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Why did I always get kudos from COMMENT_ME_JAPANESE_TITS? Why did I never get kudos from Carl Gauss? What's a girl got to do to attract a studly mathematician to her principia-mathematica-omegaverse fanfic? I'd proved the number 4 at least twenty times! But no, Gauss and his cute flowery signature were nowhere to be seen! Just me, the Hell Hounds, and the stalwart tit-requester. Typical.

(https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/3100.html?thread=5411356#cmt5411356)

Welcome back! Chat fandom, creative things, odd stuff you've seen around the net, funny stuff, books, films, anything! Meme trundles on!

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From: (Anonymous)

And I find it interesting that the *way* the characterization feels thin and unconvincing is the same way it does in a lot of MFA novels, or novels that are touted as The Next Big Thing in the lit world, though it's hard to put my finger on what exactly it is they're all getting wrong. Like, ok, what I *feel* from them is "lack of life experience", but what is it about the words on the page that gives me that vibe? What makes one book feel solid and another feel weightless? Something I'll be wondering about.

From: (Anonymous)

Ch9. June goes to an Asian American social event to give her some street cred. It backfires; the organizers have assumed she's Chinese, and it's well awkward when they realize she isn't. The organizer is pissed off but stays silent (out of decorum? Out of kindness to June? Out of her own embarassment? I like that it's not spelled out, as it would be in a shittier novel), and June feels ashamed. It's impossible not to read this chapter without cringing, and while it's a bit heavy-handed, I think the book would work better with more of this vibe; June actually feels guilty, for a change, and trapped. In general, I think this book would have benefited from making June either more sympathetic, or thoroughly unrepentant, whereas it's mostly stuck in an awkward middle ground.

From: (Anonymous)

Ch10. Hollywood comes knocking. They suggest they make a film of the novel, in a racist way. "Aight," says June. "Sounds good to me." This is another one where the idea of the scene appeals to me but I don't think it's as well-executed as it could be. Go harder, more ridiculous! Or go softer, more realistic!

(Also there's a pun on "death of the author", and I can hear Kuang, bojack-like, "did you get it? Did you get it? Did you?" but tbf the goofiness of this makes me like her better. yes u put words in a character's mouth that they would never say, but we got it.)

From: (Anonymous)

Ch11. She's describing the mean comments June gets on social media, as rumors of the novel's true origins swirl. I don't think I can critique this part fairly, since I write a lot of stuff that goes in that direction (ie: parodying aggro responses on social media), and am of the humble opinion that I do it better than anyone else. For me, Kuang's attempt is a bit limp and needs seasoning with wittier humor. But yeah, biased. Tho I don't think humor is Kuang's strong suit. The comments here read more like draft placeholders than the final comments. This chapter could've been so much funnier.

From: (Anonymous)

Example:

https://imgur.com/b94BsEd

Come on, babe, you've literally just transcribed a meme. Go harder! Make it original.

From: (Anonymous)

Oh, and that scarjo bit niggles because if a reader doesn't know the scarjo memes, it doesn't explain enough. If the reader does know, it overexplains. A lot of the writing in this book is like that, and could do with tightening.

From: (Anonymous)

End of chapter. It goes more into her being disturbed at online trolls, and the overimportance of twitter for the publishing industry and authors' reputations, and again I think "this would be so much better if the character hadn't been positioned as stealing the MS to start". Still, the psychological stuff here is good, and feels informed by experience.

From: (Anonymous)

Ch12 or 13, I forget. June decides she's had enough of online trolls, so she decides to make a honeypot website so she can track their locations from their IP addresses. This idea is cool but it's executed in a really dumb way, for some reason. Apparently June knows how to set up a website, and how to retrieve visitor IPs, but not how to geolocate them. What? So she knows everything except... Google? 🧐 She intends to forward the IPs to her IT tech brother in law, so he can track them, anyway. 🤷

Not finished the chapter, yet. Maybe it'll make more sense as it goes on. If you can code, this chapter will prolly give you a laugh; this is not an author who knows tech. :p

From: (Anonymous)

Still same chapter. Athena gets posthumously Cancelled for not being good enough Asian American Representation, and this part I think is sharply written and satisfying to read. It accurately depicts how the lit crowd hop from adoring the hot new thing to burning the witch at a fingersnap, usually without even bothering to read any of the works they praise or castigate. It made me laugh, though also makes me wonder if Kuang will ever get it together and terf out. You can't really talk about witch-hunts in modern publishing and not mention THE most obvious one.

