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I've seen that in a bookstore, too. That one kinda comes off as tongue-in-cheek, though.
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My search history sure must be confusing for whoever is stuck observing me.
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I just saw this now, but you're thinking of the Adventists like Evan. Ye Wenjie isn't a member of any of the three faction within the Earth-Trisolarian Organization, something that's rather directly explained to the reader in chapter,
>Human's can't achieve real communism so let's get aliens to do it.
If anything, it kind of blames this on her being a scientist, since while she comes to the conclusion that relationship between humans and evil is like a glacier and water, they're made of the same substance (this is my paraphrasing her). Then after she finds happiness and love her being a scientists causes her to constantly ruminate on the past so she never gives up on those ideals and sends the message,
Ideologically, she's a bit close to the religious types, especially since she refers to the aliens as her Lord and refuses to comment when that's brought up to her.
A lot of what she does after that is her trying to find justifications for herself, despite the kindness she gets from everyday non-scientist humans. The difference is perspective people have due to their line of work is also something that keeps coming up.
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They are perverts that get off on making you uncomfortable. Like an exhibitionist.
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B-B-B-BASED.
Super Mario Brothers
kiwifarms.net
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I was wondering if this was going to be posted. Watched the whole thing and I have mixed opinions on it but I'm not going to write a whole essay on it. I wish that the way she defined "self indulgence" was less vague because you can say that about all writing. (This post is self indulgence.)
Also, I don't know if so much talk about Second Story would count as derailing or not. I don't remember the time stamp (edit: 49:05) but I was really confused about the Blue Prince yaoi comparison but I also haven't read much of it.
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- Jan 31, 2015
Tolkien wrote fanfiction about the Niebelung Saga (yes, he did!). Alexander Dumas wrote fanfiction about ETA Hoffmann because he was a giant fan of him. This annoying harpy is acting like a fucking puritan. Books for women bad, fanfiction super duper bad!1
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I have to listen to it again tomorrow, though I was listening to the self indulgence part before I got interrupted. My thought-process with that is that by "self indulgence", I think she was approaching it as a double-edged sword. You need it for motivation because you want to tell a story in the particular way you envision it, but you cannot let it be the main driving point lest it becomes more about your personal preferences and you lose the plot as a result. It's a delicate balance, and it's something the author needs to learn to be self-aware about, and even professional writers will fall victim to it when they're not careful.
Also I think she meant to say "City of Bones" is Harry Potter fanfiction, not "Twilight". That made me go "Wait, what?" while listening to it (I don't know if it was pointed out in editing).
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A very nice video. Girls being have issues. Never become a coomer, ever!
While I haven't read Dumas, I have read Tolkien, and last I checked none of the characters in his stories are ripped whole cloth from another work, nor is the majority of the story about graphic descriptions of sex. I suppose maybe I could have missed that part, but I doubt it. However, please explain why self-inserts, and shipping of characters in any way (and even with nonsensical homosexual pairings) is comparable to the works of Tolkien (or Dumas) because he used Norse and Germanic mythology as inspiration for his works.Tolkien wrote fanfiction about the Niebelung Saga (yes, he did!). Alexander Dumas wrote fanfiction about ETA Hoffmann because he was a giant fan of him. This annoying harpy is acting like a fucking puritan. Books for women bad, fanfiction super duper bad!1
Seems to me if you wanted to write a series about two wizards going to a magic school and them falling in love, you could do so without stealing from Harry Potter. Not like wizards haven't been done to death for the past hundred years, or coming of age stories, or love stories, or etc...
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- Dec 3, 2017
Answer is, this is a common Tumblr/fanfiction space self-apology, that their gay pedo real person fic is totally real literature cause classics are fanfic if you squint hard enough (and that they are subversive art and not gross wank material cause ummm banned books Catcher In The Rye nazis something).
I curse Tumblr search for not letting me find that one post that was circlejerking over it, it was so bad it needed to be seen to be believed.
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- May 29, 2024
Nah I'm not actually doing that again.
I will be interested to see what she has to say to condemn something as broad as "fan fiction."
