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[valtsv]

my problem is if i enjoy something enough i will be nitpicking. i Will have things to say about where and how it failed. out of nothing but love straight from my heart. unfortunately this often makes me indistinguishable from a hater who has never experienced joy or kindness. such is the amateur critic's burden.

[valtsv]

all of my favourite things are like beautiful racehorses that trip over their own feet a hundred times. but they get back up again. and goddamn, you should see them run.

[grilledfiish]

I think feathertail’s sacrifice being at least a litlllleeeee selfish could be interesting. Her whole life she’s been conditioned to see sacrifice as the ultimate show of love or loyalty and as a way to be remembered by the people around you, maybe she felt jealous that Stormfur who was loved and accepted when she wasn’t even by the people who were once complicit in their deaths, would be able to have this opportunity to secure his place in people’s memories, leaving her alone in RiverClan again. I think in her final moments she saw a way to finally escape the hole she’s dug herself into, and to finally ensure that she wouldn’t be immediately forgotten and replaced after her death, becoming free from the constant pressure of trying to maintain the ‘perfect RiverClan warrior’ image she fought so hard to attain . To the point where she forgot how her death would hurt the people around her, or where she maybe didn’t even care. I don’t knowwwwww

[halogenwarrior]

Yeah and expanding on this I think it is interesting how you have Stormfur the one who is Stonefur's apprentice so the one who is societally expected to emulate him/see him as a role model, Stormfur who is the one to try to act like the big warrior sacrificially protecting his sister when Stonefur is told to kill them, and then Stormfur who is told he's the savior of the tribe perhaps by sacrificing his life, and how Feathertail might resent that she isn't allowed to attain Stonefur's immortality in death Stormfur is hogging the idea of walking in Stonefur's footsteps. Though of course Feathertail was the one chosen by StarClan for the New Prophecy journey I'm not sure how that fits with all of that.

[zeetannas]

to be honest i think there’s a large number of people who conflate the very real and widespread phenomenon that women tend to be written off as just mothers or love interests in order to diminish their importance in a given story with the fact that a huge reason they’re sent to narrative purgatory in this way is BECAUSE the labels of “mother” and “girlfriend/wife” are systematically devalued and seen as inherently inferior because they’re terms that have been associated with ownership and/or control over women. like the amount of people who’ve told me that a certain female character is uninteresting or badly written because she happened to have a kid or be a man’s girlfriend or sister just to find out she was actually fleshed out very well and carried significant narrative importance frustrates me soo bad. there’s a huge problem with how those roles (specifically “wife” and “mother”) are systematically devalued and yet also perpetuated as the only viable options for women to achieve their societal roles in the patriarchy but acknowledging the devaluation of those labels to begin with is an important discussion in itself.

[eightglass]

worm would've been better if taylor hebert was explicitly a trans woman GOD

the bullying at winslow would have been even more horrific. oh god she would've confided in emma before summer camp and emma would've outed her. transphobic teachers and principal and sophia OUGH.

internal shit would've been INSANE. grieving her mother's death in part because she never got to come out to annette before the car crash AAAAUHGHGHGH

even more secrecy and awkwardness with danny OUGH. ough. was she outed to him by the locker incident? or is she still closeted to him..? oughghhghghghhghg

first time taylor meets and talks to the undersiders lisa immediately recognises that she's a girl and taylor is thrown for a loop and Does not know what to think about those villains..? but then she meets armsmaster who assumes she's a guy (colin is a jerk) and she doesn't want to deal with that really

first paycheck from the undersiders she gets herself diy hormones. or maybe lisa gets it for her. perhaps in the coming months there are some changes and perhaps danny notices but probs not. oughghg.

