sorryyourenglishteachersucked

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

If you go to a good school, with a good English class, you will often be taught some good media literacy skills! You will be assigned more freeform analytical writing assignments for homework where you'll be graded less on the conclusions you came to, and more on how well you can use the text and/or its context to support those conclusions. You will have lively discussions about your own readings of a work of fiction, you will read takes from multiple other perspectives, and you will be taught how and why a textbook author's reading isn't the be-all and end-all of what a piece means, but this author's interpretation is the one on the standardized test and here's why it's a valid reading and these sample wrong answers are...less so. You will be taught some research skills - how to recognize a reputable source, what you have to cite, how to recognize bias and spin, and some teachers I've seen have even been updating this subset of lessons with assignments to experiment with what AI can and can't do, particularly focusing on hallucinated information. Of course, even in that case, it's possible to fall behind even if you are trying to pay attention, because you might be disabled in a way the school doesn't want or know how to Deal With (in fact, this can be WORSE in Good Schools in some respects because of the environment of elitism they may cultivate), but it is true that there are good English classes out there, and if you got one, that's fucking awesome and I'm happy for you.

But if you don't go to a good school, the extent of your literature education is likely to be - "here's a classic book. Read it. Here's what the textbook author says it means. Memorize it, it's on the test. Here's how to do all these citation formats, no we won't teach you when to use them or how to spot a reliable source of information, you were supposed to learn that last year or from your parents. Oh, whatever, we have other students and way too many papers to grade, try again next week."

It is critical not to forget this lest you start to fall into some kind of "no, I pulled myself up by my bootstraps and paid attention in English class, you're just a willful ignoramus" thinking when what really happened is that you got the good class and the other guy didn't.

“they do teach media literacy in schools, you guys just didn’t pay attention in English class and—” a lot of curriculums fail to include or address digital media. that is a problem. "but any decent school is supposed to—" not everyone goes to a decent school

don’t get me wrong, i agree that people should be held accountable for spreading total mcbullshit online. it sucks, it’s dangerous, and there’s no excuse for it. however, the idea that everyone has equal access to educational opportunities is—i cannot stress this enough—wrong. educational success is deeply rooted in privilege. this is not a meritocracy in which the ‘smart’ people are the ones who paid the most attention in class. to suggest otherwise is a useless exercise in having a superiority complex, especially in response to “we should seek to improve media literacy & information access,” which is true and a silly thing to argue with

#reblogs #high school english woes

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

Listening to a podcast discussing conspiracy theories and deconstructing the ideas behind them and it's reminded me of the coolest practical lessons in critical thinking I ever got, both in high school, both from the same teacher. One was a month long project on who killed jfk in which we could basically present any theory as long as we cited all our reasons and it got us really excited about research and interpretation, but it was the follow up that I liked best.

Our next project she brought us into class and showed us a documentary claiming the moon landing was faked. Gave us worksheets to do that sided with that stance. And at the end of class a bunch of us were like miss wait this doesn't seem right?? and she said okay, we'll discuss that next week. The next lesson, she showed us a mythbusters episode countering all the claims of the original documentary and gave us worksheets for that, and another bunch of people went wait miss you can't teach us two opposing things, which one is right? What do we put on the exam??

So she split the class in two and told us each to present a case based on each side, and to explain why our source was or wasn't the more reliable of the two. Got us to debate each other directly and use additional sources to back us up and explain why those sources were reliable and should be believed. And because they were randomly assigned there was no guarantee you'd agree with the stance you were presenting, but you had to present it like you did. At the end of the project she asked us all which stance we found more convincing and why, and the majority of us basically said "we think that the moon landing is real because most of the arguments against it seem like someone reacted to a confusing thing without testing it, but when you test it and ask the person running the test to explain the science it makes sense once you have more information. Also, one documentary was made with the help of scientists with qualifications and experience and the other was made by people who don't have that but like to write mystery books, which looks like a less reliable way to get an answer. But we still dont understand why you showed us both if one is wrong."

And she was like excellent. You've done exactly what you should do. At high school level, we as teachers are expected to filter for the reliable sources for you, so you know to repeat that to pass an exam, but if you want to be historians on your own, I won't be your teacher any more once you graduate. Lots of people have opinions and theories and research about times in history, and it's your job to learn how to look at them and decide who you want to trust. This won't be on the exam, but I need you all to know it. You all did a great job following the school's instructions to repeat information you were given, but for some of you, that information wasn't on a reliable foundation. I know you all know how to pass an exam. You're smart and you've been trained to follow these instructions. What you deserve to be taught is how to use all this once you don't have to do exams any more.

And then as a reward for us doing a good job at figuring out the value of checking your sources' sources she let us watch Bush get hit in the face with a shoe before we had to go to maths. Shoutout to you Ms Hannah you were a good'un I hope you're doing well ten years on from that class

#teachers who don't suck

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

#reblogs #structural inequality #fuck standardized testing

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

Not ironically, not unironically, but in a secret third way, I really find that spite poetry by k-12 and equivalent students about how much they hate poetry is some of the best poetry out there

#poetry #malicious compliance #high school english woes #reblogs

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

Possibly my biggest problem with trying to make hard and fast rules about what kind of Problematic Subjects (TM) people are Not Allowed to Like or Create At All is that it's always so EXTREMELY limited in scope, so reductive about what constitutes "problematic", that it functionally ends up sorting stories into "as common-sense-bad as serving fried babies in the stands at a puppy-kicking contest and thus depiction of it is just as evil because if the story is fun or cathartic in ANY way someone might take it as saying it's good to reenact (because that's what common-sense-bad means, that people can be convinced it's good that easily)" or "wholesome perfectly imitable aspirational goodness that you should strive to recreate in the real world, no flaws, this is what utopia looks like, this is the ideal", and NOTHING in between exists, CAN exist...

And because human emotions are an irrational mess, this ends up meaning that a LOT of stuff showing some MAJOR unexamined biases ends up getting defensively shunted into the latter category.

How?

Hey, booktok! Look at this far-future military culture bravely standing up against aliens who are, by both their culture and their very genetic nature, just too evil and warlike to EVER reason with! Nearly 30% of the named characters are women including our lead couple and we have two trans characters too and we EVEN take 20 whole seconds to address the reasons that a military still exists at all so there's nothing sexist or problematic here! It's all but a post-patriarchal utopia! Never mind that everyone still looks down on survival skills like textile creation and sewing and gardening and cooking as soft frivolous nonsense only applicable to homemaking, that's a TRUE FACT and definitely not just an internalized bias because the author lives in a society where those are ~for giiIiIIrrRrRrllLLs~, and there's nothing even slightly questionable about the fact that the innately evil aliens are basically orcs transposed into a sci-fi setting, shhhh, orcs have never been written in a way that carries any kind of baggage, no more questions, don't you want cute lesbians surviving against the odds? What are you, some kind of homophobe!?

