Exactly my thoughts. Like im not saying it makes the book better but that's just King not writing a book well. Does not need to be anything more than that.
Wow reading your comment I was literally about to ask how you feel about "Lost Girls" and then you mentioned it. Only learned about it today. I love Watchmen and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, which is all the Moore I've read but damn.
Well now I'm curious how you feel about Watchmen. I am mentally prepared to have one of my favorite things brutally criticized at this time.
It absolutely is not. Like everything else Snyder does it's fascist trash and he doesn't understand the point.
CW: discussion of sexual assault
spoiler
I get what you're saying, but I never felt like Silk Spectre I's odd "being nostalgic about rape" thing was meant to say that women categorically love being raped. Then again, I never knew that was something that came up in other Moore works so I might have to kill the author to believe that I guess? I just, even as a highschool boy with bad attitudes about sex and women I didn't read it that way. I also think its a relatively small part of Watchmen and that so much of the rest of it is good and makes points that leftists should agree with that I can't understand casting out the entire work for it.
I also think that if I wasn't aware of Moore using this device frequently, that showing a woman having a different reaction and coping mechanism regarding her trauma isnt actually bad? Its fairly realistic actually because people react to trauma differently? Like me and my sister were both emotionally abused by my mom but have VERY different attitudes about her today, with her forgiving her and welcoming her back with open arms and me going no contact.
Also yeah, I categorically disagree with Snyder doing Wathcmen better because Snyder misunderstood Rorschach too much for that. And Rorschach is a much more important part of Watchmen than the rape of Sally Jupiter and Sally's attitude about it.
Never read any King because idk I guess I always thought it was too middle-brow but just speaking generally, I prefer a book that is more fucked up vs one that is less fucked up. The idea that nothing sexually perverse, uncomfortable or immoral should be written in a book is dull. The story does work without that bit obviously since they nixed it for TV, and without reading it I can't really comment on whether it works in the book or not, but in the abstract, having all your child characters be forced to have group sex in a sewer to defeat an evil clown probably improves a lot of stories. Harry Potter woulda been better that is for damn sure
If a piece of media doesn't cleanly and simply state by the end "communism is the only path forward, we have nothing to lose but our chains, go read 'state and revolution next'" it is actually a bad and immoral piece of media with no redeeming qualities.
^ If you assume most people on this site are only 0-3 steps removed from this type of media analysis, the media analysis you'll see on this site will make a lot more sense.
The users here are very politically literate. They're not very artistically literate, on average. Sorry y'all, I've been trying to discuss art here for like 2.5 years, someone's gotta say it eventually.
Call me crazy, but I think the anchor commenter was using a literary device known as a "hyperbole" to point out how low the floor is when it comes to the "average story" (IE harry potter)
You're right, you've thoroughly countered what was a rigorous literary critique and not just a throwaway comment about how the "gross stuff" in a book isn't what makes it bad, but the actual bad writing.
You're right, I'm sure they literally meant they want child sex scenes in every piece of media. There's actually thousands of secret pedophiles hiding all over the world and we just have to find them and reveal them and then the world will be A Good Place. My mind is definitely not wracked by decades of Espstein-esque conspiracy theories.
They were right, I was being hyperbolistic but for a joke rather than to support my point. But they were also right about my point which is books can be dark and dirty and immoral and that can be very compelling and is a big part of the joy of reading for me
Dude fuck you used the word treat. I can't come back from that I'm so owned.
cw: pedo shit
spoiler
I like fucked up fiction as much as the next depressed western communist, but jfc I've never thought that a child sex scene would improve any novel. Mfer, what's your standard here, goddamn Lolita?
Lolita is actually amazing book? The sex scenes aren't meant to be titillating they're fucking horrifying.
I was waiting on someone smarter than me who's actually read it to say this. From what many smarter than me people have told me Lolita is incredibly on the nose about its message and I don't get how so many people miss that. I mean tbf its normal to be disgusted by the content of Lolita but like Nabokov is using that impulse intentionally?
I'm not sure if the pedos who use the term Lolita have actually read the book? Or they could be viewing themselves as "sticking it to the man" by "reclaiming" a term.
