Ok but actually I was shocked but not surprised to see that in the OP. This just adds further proof to his literary illiteracy, as if we couldn’t tell from all the horseshit he’s written.
Giving him the GREATEST possible leniency with this take, I still can't make it make sense. He could have meant it, like, oh, the book is
structured like a romance and fulfills the criteria in a warped way, but it really doesn't. As far as genre, it's like the great romance in Humbert's head keeps getting interrupted by B-movie plots about murder and road trips and comic hijinks. It's a sarcastic psycho thriller. There's not much of it that could even be
misread as romantic or titillating because every time the narrator tries to set the mood, something so terrible or surprising happens that it kills it dead (like Humbert endlessly plotting how to kill Dolores' mom only for her to be plowed down by a car). It's like the antiromance novel because it's
funny that Humbert doesn't even realize how much the story has gotten away from him and how much of a cosmic failure he is. This isn't a moral claim, it's a literary one. I'd have a much easier time calling it a comedy than a romance. But then I just think Nabokov is a funny guy.
I was so curious how he actually sees the book that I found all his references to it.
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Lolita is about
obsession, and specifically about narcissistic self-love. It's not his pedophilia alone that makes him noxious.
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I actually agree here, that's a good way of putting it.
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"... has had such a lasting impact on my visualization of intimacy and violation."
This instantly made me think of all the scenes in
Manhunt where troons Fran and Beth vividly imagine being dominated by the TERFs trying to kill them or sucking out the female organs of their sexual conquests:
She kissed the pink bud of Sophie’s clit and imagined sucking it out of its hood of tender skin, drawing it like a snail from its shell into her own body where it might take root and change, drawing her cock up into her flesh, parting the soft curtains of her sex.
Her cock still burned with the memory of Viv’s fingers finding it, worming through her unzipped jeans to caress its stiffening length in the half-second before disgust curdled the other woman’s hungry expression, in the split second before Ramona staggered drunk out of the dark and stabbed Viv in the throat. That gaping wound, slick and pinkish red where the starlight touched its ragged lips. She imagined setting her lips to that fragile gash, tonguing its depths, kissing beads of sweat and blood off the wet landscape of its interior.
All this fetishization of violence is seen not as something that ought to make us recoil in horror because these are bad people. Everything wrong with them is because of society. They all have tragic, sexual abuse backstories, and the real women are just so, so mean to them, it's not their fault that they confuse violence with love. They learned it from
you, lady-they-are-desperately-trying-to-crawl-inside-of! The message basically amounts to "just let them be women, and they wouldn't be this messed up."
If we saw them delivering their account of what happened to a jury of their peers, or to a book audience, as we do in
Lolita, we would laugh at how transparent their self-pity was. But we're supposed to understand that they're doing everything out of fear and dysphoria and pity them.
The "violation" here is never what the troons are doing to others. It's always that they are being used by two-dimensional white women, and the sudden shock of realizing that white women don't want them like that is treated like a shot to the head, accompanied by literal gore as those white women get maimed.
Violations are also treated as negotiables, to Fran above, where Viv literally cries out "genital rape!" when she learns he has a dick, right before getting stabbed by another woman who is trying to protect Fran. Other main character Beth is hit with a rape accusation that Beth firmly believes is just because a girl regretted having sex with him.
The whole ride home she’d replayed her kiss with Meg and their hookup in the shower that same night. Did I put my fingers in her without asking? Did she pull away when I leaned in? The more she thought about it, imagining those soft lips opening around her tongue, those long lashes fluttering in dreamy anticipation, the more she realized that no specific moment, no single touch, was to blame. What mattered was that she’d broken the silent rule. She’d touched a girl before the girl touched her, had laid her violent hands on tender skin.
If you get ensnared into the briar patch of these characters' excuses, you will end up thinking of yourself as the villain. I don't actually think there is much to
Manhunt other than wallowing in viscerally upsetting imagery, but if there's a pattern to it, it's that bad things happen when troons are told no, and somehow even though the troons murder several people, only sometimes in self-defense, they are still the biggest victims.
“A TERF tried to kill me,” she said spitefully, attempting not to relish the unassailable position of her victimhood too much.
I mean. It would be hysterical if it were an anti-trans satire. But.
Micah finds it relatable.
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Thanks, James. Who can forget that horny moment when Humbert licks Lo's eyeball. Famously, Nabokov frontloaded the "erotic" writing, which takes place mostly when Humbert is sitting by himself and remembering his childhood, and lets the book spiral into self-parody after that. Nabokov writes that readers were "misled [by the opening chapters] ... into assuming this was going to be a lewd book ... [expecting] the rising succession of erotic scenes; when these stopped, the readers stopped, too, and felt bored."
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my longest "nah boy" ever!!!
As a result, he has built up a following of fellow trans cult members, who either can’t call him out for his wack ass shit like “kill Jesse Singal/JK Rowling/other prominent people who have anything negative to say about aspect of troonism” because they’ll be dogpiled and ousted, or won’t call him out because they believe it too.
I love that they're still acting like boycotting JKR is tenable after Hogwarts Legacy. No one cared. The illusion of strength has been zapped.