This also carries over to relationship dynamics; consider how...for all they get held up as the height of wholesome cuteness, coffee shop AUs aren't ~unproblematic~ at all. Sure, in the context of the story we can tell that the character cast as the barista is interested, but if that were a real-life situation? The only one who would be able to know if they're interested or not would be them, thanks to the limitations of Customer Service Mode. You can't ethically enter a relationship with someone in a situation where they don't have a safe way to firmly and unambiguously say no, and guess what, that's what most coffee shop meetings are! You see unproblematic fluff; well, when you call it that I just see workplace harassment. I'm not gonna say anyone can't write or enjoy these AUs! But I AM gonna side-eye the hell out of anyone who insists they're ~perfectly wholesome goodness~...at least, as long as the characters don't have an age gap greater than 2 years or so; if they DO have an age gap (and yes it still counts if it exists in canon but not in your fic) THERE'S an irreconcilable power dynamic! The only one in play here. Everything else about this scenario is 100% imitable and wholesome and healthy and fine!

...yeah. No. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.

See, one of the big problems with the whole Irredeemable Media mindset is that it declares that if you DON'T make that argument, and make it convincingly, you're not allowed to like this thing and still call yourself a Good Person; if you do like this thing, and you can't justify why it's wholly Unproblematic and totally okay to reenact irl, you're morally equivalent to an actual, literal child molester (and that one is not hyperbole but in fact the most common accusation flung over this).

But the problem is, Liking Things is an emotional response, not a rational choice. Liking Things is not something you consciously decide to do after evaluating that the Thing is 100% consistent with your worldview; it's just something that Happens.

So, look. To simplify it to a short paragraph, media analysis is supposed to work like this: you examine the piece of media and the events in it and the world it illustrates, you ask yourself what context it was written in, you ask yourself about the culture it originated from and how that influence shows in the end result, you ask yourself what about it resonated with you, for better, worse, and neutral, and from there, at the end of the process, you draw your conclusions about What It Means and how it relates to real-world issues and human behavior and whether or not you'd recommend it to others, and if so, to whom.

But when you follow this liking-media-is-a-one-to-one-reflection-of-one's-real-world-values mindset, what often ends up happening is that you get the process backward and engage in some dangerous circular reasoning: You Like This Piece. You Are A Good Person. Therefore, This Piece Is Good. You Like It, Therefore It Reflects Your Values, Therefore Its Values Are Good. It Is Not Problematic, Otherwise You Would Not Like It.

Ironically, that approach is far more inclined to make you want to accept some really fucked up ideas because your favorite piece of media contains them, than delighting in liking problematic trash ever would. Why?

Because you're not analyzing a piece of media, you're defending your own entire character. Your value as a moral human being. Your inherent goodness. Your ticket to heaven. You're defending all of this as if you're on trial. In order for You to still be Good, your favorite piece of media must also be Good, meaning everything about it must be Good. Those space orcs don't have any racist baggage, because they're not human! There is certainly no history of Black and indigenous people being compared to races of inhuman monsters; in fact, anyone who points out how their broad noses and war paint and the dark tones of their blue skin do indeed have some Implications in racial coding, those people are full of shit, those people are the REAL racists for making the comparison! And, and anyone who suggests that your coffee shop AU, when read through a lens of realism, is just as questionable about consent as any pulp bodice-ripper, and that both of these subgenres use romance genre conventions as a shorthand for consent instead of showing it explicitly and that's okay as long as the target audience also understands what's going on - no, absolutely not, clearly this is just a bad-faith argument to hold up an ACTUAL problematic ship, you're nothing like those trashy edgelord authors, see, the barista laughed at and leaned into the flirty joke, no one in the history of customer service work has EVER done that as a professional courtesy or to prevent a conflict from escalating while silently wishing the interaction was over and wondering if the customer is going to stalk them after their shift, or at least no one is a good enough actor that if they were thinking that you wouldn't be able to tell, the consent was totally clear and totally illustrated 100% realistically!

Whereas, if you just admit to yourself that, yeah, okay, the author of Fight The Aliens And Make It Lesbian definitely tried to make something overall positive, and oh boy did they ever deliver in terms of letting a diverse cast be action heroes and examining how that kind of stress can affect a person and how people can still find joy in the direst of situations, but they still had some unexamined biases that show through and it's worth addressing so we can do even better in the future; or that actually, yeah, the reason the customer/barista meet cute is fun to fantasize about is because the nature of the narrative eliminates the uncertainty about everyone's intentions, even though it's every bit as inimitable as professor/student in reality (and holy shit more people need to be aware of that actually, workplace harassment is fucking rampant) - that shows far more moral integrity than trying to jump through hoops to justify these things. Under the other model, you were bending over backward to give these things a pass to prove you weren't a Bad Person for liking them, and in the process defending some genuinely indefensible ideas and irl behavior. Now, you're just letting yourself be a human person with emotions that don't necessarily equal something you should act on, or even that you would ENJOY acting on - I mean really now, when you stop and think about it, would you actually want to try and flirt with your blorbo over the cafe counter when you get nervous even just ordering coffee from a normal person?

#media #media critique #media analysis #problematic media #sorry your english teacher sucked

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

#reading this post was like 'yup. uhuh. yep. wait is this about fucking steven universe'#doesnt make the content any less good it was just. a huge whiplash sdfsghdfg

via @crescentmoonrider

Ehe, the post as a whole was meant to be very general, but that also certainly was a bad faith clusterfuck that I can't help but vague from time to time because it really did constitute a showcase of some of the WILDEST Disk Horse fouls on the internet.

(Really, what was it about the rock cartoon that made people get so unhingedly confident in the WORST bastardizations of basic critical thinking skills...?)

What "you are not immune to propaganda" means:

Propaganda works by tampering with your internal template for how you view the world

When propaganda takes a form you don't expect, it can get into your head very easily

Propaganda typically utilizes emotional manipulation to make you feel like you're learning something and/or preparing to protect something, to prevent you from questioning the actual content of its message

Some propaganda, especially that made to induce you into conspiracy thought, even uses literal hypnotic techniques* to prompt you to question what you already know, so even if you know that the idea presented is wrong, if you don't recognize the strategies in play and why the arguments are hollow at best, it may still affect you; if you want to study that variety, you need to go in prepared and likely do a "mental detox" afterward

No matter how hard you try to build your defenses, everyone has things that they don't know that they don't know and manipulative techniques they won't immediately recognize, and it's very easy for misinformation to take hold around those things, thus, true and complete immunity is impossible

What "you are not immune to propaganda" DOESN'T mean:

Propaganda is so unavoidably effective on everyone that your only hope for not getting almost literally mind controlled is to never even look at it, and you must shun anyone who does, regardless of their reason or takeaway, because it's only a matter of time before they turn into a monster if they're not secretly one already

* Note that it's important to recognize that hypnosis is not as effective as it's made out to be in media! Many techniques - especially the most dramatic and showy ones - don't work unless they're used on an active cooperative participant, and even the ones used in propaganda for use on unknowing targets, such as rapid-fire repetition of thought-terminating cliches, can be resisted effectively once they're recognized for what they are. There is no such thing as a YouTube video that will make a normal, otherwise well-adjusted person suddenly turn violent in a zombie-like trance. There are many videos that prompt you to focus on rapidly meandering appeals to emotion, particularly fear, in such a way as to render you more open to suggestion in spite of your preexisting knowledge. The idea is to make you feel intelligent, affirmed, and comfortable enough to relax and believe you are special in seeing an obvious "plot hole" in reality, to convince you more subtly to accept contradictory and/or blatantly implausible details at face value.