From: (Anonymous)

Right when I was complimenting the structure, she went and spoiled it by introducing a new, villainois character halfway thru the book. Ok, she gave a heads up about the character's existence... Like a chapter before. This character needed to be mentioned at the start!

Though tbf, there's a chaaaance they were. Maybe I skimread. Any dans who've read it, feel free to correct me if I'm being an eejit.

From: (Anonymous)

(ooh, "villainois", sounds French! That was meant to be "villainous". Obviously. Enjoy this pointless post.)

From: (Anonymous)

Ch15. Hard to concentrate, because the tenses are all over the place. Fix grammar plz. Shame, because otherwise this chapter is good. June reveals that, after she was raped at Yale, Athena comforted her, listened to her, then poached her account of her feelings and used the tale to get published in a literary magazine that June herself had been rejected from. Fair enough, June, do what you like with Athena's manuscript after that, lol.

From: (Anonymous)

Ch16. June puts out another book, plagiarizes off Athena, again, but this time it is discovered immediately, and there's proof. Given the earlier rumors, everyone assumes she's been plagiarizing everything. All her fake publishing friends desert her. But she has a damn good agent, who salvages things. Up 'til now, he's been depicted mostly as a slightly racist bro, but his smooth agenting in this chapter has boosted him in my estimation, because apparently I value competence over most things. :'] She has only plagiarized the first para, so they agree to rewrite that, make a statement, and leave the rest.

But June's not out of the woods yet. Athena's mother has all of Athena's old wip notebooks, so can prove that June is a plagiarist, but she says she won't look inside. The emphasis on her mother having secrets is now heavy enough that I've been wondering for a while if Yellowface is going to have a twist that Athena is a) adopted and b) Korean, just for the lols.

I am enjoying the plot developments and interested to see what happens next; I think this book is better when it moves away from Discourse and more into plotty territory. May be personal preference.

From: (Anonymous)

Kuang continues to be a bit odd about money. June apparently has enough to live on, for the next 15 years, eating takeout every other day. But then she gets some good news about royalties going up a bit for a project, and she's pleased, picturing buying an IKEA couch. So who's this person who has funds for fifteen YEARS but can't afford a couch from IKEA??? Did I miss something? Is Kuang unfamiliar with IKEA? She's mentioned it by name a few times. I also don't see how June can possibly have this much money, with the figures quoted so far. Maybe I misread something. And if June went to Yale, and she has 15 years' living expenses handy, why is she too dumb to invest?

From: (Anonymous)

Even if she just uses a fixed rate savings account, she could stretch that passive income. Get it together, June.

/dan-getting-distracted-by-pointless-details

From: (Anonymous)

17. The mob turning on June has unexpected consequences: she becomes a darling of the online alt-right. Here, I don't think Kuang has her finger on the pulse. She suggests the alt-right would take the angle that plagiarism is fine because free speech and Own The Libs. No. The angle the online right would take is *exactly the same angle Kuang is taking*. They would frame it as a "woke mob" story, and it'd focus on June's discovery of the viciousness and superficiality of those in the industry who present themselves as progressive, kind and virtuous. And a fair chunk of rightwing youtubers et al would just go "lol snake eating its tail" or "lol industry run by women; what do you expect?"-- but those left remaining would invite June to tell her tale of her emotional journey. Kuang, in the eyes of many of the people you are seeking to satirize, *you are alt-right*. Sorry. But I suspect that, sooner or later, you are going to say something inconvenient for them, and they are going to let you know it.

From: (Anonymous)

17 continued. She has writers' block, so she goes to Chinatown for inspo. She is cringe. She goes to a restaurant, where she tries to interview the staff, but they recognise her as a plagiarist and ask her to leave. (Thathappened.jpg). For some reason, she doesn't know what soup dumplings are, even though she could take a wild guess from the name. I'm still confused about how June can be *so* stupid and a Yale student while not rich. Anyway. I'm confused about how she doesn't seem to have ever been in a Chinese restaurant before. She also expects Chinatown both to be full of crime and also super gentrified? Idk, these seem like very weird expectations for Chinatown, but I keep substituting in my local Chinatown, which I tend to visit for late night cafes and dessert places. No rep for more or less crime than anywhere else in town, and somewhere local students choose to go all the time for nights out. Maybe hers has a different rep.

