- Joined
- Oct 2, 2015
Translating from Russ-speak, it’s not that having a publisher makes your book better qualitatively than a self-published competitor, it’s that having a publisher gives an air of legitimacy to your book that then can’t be second-guessed by the reading plebs. A fallacious appeal to authority, if you will. “If a publisher thought it was good enough to publish, then I won’t second-guess their judgment and will be happy to read it, surely it can’t be bad if a publisher thought it was good enough for their brand!” It also would give someone else to blame other than himself if the book is still (inevitably) of poor quality, because they were the ones who chose to publish it, so it can’t be bad, because an authority figure said it was good.
And he’s still blaming the authority figure here, to escape blame on himself, because he knows that nothing he does stands on its own merit—it has to be propped up with singers, producers, publishers, actors, musicians, and dancers to get anywhere. And then, once again, having other people involved gives him an easy scapegoat, because it wasn’t anything he did wrong with the original product, you see, it was the dang dirty interpreters of his vision not seeing exactly what he meant and making it into his glorious masterpiece that he thought it was!
Having a “middleman” performing, publishing, or distributing the content also, in a strange twist, allows Russ’s work to be judged on its merits, because it anonymizes Russ to a degree. It’s just that he can’t understand that the actual quality of whatever he makes, when it shines through like that, shows that it’s objectively bad, instead of only being subjectively bad because it’s associated with him and his ‘brand.’
Ultimately it all goes back to wanting an authority figure to intervene to get him out of feeling bad about things, whether he’s being unfairly picked on as a kid by other kids or whether he’s being fairly criticized for his outrageous opinions and poor-quality creative ventures as an adult by other adults. This is a running theme with Russ in particular, and a lot of cows in general: they’re forever children and can’t handle the consequences of their own actions, always wanting to be rescued by someone who can make better choices than the ones they’ve made for themselves so far, because they can’t understand what they’re doing wrong, only that they’re not getting what they want.