You are not immune to propaganda, but there are also many, many ways any specific piece WILL fail on many people, from being recognized and called for what it is, to failing to convince a person to connect its ideas to any real-life people or issues. In fact, convincing yourself that propaganda is this terrible magical mind-control ray that's just impossible to resist only serves to make you more vulnerable, because then a lot of propaganda...suddenly no longer fits your mental profile for What Propaganda Looks Like.

The closest possible thing to immunity to propaganda is learning the tricks, not blind avoidance of anything with arguably questionable themes or aggressive paranoid readings; the latter is how you get takes like "the Jewish take on redemption and forgiveness is ACTUALLY fascist apologia".

#replies

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

What "you are not immune to propaganda" means:

Propaganda works by tampering with your internal template for how you view the world

When propaganda takes a form you don't expect, it can get into your head very easily

Propaganda typically utilizes emotional manipulation to make you feel like you're learning something and/or preparing to protect something, to prevent you from questioning the actual content of its message

Some propaganda, especially that made to induce you into conspiracy thought, even uses literal hypnotic techniques* to prompt you to question what you already know, so even if you know that the idea presented is wrong, if you don't recognize the strategies in play and why the arguments are hollow at best, it may still affect you; if you want to study that variety, you need to go in prepared and likely do a "mental detox" afterward

No matter how hard you try to build your defenses, everyone has things that they don't know that they don't know and manipulative techniques they won't immediately recognize, and it's very easy for misinformation to take hold around those things, thus, true and complete immunity is impossible

What "you are not immune to propaganda" DOESN'T mean:

Propaganda is so unavoidably effective on everyone that your only hope for not getting almost literally mind controlled is to never even look at it, and you must shun anyone who does, regardless of their reason or takeaway, because it's only a matter of time before they turn into a monster if they're not secretly one already

* Note that it's important to recognize that hypnosis is not as effective as it's made out to be in media! Many techniques - especially the most dramatic and showy ones - don't work unless they're used on an active cooperative participant, and even the ones used in propaganda for use on unknowing targets, such as rapid-fire repetition of thought-terminating cliches, can be resisted effectively once they're recognized for what they are. There is no such thing as a YouTube video that will make a normal, otherwise well-adjusted person suddenly turn violent in a zombie-like trance. There are many videos that prompt you to focus on rapidly meandering appeals to emotion, particularly fear, in such a way as to render you more open to suggestion in spite of your preexisting knowledge. The idea is to make you feel intelligent, affirmed, and comfortable enough to relax and believe you are special in seeing an obvious "plot hole" in reality, to convince you more subtly to accept contradictory and/or blatantly implausible details at face value.

You are not immune to propaganda, but there are also many, many ways any specific piece WILL fail on many people, from being recognized and called for what it is, to failing to convince a person to connect its ideas to any real-life people or issues. In fact, convincing yourself that propaganda is this terrible magical mind-control ray that's just impossible to resist only serves to make you more vulnerable, because then a lot of propaganda...suddenly no longer fits your mental profile for What Propaganda Looks Like.

The closest possible thing to immunity to propaganda is learning the tricks, not blind avoidance of anything with arguably questionable themes or aggressive paranoid readings; the latter is how you get takes like "the Jewish take on redemption and forgiveness is ACTUALLY fascist apologia".

#critical thinking #propaganda #sorry your english teacher sucked

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

Allow me to assure you, as a librarian, that if you as a concerned citizen present us with a list of Books that are Bad and should Not Be In Our Collection and which you Require us to Remove At Once, we will scan it for titles that we don't have yet to add to our purchase list.

#censorship #libraries #critical thinking #reblogs

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

These policies can help to improve the mental health of students

#teachers who don't suck #not just english #fuck standardized testing #(and a lot of other testing tbh) #reblogs

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

Speaking of deliberately approaching something from a framework the text is clearly not endorsing, as both a reader and a writer who loves doing that:

The BEST genre-switch subversions are the ones that analyze the original text(s) they're playing with twice: once in good faith with the original genre, knowing where to take things at face value; then once scrutinizing it under the framework of the target genre, going "wow, that would be SUPER fucked up and/or Generally Weird in a different story, how far can we run with it?"

If you only do the second analysis, or forget to refer back to the first, you end up with something that reads as cynical, mean-spirited, and incapable of taking itself seriously as a work of fiction. That's why a lot of people don't like the "ruined childhood" type of readings after the ever-so-common teenage edgelord phase that creates them - because they're born of trying to prove yourself ~cool~ and ~mature~ by proving yourself Better than something you used to love. "Ha, stupid writers, they never thought about THIS implication, but I did so I win!" is a very common attitude that drives those kinds of readings.

...unfortunately some people grow past that phase without growing out of either reading things in bad faith like that, or otherwise assuming that the singular analytical framework they enjoy the most is The One True Valid Framework. Which is how we get both new stories that can't take themselves seriously, and some really wild and reductive and unsubstantiated takes on existing ones (and the people who enjoyed them).

But! If you synthesize your "hey wouldn't this be fucked up in the real world or a different genre?" or "what is the most fucked up way to justify the cartoon logic in this universe?" reading/retelling with actually meeting the original text on its own terms and borrowing what you LIKE from the intended themes of the original genre - even if you don't really like the original genre, but you're willing to meet it on its own terms anyway - you can often get something pretty good.

Going back to an example in the thread, this is why Madoka Magica is so widely loved, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the above process wasn't really done consciously - because contrary to popular belief, it wasn't a big grand "take that" to the magical girl genre; it was just a guy going "hmmm, I want to write a magical girl story, but my whole Thing is tragedy; what would those look like together?" Although a lot of the aesthetics of the magical girl genre are twisted and corrupted, the core themes remain - it's a story about the power of emotion, love, and bonds being cosmically important. It's still a story that looks at a world that tells girls that they're the Emotional Sex and then belittles them for being emotional, and says "no, your feelings DO matter, they are a source of strength." It just takes that in a direction that other magical girl shows don't; while most have the main characters persevering and having a happy ending, Madoka is a tragedy - and what it ultimately says is "even if you don’t get the happy ending other magical girls in other universes do, even if it ends in tragedy and pain, it still mattered; the love you felt was real, and so was the joy it brought you, even if the good times must come to an end. It still is real, in fact, and that's why this hurts so much." That's a cathartic message for a lot of people!

