Twitter mob gets fantasy novel cancelled.

[Synobun]

I like the pick of Rowling in this discussion, as the YA Twitter crowd almost universally recognizes her as an irredeemable perpetrator of racism and transphobia now and yet she's still an absolute juggernaut in the YA industry.

 

[Lexicus]

sure, please hit me up with that link. I also appreciate the post about the connection between protestantism and SJWism, fascinating stuff.

Here is a bit of relevant text from the Atlantic piece:
The secularism of this new therapeutic approach to racial progress may seem fundamentally dissimilar to the previous two phases. In fact, however, third-wave antiracism is a profoundly religious movement in everything but terminology. The idea that whites are permanently stained by their white privilege, gaining moral absolution only by eternally attesting to it, is the third wave’s version of original sin. The idea of a someday when America will “come to terms with race” is as vaguely specified a guidepost as Judgment Day. Explorations as to whether an opinion is “problematic” are equivalent to explorations of that which may be blasphemous. The social mauling of the person with “problematic” thoughts parallels the excommunication of the heretic. What is called “virtue signaling,” then, channels the impulse that might lead a Christian to an aggressive display of her faith in Jesus. There is even a certain Church Lady air to much of the patrolling on race these days, an almost performative joy in dog-piling on the transgressor, which under a religious analysis is perfectly predictable.


Add in the tendency to let pass certain wrinkles in the fabric as “complex”—the new religion, as a matter of faith, entails that one suspends disbelief at certain points out of respect to the larger narrative. Beyond a certain point, one must not press too hard when asking a priest why God allows bad things to happen to good people.

Even more strongly put by Fisher in Exiting the Vampire Castle:
The problem that the Vampires’ Castle was set up to solve is this: how do you hold immense wealth and power while also appearing as a victim, marginal and oppositional? The solution was already there – in the Christian Church. So the VC has recourse to all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented, and which Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals. This priesthood of bad conscience, this nest of pious guilt-mongers, is exactly what Nietzsche predicted when he said that something worse than Christianity was already on the way. Now, here it is…

 

[adcarrymaokai]

Also there's the uncertainty about Rowling and her statements.

But the sorting hat was trans!!!11!

Also, the depiction of bank goblins is literally an antisemitic trope, but I bet @Mouthwash won't care about it because Rowling is a libertarian.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

what really happened when Voldemort entered Harry's "private quarters"? Am I to believe that a grown man wasn't able to kill a mere toddler? What exactly did he do with his magic stick that is so ..unspeakable? Why is Harry so shy and weird and seems to have little sexual urges, almost bordering on asexuality?

Why is there a big ass snake in the 2nd book that is after Harry, a big snake from the post, hmmh yes, quite Freudian. So Voldemort is represented by a snake of all animals. In the first movie he is on the back of someone's forehead..I mean head. And he is bald. So it looks like a forehead. Anybody take issues with this? I'm just asking questions..

 

[schlaufuchs]

I like the pick of Rowling in this discussion, as the YA Twitter crowd almost universally recognizes her as an irredeemable perpetrator of racism and transphobia now and yet she's still an absolute juggernaut in the YA industry.

That wasn't intended :3.

To me, Rowling and Lucas represent the best exempla of the problem of tying interpretation and criticism inherently and unassailably to to pursuit of a "true" understanding of some kind of an authorial intent. Mostly because they a) appear to change their minds constantly about what that intent was, b) represent that change not as a change in actuality but as an absolute reflection of their initial vision which is either noncontradictory, or contradicts only inasmuch as some kind of impediment prevented them from effecting their true vision originally, c) that these changes often, at times even objectively, render the original work less nuanced and less interesting, and d) wield their status as authors with authoritarian force, branding anybody who contradicts or disputes this interpretation-handed-down-from-on-high as heretical.

Tolkien (of course Middle Earth wasn't an allegory for WWII!) and Bradbury (I did-did not-did-did not intend for Fahrenheit 451 to be about censorship) would also be good subjects in this.

