rynling | Entries tagged with books

How Extortion Scams and Review Bombing Trolls Turned Goodreads Into Many Authors’ Worst Nightmare
https://time.com/6078993/goodreads-review-bombing/

One emerging issue is review bombing: when a coordinated group, or a few people with multiple accounts, intentionally tank a book’s aggregate rating with a flurry of one-star ratings and negative reviews.

“There are some legitimate great reviews going up and many people take it seriously,” Stein says. “But a lot of people aren’t writing actual reviews of the book. They’re posting reviews of a book well before it’s even published—before advanced copies are even out. So they’re just touting an author or they’re trying to take down an author.”

A new Stephen King book, Billy Summers, came out last month. This one is not for me, and it took me about two weeks to finish. When I was done, I went to Goodreads to see what other people thought. The novel had page after page after page of reviews that were posted before the book came out, most of which consisted of a single sentence like "the cover looks nice" or "the summary seems interesting."

I also noticed this with I Am Not Starfire, which is drawn by an artist I admire but based on an IP I don't care about. I wanted to know whether the book is any good as a stand-alone work, but what I found were dozens of one-line, one-star reviews saying things to the effect of "dumb fat bitch can't draw."

I was so proud of myself for having my own author page on Goodreads and posting reviews there, but I guess I showed up to the site just in time for it to become another Facebook. Damn. What can you do.

I’m currently reading Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life, which is about fungal mycelial networks. Like the vast majority of popular science books, it’s somewhat difficult to follow, but there are bits of interesting information scattered about. For instance:

When the English country house Haddon Hall was being renovated, a fruiting body of the dry-rot fungus Serpula was found in a disused stone oven. Its mycelial connections wound back through eight meters of stonework to a rotting floor elsewhere in the building. The floor was where it fed, and the oven was where it fruited.

That’s some Grade A haunted house good shit right there.

This is also the premise of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s horror novel Mexican Gothic, and the fact that this sort of total structural fungal infection is actually possible in real life is delightful.

Another thing I appreciate about Amazon is that they have literal tons of remaindered books in stock.

By "remaindered" books, I mean out-of-print titles that are brand new except for having a black line drawn in Sharpie across the bottom edge. I think that, back in the day, publishers used to tear the covers off of unsold books and ship them in giant crates to the author (ouch), but I guess these days they just send them to Amazon.

The really depressing thing about the fiction market is just how quickly current titles are remaindered. Like, you can have 50k followers on Twitter, and your book can appear on all the "best of" lists on the year it comes out, and it might have been longlisted for the National Book Award or whatever, but in less than five years all the unsold paperback copies will still be remaindered.

Because professional books reviews written by professional book reviewers tend to make me angry for an entire shitty rainbow of reasons, I always end up finding out about interesting books a few years after they come out in paperback. If I wanted to go through traditional channels, getting my hands on these books would be almost impossible, but Amazon has me covered.

> I've found myself reading a lot of work that's not written in English during the past two years.

Despite the stories I write, I am not interested in Evil Sexymen in real life.

But damn if I haven't found myself in an intense relationship with Amazon Dot Com, which uses its massive wealth and power to ship me books from around the world for a fraction of the cost of buying from a local indie bookstore.

It's actually one of my dirtiest secrets that I'm not a fan of small bookstores, and don't even get me started about libraries. I know how bad this sounds, but listen. Anyone who treats you like trash because you can speak and read languages other than English can go fuck themselves.

And anyway, I use the money I save on not paying some pretentious hipster's rent to buy zines and chapbooks and Kindle singles, many of which are much more interesting than professionally published books to begin with.

I just think that, if Amazon works for Dr. Chuck Tingle, then it works for me.

ETA: I should add that this does not apply to comic book stores. I love comic book stores, mainly because they stock zines and small-press comics but also because they tend not to be owned and staffed by assholes.

First, you don't have to read anything that hates you.

Second, you don't have to read anything that makes you hate yourself.