What I'm saying is - well, same thing as the rest of the thread; if you want to read a horror story or a Greek tragedy or a piece of experimental fiction like an escapist fantasy story...you can do that, it can even be a fun and beneficial and eye-opening exercise, but if you want to be serious about it, you have to be willing to recognize that asking how well it fulfills the purposes of an escapist fantasy is NOT the only framework you can use, nor is it everyone's default, and meet it on its own terms first.

One thing about fandom culture is that it sort of trains you to interact with and analyze media in a very specific way. Not a BAD way, just a SPECIFIC way.

And the kind of media that attracts fandoms lends itself well (normally) to those kinds of analysis. Mainly, you're supposed to LIKE and AGREE with the main characters. Themes are built around agreeing with the protagonists and condemning the antagonists, and taking the protagonists at their word.

Which is fine if you're looking at, like, 99% of popular anime and YA fiction and Marvel movies.

But it can completely fall apart with certain kinds of media. If someone who has only ever analyzed media this way is all of a sudden handed Lolita or 1984 or Gatsby, which deal in shitty unreliable narrators; or even books like Beloved or Catcher in the Rye (VERY different books) that have narrators dealing with and reacting to challenging situations- well... that's how you get some hilariously bad literary analysis.

I dont know what my point here is, really, except...like...I find it very funny when people are like "ugh. I hate Gatsby and Catcher because all the characters are shitty" which like....isnt....the point. Lololol you arent supposed to kin Gatsby.

#teachers who don't suck #literary analysis #critical thinking #transformative reading #transformative writing

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

"No one actually acts like those first descriptions, you're exaggerating, that's a strawman from The Other Side!"

I regret to inform you that everything I mentioned in those descriptions are opinions and behaviors that I have personally encountered in the wild, with significant frequency.

If you don't believe they're real, it means one of two things:

You are lucky that your immediate circle hasn't ended up with one or more of those types in them (and you're probably not on Twitter), or

You know one or more of those types - you may even be one yourself - but because it's on Your Side, you think it's perfectly rational and more nuanced than I make it sound, or at least no worse than a mild and rare annoyance.

Either way, without acknowledging that such positions can and do exist, you're potentially vulnerable to getting suckered into siding with them in their most batshit extreme claims that heavily censoring any and all queer media is a necessary part of fighting abuse, or that just letting fascists run rampant unimpeded is a necessary part of fighting censorship - and you almost certainly have a distorted and "partisan" view of the whole conversation.

If you truly believe that a substantial group - one which many people list themselves as part of in their bios - in predominantly queer fandom spaces is actually a dangerous movement of pedophiles spearheaded by people whose goal is to normalize real life child molestation and incestuous abuse, through shipping and fanfiction of all things, and that they have the power to do that, then you have ALREADY internalized some SERIOUS far-right bullshit that you need to unlearn ASAP - and you have a severely distorted view of fandom's pull on the world.

If you cannot differentiate reasonable criticism of, say, the prevalence of taboo fetishism in media whose target audience is not likely to recognize it for the unrealistic fantasy it is, or the double-standard in the sexualization of female characters vs. male characters in mass media - including criticism of how young it often starts - from calls to censorship and harassment, and/or just biased coverage of those facts to imply racist and/or queerphobic stereotypes; or you cannot tell "I don't want to see this potentially disturbing topic in my space" from "this subject is Icky so no one should be able to write or read about it at all, anywhere", or you think that the politicians trying to roll back queer rights and ban sex from the internet are getting their talking points from rude 14-year olds on the internet rather than the other way around, you are at RISK of getting suckered into some of that classic "free speech" as a smokescreen for some "how DARE this private company tell me I can't use their platform to scream racial slurs at strangers!"-type bullshit.

The thing about how modern fandom has organized into a war between "antis" and "proshippers" is that...there are so many things that are WAY bigger than fandom wank wrapped up in this, and it is terrifying how all of this gets reduced into ultimately meaningless wank about which fictional dolls should kiss.

Let me ask you a couple of questions:

When you say "antis DNI", do you mean "antis" as in people who claim to be "protecting fandom" with their ship policing but have only ever gone after ONE het ship en masse for SOME ~inexplicable~ reason, assume their (mostly queer) peers are sexual predators by default and have to be trained out of predation and that many of us can be corrupted at the drop of a hat, see a fan space that isn't designated for them and assume it must be so closed off to harbor child abusers, hear "sexual expression" in largely queer spaces and immediately think "PEDOPHILIA AND INCEST!!" with absolutely no critical thought, are content to throw really heavy violent criminal accusations at largely marginalized people over flimsy-at-best evidence (and yes, finding entertainment value in the fictional dynamic between two people with an age gap that may be questionable irl IS flimsy at best), think that fandom will somehow manage to promote incestuous abuse even after Game of Thrones failed to do so despite having a much larger audience and having framed its questionable content as being ~there for realism~; and instead of just Disliking things, insist on finding reasons that no one can possibly like it without being A Horrible Person, often while arguing that questionable content in their own preferred media is Totally Fine IRL Actually and in the MOST extreme cases, actually seeking out real CSAM to weaponize against the targets of their ire?

Or do you mean people who dare to acknowledge that hey, there's a lot of irresponsible-at-best marketing and framing in mass media, like how rich and famous writers and directors insist on including gratuitous graphic sexual violence and excluding POC for "historical accuracy" in fantasy settings with dragons and shit, and a lot of racism and other really questionable shit in fandom, the fact that fandom is mostly composed of marginalized people does NOT make this okay, and hmm, maybe we need to criticize that and find a way to reduce it?

When you say "proshippers DNI", do you mean "proshippers" as in self-righteous edgelords who treat anyone setting a boundary about potentially triggering content in their own fan space as a personal attack, cannot hear criticism of their favorite thing without screaming "CENSORSHIP!" just like any right-wing chud but veiled in the language of social justice, defend hate speech and symbols in fan spaces in the name of "protecting freedom of expression" (at least as long as the hate is not aimed at them); turn edgy fanfiction into the golden calf of queer liberation such that it is not just an EXAMPLE of queer media that is often disproportionately attacked, but THE be-all and end-all of queer rights, make openly hating children and infantilizing teenagers into a cornerstone of their public-facing personalities and act like random rude 14-year olds on the internet are a bigger threat to queer expression than SESTA/FOSTA and payment processor cutoffs; deliberately chase children out of fandoms of media for children, and often create content with the primary motive of upsetting as many people as possible more than actually enjoying it themselves?

Or do you mean people who recognize that designating spaces for freedom of expression, including sexual expression, is really, really important especially for the historically marginalized groups that created the framework of transformative fandom culture; that there will ALWAYS be people who want to explore darker subject matter in fiction and coming up with tools to make that safer for all involved is a more beneficial AND more practical endeavor than banning most "bad" content outright; and that broadening the definition of "pedophilia" (which, yes, the former definition of "antis" ARE very much doing - here's a hint: for just one example, no matter the age gap, a relationship between two adults will NEVER be pedophilia, ever) and assuming it MUST be at the root of any "deviant" sexual expression has a long and bloody queerphobic history and it's REALLY FUCKING ALARMING how that mentality, right down to "freak" as the peak insult, has been so thoroughly introduced into a microcosm that is mostly composed of queer and otherwise marginalized people just by disguising it in the language of social justice?