DO YOU SEE. you don't even have to alter the direction of the story or even her character much. taylor is SO trans-coded already it's ridiculous. she already HAS the trauma and self-esteem issues (remember how many times she hates on her appearance in canon) and mistrust of systems and such. making it textual just adds spice to the secrecy of her two identities, her already fraught relationships with winslow, danny, the PRTectorate (you know their wards offer is gonna have been shitty about being a trans minor), and all her internal conflicts about everything. DO YOU SEE.

also everything shipping-wise would be much more fun with disaster-bisexual-tgirl taylor OUGh.

[julesdap]

"It has all been for Taranoke."

— the traitor baru cormorant

[self-loving-vampire]

It's a known thing for USAmericans on this site to assume their experiences are universal, but there is also a mirror trend where people assume some behavior is uniquely USAmerican when it absolutely isn't.

The whole thing where some men yearn for a socially-acceptable excuse to kill someone is far from exclusive to the US, for example.

[self-loving-vampire]

It's not even a gendered thing either. My mother wanted death squads to do this on a large scale.

[halogenwarrior]

Reminds me of the post I saw saying that human exceptionalism tropes in sci-fi stories are a uniquely USAmerican exceptionalism-based thing, as if other countries have never had a sense that they are special and important and destined for greatness.

[clementine-kesh]

my thoughts on the lines of discourse around stuff like women connecting with misogynistic tropes, lgbtq people connecting with hateful lgbtq caricatures etc etc, is that of course we should approach those discussions with care lest we end up blaming those groups for their own oppression, but i would be lying if i said that sometimes seeing that play out doesn’t make me think damn. have we considered gaining some self-respect

[halogenwarrior]

This is my internal dialogue all the time. Like most people on this site are like "am I sexist because I don't like female characters" but for me is like "I love lots of female characters but am I sexist for seeing compelling depth in a certain part of a character's arc/story that some people call just a misogynistic trope, does it mean I like misogynistic tropes deep down and am actually more sexist than the people who only like male characters? Like a real feminist would just turn away with disgust from the whole character and the fact I don't and see interpretations of it that aren't just "this character does this because she is a woman and weak or volatile" and find my interpretations psychologically compelling or whatever means I'm not sensitive enough to those tropes?

[quasi-normalcy]

I don't know what writers need to be told this, but giving a character a traumatic backstory does not, of itself, make them interesting.

[albi-mander]

trauma is great and cool but you gotta have that character make decisions and choices and shit. that's where the real character is,in the things they chose.

how do they tell the traumatic backstory to themselves? what do they do to cope? if they could go back and do it all over again, what would they do differently, if anything? was there anything they could do, and do they think there was?

[halogenwarrior]

And it's annoying when you have a character you love who has had bad things happen to them and how it intersects with their psychology, personality, character arc is beautifully done both in terms of the trauma influencing them and who they are influencing how they see the trauma, and then someone goes up and says "nuh-uh this other character is better/more sympathetic because what they went through is worse", even if it's true it's worse it's more clumsily done so I don't feel the intense empathy and involvement!

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

From one Animorphs fan to another, is there a series comparable to Animorphs that you could recommend?

TBH, I don't know of any that are super similar. Animorphs is such a product of its time and its author(s) that even series that directly competed (Goosebumps, Dinotopia) look nothing like it. However.

Series that do cool things with first-person narration like Animorphs:

Queen's Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. Set in a fictional version of ancient Greece/Turkey, the series follows one protagonist (primarily a thief, but hobnobs with queens) through a handful of different narrators who see him as a hero, a villain, a loser, a genius, a traitor, a savior... And they're all kind of right.

Pendragon by D.J. MacHale. The world's most relatable teenager narrates adventures across the multiverse. It's notable for its overt grappling with questions of ethics during war — at one point the narrator has to decide whether to kill 30 innocent people to keep nuclear weapons out of Nazi hands.

Otherbound by Corinne Duyvis. Truly a book about "we live in a society," only the twist is that the two different protagonists live in two different universes with two different definitions of "disability"... and then they develop a psychic connection.