It doesn't matter who wrote it, or why. Consuming media is not activism.

I've often had this problem with the sort of Japanese male writers that American and British men seem to enjoy translating. Like, they'll pick the worst and most disgusting writers - mainly bestselling authors who are unironically into rape, pedophilia, and being racist against China and Korea - and try to pass off their sensationalist garbage as literature because "that's their culture."

But also, there are a lot of Americans who hate women and super hate gay people, and they justify their hate by making it about race or ethnicity. I completely understand why that sort of work is trendy right now, and why critics are so quick to praise it, but I still don't think it's "woke" to hate broad categories of people because of their gender or sexuality.

I've found myself reading a lot of work that's not written in English during the past two years. This may seem like escapism, mainly because it is. I'm definitely interested in diverse stories from diverse voices, but I also need to live my life without feeling forced to read highly praised books written by people who don't make any secret of the fact that they would cross the street to get away from me.

I know I was dismissive of this book in my previous post, but it actually gives four really good and specific pieces of advice that resonated with me.

First, the only real purpose of an MFA degree is to qualify you for academic teaching positions.

Second, you really don't want to enter academia, though. Especially not as an adjunct.

Third, it's okay not to invest your time and energy into projects you have a bad feeling about or just don't want to do, even if they're paid. This includes book reviews and ghostwriting.

Fourth, it's not going to benefit you or anyone else if you're awkward on social media or at in-person events, and it's totally fine not to do either if it makes you feel weird and gross.

There's also a fifth thing that blew my mind for all the wrong reasons: You need to self-advocate for reasonable compensation for speaking engagements at a level commensurate to your experience and the venue. Putting local book clubs, small-town libraries, and indie podcasts aside, a reasonable starting price is around $1,300 to $3,000.

This is wild to me, because I've given a number of invited lectures at huge events, including giant fan conventions like New York Comic Con and Anime Expo, and no one has ever offered to pay me anything. In fact, it was usually me who had to cover the cost of lodging and transportation through grants and subsidies that I had to apply for through my university. I'm actually really upset about this, and I can't help but wonder if maybe it's a gender thing.

The reason I'm reading David Sedaris is because a friend recently told me that he got cancelled on Twitter last November for making a joke about his own privilege during the pandemic that landed in a way that made it seem as if he was dunking on service workers. This reminded me of how much I like Sedaris's story "Go Carolina" (the first piece in the collection Me Talk Pretty One Day), which is about how all the gay kids got sent to speech therapy in elementary school.

Like, where is the lie. It's totally a thing that the Future Homosexuals of America were singled out in various ways by the public school system, and that particular essay is such a good story about how everything makes much more sense when you look back on your childhood as an adult.

This is an interesting, engaging, and well-written book filled with practical advice that reads like complete fiction and does not apply to me in any way, shape, or form.

I'm not hating on the author, I'm just saying that most people probably aren't going to have the experience of successfully writing and selling mass-market literary fiction, going on book tours, and being on bestseller lists.

Also, it doesn't address the most important thing to most writers interested in a book like this, namely, how the fuck do you find an agent who isn't a scam, how do you even. The idea seems to be that we all live in New York and go to magical book parties with our magical book friends, and agents will just magically find us once we're ready for prime time.

Another idea, which seems to exist primarily among people who aren't on the market and don't know how to Google things, is that you should try to reach out to the agents who represent the authors you love. Which is hilarious, because neither those big-name agents nor their entire big-name agency is ever open to accept unsolicited queries.

Given the lack of real talk surrounding finding an agent, I have a feeling that the process is actually distinctly distressing, which is why people don't like to talk about it. I guess I'll find out.

I'm going to be salty for a hot second and say that, even though I would very much appreciate an anonymous beta reader sometimes, I don't really trust most people younger than 25 because they haven't yet developed a broad understanding of what prose fiction is and how it's different from screenwriting.