Because, idk about you, but I don't want either of the former definitions up in my shit, but the latter? The latter positions can and should coexist.

We should be criticizing how entertainment juggernauts abuse their power and reach to keep society venerating people who look and act like their CEOs above all else, we should be criticizing the way "conventional" (read: "slap a bikini model on the ad and frame her as the product") sex appeal is treated as a necessity for marketing anything to adults, and we should be criticizing how often taboo fetishism is marketed by multi-billion dollar companies to the demographics most likely to be desperate enough to forget that some taboos exist for a damned good reason (i.e., lonely straight men with disposable income) just because that might give them a better quarterly report!

We should also be criticizing the wave of "LGBT-positive" thinly-veiled conservatism that's popping up in line with rainbow capitalism and teaching people how to recognize that just because someone can speak the language of progressivism and social justice, that doesn't necessarily mean their values have the best interest of marginalized people other than themself at heart.

The fact that this near-inevitably ends up spiraling into a highly polarized screaming match, occasionally touching on the bigger picture but only briefly before circling back to what is still EXTREMELY niche drama is...disheartening to say the least, because these are very real issues with way bigger implications than just ship wars. Bigotry making excuses for itself (the eagerness to call a ship "pedophilia" that is rarely directed at het ships, the fact that the energy put into fighting "problematic ships" by mostly queer and disabled small-time creators is rarely directed at major media creators, the ableism of "yeah well toughen up or gtfo snowflake", the defense of hate speech in the name of "freedom of speech" as if that hasn't been a neo-nazi dogwhistle for decades, etc.) and the concept of how hobbies can be used to radicalize people into some really awful ideologies, misdirection, overstatement of harm, understatement of harm, echo chambers that enable such overstatement and understatement of harm, the veneration of a platonic ideal of "children" as a rhetorical device while throwing actual children under the bus (exactly as anti-choice politicians do, but yet again veiled in the language of social justice) - all of that is wrapped up in this.

It is, by far, my least favorite mass fandom drama to date.

#fandom #online (mis)communication #internet problems #sorry your english teacher sucked

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

It boils down to the fact that it's easier to get smug and angry over aesthetics you ASSOCIATE with bad behavior than it is to address the behavior itself.

In this case, we examine the fact that there are obnoxious anti-intellectual types in online fandom spaces. This is, again, a fact. Say it's not true or it's deeper than that all you want, it won't change the fact that it's fairly easy to find people who say that Divergent is an Objectively Better book with fewer unfortunate implications than 1984 (ah yes, the series that can easily be read as being about how militarized law enforcement is a fun job for Cool Kids and cops are only bad when led astray by an evil shadowy faction of elites who control all the knowledge and being able to express more major personality traits than you see in others makes you innately genetically superior to everyone else and that's why they hate you, I see no potential unfortunate implications there whatsoever...but that's another breakdown for another day and no I am not accusing Veronica Roth nor anyone who liked the series of believing these potential implications to be literally true), and all adult literature is just stuffy old white men whining about their divorces.

But the leap from "these arguments are anti-intellectual, reductive, and even potentially dangerous when we're experiencing a silent cult boom (see: QAnon, antiscientific wellness mysticism, etc.) and seeing antivaxxers taken as seriously as actual epidemiologists" to "fanfiction and 'tropes' are DESTROYING literacy and no one knows how to engage with a text anymore like they USED to" is every bit as unsubstantiated and dangerous!

First of all, while the internet does have the potential to spread anti-intellectualism and conspiracy theories and misinformation to people who might otherwise have never gotten caught up in it (note the aforementioned cult boom, how antivaxx propaganda spread enough to be considered a "side", etc.), the impact isn't actually as major as it looks - there is an aspect of sampling error. A lot of things you see people say on the internet are things they were already thinking, but never said out loud where you could hear it before. The media critiques you would see used to be heavily curated - printed in their own special sections of newspapers and magazines, by educated professional critics. Fun fact: because of this, The Great Gatsby was critically panned in its time - because the people who were writing the critiques were part of the demographic being criticized by the text, and they recognized and hated this, they thought it was just a load of holier-than-thou jealous bullshit poking at made-up problems; the mostly-unheard common man's opinion turned out to be the one history generally agreed with.

Now, though, with social media, you hear a much broader sampling of everyone's thoughts. You no longer have to be a professional critic to publish your opinion, you can just head on over to tumblr or Twitter or TikTok to hear everyone's thoughts, from old-school professional critics, to paid shills presented as "professional critics", to 14-year olds so intensely burned out on their horrible English teacher's insistence that they memorize someone else's analysis to regurgitate The Singular Correct Answer for a standardized test that they'd rather eat a stinkbug than try to apply the analytical skills they're allegedly-but-not-actually being taught in their leisure time, to grown adults who never grew past that burnout and feel condescended to any time a story challenges them in any meaningful way.

All of those people, in some form or another, have existed all along. You just never heard from most of them before.

Second of all, if you're complaining about "tropes" destroying media...you are, in fact, the one who doesn't know what they're talking about. "Trope" is not a synonym for "cliche". People using them as "gotcha"s didn't invent the term. Tropes are just story elements - it's impossible to write a comprehensible story without any; that's the same as demanding food without ingredients. They are a useful tool for actual media analysis - one of many, yes; anyone who tries to tell you that they constitute an inherently better approach than any other is absolutely full of it, but that's just it - there are many equally valid and useful approaches to analyzing any story. Picking apart the building blocks and looking at where they came from and how else they've been used - which is what analysis by tropes is - is just as valid of an approach to finding meaning as looking at recurring motifs within a story.

Third of all, fun fact: reading trashy absolute hot garbage for fun is better for literacy than not reading for fun at all. In fact, I'll just leave this one to xkcd-

I'd like to find a corpus of writing from children in a non-self-selected sample (e.g. handwritten letters to the president from everyone in the same teacher's 7th grade class every year)--and score the kids today versus the kids 20 years ago on various objective measures of writing quality. I've heard the idea that exposure to all this amateur peer practice is hurting us, but I'd bet on the generation that conducts the bulk of their social lives via the written word over the generation that occasionally wrote book reports and letters to grandma once a year, any day.

Analyzing fiction is a skill that takes practice - just like sports basics, and just like basic-level literacy. You get the most practice when you're just out there having fun with it and casually integrating it into your daily life. Analyzing low-quality fiction, even with a singular and potentially reductive framework, won't destroy your ability to analyze fiction. All it will do is teach you where self-indulgent "garbage" works for you, and what will get really old and grating once you see it too many times, and how to tell the difference. Even someone who can only break a story down into its component tropes for the sake of determining what fanfics it's begging for, and nothing more, is still successfully, validly doing more literary analysis than someone who leaves a story with no thought other than "I liked it" or "I didn't like it" - which is more or less how most people have approached stories throughout history.