Fan fiction is just using someone else's characters and world in order to create your own story. I don't think that you can lay much at the feet of fan fiction beyond just "it can be helpful if you need training wheels, but it can be harmful if you're over-reliant on it as a crutch." It seems that anything else that people do with it is on them, not on the medium of fan fiction itself.
Booger1488
kiwifarms.net
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Ever wondered which fantasy series have completely different values to the modern leftist globohomo agenda? Well you don't need to worry any longer! In his new video, Daniel "I cry while jerking off over e-thots" Greene will tell you exactly which works of a bygone era are actually horrible pieces of solidified racism and misogyny whose authors should either be canceled or exhumed so we can place them on trial!
Edit: 6 minutes in and there's an ad read for sex toys hahahah. Guess he didn't learn from his last go around with a sex worker
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Welf Welf
kiwifarms.net
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- Nov 20, 2020
>these posts complaining Second Story is going after fanfiction
How many people here actually watched the video? It's a condemnation of fanfiction-derived attitudes, style, and content entering the original fiction sphere, not a condemnation of fanfiction itself. She says this in the first 30 seconds... I don't agree with 100% of everything she says, but I think she's got a general point here, particularly about the fanfiction-esque self-indulgent writing trends we see in publishing today.
Years and years ago, I tried to read a flavor of the month book called "a long way toa small angry planet" or something overly-long like that (the cover had a horrendous typeface that made "to a" look like "toa"). Every antagonist the characters encountered was completely defanged and did nothing that might upset the sensibilities of current year + 2 (2016 I think?) tumblrinas. And the only character who ever seriously disagreed with anyone else was, of course, the badwrong white man with problematic opinions such as prefering to eat meat instead of plants or distrusting aliens that kill their own children. I was thinking about this book when she spoke of self-indulgent writing that does not challenge the writer or the reader.
How many people here actually watched the video? It's a condemnation of fanfiction-derived attitudes, style, and content entering the original fiction sphere, not a condemnation of fanfiction itself. She says this in the first 30 seconds... I don't agree with 100% of everything she says, but I think she's got a general point here, particularly about the fanfiction-esque self-indulgent writing trends we see in publishing today.
Years and years ago, I tried to read a flavor of the month book called "a long way toa small angry planet" or something overly-long like that (the cover had a horrendous typeface that made "to a" look like "toa"). Every antagonist the characters encountered was completely defanged and did nothing that might upset the sensibilities of current year + 2 (2016 I think?) tumblrinas. And the only character who ever seriously disagreed with anyone else was, of course, the badwrong white man with problematic opinions such as prefering to eat meat instead of plants or distrusting aliens that kill their own children. I was thinking about this book when she spoke of self-indulgent writing that does not challenge the writer or the reader.
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(I promise not to do another full-length schizopost, because I know that that shit gets old fast.)
"The problem with fanfiction" is something broad when it helps her arguments, but narrow and specific and "oh I didn't actually mean that" when it helps her plug holes and avoid criticism. I don't think that she's being intentionally dishonest with this (rather that she just hasn't tried hard enough to make solid arguments, and is just going on her intuition), but it's going to come across as a motte-and-bailey tactic.
For a lot of this video, she strings along a montage of shocking examples (without any context to compare them to), seemingly just to get a negative reaction from the audience, and then, once the audience is sufficiently unsettled by what she's been showing them, she tries to jump from that into some incredibly-broad point about some negative quality that's just inherent to fanfiction. But she hasn't supported that leap of logic at all with arguments and evidence. It honestly reminds me of the old greentexts about The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, where the pattern of the show is just conditioning you to be in the right mood to join them on their eventual leaps in logic, instead of actually making good arguments.
For an example: when she's talking about how terrible fujoshis are, and how insane "boys love" / "BL" fandom is, what context do we have for that? How big is this "BL" audience, really? How much influence do they have? Are these just some weird freaks in small niches on AO3 and tumblr, or are they actually poised to take over the whole global publishing industry?
Second Story doesn't give us any perspective on how big of a problem that group is, or what influence they have on publishing (beyond just the fact that "they buy books, and they'll buy more of whatever they're into," which she just implies as a causal mechanism, but never really talks about). She just shows us that they're out there, then lays the whole problem of "femgooner fujos are into fucked-up shit" at the feet of fanfiction like they're an inevitable consequence of fanfiction, and then uses that connection to say that this is another reason why fanfiction's influence is ruining all of normal fiction, too.
