Fourth Post!
Jun. 6th, 2022 09:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hoisinsauce posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
secretfanspacebtw feel free to suggest/nominate post titles
Post about fandom! Or whatever! Whether it's a rave about some obscure series, or an essay dissecting every last reason why some internet-famous author should rethink their career, someone will probably read it at some point! We also just chat about life.
(start a comment thread by replying to this post)
Post about fandom! Or whatever! Whether it's a rave about some obscure series, or an essay dissecting every last reason why some internet-famous author should rethink their career, someone will probably read it at some point! We also just chat about life.
(start a comment thread by replying to this post)
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-01 11:44 am (UTC)Personally, it'll be slow going because I'm a bit busy with work these days, but I have never been so excited for a 1300+ page book before.
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-01 11:48 am (UTC)(reminder to all that fanspace spoiler tags seem to not work, so seems we're stuck going SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER at the start or something like that so people can scroll. or rot13 I guess but some people dislike it. iirc it's some dreamwidth anti-spam thing that stops nonnies posting html ;_;)
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-01 12:00 pm (UTC)Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-01 12:25 pm (UTC)Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-01 11:58 am (UTC)Also oof at the internet trolls being hyper-focused on hating the female creator to the point where they just ignore that the male creator even exists unless they need to save him from her.
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-02 09:39 pm (UTC)(Raisins: I wrote a thing that among other things delved into the dynamics of online bullying, as accurately as I could, where it was a mix of oldschool trolls and people weaponising social justice rhetoric, much of it in the format of messageboards. I didn't publish at that time because bullies in the piece happened to use feminism as the excuse for much of the bullying, and I thought it was bad timing since feminists were getting especially viciously bullied on all sides at that point, so I didn't want to give ppl another tool to use to shut women up. I still do want to post it at some point and now it may look like I copied her! Wah. But oh well, I don't have a lot of readers anyway, and I'm sure it's been done.
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-02 09:43 pm (UTC)Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-02 10:22 pm (UTC)Compare/contrast: I'm not very far in the book, but so far it's mostly just old-school trolls, shades of gamergate and "content creators owe us", but no social justice fig leaves. That may be yet to come ...
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-02 10:32 pm (UTC)(hehe, had some similar trolls to those too! I think sometimes the lines can get rather blurred between the varieties)
fuck it maybe I'll stay up late tonight; I was gonna edit *something* anyway
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-02 10:37 pm (UTC)Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
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From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2022-09-04 03:12 am (UTC) - ExpandRe: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-03 04:05 pm (UTC)The first few chapters were blistering but it's slowed off a bit now. Female creator has been killed off, under dramatic and mysterious circumstances. I was intrigued by the glimpse we got of her when she met Robin, partly because Robin had so much trouble figuring her out or predicting what she was going to say. I understand that there are thematic reasons for her to be the one killed, but I'm still :( about it. (And why must we have a murder in every book? Not all of Sherlock Holmes' cases were murders... who can I blame this on? Christie? Grumble grumble.)
I've resigned myself to the fact that the first chapter is probably going to be most Strike/Robin ship fodder we get all book and they're going to be spending the rest of the time dating other people.
JK's included a lot of background for people who don't know about the alt right or internet trolls, which I find a bit unusual. This book seems like it's designed for the enjoyment by the Very Online, and then she felt compelled to add more to explain things to people less in the know. Or maybe because it's not very in character for our detectives to know about all this? All of the Strike books are about fame at some level, but the defectives are fairly clueless about internet fan culture, so I'm hesitant about how JK will make this work. Meanwhile all of the chat logs are perfect.
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-03 05:26 pm (UTC)Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-03 10:47 pm (UTC)Well, we've gotten around to leftist fans being toxic, with the Pen of Justice blog. The name's a little too on the nose. And ... I'm still struggling with suspension of disbelief, centered around the nature of the fake cartoon. What actual genre is it? What sort of people are attracted to it? Is it full of South Park-esqe edgy humor? Or are parts of it more heartfelt? Why is it popular with idiot sexist alt-right assholes, overly literal art-deaf wokescolds, and the general public via netflix? Why are people going off getting tattoos of it all over their body? The glimpses of fan culture are faithful enough but they're not cohesive because it doesn't make sense that all these different subcultures are fans together without being at each other's throats or (more realistically) dropping the show and moving onto different canons to separate themselves from one another.
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-04 05:25 am (UTC)Tbf I think this is fandom as the woke left sees it and as the media likes to present it.
Because this situation you're describing is basically IMO the public representation/claim of what the Star Wars fandom is like - idiot sexist alt-right assholes (see: 'fandom menace') because disliking Rey immediately makes you an idiot sexist alt-right asshole, overally literal art-deaf wokescolds flooded in after Rian Johnson's TLJ and in reaction to their perception of idiot sexist alt-right assholes, I think Filoni's TCW and the Disney movies introduced the general public, and so on. All we need is the Reylos for things to be complete.
