For me, shitty style / lazy writing make me put a book down immediately. I was raised on the worship of style you find in writers like Flaubert or Nabokov (who also happened to have deplorable political views) and I can’t shake it.

Others commented here recently that making every female character in a story into a sex object is a bad thing.

What are some reasons you’ll put a book down after you’ve spent at least a little time giving it a try?

  • BeamBrain [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    These are things I mostly see in fanfiction and their prevalence is a large part of why I rarely read fanfic anymore, but:

    • Poorly understood and badly applied historical/scientific concepts, especially evopsych
    • Characters acting as blatant strawmen for people/positions the author doesn't like
    • Protagonists who effortlessly pulverize all challenges laid before them
    • When the story enters the author's magical realm
    • Using atrocities like rape and slavery in a tone-deaf and shallow manner for cheap shock value
    • UlyssesT
      ·
      1 month ago

      deleted by creator

      • keepcarrot [she/her]
        ·
        3 years ago

        So many of my friends at the sci-fi club liked that back in the day. smh

      • FidelCashflow [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        I maintian hp:mor is good. The slaver and rape stuff was from the original. It is otherswise a quest to overthrow the bourgeois and give everyone universal healthcare.

        • UlyssesT
          ·
          1 month ago

          deleted by creator

          • FidelCashflow [he/him]
            ·
            3 years ago

            You are correct in both that it is at this point tedious to examine, and that isn't what yud ment to write. It is entirely luck and his lack of foresight that allowed thst work to be any good at all. If he possed the skill to write what he wanted it would have been garbage. I think he still has me blocked on Facebook for calling hpjev a maoist

            • UlyssesT
              ·
              1 month ago

              deleted by creator

              • FidelCashflow [he/him]
                ·
                3 years ago

                I will die on the hill that he is a weiner and objectively wrong about his own work. It accidentally has good stuff in it because he copied from better writers and didn't file the serial numbers off.

                All the miri stuff is seperate and painfully childish. Just straight brainworms and sophistry As he blocked me from the sub-reddit for reminding him. Capitalism is the ultimate paperclip maximizer.

                • UlyssesT
                  ·
                  1 month ago

                  deleted by creator

                  • FidelCashflow [he/him]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    I have a very specific and parasocial beef with the guy. Probably the biggest part of my being able to imagine a better world and become a filthy commie was through rationalism. I tried to get a less wrong meetup going, emailed him a bit, visited other groups. It was what allowed me to imagine a better world was possible after obama broke my faith in the dnc. It was the specific failure of that group to be less wrong that primed me for chapo and bernie. I still have specific enmity for them starting a fucking cult dedicated to logic and consistently being irrationally credulous fools.

                  • BeamBrain [he/him]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    He's one of those "too smart for school" types, which I used to think I was back in high school. Then I went to college and had to overcome serious academic challenges for the first time, and I realized just how limited that knowledge was. He dropped out of high school and never went to college, so he never had that sort of humbling experience. Instead he, as you say, gets his ego inflated by billionaires because he tells them what they want to hear.

        • BeamBrain [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          The slaver and rape stuff was from the original.

          This definitely wasn't in the original:

          CW: Rape, racism

          Draco snarled. "She has some sort of perverse obsession about the Malfoys, too, and her father is politically opposed to us so he prints every word. As soon as I'm old enough I'm going to rape her."

          There had been ten thousand societies over the history of the world where this conversation could have taken place. Even in Muggle-land it was probably still happening, somewhere in Saudi Arabia or the darkness of the Congo. It happened in every place and time that didn’t descend directly from the Enlightenment.