 

[adcarrymaokai]

My problem with Rowling is not even her crappy book about a college athlete who grew up to be a cop, but her Twitter tirades. She is using her author authority (no pun intended) to spread bad political views and hit pieces against people she dislikes. You'd think someone who has made millions and will continue millions for the rest of their lives can just calm the heck down and not spread bad takes all over social media... but you'd be wrong, I guess. Rowling is in the club with Elon Musk, Kanye West, and other people of questionable worth* spreading bad ideas and posing as modern geniuses. I am just tired of it.

*Ok, Kanye's music is (was) actually good, unlike anything Musk or Rowling produced.

 

[schlaufuchs]

My problem with Rowling is not even her crappy book about a college athlete who grew up to be a cop, but her Twitter tirades. She is using her author authority (no pun intended) to spread bad political views and hit pieces against people she dislikes. You'd think someone who has made million and will continue millions for the rest of their lives can just calm the heck down and not spread bad takes all over social media... but you'd be wrong, I guess. Rowling is in the club with Elon Musk, Kanye West, and other people of questionable quality* spreading bad ideas and posing as modern geniuses. Now that's really infuriating.

*Ok, Kanye's music is (was) actually good, unlike anything Musk or Rowling produced.

Eh, I think Rowling's original work was and still is great. There's a lot of great stuff in there, for example Dumbledore's driving motivations, both in why he hesitated for so long to confront Grindelwald, and why he treated Harry the way he did. There's plenty of nuance, and a ton of avenues for interpretation in the text. She's gotten a lot worse as she's gone on though. Like yeah Dumbledore being gay makes sense in some respects, and it certainly adds another layer of interest to interpretation of his motivations (although it's really not necessary - I think a textual reading on its own is more than sufficient to create satisfying pathos), but as she's gone on she's just gone totally off the rails. It's gotten to the point now that her revelations and retcons are actively ruining my enjoyment of the original books, and so now, just as I did with Lucas and the subsequent Star Wars releases, I mostly just ignore them, or else read them as fanfiction - sometimes cool, sometimes interesting, but ultimately noncanon.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

My problem with Rowling is not even her crappy book about a college athlete who grew up to be a cop, but her Twitter tirades. She is using her author authority (no pun intended) to spread bad political views and hit pieces against people she dislikes. You'd think someone who has made millions and will continue millions for the rest of their lives can just calm the heck down and not spread bad takes all over social media... but you'd be wrong, I guess. Rowling is in the club with Elon Musk, Kanye West, and other people of questionable worth* spreading bad ideas and posing as modern geniuses. I am just tired of it.

*Ok, Kanye's music is (was) actually good, unlike anything Musk or Rowling produced.

it's a shame really that ye has to be such a dork. it makes him simultaneously cute and unlikeable. he's aware of his unprecedented influence on fukboys all over the earth, yet does the most dumb and inane horsehocky with it.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

To me, Rowling and Lucas represent the best exempla of the problem of tying interpretation and criticism inherently and unassailably to to pursuit of a "true" understanding of some kind of an authorial intent. Mostly because they a) appear to change their minds constantly about what that intent was, b) represent that change not as a change in actuality but as an absolute reflection of their initial vision which is either noncontradictory, or contradicts only inasmuch as some kind of impediment prevented them from effecting their true vision originally, c) that these changes often, at times even objectively, render the original work less nuanced and less interesting, and d) wield their status as authors with authoritarian force, branding anybody who contradicts or disputes this interpretation-handed-down-from-on-high as heretical.

This is pattern human behavior apparently.

etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/1113/1/Why_Marry_(J_Carter).pdf

"Narratives of whirlwind romances were rare but the significance and meaning of love, as well as the romantic image of ‘the one true love’, led the respondents to define love in a very specific way. Thus it was common for them to denounce the love they felt in past relationships in the form of ‘I thought it was love . . .’. Michelle was a good example of this: ‘I thought I was in love with him and in hindsight it was quite an inappropriate [relationship]’. Michelle later ‘realizes’ that it was not love at all."