From: (Anonymous)

18. June has some high-schooler writing students. They find out about the accusations, so she bullies them by trashing their writing. This part is hard to read, it's fingers-over-eyes stuff, but also I found it OOC. June's like 100x meaner than she's been through all the rest of the novel.

She thus gets politely kicked out of her teaching-highschoolers job, and then there's a bizarre paragraph where she goes something along the lines of "I read somewhere that Asians are polite, even when judging you, because they have this cultural thing about allowing others to save face." Er, sure, Kuang, "letting people save face" is a specifically-Asian thing that white people have only ever heard about in tales from afar. This novel has been alright on the whole at not doing this kinda thing, since usually any particularly bizarre beliefs can be attributed to some character rather than the author, but I think acting like a white woman would be new to the whole concept of "being polite" is going a bit far lol.

From: (Anonymous)

(there's an exchange in the text to which the face-saving commentary refers, and I cannot emphasize enough how much it is exactly the conversation you would expect to occur in a context where people wanted to be polite and didn't want to address something directly, but everyone knew the situation. June has no reason to think it's Asian-specific.)

From: (Anonymous)

Ch19. June visits her mother, complains about how she's never supported her artistic ambitions, and gets into why she wants to be a writer so badly. Her mother keeps pushing her to take an office job, and then tries to persuade her to invest her money; I snicker at this, because investing is indeed what she should do. The family finances in this chapter don't add up to me (single mother with an office job comfortably putting 2 daughters through ivy league with "minimal student debt" and having a retirement fund? In the US??? She had some $700k going spare?), but I know I should let it go. I like the rant about writing turning from a joy to a chore once it becomes a job; something like that happened to a relative of mine, and it's something that makes me wary of the industry.

From: (Anonymous)

Ch20. June implies that the book we're reading is her attempt at fictionalizing her own life. She mentions she's putting extra "sapphic" stuff in just as a cynical way of getting more attention, and I laugh, because I did indeed read that thread that way, though I'm not sure the author lampshading her own thought processes via her character makes it any less cynical. Similarly, I think using the convention of an unreliable narrator to smooth over any inconsistencies in the text is a quick fix I've seen a bit too often. But it does still improve things. June gets her writing mojo back, picturing how the scandal will boost her royalties when she publishes. But then "Athena's ghost" sends her a creepy message on insta, and she freaks out again.

From: (Anonymous)

Ch21?22? I forget. We find out the identity of the ghost haunting June-- it's Candice Lee, the pro-sensitivity-read assistant! She gives a sob story about how she couldn't get work after she got fired, and I'm like "lol, like this has ever gone down this way in the history of ever". But fair enough, maybe Kuang wanted some obviously distorted bullshit to illustrate the idea of stories being distorted to suit the powerful. I suspect this is giving too much credit, but who knows. June then has a whinge about how nobody cares about her Because She Is White, and Candice retorts that nobody cares about Asians, they just want tokens, and I think to myself that IRL both these women would be on a Gender Journey rn and writing boring stuff about that.

Candice has secretly recorded June confessing to pinching Athena's work. June offers to bribe her, but Candice tells her to go fuck herself. She blames June for ruining her life. Iirc she behaved unprofessionally, directly harming marketing for their company's product, June drew her boss's attention to it, and then her boss overreacted. But yeah, if you read this bit as implying this is always what goes down when people get fired thanks to snitches on social media, might just be propaganda or might be something cleverer; the reader can decide. The word cishet has appeared twice in this book, is all I'm saying.

They get in a fight at the top of a slippery staircase, and I wonder if we're about to go full Mad Honey. June gloats; she thinks that she can take Candice in a fight because she's white and Candice is Asian and she's all 'Asian women are smaller'. But Candice kicks her off the stairs. End of chapter!

From: (Anonymous)

There's also some cringe wordplay about punching down/up during their fight, but I'll spare you that.

Depth: 24

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