(In fact, that's why I made this blog in the first place: to encourage using media that you find for fun to really intentionally build those skills instead of just...reaching the peak of Mount Stupid about them and from there getting into a bunch of horrible internet fights over inconsequential subjects that end in disaster far more consequential than blorbo wars. Because let's be honest - you're lucky if high school English actually taught you those skills instead of just making you memorize some sad facsimile thereof.)

It's easy to hate on these things because, yeah, on a superficial level, some people who do really obnoxious and even destructive things go absolutely wild for them. No shortage of loud voices treat fictional characters like real people, and real people like fictional characters, and get mad at you for knowing the difference, while claiming to be experts in literary analysis because they predicted what was going to be a popular ship once. Yes, TikTok is full of hot takes from burned-out teenagers who think that a poorly-written slash pwp is inherently more valuable toward resisting the status quo than The Great Gatsby ever was, and any historical context is just an excuse to make them read boring pointless dusty old nonsense. Yes, floating around the internet makes it frustratingly easy to find people who will argue, without a trace of irony, that Steven Universe is unapologetic fascist imperialist propaganda but Top Gun is just good harmless action fun, and a lot of them will very much be Fandom Types.

But this is very much a case of correlation not equalling causation, and focusing on the associated aesthetic instead of the actual problem renders you (1) at risk of falling into ALL kinds of reactionary neophobic garbage...and (2) even at best, kind of a huge pretentious jerk.

You're likely at your own peak of Mount Stupid.

I can't even describe to y'all how much the side of tumblr that's proud of like, not caring what "tropes" are, and thinking fan-fiction is of no value, is just a pile of pseudo-intellectual bullshit.

It's all based on assuming the intellectual high ground over Cringe Stupid People~ who only read repetitive fanfiction. Meanwhile i consume fuck all of "Media" aside from...spending Literally hours a day reading literary journals, academic publications, and ancient and medieval texts. I don't read fanfiction. I don't watch TV, as in "have never logged onto a netflix account in my life." I've read more of egyptian papyri, or ancient Greek poetry, or the fucking Annals of Tacitus in the last year than fanfiction.

Like do you want to start on the ✨intellectual high ground?✨ Do you really want to play "Who's read the most dead people?" Some of us are super mega goblin brain autistic and also devoting an education and career to this shit, hi.

Guess what, I don't give a flying fuck if someone wants to read 20 coffee shop AU's in a row of their favorite characters. It's not the collapse of the intellectual world. Everyone should do what makes them happy and read what makes them happy, we don't get long on this earth.

Fanfiction isn't inherently worse than any other kind of writing, it makes no sense to say so, and nothing you do is going to stop people from reading the stories they like. If you look at folklore studies, you'll see a lot of similar constructs to the ones we have to describe fanfiction. And tropes? Tropes have existed for a hell of a lot longer than "genre" has, they actually substantially describe stories, and the majority of "Real Book" readers consume the same tropes over and over in reading thrillers and romance with the same formulas.

"Ao3 tropes" are being used by bookstores, discussed in classrooms, and they will be used to understand how people in this time told stories, and acting like that's the death of art is bizarre. This stuff is fascinating and it's cool.

Also. People's reading choices absolutely weren't more erudite (or less horny) in The Past.

Do you think the "novels" people in the 18th century freaked out over were intellectual masterpieces? Do you think Greeks in ancient Athens somehow had some greater ability to discuss Literary Narrative Techniques than people now do? Do you think any rando common person on the street watching Shakespeare perform would have a super smart and educated take on the Themes Present Within The Text?

Maybe teens on tiktok failed 10th grade english class or whatever, but storytelling is a living creature millennia old, breathing in the lungs of people across centuries that, for the most part, couldn't even read. Telling stories and being told stories is human nature and that's just the coolest shit to me

#reblogs #literary analysis #anti intellectualism #mount stupid #correlation vs. causation #sorry your english teacher sucked

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

You know what, Frank? You've just given me a FASCINATING exercise in language, politics, and buzzwords, and I fully intend to take you up on it. Sorry that this will be long, but here we go!

So, in order to figure out what "post-SJW politics" means, we first have to figure out what "SJW politics" means.

The term "SJW" itself - an acronym of "Social Justice Warrior" - proves to be a difficult one to define. The top results of Urban Dictionary include:

"An imaginary type of person whom assholes complain about on the Internet as the reason that they can no longer be assholes."

"a word people use as an insult, when they get called out on their prejudice and have no good defense."

"Bunch of white girls that complains [sic] about everything in [sic] Twitter and everything is "hard" to them. They also hate men but they don't realized [sic] how they exist."

...from personal experience, I can say that the former two are roughly correct. It was the name of a strawman - illustrated somewhat nicely by the third definition - though it was occasionally reclaimed in certain spaces, notably on tumblr.

There's more to it than that, but that's something I'll get to further in.

A quick Google Trends search shows that the term "SJW" peaked in search volume in November 2015, with smaller peaks in September 2014 and, interestingly, in June 2020.

So, let's consider the political environment around those first two main peaks, particularly around the concept of the SJW.

Oh, huh, would you look at that - that's when GamerGate happened.

GamerGate - the incident that definitively proved that political turmoil in a seemingly niche, insular, "apolitical" space can very well spill out of those spaces in a dangerous way if they're based enough in actual real-world issues. The campaign that proved to the world at large that there is no such thing as an "apolitical" space - ironically, by the people driving it insisting they were trying to keep "politics" out of their space. "Fun" fact about GamerGate, in fact: this movement was what brought Breitbart news out of obscurity and made them into a main news source for right-wing reactionaries. If you'll recall what Breitbart pushed in 2016, and what their CEO later went on to become involved with...

Yeah.

All of this implies that "SJW politics" describes a very messy and fraught political environment - but these definitions so far don't really give us a description of what "SJW politics" might have been from the "SJW" side (which the term implies is the central focus); only what outside impressions of them were, and what the resistance to them looked like. I have fewer actual sources for this, but I was a queer person on the internet, including in gaming fandom spaces, from 2014-2015, so I can provide some firsthand insight.

And I will say that the political environment around that time, in those spaces, for women and queer people and POC was...interesting. On the one hand, it was part of an explosion in visibility for a lot of our issues - which is what GamerGate and the like happened in response to. The term "SJW" itself was very much a response to this born of some people...not being very happy about learning for the first time that a lot of what they consider "normal" was and is hurting other people, and trying to deny it. Thus, it was sometimes reclaimed in those more left-leaning spaces. I vaguely remember a popular post (which I sadly can no longer find) about reclaiming it and mocking the "anti-SJW" crowd, which I shall paraphrase as

Imagine being an "anti-SJW." Imagine looking at a group of people calling for compassion and decency, branding them "social justice warriors"...and then saying that's a BAD thing to be and declaring yourself their enemy. How do you not realize you sound like a Batman villain, and not even one of the cool ones???