That's a hell of a leap, and she hasn't given us enough of a reason at any of these steps to go with her beyond just "it all feels kind of intuitively right, doesn't it?"
She can try to say that she's just talking about the modern, online incarnation of fanfiction (as opposed to just the concept of "writing a story with someone else's characters"), but when she presents all of these problems as having arisen from traits or shortcomings which she says are specific to and inherent in fanfiction, then the subset of fanfiction that she was supposedly limiting herself to going after becomes a distinction without a difference.
It really seems like she has a personal problem with fanfiction. Like it just fucking rubs her the wrong way. I generally don't like fanfiction either, but she's using that dislike to try to justify some really-broad accusations which just don't fit. Like the idea that we have fanfiction to blame for self-inserts, when those are way older than fanfiction. It seems like Second Story has taken "fanfiction" as an answer in search of a question.
It's great that she's one of "our guys" or whatever, and that she's going after the right targets... but she does so in a terrible way. Using bad arguments against deserving targets can make the whole effort against them seem illegitimate. A bad messenger can be worse than having no messenger.
She's not "fighting the good fight" just because she's going after the right people. She's giving out horoscopes and rorschach tests, inviting her viewers to see arguments that she hasn't actually made, letting them hear whatever they already wanted to, so that they'll just nod along with it and think that she's based at the end. I'd rather that she (or someone) actually make good arguments about why elements within modern fanfiction and its fandom are bad.
Really, I'd rather that someone go after modern stories and modern audiences as a whole.
Fanfiction is really just a lowered barrier to entry. You can post stories for free and read them for free, with no one stopping you. So people who want to write gooner sadism stories can still put them out there without being dropped by their literary agent, and people who want to read gay rape bestiality can still find that even if their local bookstores refuse to carry it. But both the writers and the audience still apparently want that shit. To me, that's the real issue. The only thing that's changed is the availability.
Until one of these booktuber video essayists takes a crack at the society-wide change in private and public moral standards, looking at how and why they've changed, I think that we're just chasing after symptoms instead of looking at the root cause.
She really seems as if she's trying to have it both ways. She doesn't define her terms well, and she doesn't use them consistently.
"The problem with fanfiction" is something broad when it helps her arguments, but narrow and specific and "oh I didn't actually mean that" when it helps her plug holes and avoid criticism. I don't think that she's being intentionally dishonest with this (rather that she just hasn't tried hard enough to make solid arguments, and is just going on her intuition), but it's going to come across as a motte-and-bailey tactic.
For a lot of this video, she strings along a montage of shocking examples (without any context to compare them to), seemingly just to get a negative reaction from the audience, and then, once the audience is sufficiently unsettled by what she's been showing them, she tries to jump from that into some incredibly-broad point about some negative quality that's just inherent to fanfiction. But she hasn't supported that leap of logic at all with arguments and evidence. It honestly reminds me of the old greentexts about The Daily Show or The Colbert Report, where the pattern of the show is just conditioning you to be in the right mood to join them on their eventual leaps in logic, instead of actually making good arguments.
For an example: when she's talking about how terrible fujoshis are, and how insane "boys love" / "BL" fandom is, what context do we have for that? How big is this "BL" audience, really? How much influence do they have? Are these just some weird freaks in small niches on AO3 and tumblr, or are they actually poised to take over the whole global publishing industry?
Second Story doesn't give us any perspective on how big of a problem that group is, or what influence they have on publishing (beyond just the fact that "they buy books, and they'll buy more of whatever they're into," which she just implies as a causal mechanism, but never really talks about). She just shows us that they're out there, then lays the whole problem of "femgooner fujos are into fucked-up shit" at the feet of fanfiction like they're an inevitable consequence of fanfiction, and then uses that connection to say that this is another reason why fanfiction's influence is ruining all of normal fiction, too.
That's a hell of a leap, and she hasn't given us enough of a reason at any of these steps to go with her beyond just "it all feels kind of intuitively right, doesn't it?"