I think it's actually they are just sickos who don't understand/recognize the books judgment
CW: the heavy shit the thread is about
spoiler
yeah i understand that. it would also be the wrong takeaway to look at it and say "hmm, wow, love the child sex scenes in this, wish there were more of that elsewhere." i'm not saying it can't be used effectively like Nabokov does, but if someone wants to see that in every book, they don't like it for the horror, they have a fixation on children having sex and that's an issue.
Taking this comment seriously would involve taking a two sentence throwaway comment on hexbear.net trying to make a point about the value of art at face value. Not everything you see on the internet is a serious decree about the state of modern art. In fact some of them are jokes.
sorry, if you made a joke about
spoiler
literal pedo shit in art
then i missed it over having a problem with
spoiler
literal pedo shit
I'm sorry, is it literal pedo shit? Or is it a novel? Because there are enough rich, powerful, actual pedos that you really dont need to tilt at a novelist who did too much coke 4 decades ago.
does cocaine make you think that writing pedophilia into your novel is a good idea, even if it's clearly not good? i mean i know it's a hell of a drug, but i'm pretty sure it doesn't start making you think creative thoughts about
CW: pedo shit
kids fucking.
Its not pedophilia though? Its like categorically not that. It's children fucking each other. That really happens IRL. Whether it was done well or "artistically" is another point of contention.
Also people are actually allowed to display pedophilia in art. Depictions aren't endorsements
CW: pedo shit
at least in my opinion, middlebrow horror novels by a guy who was an insane cokehead at the time does not qualify as "art." i think it's incredibly difficult and delicate to attempt to depict either pedophilia, or children fucking, something that yes i think it's really goddamn weird to write, in good art, let alone, again, middlebrow horror, to the extent that i don't think it really ought to be attempted. depictions aren't necessarily endorsements, but if you're operating on the terms of the current global cultural movements inherited largely from the English imperium in the Victorian era, it's pretty fucking difficult to not accidentally tacitly endorse via the nature of the depiction.
Well I'm sure we can just make you the grand arbiter of what is and is not art and that will work out perfectly for the rest of us. Im glad you're here to shield us from amoral pieces of media that will turn us into pedophiles, or whatever.
Or maybe I just think theres a million more deserving and effective targets for your ire
well you could try actually presenting an argument about why the depiction of this in IT is so important that you want to argue it with me here, deep in the comments of a niche communist internet forum. regardless of whether you think that i should be spending my time doing something better (i agree, pretty surprising to me someone wants to defend this so readily on here), apparently i'm one of the more important things deserving of your ire. i mean what do you want me to work with here, i said that in my opinion (i.e. not universal, but if you'd like to make me the grand arbiter of what is art, i'd be happy to do it i guess) IT does not qualify as art and beyond that does not artistically benefit from a depiction of
CW: pedo shit
child group sex. in a book that is pretty clearly intended to be read by adults, written by an adult operating from the base of his most immediate random cokehead thoughts. which to me, again, makes the depiction of child group sex extremely suspect.
Because the American left has no business moralizing works of art because they're too weak and ineffectual to do anything of note. This is a tantrum that plays right into the sort of Moral Panic that the ruling order fucking loves.
Railing against works of art you find disagreeable is one of the most annoying thing leftists do that they've convinced themselves is "praxis." It comes from having no organization, no comrades, and no structure to implement change, so we all gather in these echo chambers and yell at Steven Fucking King, some dude whos gonna be dead and forgotten in 20 years, while the men who actually hold political and economic power, that they use to normalize pedophilia and 1,000,000 other things, will be chuckling about the fact that he had to publish to his death to maintain some standard of living.
Its not abt defending It or King, its about not becoming another chud ass culture warrior but for the liberal/left side.