Children's books that will ruin your life (/pos) like Animorphs:

The Nest by Kenneth Oppel. A heartbreaking and horrifying story about loss, fear, being disbelieved by adults, being overshadowed by a new baby, and the dawning realization that grown-ups can't fix any of the things that are most fundamentally wrong with the world.

Lewis Barnavelt by John Bellairs. The series that shows that children's horror does not have to be cozy, when it could instead be paranoid and atmospheric and disturbing.

Feed by M.T. Anderson. This book came out in 2002 but could have been written last year, all about how advertising is eating the lives of contemporary teens.

Books with many of the plots/structures that make Animorphs good:

Tomorrow, When the War Began by John Marsden. Thank you @zarohk for recommending this series — it really is the closest to Animorphs I've ever found. A group of teens is camping in the Outback when the alien invasion takes their town, leaving them to decide how much violence they're willing to do in order to try and free their parents.

Endling by Katherine Applegate. Do I cheat by including this? Very well, then I cheat. An unapologetically disturbing premise (an "endling" is the last animal in an otherwise extinct species) gets softened over time by the power of friendship and screwball comedy, without losing sight of the horror.

Die by Kieron Gillen, or The Power Fantasy (Gillen), or The Nice House by the Lake by James Tynon IV. All are comics, not novels, so I'm grouping them at the end. But all have the common thread of "queer found family gradually turns toxic while dealing with dark magical adventures," and all remind me of Animorphs' uplifting yet disturbing codependency between the protagonists.

If other people have recs, please weigh in!

[deepfang-dreamer]

Gone(Michael Grant) and Worm(Wildbow/John C. McCrae) both offer what I consider a fairly Animorphs-esque spin on superheroes.

The former is written by K.A. Applgate's husband, taking place within the Fallout Alley Youth Zone of California, where anyone over 15 has vanished and some of the survivors have gained powers. As you might expect, a society comprised of prepubescent and teenage Capes is....not good.

The latter is a book, not a series. Goes ridiculously in depth about how powers would effect the world, first manifesting in the 1980s. Our protagonist has a ridiculously good power(controlling bugs), and a fairly Marco-esque mindset, though she's still her own character, of course. Much longer than Animorphs or Gone but well worth the read. It was written in 2011, so there's some rough patches, but I can't recommend this one enough. I can best compare them as "Animorphs but with Superheroes" and "Worm but for middle schoolers".

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Other recs from the notes:

My Teacher is an Alien by Bruce Coville — Come for the body horror and fart jokes; stay for the crushing and liberating realization that humans are a beautiful and awful mess of brilliance and stupidity, capable of wonder and atrocity in equal measure, and it's up to you, the adolescent reader, to do something with that truth (@ommmmminous-hummmmmmmm)

The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher — fantasy modern PI setting that's also a long series (@doodlee-a)

Skin Deep by Kory Bing — webcomic with shapeshifting that has a similar setting (@doodlee-a)

How to Be a Werewolf by Shawn Lenore — webcomic with shapeshifting that has a similar setting (@doodlee-a)

Daughter of the Lilies by Meg Syverd — webcomic with shapeshifting that has a similar setting (@doodlee-a)

The Girl Who Owned a City by O.T. Nelson — hits some similar vibes, premise is that a disease killed everyone over the age of 12, and the protagonist is a 10-year old who organizes a group of her fellow kids to survive (@lark1537)

Misfits (2009-2013) — Not a book series but it's almost criminal to not see Misfits mentioned for media similar to animorphs. ~2012 era or so british-produced tv series about troubled kids who get random superpowers and proceed to have all the problems. A lot of very similar themes despite the premise not being a 1:1 match. (@theevarquill)

Guardians of Ga'hoole by Kathryn Lasky — I read it long time ago so I don't remember much (and therefore feel free correct me if I am wrong), but if really really short: it's children xenofiction with main topics about wars, slavery, genocide, cults, fratricide — stuff like that. Oh and there's fascist owls. And it's only 15 books long. (@toadinthechest)

[succulentul]

havent properly drawn these guys in a while so heres my first animorphs art of the year! ive missed them so much （；＿；）

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I don't know how you'd set it up but it would be really funny to force Tobias into a mission where he HAS to morph some other Bird of Prey because he would spend the entire time complaining endlessly about how the tail feathers are all wrong or something.