The comment I always get from amateur writers is that my stories don't have enough "action." Which is bizarre. Like, this is a short story about overcoming grief, Karen. Or let's say it's a story about the quiet dread of realizing that your parents aren't infallible; it doesn't need explosions.

This is not to say that I don't enjoy writing plot and action (and sex), but rather that I don't think it's absolutely necessary for all work at all times. The same goes for the demand to have a flashy opening "hook" to a story, which I think is a sort of brain fungus people get from reading too much YA fiction to the exclusion of everything else.

Honestly, plot is overrated. What happens in The Makioka Sisters, one of my favorite novels? 540 pages of nothing. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, one of everyone's favorite novels? 620 pages of nothing. Yotsubato, the critically lauded and award-winning manga that is universally beloved by people in every single country on this earth? 15 volumes of nothing. The reason everyone loves novels by Stephen King so much isn't because of the scary things that happen, but because of the hundreds of pages when nothing happens at all. You just want to spend time in those vaguely creepy small towns with weird and interesting characters.

Character is just as important as plot. I would even argue that character is actually more important than plot, especially for older and more experienced readers who have passed the point of being surprised by any given plot development.

I don't mean to suggest that literary fiction can't have a strong plot (because just look at Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood), but rather that a story doesn't need "action" to be compelling to an audience. Hollywood screenwriting is fun, but prose fiction has its own distinct set of pleasures. Not everything can or should be Harry Potter.

If I were going to inch even further along this precarious branch I'm perched on, I might even say that the extreme de-emphasis of character is one of the main reasons why YA fiction writers are so awful and cruel to one another regarding matters of "representation," which is all they have to distinguish themselves when the over-saturated market doesn't allow them to write flawed characters who are actually interesting and memorable.

The new Stephen King novel is good. It is so good. What right does it have to be so good.

The premise is that there is a boy who can see ghosts. Ghosts linger near their site of death for a day or two. They’re super chill, and they always tell the truth. This is interesting, but it doesn’t really matter.

What matters is that the boy lives in New York City with his literary agent mom, who is having serious financial trouble due to the 2008 market crash and her brother’s medical bills. She’s also developing a problem with alcohol, which is enabled by her girlfriend, who is a cop. All the ghost stuff is incidental to what the reader actually cares about, which is whether this three-person family is going to be okay.

Every sentence is perfect, and there is not a word out of place. The chapters are short and neatly structured. The writing invites you in, and the next thing you know you’re a third of the way through the book. It’s like a one-to-one psychic transmission of story. Goddamn.

At a certain point I realized that, as a writer, I am never going to be Margaret Atwood, mainly because I have zero sense of duty to literary fiction as a genre or to society in general. But maybe, if I put in the work, I can try to aspire to the level of Stephen King.

I remember liking Junot Díaz's novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, so I read his short story collection This Is How You Lose Her. It's horribly misogynistic - like, it's about misogyny, and not really in a self-reflexive way - but it's fun, sort of. Until the last story, in which Díaz is more or less talking about trying to sleep with his undergrads.

( Read more... )

I still like the short story collection, though. This is one of those things, like Louis CK's "Jizanthapus" bit, that I'm just going to have to have complicated feelings about.

Kiss Me First is a novel from 2013 that feels like it was written specifically for me and my set of interests, and I enjoyed it immensely.

I guess the story’s genre is technically “psychological thriller,” but it’s really about a sheltered 23-year-old shut-in with Asperger’s slowly making friends and learning to find her place in the world.

Leila, the first-person narrator, is completely alone after her mother dies of MS. She doesn’t know her father, her grandmother hates her, she never went to college, she doesn’t have any friends from school, and she works a part-time tech job remotely from her bedroom in a small apartment above a restaurant. She spends most of her time online, playing World of Warcraft and posting on a thinly disguised version of the RationalWiki forums called, appropriately enough, Red Pill.

Eventually she comes to the attention of the founder of Red Pill, a man named Adrian. He essentially grooms her into accepting the job of impersonating a 30-something-year-old woman named Tess online so that the real Tess, who has paid him for this service, can go off and commit suicide without arousing suspicion.