You're right about moving on to different canons but the situation I'm seeing is that a lot of people stay on and hate watch in the hopes that eventually it will be their Star Wars, for whatever value of 'their' they deem suitable.
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-04 06:31 am (UTC)I read an article speculating the fandom was at least partly based off Rick & Morty. I'm not familiar enough with that show to know what kind of fans it has, though.
I'm not as far into the book yet, but the description of it from Robin as a "stoner's macabre fantasy" does sound like the kind of thing that would attract both edgelord male viewers and artsy lefty e-girls.
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-04 07:14 am (UTC)Although yeah, thinking about it further, it would be unusual for the two types of fans to mix on the same platform, which is what seems to be happening w/ the game in the book? If not moving on to other fandoms entirely, usually they'd at least split off so they wouldn't have to deal with each other, like the Tumblr/Reddit schism in a lot of fandoms.
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-04 10:21 am (UTC)The only thing the fandom seems to do is say one of two catchphrases and gush about the characters.
I don't know how you'd build a fandom out of that, it just seems oddly empty.
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2022-09-04 11:37 am (UTC) - ExpandRe: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-04 09:52 pm (UTC)Honestly the depiction in the book reminds me more of fandom in the aughts than in the teens. LJ, forums, etc -- you gather around some canon but you actually spend 80% of the time talking vague personal stuff. Ha, it brings back memories of this teenage guy I knew traveling to Australia to meet a artist he was keen on and then being crushed when it turned out she had a boyfriend and also spent the entire time ignoring him in favor of online gaming. That sort of vibe, where you cross lines into namespace more. Now, does it mesh with call-out campaigns on twitter? I don't know, that seems like a later, less localized fandom era.
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-04 10:05 pm (UTC)Aw, poor Morehouse. I guess we needed another murder to raise the stakes more. (And with the lack of good Strike/Robin fodder, I was getting really invested in him and Paperwhite. C'mon! She called him Mouse! It was adorable!)
I'm usually rubbish at guessing the perpetrators, and this book is no exception. I was voting for Inigo, but now that they've revealed more about him, it seems unlikely. And there are too many signs posting to Kea to be her. Maybe the former assistant? Maybe Nils or someone in his orbit? Nils is obviously shady and the other shoe hasn't dropped for him.
I've started enjoying the book more, partly because I've stopped caring about the actual canon and how much sense it does or doesn't make. It's basically a bunch of messed up online friends, and it's fun failing to guess who's who. One major appeal of JK's detective books comes from the judgy details in the visits they make to incredibly dysfunctional family units, and we've had a lot of those.
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-05 02:04 pm (UTC)Well the first paragraph of my previous post aged very poorly, haha, as the big villain Anomie and Paperwhite turned out to be the same person. Okay. That twist seemed like a bit of a reach. Like, if you can convincingly portray a twenty year old college student, who talks about classes and how worried she is about her mom's cancer diagnosis, why are you also an incel who doesn't understand how to talk to girls? Who's... giving himself hives? How does that psychology make any sense.
I also would have expected greater rage at his father Inigo, frankly. And more of a mental break after Strike confronts them at the summer house.
I am also disappointed/surprised by how little other details were dropped on Nils, who seemed like a creep of the highest order. Basically Zoe gives a whole speech about how she thinks he's the culprit, and she's praised for being smart, but her theory isn't actually correct. It feels like the kind of step you take as a writer when you hadn't figured out which ending you wanted but you're too busy to go rework things, so you give the option you ended up not taking to a side character as their theory.
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-05 02:21 pm (UTC)Finally, I think she's getting bored of Strike. He's such an awful but entertaining person, which makes him a great lead for a series, but she seems to want to start reforming him here to which I say booooooo, that's boring. Yet another reason I think this book probably would have worked better as a stand alone or a book in a different series.
Despite all that, personal ranking of series: 5 > 2 > 6 ~ 1 > 4 > 3
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-06 08:05 pm (UTC)Interesting, I haven't read that far into the series yet but your issues with it sound a little like the issues I had with the Casual Vacancy (where I found her politics disrupted the book rather than working *with* it the way they did in HP, so they felt lecturey).
I also find your take on Strike interesting because it may be that I just haven't hit the worst stuff yet, but so far I get the impression she really admires him and she's trying to make an effort to make him 'gritty' to balance that out, but it's also like, well, Hagrid was her HP fave, wasn't he? And I always assumed Strike was like 'start with Hagrid but what if he's smart' (and then a veteran to make him gritty haha).
Now I'm trying to picture what a Hagrid detective agency would even look like
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-09 07:56 pm (UTC)He definitely is meant to be admirable in many ways - he's hard working, shrewd, values the truth and helping people - but those are preconditions for me to like him, not the reasons I do.
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-09 08:01 pm (UTC)I think they are v different characters, but I always got the vibe she started with Hagrid to get Strike. Maybe it's just the voice!
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
Date: 2022-09-09 08:03 pm (UTC)Hm, I'm having trouble seeing similarities between them other than being male and having messy hair? What am I missing?
Re: BOOKS - Ink Black Heart 🖤
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