Even this was too much effort for a fucking hexbear comment. That's all youre getting
Railing against works of art you find disagreeable is one of the most annoying thing leftists do that they’ve convinced themselves is “praxis.” It comes from having no organization, no comrades, and no structure to implement change, so we all gather in these echo chambers and yell at Steven Fucking King, some dude whos gonna be dead and forgotten in 20 years, while the men who actually hold political and economic power, that they use to normalize pedophilia and 1,000,000 other things, will be chuckling about the fact that he had to publish to his death to maintain some standard of living.
then why are you here? i'm only shitposting on here. i'm certainly well aware that posting isn't praxis. we are arguing in a niche communist internet forum, on a meme post about how a work of art is bad, because some of us think that the depiction in question is pretty fucked up, and some people really seem to want to defend it here (you apparently). if you wanna tell someone off, why not tell off RNAi for posting instead of...not posting and touching grass i guess. i for one am relaxing on a day off. in my opinion, i'm not doing praxis, i'm criticizing a novel that i do not consider to be a work of art because someone posted about it and i feel like posting. to me, this seems an awful like going through an argument because you didn't like my one comment about thinking that IT having this graphic depiction is fucked up. you could have left it and moved on, neither one of us would comment on it again, and i for one would continue to go one with my life, doing what i'm going to do, not posting about the left culture war on any site but this one.
I get what you're going for here but disqualifying it as "being art" kinda sucks to me because bad art is still art? Like just say its bad art. Like even the most vapid meaningless mass market shit that doesnt try to say anything is art. The word "art" isn't a superlative to award to things you respect.
CW: the worst stuff still
i think your bad art stops being art the moment your mind in any state decides to put that scene into the story. you wanna pick your favorite flavor of non-artistic depiction to put on it, fine by me. i don't really care to debate the semantics of what is and isn't art in general, but i think depicting children in such a way just shouldn't exist. we've already decided as a society that children in general can't consent, and even when two children do consent to sex with each other, that's an extremely different social situation than an adult depicting it in his horror novel.
CW: edgelord shit
is it not as likely or more likely that the author was trying to be edgy and writing marquis de sade wannabe shit? is it absolutely necessary to diagnose them with a paraphilia and guess at their intent?
mind you I haven't read the book and I don't really know exactly what it is that I'm defending. if it's graphic to the point of being pornographic then I am not at all interested in defending that. you keep stressing that it's "pedo shit" like that's self explanatory but it really does not get any sort of point across
whoa, i've never claimed that king is a pedo guy himself, and i wouldn't. i'm saying his depiction of it is an edgy depiction of something that is associated solely with pedophilia. i'm saying that regardless of his intent its indefensible and fucked up. i'm saying that it is immaterial to the plot, and therefore a very strange thing to defend.
i'm also saying that because of the nature of the cultural basis that king was writing from, regardless of his pathologies, it was there in his subconscious for his coke addled brain to grab onto and write into his horror novel. i imagine he probably thought it was unsettling and horrifying. that doesn't mean it was a good idea, and i think it wasn't, i think it's the kind of thing you put in your novel if you're doing an insane amount of cocaine.
From the way the CW was worded my assumption was you were calling Stephen King a pedo.
i just started labeling my cw's pedo shit before that's what rna put on the post, but i guess i was wrong for assuming that people took that as "anything involving the topic at all" as i did.
CW: more of this stuff that's really cool to argue about
well if if it's reasonable to assume that stephen king isn't a pedo, and that the intended audience of "IT" isn't pedophiles, then what makes it pedo shit? I hate getting into semantics, especially on this fucking subject, but I think we can be forgiven for the way we interpreted your comments
from what I gather, the scene is not exactly immaterial to the plot. people here have argued that there would have been better and far less problematic ways to advance the story in the same manner and I can sort of agree there, but that amounts to saying "here's how I would do it better" and not "here's why this shit is inadmissible", or anything about the general sentiment that any story going that far is automatically bad
I mean yeah sure it's strange, weird, fucked up, transgressive and from an authorial perspective probably better avoided altogether if only to spare one's self from grief, but is it actually harmful
CW: just my favorite thing in the world to argue about apparently
i tagged anything involving the idea of kids as sexual subjects in anyway as pedo shit because i don't think it's something that merits depiction in pretty much any way, except for perhaps something like Lolita, and even then it's clearly touchy. the point with the plot isn't that king contrived a narrative that could only be resolved by a child orgy, it's that he reached a narrative point where he had a group of very upset and scared children in a sewer with a cosmic horror, and he decided that they should calm down by fucking each other. i'm not going to debate in general about "well i would have done it better," just that holy fucking shit is that not an acceptable plot device, unless perhaps you're writing a serious literary novel that is explicitly exploring the fucked up nature of the dynamics. i think it's harmful to display this in any way, and just super weird for the kids to be doing in a sewer in response to cosmic horror.