Leila takes the job very seriously. Although she insists on seeing Tess as nothing more than a client, it’s clear to the reader that Tess is becoming her friend, and that she and Tess come to care about each other quite a great deal. It also becomes clear to the reader – although not so much to Leila – that Adrian is a narcissistic sociopath. Along the way, Leila ends up inadvertently catfishing Tess’s old boyfriend Connor, who falls in love with the persona she’s created. Again, the reader understands that this man is creepy, but Leila doesn’t. She also takes on a boarder in order to help pay the rent while she devotes herself to writing what amounts to real person fanfic about Tess, and this character – a (probably very gay) theater student named Jonty – ends up becoming a nonjudgmental moral center who helps Leila understand the potential of the world outside the confines of “rationalism.”

The novel’s main mystery is what happened to Tess, and I think that’s sufficiently addressed. The conclusion of the story is very satisfying, and everything fits together neatly without any surprise clues only coming to light at the end. In addition, the consequences of Tess’s online behavior are dealt with honestly and realistically, which was refreshing. What I personally found interesting about the story, however, was how Leila gradually opens up to the people she interacts with and finally starts to develop meaningful relationships.

I also admit that I have something of a strange fascination not with catfishing, necessarily, but with the difficulties and nuances of existing as a person online. The question of “could you find out so much about someone that you can successfully pass as them online” is intriguing, and the author digs deep into the mechanics of how this would (or wouldn’t) work.

The genre that I personally would assign to Kiss Me First is “coming of age story,” or perhaps more specifically “online friendship romance.” If nothing else, it was fun to read a novel set mostly online that isn’t filled with an older person’s bizarre approximation of how younger people speak to one another. This is a bit off topic, but that’s one of the main reasons why I have a lot of trouble reading contemporary YA novels: I cannot deal with tone-deaf text exchanges, especially when two characters are supposed to be friendly or flirting. I can’t really explain why this is so grating, except to shake my head and mutter that what the everloving fuck, no one actually speaks in Lolcat.

It's Not 'Weird' to Be an Adult Woman Who Loves Disney
https://www.glamour.com/story/its-not-weird-to-be-an-adult-woman-who-loves-disney

The trio say they don't go to the parks to relive their youth, though. Smith, Puga, and Walker all have successful careers in creative industries and approach Disneyland like a city’s downtown rather than a family-friendly vacation resort. They're not alone: With a rotating offering of seasonal Instagram-ready treats, celebrity chef partnerships, and a record for being the single largest employer of sommeliers, Disney’s Parks & Resorts have a lot to entice adults with money to spend. To Internet savvy, culturally involved guests like these three, Disneyland provides the same experiences they’d have elsewhere, only better.

When asked about the stigma attached to adult women visiting the parks, they shut it down. As these three see it, everyone’s a fan of something—why should enjoying a roller coaster through space in an intergalactic Tomorrowland be so different? “People are always going to judge no matter what,” says Walker. “You just have to sort of own what you love and be proud of that. Maybe they’ll never understand, but they’re missing out on something pretty special, and that’s okay. More for us in the long run.”

I’ve been slowly making my way through Rebecca Williams’s monograph Theme Park Fandom, and it’s one of the best academic books I’ve read in years. In the Introduction, Williams opens the discussion by referencing a cringe-inducing opinion piece written by a gross older man saying that adult fans of Disney are creepy, which was picked up by College Humor and adapted into an even more cringe-inducing video.

I won’t deny that some adult Disney fans are creepy. In fact, I can think of a specific acquaintance right off the top of my head who collects Disney enamel pins and is creepy as fuck about their aquisition habits, as well as a certain Tumblr account that posts bizarrely sexual photomanips of the characters from Frozen. I don’t think this level of creepiness has anything to do with Disney fandom, however.

