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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Wollff@lemm.eetoAntiwork@lemmy.mlWe need a guillotine emoji.
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    11 months ago

    retributive violence against individual actors is not the same as dismantling oppressive systems

    My problem is that I only understand one of those things. The other is meaningless hot air, spewed exclusively by intellectual elites who may or may not have any idea of what that is even supposed to mean.

    work of creating resilient communities and networks of mutual aid to replace those heirarchies.

    And that explanation doesn’t tell me anything either. Put up a guillotine. Put the man in. Let the blade fall. I understand that. Create a network of mutual aid to replace hierarchies? Never saw that happen. Never learned about that, or how that is supposed to work. Don’t know what that is supposed to mean, or how that is supposed to play out.

    If you assume anyone knows about any of that, and if you assume that anyone can imagine anything concrete about that, you are out of touch. You are communicating ineffectively. At least to me. And probably to most other people as well.


  • Do you notice a pattern?

    Every single one of those is either SF or Fantasy.

    There are a lot of artsy lovers of literature out there who hate exactly those genres, and who have a burning passion to fix all the (perceived) flaws which (in their view) come baked into them.

    As I see it, that’s a big part of the problem: For the last century “a writer” was always “the literary type”. There were some nerds who pretended to be writers. And those wrote pulp, SF, fantasy, and comics. Those were not real writers. You wouldn’t hire one of those, if you wanted to have a real, well crafted story. At least that has been a rather common prejudice for the last 100 years or so.

    And now, all of a sudden (over the last 20 years), the most popular franchises, generating the most income, all turned into SF and Fantasy, while eating everything else in their path.

    In that context, I don’t think the current situation is all that surprising. If you want to hire “a real writer”, there is a good chance that you will hit one who despises what writers were taught to despise for the last hundred years. In an unlucky twist for everyone involved, that also happens to be what they now have to write.