That would be amazing! God knows Tobias doesn't have nearly enough problems, and definitely needs more.

The obvious one would be a night mission that forces him to give in and just acquire a damn owl already. It's so funny to me that he goes the whole series without that morph, despite its obvious utility, out of sheer stubbornness. But even Tobias would (grudgingly) use owl if there was a mission that needed a very skilled flier at night. Heck, he might even enjoy it despite himself.

I could see him being forced into golden eagle morph if they need to carry a lot of weight in raptor shape — maybe he's assisting a fellow Animorph in snake form to the battle, like in #21. Tobias would haaaate it, but he'd probably also see the point in needing a shape that big.

Alternately, could there be a mission with a lot of close-quarters speed flying where he has to take on his other nemesis, the peregrine falcon? Maybe something where the Animorphs attack a yeerk base on the side of a cliff and need an ultra-fast getaway. I could also see Tobias — through his teeth — admitting that peregrine falcon is cool, the way he does with mallard. Golden eagle would probably be the only one he would never ever come around on, since he sees them as bullies and for him that'll always be a hard "no."

[chekhovs-raygun]

hey you know what i just realized? tobias goes the entire series without ever once complaining about red-winged blackbirds. this is unbelievable. in spring the horny little bastards do absolutely nothing but a) bweedleBWEEEEEEE and b) bodyslam every single raptor they can find.

i have seen so many miserable hawks falling out of trees under the pingpong barrage of enthusiastically deranged alpha bro blackbird aggro. i have seen an owl waddling along the edge of a cornfield as these guys do highschool jock crimes to their head. i have seen a blue heron get bodychecked into the water. i have seen so many ravens go down like cool goths getting hit by a firehose. i have seen falcons doing us airforce evasive maneuvers to get away, and failing. i have seen an actual factual bald eagle making the sad piccolo noise of a baby elf forsaken by god as it desperately tries to gain altitude with these tiny monsters hanging off its ass.

i can only surmise that tobias's feelings for red-winged blackbirds can't be printed in a middle grade novel series about wartime bodyhorror atrocities because the entirety of the thought is just:

FUCK.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

He does spend a lot of time trash-talking corvids, so presumably they're included in that rant. But yes, he needs this morph too.

[txttletale]

or to be a little less pithy, groundedness means a sense of internal consistency, the idea that events and traits of a story or world are grounded in a coherent set of logics.

while realism means--exactly that, adherence to the specific logics of actual reality and its physics, logistics, etc.

there is of course nothing wrong with wanting realism in a story, but 99% of the people who say they do really want groundedness. like the vast majority of dumb arguments about asoiaf/got are its fans saying "its realistic" when they mean "its grounded" and people ridiculing them because it is in fact not very realistic (and not just because of the overt fantasy elements)

[prokopetz]

In my experience, another big part of the problem with talking about "realism" in fictional milieux is the product of a specific Type of Guy employing the term as a sort of semantic bait and switch, sometimes without consciously realising that this is what they're doing.

There's a particular recurring discussion of "realism" in media that goes something like this: "okay, but realistically the heroes would always win because they'd just shoot the villain while they're monologuing" – while refusing to acknowledge the obvious follow-up question: "wait, but if monologuing reliably gets you shot, where do all the monologuing villains come from?"

i.e., what we're really discussing is not a milieu which has adhered to some notional model of "realism" ab initio, but one which was apparently governed by the conventional tropes of its genre right up until the moment the character the person framing the scenario wants to win walks into the room, whereupon "realism" asserts itself.