CW: advanced desensitization
if others have summarized it properly, they're doing it to coax themselves into adulthood under the assumption that the clown will leave them alone afterwards. it's not exactly pulitzer shit, but it's not completely out of left field for that story either. in other words it's pertinent enough to the story that it can't really be hand waved away as a cheap pretext to shove a child orgy into the novel.
I guess it just doesn't really get any reaction out of me. mind, I'm not particularly attached to the idea of having children as sexual subjects in my stories either. only I'm having trouble seeing how it's inherently worse than any other commonly accepted excess of imagination like SV, or torture porn, or make-believe genocide, what have you. it's all beyond my capacity to reminisce either way.
CW: advanced desensitization
I’m not particularly attached to the idea of having children as sexual subjects in my stories either. only I’m having trouble seeing how it’s inherently worse than any other commonly accepted excess of imagination like SV, or torture porn, or make-believe genocide, what have you.
I don't think those things should really be in "art" either. but this is at least very clear cut to me. i don't think it matters how or why they got to that point. did anyone else point out to you that king, a cis white male, decided to depict inherently non-consensual sex between minors wherein all the child protagonists but one are males? did anyone decide to also explore the importance to the plot of what that would do medically to the girl in the situation, a minor as equally unprepared for it as every other minor involved. i'm not asking to reminisce on any of these awful things, i'm just baffled that people would go to bat in the comments that it's important to be able to depict this.
CW: can probably tell by now
you make a good case for this stuff being peak /r/menwritingwomen material. I guess that on its own makes either the book or the passage in question problematic and/or worthy of derision. this is tangential though. if the author hadn't been a cis white male, and if their depiction of the situation had been medically accurate, wouldn't you still object to the scene on the grounds that it contains a child orgy?
as far as the importance of being able to depict this goes, I can think of a better way to phrase it. if you want to take the option away from other people, you need to have a good reason. more than that, it needs to be pretty unambiguous, because even before bringing ethics into consideration we all have subjective notions of what doing it "correctly" entails, pertaining to our abilities as storywriters and/or critics of storywriting. if anything, we've proven this.
in any case, I don't want this discussion to grow contentious, so I'll bow out here. I appreciate the time you've spent discussing this with us and I can't say I completely disagree with you either.
CW
wouldn’t you still object to the scene on the grounds that it contains a child orgy?
absolutely, but i'd be less interested in debating it because the focus could be on the general trauma of the depiction, and it would be more likely to meet the extremely narrow artistic range in which i could find such a depiction in some way acceptable.
more than that, it needs to be pretty unambiguous, because even before bringing ethics into consideration we all have subjective notions of what doing it “correctly” entails, pertaining to our abilities as storywriters and/or critics of storywriting.
i don't disagree here, i'm not really in the habit of saying that something should be banned outright. but i also don't see the idea of no one reading IT ever again to be in any meaningful way a loss to the world.
anyway, good convo.
even taxi driver, a movie with a literal 12 yr old sex worker as a main character, didn't have a sex scene
True, but I think child sex scenes in live action cinema is kind of different from child sex scenes in literature. (This is why it works in Lolita the novel but doesnt in the films, imho).
Maybe thats a brain processing error on my part though.
I'm a King fan and also a fan of "fucked up" media, but this is the wrong scene to use to make this point. There really was no redeeming value to it.
It's a 30 (40?) year old dead horse about a scene in IT that everyone, including King himself, regrets.
