeat the final boss by getting gud. I also do not get the sense that the fandom of wildbow's Worm (whose female protagonist does not get treated well by the universe at all) leans female.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2hr ago
Okay. I have a lot of thoughts about this, gathered over the years of my own (unsuccessful) attempts to be a published author.
To be clear, my failure is mostly lack of commitment (I have not written that many manuscripts, I have only intermittently tried to shop them around, I still mostly treat it as a hobby). I will assert that I am a good (publishable) writer. My posts here on the Motte may not reflect that, but I don't put much effort into writing here. I've been in critique groups, a few writing workshops (these are mostly worthless) and read all the books on writing (both the "how to write novels" ones and the "how to get published" ones). Feedback and my own (obviously not impartial) assessment is that if I really wrote like an author who is determined to be published and kept trying, I'm good enough to get published. (FWIW I did make it all the way to Baen's final round with one of my manuscripts- I got personalized feedback from the editorial committee telling me why it was an "almost but not quite." If you have researched publishing, you know that getting anything other than a polite "This showed real promise but it is not what we're looking for at this time" is rare.)
So first of all, you are right about the overwhelming bias in literary agencies. Fortunately they mostly advertise their biases, so you already know if they are looking for "diverse voices, especially from marginalized and underrepresented communities blah blah blah" there probably isn't much point in submitting to that agent. Most agencies list each agent's preferences, and usually there is one person (most often the one man) at the agency who specializes in things like science fiction and epic fantasy. If his (or occasionally her) profile doesn't flash all the same LGTBQ flags and "craving stories about found family, non-heterocentric romances," etc., then they just might be the sort who is looking for the next Brandon Sanderson or George R.R. Martin, and you have a shot.
But yeah, I would estimate that about 80% of literary agents today have a shingle that says, not quite in so many words, "If you are a straight white dude writing fiction that would appeal to straight white dudes, don't bother me."
It's always going to be a long shot no matter what. Always has been.
I would strongly recommend against misrepresenting your own identity. (Yeah, I've considered that myself.) It will come out eventually, and then your agent will dump you and you might become the next scandal/cancellation in the literary sphere. Also, you do want to eventually be known under your own name, right? Getting your foot in the door by pretending to be a queer BIPOC neurodivergent she/they will only ever look like you were trying to pull a stunt.
So a lot of people are telling you to skip trad publishing and go indie. This is a more viable option than it used to be. But the thing you have to realize about the real money-makers are that they either got extremely lucky (yes, that includes Larry Correia and John Scalzi and Matt Dinniman- hitting it big with a self-cultivated fanbase isn't just about writing a good book, it's often just about timing and catching a wave) or being a grinder. The real moneymakers on KU are people who churn out a book every month or two, whether it's werewolf romances or LitRPGs or harem fantasies, and while some authors can grind out passably entertaining stories at that speed, none of it is good writing. Their audiences are looking for more-of-the-same-please brain candy, not quality writing. Those authors also, of course, are doing it full time if they've started to make enough to live on.
The elephant in the room with self-publishing that hardly any of the self-publishing advocates really want to address is that you and ten million other people are all trying to do the same thing, and nowadays that includes five million Indians using AI. Kindle Unlimited was always looking for a gem in a sea of muck, and now that is true more than ever. Writing a book and throwing it online and hoping it gets "discovered" and builds an audience organically is an even bigger long shot than getting chosen by a rainbow-haired non-binary polyamorous pagan literary agent for your right-wing Catholic epic fantasy (I know that is not how you described it). So that means you have to do all that social media stuff and marketing yourself and getting "in" with various review and lit circles and hanging out with other aspiring self-pubbed authors who will boost each other and... if this sounds like a shit job to do what you really want to do (write) yeah, and everyone in that sphere will tell you tough shit, that's the game.
If you are serious about wanting to make a living from writing... you know that every single book on writing tells you the same thing ("don't quit your day job or have a supportive working spouse") for a reason, right? Even if you do get published (traditionally or self-published), your odds of making enough money to live on are extremely long. Successful authors, big name authors, authors you know, mostly do not live on their writing alone. If they do, it's because they do lots of other writing besides novels. They hustle for freelancing and editing and teaching gigs, they are constantly selling short stories, they do some journalism, they maybe get a gig writing a superhero comic for Marvel or DC. The number of authors who actually make a living, let alone a decent living, off their novels alone is tiny relative to all published authors. Absolutely, dream about becoming a Rowling or a King or a Sanderson, but don't set that as a realistic life goal.
rayon
waifutech enthusiast
2hr ago
Hyperdimension Neptunia's EN dub is head and shoulders above the rather generic JP, in both vidya and anime incarnations. With due respect to Rie Tanaka, Neptune's eternally-smug English VA is uncannily fitting and lived rent free in my head ever since, this is the dorkiest laugh I've ever heard and it sends me every single time I watch this clip (compare original). IMO Neptune and Noire's respective VAs legitimately carried most of the franchise, to the point that the absence of sovl Erin Fitzgerald from Cyberdimension onward due to [whatever bullshit was going on at the time, I forgot] tangibly contributed to me eventually dropping it.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2hr ago
What are the human-animal hybrids in the western imagination besides werewolves and centaurs and minotaurs? Not too many. Werewolves were all over vanilla WoW.
why not 20th century Disney style animal people
Cut-off should be whether it is an organic development of the Western imagination, or whether someone looked at trends and spreadsheets and determined that “catboy” looks adorable and will bring in players. Remember that “gothic” is itself a conversation with the Middle Ages and folk legends. Cat boys are unserious.
A lot of stuff in these movies are like this, reused badly or inexplicably. Even down to Holdo's Leia-style costuming, frankly. Leia dressed that way in ANH because she was still undercover in the Senate, still a princess. Why does Holdo dress like that in open warfare?
Are you asking for "girl stories" (that aren't smut-adjacent) or "stories written by women that aren't girl stories"?
I would argue that Harry Potter is not a girl story. While Rowling has some problems writing adolescent boys (and for that matter, her adult Cormoran Strike novels sometimes show a bit of women-writing-men weaknesses), the Harry Potter series was very much a boy's adventure (and was sometimes even criticized for that, despite its fanbase being majority female). However, as a story that appeals to girls yet doesn't also alienate boys, it's probably the ur-example today.
Dragonriders of Pern is, as you say, something that appeals to spergy horse girls and I have seen female authors inspired by it refer to it as "girl-canon," but back in the day it had a broad cross-gender appeal. (The "Harper Hall" sequel trilogy was much more of a for-girls thing.)
There are a number of female authors who write decent novels that appeal to men: Lois McMaster Bujold, Elizabeth Moon, C.J. Cherryh. Leaning more towards "feminine perspective but still readable by a man," Leigh Bardugo, Cathrynne Valente (the author is insufferably woke and has one of the worst cases of TDS I have ever seen, but I really do recommend her Fairyland books, which are both very much "girl" stories but something I would totally read to a boy), Naomi Novik (a lot of people love her Napoleonic wars-with-dragons Tremaire series though personally I didn't), Ursula LeGuin. And outside the SFF genre, Alex Marwood, Sara Gran, Lisa Brackman.
Really, it isn't that hard to find good female authors who aren't writing didactic man-hating feminist novels or romantasy. Finding books that appeal to young readers of both sexes is harder but not impossible.
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