I’m not personally a fan of Disney (or Marvel, or Star Wars), and I have no real desire to go to a theme park. (Maybe when Universal opens its Super Nintendo World attraction? But probably not, honestly.) Still, I don’t get why people think fans who go to theme parks are weird, aside from the obvious misogyny and homophobia. It sounds like the people who are into this sort of thing have a lot of fun, and they’re not hurting anyone. I mean, sure, Disney is a giant evil corporation, but we’re not going to get meaningful anti-trust legislation by harassing people on Instagram.

So I’m not planning on visiting Florida or California, but it’s been interesting to learn about the different subcultures surrounding the Disney and Universal theme parks, as well as how the fans participating in these subcultures have made use of social media to connect with each other while actually influencing the objects of their fandom at a surprisingly high corporate level.

I know “serious scholars” like to mock Fan Studies as an illegitimate subdiscipline of Media Studies, but I’m getting tired of “serious scholarship” about How Disney Is Anti-Feminist And Poisoning Our Children™. To me, it’s much more meaningful to learn about how this culture is created, who is creating it, and how it’s not just Rich White Men producing media that’s consumed passively. If nothing else, I feel that good scholarship should be like a documentary that shows you a part of the world you only vaguely knew existed and then explains how it influences its broader cultural context. Theme Park Fandom is really enjoyable to read, and it’s been helping me make sense of all sorts of aspects of contemporary American culture that I’ve always found a bit mystifying.

I’ve also been reading Carlye Wisel’s various bits of theme park journalism, and I’m a fan. I wonder, how does someone get a job like this?

Trans Wizard Harriet Porber And The Bad Boy Parasaurolophus
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08B386R6J

Let me be real with you. I paid actual human currency for this, and it's not bad.

I was intrigued by the description of the novel Born to Be Bound in the New York Times article that I read earlier about professionally published Omegaverse romance novels. ABO Batman fic with the serial numbers filed off? Sign me up!

I didn’t realize just how intense it would be. I can’t imagine being a literary agent and being like, Yes! This is absolutely the sort of thing that needs to be on the shelves at Barnes and Noble!!

(Content warning for everything there is to be warned for, probably.)

( Read more... )

I’m mostly indifferent to romance as a genre, and I’ve never read the giant novels about sexy cavepeople that everyone keeps telling me about, but I’ve always enjoyed the work of authors like Jacqueline Carey who write dark fantasy with strong erotic elements. That being said, Born to Be Bound is on a different level altogether.

I’m not wringing my hands in moral panic like someone whose first encounter with female-authored erotica was Fifty Shades of Grey, and I actually appreciate certain Omegaverse elements like pair bonding and same-sex parenting. Hell, I’ve had to respond to people’s comments on my own stories on AO3 in order to explain that the characters do not deliver academic lectures on safe sex because this is fiction, not a manual intended for educational instruction in the current best practices for whatever community exists to serve a particular fantasy.

I mean, don’t like, don’t read. Your kink is not my kink, and that’s okay. Born to Be Bound isn’t for me, but I’m happy it exists for the people who enjoy it. But just, wow. This is not “soft” Omegaverse by any means. Instead, the author has dialed all the genre’s tropes up to eleven without any sort of explanation, reflection, or analysis. How in the world did this sort of thing become mainstream romance fiction?

Monster Romance
One or more parties in a romantic relationship is inhuman, either literally or figuratively.

Beast Husbands
One of the parties (usually male) is human but has been cursed with an inhuman appearance.

Shitty Wizards
One of the main characters is a wizard who uses their powers for entirely selfish ends.

Witches
At least one female, male, nonbinary, or genderqueer character identifies as a witch.

Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell’s newest book, is about why we can’t catch people who are lying and don’t believe people who are telling the truth. Gladwell is very careful to divorce the act of not believing any given person from identity politics. What I believe he’s trying to suggest is that our cognitive failures have more to do with human psychology than the particularities of any given society in any given place at any given time. Moreover, suffering from a critical misunderstanding is something that could happen to any of us, regardless of race or gender.