Heck, there were folks doing this song and dance in the notes of the post this one is following up on, trotting out hypotheticals like "in a realistic fantasy setting the twelve-year-old chosen one would always lose because experience trumps skill and the power of friendship isn't real", implicitly taking it as given that in a milieu where this is true, people would still be handing out magic swords to twelve-year-olds.

It's basically treating those silly "How [Media] Really Should Have Ended" YouTube videos as a legitimate critical lens, and in circles where this song and dance is common, it leads to a lot of people reflexively shutting down the moment they hear the word "realism" because they assume (often quite reasonably!) that oh great, it's That Guy again.

[halogenwarrior]

Characterizing complex characters in writing or even just in your own head is hard (whether it's a fanfiction and you are trying to reproduce the complexity or someone else's creation or an original character or a mix where it's an existing character but with little enough screen time that you have elaborated on them). You can't just say "I'm an expert in character I know all their nuances", because the nuances are always trying to slip out of your head, it's a constant game of "oh I got to remember that character X has Y trait have you forgotten that?" and then playing Goldilocks like "but wait don't exaggerate Y too much that makes them seem like a caricature and ignores the nuance that they are also Z!" It's just not easy to have a full detailed complex picture of a character in your mind at all times without it getting eroded and you having to look back at your own notes.

[aliteralchicken]

someone who is attempting to put their fav male character in a blender will say you hate your fav female character if you put her in a slight angst scenario, don’t let this deter you, she deserves the blender as well

[i-love-my-blorbo-polls]

What alignment is your Blorbo?

-chaotic good

-chaotic neutral

-chaotic evil

-neutral good

-true neutral

-neutral evil

-lawful good

-lawful neutral

-lawful evil

And some made up ones

-chaotic lawful (will screw everything up withing laws)

-lawful chaotic (exploits any loopholes necessary to get out of punishment)

-Hell If I Know, Man

What alignment is your blorbo (this is a good one I like this one)

Chaotic good

Chaotic neutral

Chaotic evil

Neutral good

True neutral

Chaotic neutral

Lawful good

Lawful neutral

Lawful evil

Other/made up

Remaining time: 1 day 17 hours

[halogenwarrior]

Ok when I significantly change the tags to elaborate in one of these blorbo tag posts I reblog it so people see the new edition, then delete the old version so:

[balrogballs]

I’ve been spinning like a chicken on a spit ever since I heard about the whole ‘AI generated story places in renowned Commonwealth Writing Prize’ scandal and now has come the time to regale you with my Opinions™️ about the matter, because it’s hit on some thoughts I’ve had for a while re: how I approach writing, both fanfic and original fiction… and thoughts I’ve had as a reader. long read, strap in.

tldr scandal speedrun: story by Trinidadian writer Jamir Nazir just won the Caribbean regional prize at the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize ie one of the biggest short fiction awards in the world (almost 8000 entries this year) and was subsequently published on Granta's website, as all regional winners are. readers start flagging that something is off, and it quickly becomes clear that the story is almost certainly AI generated, and obviously the press and wank started up, media coverage, and my all time favourite part: Granta editor Sigrid Rausing uploads the story into an AI to ask if an AI wrote it and then puts out a statement that pretty much says ‘probably, but guess we’ll never know!’ (SORRY THIS PART IS SOOOO FUCKING FUNNY TO ME LMFAO 😭)

much of the earlyish discourse has focused on the AI detection question, what does this mean for literary prizes going forward, how do we verify human authorship. some responses have been very good/interesting (the Africa is a Country piece especially). what I want to yap about is what the judges' response to this story tells us about how postcolonial writing is read by the institutions that gatekeep it and readers who dismiss it (and this puts it perfectly with Arundhati Roy as an example), what the judging panel’s language reveals when read as a critical object in itself, and why the failure mode here is so damaging. tldr: the story is dogshit and so clearly AI generated you can even see the AI’s ‘thought’ process, but the mainstream reactions are slagging off the wrong thing, and for reasons that have little to do with AI.