But our headline here references Homestuck, and in fact, Homestuck itself provides us an illustration of the fact that the social justice discourse of the era wasn't all about compassion and standing up for marginalized people, in the form of Kankri.

Say what you will about Kankri and other "SJW" parody characters like him, but he does correctly identify a problem with the way the discourse was being handled. This was the era of treating marginalized identities like cards in a TCG. This was the height of the era of blatant, open ad hominem being treated as valid; when it was most accepted that it was more important to listen to someone based on what marginalized identities they had than the content of their actual point. Marginalized identities, and "problematic" points you could personally identify about a piece of media or a celebrity or anything else, were almost their own form of social capital in left-leaning fandom spaces around that time, and this led to a lot of people lying about their identities in order to sound more credible, and a major rise in paranoid readings of fiction and nonfiction alike - and this isn't even getting into the fact that a lot of the Feminism 101 points were being handed to a group of largely trans teenagers by blatant TERFs who were keeping their transphobia quiet until their recruitment targets were primed. Negging was a popular tactic for attention and even to beg for money - "if you don't reblog this, I'm judging you" is a cliche to this day for a reason.

This isn't to say that the "anti-SJW"s were ACTUALLY the ones who were 100% in the right. They were very much not. Sensationalism bias often just meant that the most aggressive - and the most flawed - pieces and people were the ones that got the most attention. It is only to say that, while we often dismissed it because those critiques rarely came from a place of good faith and often dismissed the very existence of racism, misogyny, queerphobia, ableism, and the like as just "whiny losers complaining about fake problems holding them down because they can't hack it in the real world", the most painful caricatures were often the ones that held a grain of truth about the flaws of the popular attitudes of the time, in a way that many people weren't ready to hear.

And, I would say that this does help define the split between "SJW politics" and "post-SJW politics". I would argue that, if "SJW politics" describes the environment of the time when these flaws of leftist discourse were on the rise and at their peak, then "post-SJW politics" describes the era when we did become ready to hear those critiques and acknowledge that this behavior was...not great. I would further argue that the split happened around 2016 - prior to then, a lot of the wilder discourse came from mostly young people swinging wildly at the nebulous concepts of structural inequality without really having a full grasp on what it meant, and...2016 sure did give us a solidified image of it, unfortunately.

Thus, I would argue that "post-SJW politics" refers to this current trend of

Popular sentiment leaning broadly left of the US government, in spite of a loud and heavily galvanized right wing,

The acknowledgement of nerdy online fandom spaces as, indeed, a political space - and, in fact, increased awareness of the fact that it is impossible for any space to be truly "apolitical",

A heightened awareness of the dangers of ad hominem and the fact that people can just go on the internet and lie about who they are,

Efforts to undo the influence of divide-and-conquer tactics from the "SJW" era, including the influence of crypto-TERFs giving the Feminism 101 talks,

Etc., etc.

But the point I was trying to make with all of this analysis...ultimately wasn't actually about defining what "post-SJW politics" means. The point I was trying to make here is:

Look what I did. While it did come from actual analysis, I just made that definition up. In fact, if you look through the analysis, you'll notice that this involved me making many, many personal judgment calls on ambiguous definitions and providing anecdotal evidence. It's very likely that our theoretical article writer who gave us this headline was defining these terms in a way that's totally different from me. I simply went along with a definition that feels right, and that I can support with some limited evidence. Sure did make me sound like I know what I'm talking about, didn't it? But I don't. I have no idea what our theoretical author is talking about. I just faked it.

That's a major part of how buzzwords work.

See, ironically enough, the word "buzzword" has become something of a buzzword itself on the internet. The point of all of this analysis was to bring us back to recognizing what a buzzword actually is, and why they're meaningless.

The definition of a buzzword, from the American Heritage Dictionary:

1) An stylish or trendy word or phrase, especially when occurring in a specialized field.

2) A word drawn from or imitative of technical jargon, and often rendered meaningless and fashionable through abuse by non-technical persons in a seeming show of familiarity with the subject.

3) stock phrases that have become nonsense through endless repetition

"A word [...] often rendered meaningless and fashionable through abuse by non-technical persons in a seeming show of familiarity with the subject." You know, like how someone on the internet who encounters a word that they're unfamiliar with, or which references a subject they find annoying, will often write it off as a "buzzword" even when it's being used correctly in context.

So, what's the difference between a newly-coined piece of technical jargon, and a buzzword imitative of it?

A solid definition.

While it gets a bad reputation (the word "jargon" itself having popular use as a derisive term for any words that a speaker doesn't understand), technical jargon exists to give a short name to a subject that's cumbersome to describe even when simplified. For example, it's easier to say "computer architecture" than "a set of rules and methods that describe the functionality, organization, and implementation of computer systems" (English Wikipedia) or even "the conceptual design and fundamental operational structure of a computer system" (Simple English Wikipedia).

But "computer architecture" has a definite meaning. It might be used as a buzzword - e.g., by someone trying to sell a new game as being more revolutionary than it is by incorrectly describing a creative new feature of the engine as its "innovative new computer architecture" - but it is ultimately a word with a set meaning that is not open to interpretation.

"Post-SJW politics" is...not that. It's just a word that sounds like it should mean something, and should have been coined by someone who knows a fair amount about political science, and can even have a definition reverse-engineered, but was ultimately just thrown out here in a headline that doesn't even have an extant article attached.

This is why it's important to define your terms when writing nonfiction - and why it's important to recognize what definition (if any!) the author was using, when reading and engaging with nonfiction. Failing to do so is how you end up with, for instance, "emotional labor" going from meaning "performing a false and taxing emotional state, particularly as a duty of employment" to "having to be a good friend, which is a bad thing to ask, somehow".

Tumblr can’t even be bothered to tell me what post-SJW politics even are

#op is a bot #buzzwords #nonfiction #politics #reblogs #sorry your english teacher sucked

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

So, okay, fun fact. When I was a freshman in high school… let me preface by saying my dad sent me to a private school and, like a bad organ transplant, it didn’t take. I was miserable, the student body hated me, I hated them, it was awful.

Okay, so, freshman year, I’m deep in my “everything sucks and I’m stuck with these assholes” mentality. My English teacher was a notorious hard-ass, let’s call him Mr. Hargrove. He was the guy every student prayed they didn’t get. And, on top of ALL OF THE SHIT I WAS ALREADY DEALING WITH, I had him for English.

One of the laborious assignments he gave us was to keep a daily journal. Daily! Not monthly or weekly. Fucking daily. Handwritten. And we had to turn it in every quarter and he fucking graded us. He graded us on a fucking journal.

All of my classmates wrote shit like what they did that day or whatever. But, I did not. No, sir. I decided to give the ol’ middle finger to the assignment and do my own shit.

