- cross-posted to:
- techtakes
- cross-posted to:
- techtakes
(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)


Skimming that script in much the same mood as deciding to watch Battlefield Earth, and the impression I get in addition to the points you make is just how joyless it is. I mean, I have an AO3 account. I grew up with some pulp in my literary diet. Sometimes you want to indulge in a genre convention just because, well, dammit, swordfights! Secret passages! Ah, Watson, terribly sorry to rouse you at an hour that God has possibly forsaken, but the game’s afoot! I can think of more than one adept fic writer who has gone, “Yep! This is the chapter wherein there is only one bed, ha ha!”
Yud provides neither the pleasures of interrogating genre conventions nor those of wallowing in them. Joyless. The storytelling equivalent of the piss filter on Ghibli-ripoff slop.
Joyless and also bloodless. Like, there is plenty to criticize about the “I guess I got isekai’d to Gor and now I’ve got a sexy slave harem” premise. But somehow he still manages to write with barely any actual empathy for the victims of that system, foregrounds how hard it is for our hero to bravely abstain from that sweet wolf sex and how maybe it’s not even the right thing to do, and then after confronting the horrifying realities for all of one scene proceeds to write the character out of the story without even giving her a fucking name in the text. Like, he somehow wrote a story about rescuing sex slaves that feels more pro-sex-slavery than a story that just embraces the sleaze of it.
“My name is Avrietzur Detkowsky. I am the Summoned Hero, brought from Earth to Elgor 69. I do not wish to water you.”
“Master, I do not understand. I am plant. I am to be watered.”
“I cannot explain, but it goes against my Earth customs to water plant.”
“But Master, surely we will be less conspicuous in our journey together if you water me, as I am plant.”
“Oh, I wish I could explain the tortures of my soul, as I struggle to maintain morality in the face of temptation. But no one on Elgor understands, least of all my traveling companion, plant.”
“Master, please, I am plant. I am potted. The runes on my ceramic pot clearly spell out that I am plant and I belong to Master.”
[much later]
“Oh no. Plant, my faithful companion, has fallen off a cliff and died.”
It feels like this has to be some kind of karmic balance to the webfic ecosystem for the existence of the John Brown Isekai.
Right, deconstruction and lampshading and playing straight and exaggerating tropes are all themselves tropes – but our esteemed gentlemen is above tropes, so all he can do is glance vaguely in these various directions without actually going anywhere.
Eliezer is so above tropes he has an entire page of tropes dedicated to him
It’s funny because the only way to be above tropes is to be incoherent and meaningless, and yud is kind of that