I can't say I fault Rowling much for it when people literally do the same thing when it comes to how they feel about potential/past life-long (or not so life-long) partners (I do fault Rowling for other things). It's not a matter of details of how the relationship formed, or how it developed over time. A simple change to the present status of the relationship can straight up alter people's own internal narrative/beliefs about what they previously thought.

So did Rowling *really* always consider Dumbledore gay for example, or is that just how she remembers it now? Knowing that people remember things differently in the moment vs later, is that a particularly meaningful distinction? If we reject her words in this context, what could we reasonably accept?

There's always the possibility that someone is just lying too, but in regards to stuff like this I don't really care.

 

[schlaufuchs]

I mean, that's essentially the point, and at the heart of the essay "The Death of the Author"

Essentially what it means is that at the point of publication, the author splits into two people. There is the capital-A Author, who wrote the work, and dies at the point of creation, never-again able to comment on meaning and intention, and the lower-case a author, the physical person who continues to live after publication. The author might be able to comment on what they think the Author meant in expressing a certain passage, but the author, just like all other members of the audience, are only commenting on things second-hand, and are ultimately subject to their own lens and biases. In strict reading, the author's interpretation is not inherently any better or worse than any other academic or fan's. My understanding of where literary criticism stands today is that the author, more than anybody else, is best able to approach an understanding of the Author's intent, and thereby an author's commentary on what they thought they meant can be useful in interpreting aspects of a work and revealing components of a work which you the audience hadn't considered before, but ultimately this should be treated as a tool in an individual's critical toolbag, just as adopting a Marxist, Postcolonial, Freudian, or Deconstructuralist approach can be, and ultimately these ought to be means towards achieving a higher personal understanding or appreciation for a work, not as ends for achieving some objective, perfect interpretation.

There's nothing per se wrong with Rowling continuing to comment on her own works and provide personal interpretation and criticism. That's great. The problem I have with it, same as I have with Lucas, is the way that she deploys her status as the author as a cudgel to silence alternative readings (sometimes literally and physically, as in the case of textual retcons or the destruction of older editions of a work).

 

[adcarrymaokai]

Hermione's cat was a Black Lives Matter activist.

 

[Lexicus]

I mean my favorite thing about Rowling is how the same woman who wrote:
"That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend. Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty, and innocence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing. Nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic is a truth he has never grasped."

also writes 16-tweet threads bagging on Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters, it's hilarious

 

[Valka D'Ur]

This is the novel: "In the Cyrilian Empire, Affinites are reviled and enslaved. Their varied abilities to control the world around them are unnatural--dangerous. And Anastacya Mikhailov, the crown princess, might be the most monstrous of them all. Her deadly Affinity to blood is her curse and the reason she has lived her life hidden behind palace walls."

To those wondering about what the terrible crime was - it was having non-race based slavery in a fantasy universe, thereby, somehow, denying the experience of black Americans. This is now the party line of the social justice movement.

Spoiler NSFW :

You can read more about the craziness here.

So apparently black Americans were the only people ever enslaved in the history of the planet and nobody can include slavery as a theme in a novel without them.

Wow.

This seems like a big deal for fantasy readers. I've never heard of an actual novel being cancelled before.

Books can be canceled for any number of reasons. There's a reason, for example, why we're not allowed to discuss story ideas in the TrekLit forum at TrekBBS. Some of the pro Star Trek authors read that subforum and post there, and one day one of them read a post by someone who included an idea for a novel... and the author informed us that he just had to ditch the novel he'd been in the middle of, as the member's post touched too closely on something that was in the novel. For legal reasons, authors have to be paranoid about not using other people's ideas, lest said fan(s) sue them.

This is why, when I post there, I sometimes put a disclaimer at the top of my post, telling the pro authors not to read my post since it contains a story idea or fanfic plot (I do this as a courtesy to them in the non-TrekLit subforums since two of them tend to read and post in many parts of that site).

Book burning has returned. You could see it coming with the Proper-speak on campuses. How much longer til we get the next Joseph Mcarthy seeking to stamp out MAGA.

