one of my greatest victories, to this day, was taking a writing class where they endlessly dunked on “genre fiction,” writing a story in their beloved “magical realism” style, and getting a solid positive response from the professor for it
I just really cynically threw in like “yeah, their parents argue, and sad girls in snow, they’ll eat that shit up” and they 100% did
take that, you pretentious dipshits. I can do your style, but I guarantee you couldn’t do a sick-ass chuuni-dipshit tabletop if your life depended on it
@gardevoir What's the carrier bag theory of fiction?
-F
@Felthry an essay by Ursula K. LeGuin, which I found pleasantly thought-provoking https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ursula-k-le-guin-the-carrier-bag-theory-of-fiction
@gardevoir See I'm fond of saying that The Cold Equations is a Second-Order Idiot Plot (a sci-fi society which can only function if every single one of its inhabitants is a complete idiot). Every single operating procedure that led to "teenager gets jettisoned in space" makes no sense whatsoever.
Like I can definitely see bean-counters trying to push "zero margin for error" as a cost-cutting measure, but. They didn't check for stowaways until *after* they'd taken off! They didn't even *lock the door!*
@DizzyHMuffin I actually think I just want to expand it with like one sentence:
“not realizing that too much fuel had already been expended to put both of them into orbit, his choice failed to matter, as he was turned into a pancake during a high-speed lithobraking maneuver on arrival”
@DizzyHMuffin honestly, now that I think about it “someone choosing whether or not to sacrifice someone else, not realizing that both of them are already dead on the rails laid by capitalism” is itself a much stronger story
@gardevoir I like the way you think
“just wallow in sadness for a bit, you fuckers love that shit”
the only good thing about that class is that it introduced me to “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” which I really like but have never quite been able to successfully deploy