Chit-ChatSunday Social - open chat!

submitted by NutterButterFlutterStill waving into the void[M] from self.LGBDropTheT

sorted by:
top
newinsightfulfun
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]gadflyinajar 9 insightful - 1 fun9 insightful - 0 fun10 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

My(straight/maybe bi) girlfriend(bi) wants to be a novelist, (I'm also trying to write something) and I support her so much in it, but as she was describing the bare basics that she finally got down most of it was just "It's a fantasy world, but like this group of people are like the bad white cis people and this group is like the good trans people and also the former are capitalists. Also there's a magic system." She reads a lot of the "Woke YA" genre where everyone is trans and disabled. To be clear I didn't so much as complain for a second as she was telling me about her worldbuilding, because my job as her boyfriend right now is to support her and make sure she accomplishes what she sets out to do, she can get real critique elsewhere. Supporting the fuck out of her, but man, it just all seemed so copy-paste to me. Weird thing is that she's had an at-length conversation with me about my own thoughts about transgender BS and agreed with me, admitting that she and everyone else just goes along with the stuff "to be nice" but that she hides that she knows its not true. So she doesn't seem to think wokism makes any sense at all, but she consumes weird woke propaganda non-stop and her fantasy novel just lacks any sort of ideological nuance. She's smart as fuck I don't understand why this stuff is so sticky when people start believing it. Love her to death though, I just avoid the subject matter with her specifically.

[–]MarkJeffersonTight defenses and we draw the line 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Looking at it from the writer's perspective, It sounds like she just wants to go with subjects she's already well familiar with since she's just starting out. If she's a smart as you say then that propaganda/ideology she reads is just entertainment and/or inspiration to her. Example: I read a book about the after-death underworld(Diyu) for fun, which is distributed as a religious text. I'm sure many people do that with the holy books from Abrahamic religions. In some respects, it doesn't so much matter what exactly she's writing or whether she believes in it as long as she's writing and flexing that creative muscle. She's probably much more wary of the blank page at this point than whether she's making gender-identity themed fiction. The capitalist "bad white cis", and "good trans" are probably substitutable by Dirty Orcs and Noble Elves. It's the Fantasy, Magic use, and Moral battles that's the important part. She just needed some established archetypes and tropes and is grabbing them from the woke YA books. Copy-paste, like you said. Since you are bothered by it, perhaps you could suggest some other ones she could use instead from other fictional(or non-fictional) works that you know she likes.

[–]gadflyinajar 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

Yeah, honestly this occurred to me recently but as sort of a feeling I couldn't place in words, that familiarity of it. You phrased it well. I'm pretentious enough that in my writing that I show my friend (who is WAY more into writing than me) for criticism, I pretty much subvert expectations nonstop. The book is satire, which is good because if it wasn't, I'm sure that constantly pulling the "lol THIS but different!" card with tropes would get annoying. In my own head I think I internalized "Why copy/paste anything", which has helped me a lot with making my story enjoyable (At least as far as I can tell, I try to be my worst critic). In reality, genre-fiction has tropes. I doubt I will be the man to change that. Maybe it's just that I don't get why anyone would want to be a "genre-fiction" writer, but I'll have to think more about that because the idea isn't fully formed.

While I am bothered by it, I'm not more bothered by it than I am excited to see where this leads for her. My internet complaint is just venting, and less even about her than it is just tiredness of seeing woke stuff everywhere. I get that it's juvenile to be like "UGH GO AWAY WOKE GO AWAY WOKE" because there will always be ideas I disagree with, but I'm just so bored of it all and it seems to be unavoidable. I think that's mostly what bothers me about it. I feel like woke stuff gives me a headache at this point. I think I'd like to just forget that trends exist and live in the woods somewhere with Amish people or something.