i know an engineer-type dude who said fiction bored him, because fiction is mostly-formulaic and tropey, and you can generally guess whatās gonna happen next, and yada yada
so his solution for this problem was⦠to solely read serial web novels in languages that (1) he did not speak, and (2) for which there was no actual translation, fan or otherwise
apparently, the combined forces of ātrying to figure out WTF is going on via the power of Google Translate" + ācultural differences in storytelling conventionsā + āthe inherent randomness of where the hell amateur authors are gonna take their plotsāāthose all mashed up to make stories that were unpredictable enough to keep him guessing all the time
then he described to me this totally batshit-sounding Hungarian story heād been obsessively reading once a week for years
and god i think about him all the time.Ā like.Ā that is the most wild way to process fiction that i have ever heard of, but also, iāve gotta admire the sheer chaos energy of it