So, for my daily journal entries, over the course of an entire year, I wrote a serialized story about a horde of man-eating slugs that invaded a small mining town. It was graphic, it was ridiculous, it was an epic feat of rebellion.

And Mr. Hargrove loved it.

It wasn’t just the journal. Every assignment he gave us, I tried to shit all over it. Every reading assignment, everyone gushed about how good it was, but I always had a negative take. Every writing assignment, people wrote boring prose, but I wrote cheesy limericks or pulp horror stories.

Then, one day, he read one of my essays to the class as an example of good writing. When a fellow student asked who wrote it, he said, “Some pipsqueak.”

And that’s when I had a revelation. He wanted to fight. And since all the other students were trying to kiss his ass, I was his only challenger.

Mr. Hargrove and I went head-to-head on every assignment, every conversation, every fucking thing. And he ate it up. And so did I.

One day, he read us a column from the Washington Post and asked the class what was wrong with it. Everyone chimed in with their dumbass takes, but I was the one who landed on Mr. Hargrove’s complaint: The reporter had BRAZENLY added the suffix “ize” to a verb.

That night I wrote a jokey letter to the reporter calling him out on the offense in which I added “ize” to every single verb. I gave it to Mr. Hargrove, who by then had become a friendly adversary, for a chuckle and he SENT IT TO THE REPORTER.

And, people… The reporter wrote back. And he said I was an exceptional student. Mr. Hargrove and I had a giggle about that because we both knew I was just being an asshole, but he and the reporter acknowledged I had a point.

And that was it. That was the moment. Not THAT EXACT moment, but that year with Mr. Hargrove taught me I had a knack for writing. And that knack was based in saying “fuck you” to authority. (The irony that someone in a position of authority helped me realize that is not lost on me.)

So, I can say without qualification that Mr. Hargrove is the reason I am now a professional writer. Yes, I do it for a living. And most of my stuff takes authorities of one kind or another to task.

Mr. Hargrove showed me my dissent was valid, my rebellion was righteous, and that killer slugs could bring a city to its knees. Someone just needs to write it.

#teachers who don't suck #reblogs

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

I genuinely believe that at least part of the reason we're seeing so many people look at older media as "pretentious," is because nobody's teaching it or providing resources to learn about it properly, in a way that's accessible to all.

If you try to sit down and read Ye Olde Classic Lit because you've been told it's Important To Read, but you have zero tools for understanding the archaic language and necessary historical context, of course it's going to feel weird and outdated and pretentious.

Of course you're going to gravitate towards things written in a style and tone that more closely resembles your own modern language--there's a reason for the popularity of things like "No Fear Shakespeare" and "OMG Shakespeare" that translate older literature into modern references and slang (and, yes, emojis). If you aren't taught how to read older literature (or how to watch older films, etc., etc.), then it's not going to make sense!

We don't have an inborn ability to understand language we've never encountered. We need context and touchstones, and if we don't know how to find them, of course we're going to seek out something where the touchstones are more obvious. Of course we're going to feel alienated when people tell us we Have To Read The Thing because it's a Cornerstone Of Culture, but we don't have the tools to understand it. Nobody likes being made to feel stupid and small because they haven't been given the tools to understand a piece of literature.

Incidentally this is why I think Dracula Daily is one of the best things to happen to foster genuine learning and literary analysis in recent memory. People are having fun, because they've been given something to connect with and an accessible way to do it. People are coming together to share their own knowledge and interpretation and associations and ideas. Knowledge is being passed on. New interpretations are coming together. It's fucking awesome. More of this, please.

#literary analysis #critical thinking #classic lit #reblogs

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

I will say, your views on the lack of accessibility wrt ecology and sustainability also applies to the issue of getting people to expand their horizons reading-wise. I've been thinking about this wrt this long rant-y article I stumbled on about how Book Twitter's insularity was breeding a major anti-intelectualism but the only hint of a solution they had was "Maybe we should start being meaner to these people," even tho that behavior's is what makes them double-down IMO.

If it's talking about how people on book twitter are like "YA fiction is the only books worth reading and classics are boring and everything else is about divorce and stuff" i'm afraid the seeds to that were in the ground long, long ago

most americans in particular have a garbage high school experience where classics are taught in terms of one "correct" interpretation of the text, without appropriate historical context, and there is little room for criticism or actual novel thoughtful analysis or just...the personal petty opinions that are 100% inevitable. I think people get spiteful about classics because they were too often exposed to the idea that if you don't like a "classic" book it means you're just stupid or you don't understand. Which is not true; sometimes you just hate a book for reasons that are your own

YA book twitter is Like That because of a very real and destructive subset of readers that were/are equally annoying about "classic" books or whatever sort of book they deem intellectually superior. YA fiction frequently falls into both of the most commonly pointlessly maligned literary genres: fantasy/sci-fi and romance. Children's fiction, or any book designated as being "for children," also attracts this kind of disdain. How quickly we forget our history.

The people that enjoy this sort of book have been primed for aggression and defensiveness because of endless pointless attacks on the kind of reading material they prefer, designating it intellectually inferior.

And some people really do have a stick up their ass about people reading for pleasure in general.

#anti intellectualism #high school english woes #reblogs

[sorryyourenglishteachersucked]

What I hate the most about the Whedon-esque brand of lampshade humor that's so popular in a lot of popcorn-muncher movies and other things popular among cishet men's version of geek culture is that,

Examining and playing with genre conventions and identifying where they're really unrealistic and jarring out of context can be a really fun and useful exercise...if you don't begin and end at "HA HA, GOTCHA!!"

It opens up a lot of possibilities for doing something NEW and EXCITING - if you actually take the time to ask yourself and research, "why does this convention exist? What does it usually convey? What is it usually shorthand for? What does it imply happened 'off-screen' and what would happen if those 'off-screen' events were NOT what's usually assumed? If we decide to play with that, how could we hint that something is different without entirely spelling it out before the twist? Is there room in this genre for a story WITHOUT this convention? What if we took this one and stuck it into a totally DIFFERENT kind of story; what would the implications be?"

But instead of doing that, "well THAT just happened" brand "jokes" seem to just show the author resenting the story for being a story, and even resenting the AUDIENCE for WANTING a story.

The thing is, I used to really love those moments...in moderation. For example, in action-adventure stories where the main character is a fish out of water, one foot in this wild new story world but one foot in what they always thought was ours, they're really appropriate in the rising action phases! This isn't normal for them, just like it wouldn't be for us! It takes time to get used to! A well-timed lampshade joke might make you remember that you're only able to take it so naturally BECAUSE it's a story, because YOU know the synopsis, and that reminder might pull you FURTHER into the story along with our main character instead of slamming you out of the setting!

But they've been ruined by irony poisoning. By rich white dudes who think that writing is a competition between them, their audience, and the very concept of fiction itself; who go in assuming you don’t know what a fictional story is or how they work. By the CinemaSins mindset.

It's one of the most exhausting things to me about current pop culture trends.

#the cinemasins mindset #forspoken #reblogs