J

It never really went away in some parts of the world or even in some jurisdictions. People are trying to get The Handmaid's Tale banned because since the TV series started, they think it's all about Trump and/or the Middle East, even though the book was published in 1985 and Margaret Atwood stated that her primary inspiration was the Puritans.

The average reader doesn't have any power at all.

Maybe not on Twitter, but sometimes an Amazon review can persuade people away from a book, if it's sufficiently scathing.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

wow, what an understandable and succint summary of DotA. nice one Owen, you have a way with words.

 

[adcarrymaokai]

So apparently black Americans were the only people ever enslaved in the history of the planet and nobody can include slavery as a theme in a novel without them.

Wow.

Literally 3 pages of the thread discussed how this is not true and just something marginal reactionaries said on Twitter, and that's the conclusion you arrived at? Groundbreaking.

Maybe not on Twitter, but sometimes an Amazon review can persuade people away from a book, if it's sufficiently scathing.

I highly doubt that. Reviews are reviews, but I don't make up my mind based on what other people think.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Literally 3 pages of the thread discussed how this is not true and just something marginal reactionaries said on Twitter, and that's the conclusion you arrived at? Groundbreaking.

Sarcasm. It is a difficult concept.

I highly doubt that. Reviews are reviews, but I don't make up my mind based on what other people think.

When I'm unsure of a book or product I do read the reviews. Most of the time I prefer to make up my own mind, but if someone says a thing isn't put together well or is not as advertised, that's a good indication that I would regret buying it.

I daresay that Deborah J. Ross might have lost a couple of sales on one of her Darkover novels from people who were really looking forward to a proper sequel to Stormqueen! and got a piece of novel-length drivel instead. I wrote a really scathing review of said sequel. It's a shame because most of her novels are very good.

 

[adcarrymaokai]

Sarcasm. It is a difficult concept.

Pulling J.K. Rowling here? That wasn't sarcasm until you said so.

 

[yung.carl.jung]

I highly doubt that. Reviews are reviews, but I don't make up my mind based on what other people think.

so how do you make up your mind about a book before reading it. do you.. judge it by it's cover? do you judge it by it's author, a fallacy at best? better yet, what do you judge a book from a lesser known author, who doesn't have a wiki page by? just the title or what? "genre"? you see this is quite the conundrum.

what other people think (or even just how other people summarize for example) can be quite helpful, which is why so many people read music and film reviews. roger ebert is just a glorified Amazon reviewer.

 

[adcarrymaokai]

so how do you make up your mind about a book before reading it. do you.. judge it by it's cover? do you judge it by it's author, a fallacy at best? better yet, what do you judge a book from a lesser known author, who doesn't have a wiki page by? just the title or what? "genre"? you see this is quite the conundrum.

what other people think (or even just how other people summarize for example) can be quite helpful, which is why so many people read music and film reviews. roger ebert is just a glorified Amazon reviewer.

I actually hate reading and therefore don't read books.* With other content, like games, I actually get the game, or better yet a demo, and play it to form my opinion of whether I like it or not. For something like Civilization, there are literally let's play videos from developers showing gameplay, so you can figure out whether that's something you want to play or not. Game footage is not an opinion (though it can certainly be manipulated to present the game in a better light, but that's capitalism).

*I am just an unimaginative person who can only read math and computer science textbooks and who needs a visual component in fiction works to be immersed in them, which is why my choice of entertainment is video games and youtube/cartoons (cartoons are generally more grotesquely fictional than movies or TV series).

 

[yung.carl.jung]

I guess with the advent of the internet all novelty ceases to exist. If there is an obscure band you just google it. you don't go into a record store anymore and pick something based on the cover, or based on hearsay. it's literally right infront of you, it's in your phone, in your laptop, in your pc. If there is an obscure game you watch an LP before you buy it. if there's an actor/actress you like, you can find high quality pictures of every single one of their limbs, and probably private pictures of them doing private stuff, in a matter of miliseconds. if there is some faraway island no one has ever set foot on, chances are there are google photos of it. if there is some distant star, you head over to the NASA page and check out how it looks from the hubble space telescope or something. the entire world is at your feet 24/7, 365 days a year. we're ****** aren't we?