She can try to say that she's just talking about the modern, online incarnation of fanfiction (as opposed to just the concept of "writing a story with someone else's characters"), but when she presents all of these problems as having arisen from traits or shortcomings which she says are specific to and inherent in fanfiction, then the subset of fanfiction that she was supposedly limiting herself to going after becomes a distinction without a difference.
It really seems like she has a personal problem with fanfiction. Like it just fucking rubs her the wrong way. I generally don't like fanfiction either, but she's using that dislike to try to justify some really-broad accusations which just don't fit. Like the idea that we have fanfiction to blame for self-inserts, when those are way older than fanfiction. It seems like Second Story has taken "fanfiction" as an answer in search of a question.
It's great that she's one of "our guys" or whatever, and that she's going after the right targets... but she does so in a terrible way. Using bad arguments against deserving targets can make the whole effort against them seem illegitimate. A bad messenger can be worse than having no messenger.
She's not "fighting the good fight" just because she's going after the right people. She's giving out horoscopes and rorschach tests, inviting her viewers to see arguments that she hasn't actually made, letting them hear whatever they already wanted to, so that they'll just nod along with it and think that she's based at the end. I'd rather that she (or someone) actually make good arguments about why elements within modern fanfiction and its fandom are bad.
Really, I'd rather that someone go after modern stories and modern audiences as a whole.
Fanfiction might be full of lazy and rotten shit these days, but I think that the problem precedes fanfiction, rather than stemming from fanfiction.
Fanfiction is really just a lowered barrier to entry. You can post stories for free and read them for free, with no one stopping you. So people who want to write gooner sadism stories can still put them out there without being dropped by their literary agent, and people who want to read gay rape bestiality can still find that even if their local bookstores refuse to carry it. But both the writers and the audience still apparently want that shit. To me, that's the real issue. The only thing that's changed is the availability.
Until one of these booktuber video essayists takes a crack at the society-wide change in private and public moral standards, looking at how and why they've changed, I think that we're just chasing after symptoms instead of looking at the root cause.
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In fairness, this alone is a separate video essay because it's so batshit insane and huge that I think it's okay for her to give examples to generate interest in a demand for a deeper dive later.
This problem has been pointed out for so long that it was only a matter of time before someone could put it into words for a general audience. I actually wonder how many essays talk about this, either in video or blog form, and this alone is what's going to get Second Story more infamy because certain denizens of the Internet (and now the publishing world) hate being told their writing sucks because of this specific reason.
Rezza
kiwifarms.net
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- Nov 6, 2020
Yeah, she's just an attention-whore lmao
Anyone truly obsessed with their characters name would have chosen a weirder, or a very mundane name
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- Dec 12, 2022
He wrote a verse adaption of Volsunga Saga, which itself is a prose adaption of the Poetic Edda, which is a narrativized compilation of poetry likely based on folktales. He never adapted Nibelungenlied.
The farther back we go in time the less anyone cares about "originality" in writing, people were proud to be retelling their peoples stories. The Middle Ages effectively had a Arthurian Cinematic Universe where authors would take characters and story lines and swap them around without any care for copyright or attribution. The obsession with the genius creative who makes it all up himself, and definitely isn't standing on the shoulders of giants, is modern, not traditional.
And can we please not be so tiktok-brained as to call every adaption 'fanfiction', please?
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- Jul 30, 2017
I actually kept meaning to reply to @Grayback but work and the holidays kept me busy until it was too late to bother.
But this all reminds me of the article by the late, great, Shamus Young on why we can't have short criticism.
And this is certainly on my mind because MauLer just recently uploaded a critique of Star Wars Outlaws that is SEVENTEEN HOURS LONG.
I'd love to watch it but... I've got shit I got to do.
Yeah, it can always be longer, there can always be more details, there can always be more definitions, more granularity... but eventually people got to realize we're talking about YouTube and not fucking college dissertations.
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- Jan 3, 2017
I don't know who this smarmy looking douchebag is, but
A) it's hard to take him seriously when he mispronounces half the author names and titles, and
B) I can't imagine a topic I give a shit less about than what reddit thinks comprises "badly aged fantasy." Harry Potter clocked fairly high on the list and you know it has nothing to do with the quality of the writing.
EDIT: I sat through the whole thing and I feel like I did after watching The Many Saints of Newark: "Why did I do this to myself?"
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