Malcolm Gladwell makes a strong and convincing argument, because Malcolm Gladwell always makes a strong and convincing argument. Malcolm Gladwell is an excellent writer and very good at the sort of journalism he specializes in.

That being said.

Oh boy.

That being said, it is VERY FUCKING DISINGENUOUS for Malcolm Gladwell to remove gender from the equation when ALMOST EVERY SINGLE EXAMPLE he references involves people either not believing what a woman is telling them or not believing that a woman could be who and what she clearly is.

( Read more... )

Speaking as someone who is often on the receiving end of not being believed, even with impeccable credentials and a strong and assertive affect, I think all of the reasonable, intelligent, and sane reasons Malcolm Gladwell provides for why we can’t catch people who are lying and why we don’t believe people who are telling the truth apply if and only if gender is not a factor – but let’s be real, gender is absolutely fucking always a factor.

And honestly? Not only is it difficult to get people to believe me, it’s difficult to get people to even pay attention to what I’m saying in the first place. I’ve been wanting to do this for a good long time, but I have half a mind to start a running series of posts titled “Men Respond to My Emails” with screenshots illustrating just how abjectly absurd this tendency can be sometimes.

I'm a big fan of Gal Shir’s texture brushes, and yesterday I read his self-published book View Insights, which is about how to grow a following on social media, specifically Instagram.

The first 2/3 of the book contains good general life advice, such as:

(1) Do what you actually enjoy doing
(2) It’s not necessary to quit your day job
(3) Divide your ideas into “big projects” and “small projects”
(4) Learn how to balance and prioritize your projects

The book also contains a few pieces of advice that are predicated on assumptions that strike me as somewhat “masculinist,” such as the idea that no one cares about pictures of your face or your personal life – which is not even remotely true in the online spaces I have experience with, where people tend to care just as much about the artist as they do the art. So your mileage may vary, I guess.

What I found interesting about this book was the last third, in which the author digs deep into how Instagram’s algorithms work and why they work in the ways they do. Tumblr is an altogether different platform that works in different ways for different reasons, but Shir corroborates some of the tendencies I’ve noticed on Tumblr, such as:

(1) The “value” of a post is algorithmically ranked within a limited number of tags
(2) This “value” is partially dependent on the “user rank” of the poster
(3) This “value” is also determined by interaction from other “high-rank” users
(4) The level of interaction needs to be significant, like commenting or sharing (and not simply liking)
(5) This “high-rank” interaction needs to happen within the first few hours of posting

A few years ago I speculated (here) about what I called “anchor blogs” on Tumblr, which are blogs that may not necessarily post original content but still manage to be influential. I was thinking about how actual person-to-person social networks tend to function within fandom; but, if this algorithmically based “user rank” theory is true, this would help explain the patterns I noticed relating to how any given post spreads.

Tumblr has passed its prime, so I’m not sure if any of this still applies; but, according to this theory, this is what you would have needed to do in order to become a “high-rank” user:

(1) Interact with a lot of content
(2) At a significant level
(3) Within hours of it being posted
(4) And follow a lot of people
(5) While having “high-rank” followers

What all of this boils down to is that these two platforms reward “engagement,” which is essentially extroverted behavior combined with the condition of being on your phone all the time. Shir says that, when he first started trying to build a following on Instagram, he would devote three hours a day to interacting with other posts and people on the platform during peak hours. Unlike Instagram (and Facebook), I’m almost 100% certain that Tumblr doesn’t apply a secondary “positivity rating” to posts and comments, but actually being genuinely friendly probably doesn’t hurt.

This three-part documentary series on Netflix is really upsetting, and I mean really upsetting. It's difficult to write a summary, but basically, a group of people on Facebook tries to track down a man who posts videos of himself killing animals, thus giving him the attention he craves and inspiring him to post a video of himself killing another human being. The documentary itself is well-made and doesn't show the grisly bits of the actual videos, but it's still not a pleasant experience to watch. Thankfully, there's nothing particularly sensationalist about the project, and the "internet nerds" are presented as normal and intelligent adults.