"If you don't like a sex scene with children, you're a puritan"
Better a Maxist-Goreist than a Marxist-Epsteinist :shrug-outta-hecks:
Tipper Gore advocated for warning labels on explicit media and was considered a pearl clutcher and a censor by a lot of people
not my best bit tbh, after looking up what she actually advocated for it's really not that big of a deal
In the context of the time it was a big deal. The same right wing freaks who are making it illegal to admit quee people exist in Florida were trying to do the same thing to entire classes of media back in the 80s. Tipper (and many others) was carrying water for them by being a reasonable centrist instead of shouting them down for being fascist bastards.
yeah it's easy to judge the outcome (eg "parental advisory" labels) but I'm assuming it's peanuts compared to what they were pushing for
I can't take part in the struggle session because I haven't read the book :ooooooooooooooh:
What's that Zizek quote from a movie review of his? something like "i know for a fact this film is not worth watching, and that is why i will write my review of it without watching it"
Take it easy, Stephen. I think the publisher was expecting a manuscript for that story about the haunted AirPods by tomorrow morning -- how is that coming along?
ALMOST DONE. WHAT IF AIRPODS WERE HAUNTED, AND HAD CORDS TO STRANGLE YOU WITH?
Anime bad
spoiler
This is a joke, weebs. Don’t be mad at me
I would have upbeared your post with or without the bit behind the spoiler :edgeworth-shrug:
ok hear me out. what if we used machine learning to fix this problem. like a model that makes everyone in evangelion as old as misato or something. then we pretend the original version does not exist.
like a model that makes everyone in evangelion
as old asmisatoNow it's perfect
at this point I just share my ideas because I know someone will come along with a better one
Haven't watched Eva, but I don't think it's supposed to be a display of normal, healthy relationships. It's like how makima and denji are a very wrong and bad relationship, and that's a point of chainsaw man. But a lot of people miss this and get turned on.
that's not really the problem. the way NGE depicts the dynamics between its characters is honestly genius for the most part. the icky part is the use of the male gaze on underage girls. just imagine himeno was 14 years old basically.
Tbh if you told me that Asuka and Kawaru were 21 before I knew they were 13 I would have believed you. Anime art just be like that. So idk how much you'd even have to change their designs. Though if you were going to undertake this you might as well fill them out more to remove all doubt.
yeah, this shit perplexes me too. my takeaway is that gainax absolutely needed to include heapfuls of fanservice, either because they liked that stuff themselves, or for economical reasons (they did release adult games featuring their own intellectual property just to stay afloat). if they'd played it straight and depicted the characters the way kids that age normally look, then there would be zero ambiguity as to whether or not it's fucked up to use the male gaze on them so much.
but on the flip side, it's not as if they were adapting a manga or light novel. they were absolutely in control of how old those characters are. so unless it was completely impossible for japanese audiences in the 90s to accept shinji as being any older than 14 due to cultural beliefs about how quickly boys should develop into mature adults, I really can't think of any reason for the Eva pilots being canonically so young. it's also understood that much of the sexualization in NGE is directly from the point of view of a hormone-laden teenage boy, but that phenomenon persists well into adulthood especially if the subject happens to be a repressed nerd.
with all that said it's probably better to bump the wrinkle and subcutaneous fat sliders way up just to be safe.
FR last I checked in this had 17 upbears and 0 comments, I just figured no one here had much to say about the situation, as I didn't
Sci Fi writers don't be weird about sex challenge (Difficulty: Impossible)
Counterpoint: Sci Fi authors be extremely weird about sex. Galaxy Quest should be the floor, not the ceiling.
I've only read Ender's Game and I don't remember weird sex shit. Did I filter it out or was it in other works?
I don't think it shows up in Ender's Game, but Card is super homophobic
Speaker for the Dead's plot partially turns around a family that gets torn apart due to cuckoldry, I don't really remember specifics though.
That shit makes me hesitant to recommend people Dhalgren. There are a lot of things I absolutely love about that book, and it def is relatable today in terms of living in a collapsing society, but fuck that pedo shit (including a literal pedo 3-way partnership) fucking is so bad.
i think it's kind of made clear that the protagonist is not a particularly moral person, and that Bellona is not a moral city, but i can certainly see why it would be offputting to some
George R. R. Martin has entered the chat.
From what I understand current Stephen thinks that passage is just as what the fuck as everyone else and regrets writing it.
CW: Discussion of sexual assault and CSA.
spoiler
None of the child sex in ASOIAF feels as narratively unnecessary as the child orgy in IT. None of it really felt particularly gratuitous because it all moved the plot forward. Like I guess you can say he chose to put it there when he didn't have to but for what I've read it made sense when it was done.
Like Martin absolutely is guilty of the "overuses rape as a plot device" thing that so many male authors are guilty of but still.
There's a fair amount of it in the background I guess
But yeah the show is way worse with this.
Part of the reason I never watched the show was that they felt the need to add more sexual violence to a series that was already an intensely miserable slog of violence, torture, sexual violence, and extremely unlikable characters.
I actually really appreciate GRRM as a writer and really liked the show (sorry everyone) but I’m frustrated at how GRRM’s characters are frequently remarkably...foolish. Yes, much of the story is driven by the contradictions of feudalism, yes, the characters grow, but in the first book, Sansa and Eddard in particular just keep fucking up, over and over again, to a really frustrating extent, due to their pettiness and ignorance. Something about GRRM’s writing also seems extremely coddling to me, but that could just be because he’s a master of rhythmic sentences and paragraphs.
Sansa is a tiny child, it would be way more frustrating if the little kids weren't dumb as fuck because then I'd be asking why they weren't just written as older characters.
Ned just fucking sucks tbh but Sansa is a prepubescent child at that point and is a very realistic portrayal of one. She's actually my favorite character.
My first exposure was the show, and I still like the first four seasons, but yeah thats a fair opinion.
Martin's psuedo historical setting is extremely indulgent in a lot of ways. The average age of first marriage in the middle ages was like 23 for women and 27 for men, not thirteen. Were their child marriages for political purposes? Certainly. But there were plenty that weren't. Martin chose to have a child marriage, then chose to describe the sex scenes, and chose to have it be a major character development moment for the 13 year old protagonist. Plus there's obvious practical issues; Medieval people weren't stupid. They knew that a child had a much, much higher chance of complications in pregnancy than an adult woman.
He could have made her 18. He could have done a fade to black way, way earlier in the scene. He could have done a lot of things. But he did what he did. It's not especially egregious by the standards of fantasy writers, but taken as a whole with the gratuitous misery of the whole series I think it adds up to a pretty good reason not to recommend ASOIAF.
OK I have to rewrite this post after it was eaten by the temporary lock lol.
CW: discussion of sexual assault and CSA
spoiler
Wasn't it that the "marriage was actually usually in the late twenties in the middle ages" thing actually only for peasants and for the nobility child marriage was indeed common? Thats what I read anyway.
I categorically agree with your point that "he chose to have it that way" but for me, there are a number of reasons why I don't think changing Dany to 18 would have worked. First of all, its an important part of [i]Viserys[/i] character that he is a huge bastard for giving away his little sister to Drogo, and for treating her as property to be given away in the the first place. He is a desperate kid who wants to be king and will literally give his 13 year old sister away to a war lord to get it. Its also important to Dany's character because like, here's the thing. Dany doesn't act like a young adult who's canon age happens to be 13 (like a lot of children in fiction). She's a realistically portrayed child I think. Martin is shockingly adept at writing children, in many cases from the child's POV. The Stark kids (especially Sansa) are very well written children with realistic trauma responses. Joffrey and Tommen are also good examples. And yeah, so are Viserys and Dany.
The books also don't portray Dany/Drogo as romantic like the show does really. It does portray Dany as being genuinely in love with Drogo which... I'm ambivalent about because is decently realistic for a child to have that as a trauma response but Martin is still an adult man who chose to write her that way. So I get how people would be put off by that. There's also the whole mess with the different portrayal of the "sex" scene itself between book and show. Since, in the book, Dany is portrayed as giving nominal consent to Drogo (which many idiot fans think means it was consensual despite Dany being 13 and Drogo a grown man). The show meanwhile does away with this and instead explicitly portrays it as rape... but then goes on to romanticize the relationship after? And I think the show decided to do that to put rape porn on tv for shock value not out of perceived moral obligation to portray rape as rape.
I mean yeah it's fucked up, but what's another metaphor for casting aside your innocence to defeat an enemy who you believe will give up on you the moment you 'grow up'?