The director has said that he created this documentary for the purpose of spreading awareness, which I appreciate. My experience with trying to get my anxiety treated over the course of the past year has been that a lot of people - especially people born before around 1980 or so - just don't understand how violent and upsetting online engagement can be sometimes. Even people my age and younger haven't responded well when I try to talk about this, and common responses include:

- Maybe the person attacking you has a mental illness. (That's not a valid justification.)
- Maybe you shouldn't spend so much time online. (That's not the problem.)
- Maybe you deserve this. (No one "deserves" death and rape threats.)

What I think people who haven't experienced extended episodes of online harassment aren't getting is that sometimes it's possible to encounter people on the internet who are genuinely scary. When you become the target of a person like this (as one of the primary "narrators" in Don't F**k With Cats does), it has nothing to do with you specifically, and there's really nothing you can do about it.

I also recently read the book Nobody's Victim, which is written by Carrie Goldberg, a lawyer and advocate for victims of internet stalking and harassment. This book is just as upsetting as Don't F**k With Cats, especially since many of the people Goldberg represents (as well as Goldberg herself) have had to suffer through intense and pervasive victim blaming. No one they go to for help understands what happened to them, and everyone thinks the fact that they became the targets of scary people is somehow their fault. Very few people believe what they're saying in the first place, and a lot of the evidence they produce to document what they've experienced is used against them.

I personally haven't been the target of anything as severe as what appears in Don't F**k With Cats and Nobody's Victim (thank goodness), but it was still very easy for me to recognize the patterns of how popular online platforms enable abusive modes of behavior and the hate crimes of disturbed people. I'm finally starting to see people within fandom share resources (like this) discussing best practices regarding how to process and handle these types of encounters, and that's wonderful, but I'm really looking forward to there being a greater awareness of these issues in mainstream society as well.

From the beginning of the 2016 American election cycle, a popular way to signal social belonging on Tumblr has been to reblog angry posts about J.K. Rowling like the one above.

J.K. Rowling isn't perfect. No human being on this earth is perfect, and Rowling is no exception. Rowling's books are far from perfect, and I have to admit that I personally don't particularly like or enjoy them. It's important to critique popular media, and it's reasonable to hold public figures to basic standards of decency. Still, I'm concerned about posts like the one above, which promotes decontextualization as a performance of progressive political ideology.

It's difficult to make generalizations, so I want to refer to the post above to demonstrate what I mean.

( Read more... )

Again, it's vitally important to think critically about popular culture, and I strongly believe that public figures should be held to basic standards of decency. I am all for critiquing the Harry Potter series and Rowling's creative decisions. That being said, the trend of posts on Tumblr that hold one progressive female artist or activist responsible for everything that's wrong in the world by means of aggressive decontextualizations of what she's actually doing and saying are frightening, especially since they're starting to recirculate within left-leaning spaces in advance of another election cycle.

In the end, who does it benefit to say that books about respecting difference and resisting authoritarian violence even when not everyone on your side is perfect are "problematic" and are only read by bad and stupid people? Given that the Harry Potter series is the primary gateway a lot of younger kids have into enjoying books, who does it benefit to say that reading itself is something that's only done by bad and stupid people?

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Rynling R&D

Entries tagged with books

Another Sinking Ship

Mushroom (Murder?) House

Re: Consuming Media Is Not Activism, Part Two

Re: Consuming Media Is Not Activism

Consuming Media Is Not Activism

Before and After the Book Deal, Part Two

Re: That One Time Laura Almost Poisoned the President

Before and After the Book Deal

Plot Is Overrated

Later

Junot Díaz

Kiss Me First

Theme Park Fandom

Another Delightful Visit to the Tingleverse

Born to Be Bound

My Favorite Genres

Talking to Strangers

How Instagram and Tumblr Work

Don't F**k With Cats

A Fun Tumblr Hot Take