Now imagine it's nineteen eighty fuck and you've snorted a sugar bowl's worth of cocaine. How would you write it then?
Also: What does it mean that Pennywise returns, rendering their hypothesis null and void?
Edit: Oh dear god did I just pull a Bookman's Bluff to defend Stephen King?
but what’s another metaphor for casting aside your innocence to defeat an enemy who you believe will give up on you the moment you ‘grow up’?
many metaphors there are lots of cultural signifiers of adulthood.
the moment I grew up was when I started planning my recipes to buy lentils in a more cost effective way
many metaphors there are lots of cultural signifiers of adulthood.
It's not about entering adulthood, its about casting aside your innocence. And again, the point is that The Loser's Club is wrong about what it means to be 'grown up.'
the moment I grew up was when I started planning my recipes to buy lentils in a more cost effective way
Spoken like somebody who's never even been near a sugar bowl's worth of cocaine
Have them do their taxes on a long-form IRS Form 1040 and try to write off random bullshit as charitable donations and fraudulently try to claim the child tax credit with their various pets listed as dependents.
no it's not but it's more realistic to the sort of idea a child would have and also that's a fucked up thing to just have happen as a minor plot point.
True, but my whole point hinges on two facts:
-
The Text literally agrees with you.
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Horror is a genre where fucked up things happen
Also, they prove Pennywise isn't invincible, and it's referenced extensively throughout the rest of the novel. Hardly "a minor plot point."
The only things humans really enjoy in life are seratonin, dopamine, and oxytocin.
And where did I say it was necessary?
Also you just said you were critiquing horror as a genre? Is this a common trope?
I think traumatize is a bit of a strong term to use here. I don't think it is mental self harm at all.
The subject matter could traumatize so that's why we need CWs. But that applies for a lot of stuff outside of horror content as well
who knows why people like the spooky?
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Please tell me Ulysses, am I a simpleton for wanting to ban pedo shit in media?
Ah, I know see the light, I'll start advocating for more
pedo"thought provoking avant garde" stuff everywhere
Just want to add that one of the more heinous things about King (which occurs in It as well as other books like Pet Sematary) is his tireless theft from and misrepresentation of indigenous culture. I’m like, jesus, Native Americans have clearly been through more than enough, but King is like, nope, it’s not enough that hundreds of millions were wiped out to make room for shitheads like me, it’s not enough that their modern descendants barely qualify as second class citizens, I need to dance on the mass grave that is amerikkka and also make billions of dollars while doing so.
It’s fucking disgusting and godwilling this dude will be erased from history (except as a lesson in what not to do) after the revolution. The liberal worship of King is also an indictment of the status quo and a sure sign that artistic brilliance in amerikkka has little if any relationship to success.
I'm with you on this criticism, but I get antsy when I hear people start talking about erasing art from history after the revolution. Book burning is not an element of revolution that some leftists seem to want that I can get behind. I mean, there's exceptions to that I guess, I see no reason not to burn 12 Rules for Life. And copies of Mein Kampf should be limited to a few copies you can check out from Uni libraries if you're doing relevant research and not available to the public. But something like King's works? Let revolutionary education counteract the bad messages there.
It doesn’t need to be burned, but community resources could probably be better spent elsewhere.
To be fair, American culture can easily be summed up with perverse sexual pathology.
king sucks, has sucked, and always will suck
he's not even a good writer and yes i will fight anyone on this point
Children of the Corn was actually not terrible
Until the main protagonist got got, and the book banged on for some time, following one of the children
The other 2 books of his I read, Cujo and It, both kind of sucked and got...really needlessly horny. Not just the pedo parts, but other parts as well; iirc, the beginning of Cujo has him describing the female protagonist's boobs apropos of nothing
Didn't he write Cujo on so many drugs, he doesn't even remember writing it?
Tommyknockers is the one he can't remember writing, but Cujo is from the same period.
I read some short stories that were okay, the two novels I read (Desperation and uuh some writer dude that died and he was able to go to fantasy land and cure his wounds with tea) I didn't like or at least get
![[CW: Pedo shit] Pillar of american culture](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/w7IraBiZuk.png){kind=link}