it has been actually infuriating to watch a significant chunk of the online reaction use this nonsense piece of writing as a launching pad for a much broader dismissal. someone posts the bench-men sentence or the sunrise-over-a-sink sentence as evidence of AI, and then in the replies someone else will say some shit like "well this is just what postcolonial writing is like" or "I've read prize-winning stuff that reads exactly like this". and suddenly we're not talking about Jamir Nazir anymore, we're talking about whether this entire mode of writing, postcolonial literary fiction, global south prose ‘in general’, varied and distinct language plays associated with everyone from Roy to Walcott to Kincaid, as somehow inherently gaudy, unmoored, purple, a performance of profundity that collapses under scrutiny. sheer vim against styles of writing unfairly and lazily judged as ‘florid’ and ‘overwrought’, ie people calling for the clinical manicuring of prose through a lens of anti-AI progressivism.

and this rage has very little to do with AI or this AI generated story, and a lot more to do with the epistemology of reading across cultural difference:

what assumptions are you making when you encounter prose that doesn't do what you're used to, and how do you distinguish between:

this is doing something I don't have the framework to follow/yet

and

this is doing nothing

the uncomfortable answer is that a lot of people, at levels high above the average reader mind you, being prize judges and all, don't make that distinction. they experience the unfamiliarity and name it as failure, as excess, as incoherence, as the literary equivalent of noise, without asking whether the problem is in the text or in the reading, or they fall prey to a manifestation of ‘trim the fat culture’ (good post on this).

this is not an accusation of bad faith reading necessarily; it is just what happens when you read without the relevant context and without the intellectual curiosity to notice that you're missing something and attempt to find it. telling, however, is how quickly that experience of unfamiliarity, in this particular case, became a generalisation. not "I find this story's specific metaphors incoherent" but "I find this kind of writing incoherent", as if “this kind of writing” is a stable category and not just something this AI slapped together. a sliding from the fraudulent to the traditional that happens with striking confidence, and one which you do not see applied with the same ease to, say, Western European modernism, where the response to difficulty tends toward "I need to read more Woolf to understand Woolf" rather than "yucky stinky Woolf is AI-slop”.

anyway. here is my favourite sentence from the shitty AI story:

"she had the kind of walking that made benches become men."

and like it’s my all time favourite sentence ever because like. what does it mean. what is it doing. why is it there. what decision was made in its construction and to what end? and I just could not come to a conclusion because the real answer is that no actual decision was made, because decision-making requires an engagement with the writing, requires a reasoning for the sentence to exist in the way it does, and this exists across all literary prose styles, from the sparsest to the lushest. the bench-men sentence is difficult to interpret, but not in a ‘this is difficult to interpret which makes the reward of interpretation sweeter’ way, it is difficult to interpret in a ‘there is nothing under this sentence’ way, and that is made very clear when even the slightest interpretative pressure is laid on the story.

anyway, turns out the judges of one of the world’s biggest literary competitions did not apply that pressure. caribbean regional judge Sharma Taylor described Nazir's language as "sublime — precise yet richly evocative — conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy" and like man this isn’t to dunk on Taylor personally but i think that sentence, in being a diagnostic object, is in itself a diagnostic object as to the whole scandal here: it’s evaluative language that doesn’t touch the text itself, a string of compliments whose terms don’t require a unique object. "precise yet richly evocative" is a sentence that could describe anyone from Chekhov to MT Vasudevan Nair.

what it cannot do is tell you what is precise about Nazir's objectively vague, dreary sentences, or where exactly economy manifests in a story that opens with three subordinate images somehow being unable to create even half an image. the judges either didn't notice or didn't give a fuck, and imo the honest interpretation there is that the evaluation was matching the text against a prior model of what this kind of writing is supposed to feel like, rather than what it actually does.

the main vulnerability of this kind of matching-against-model judging criteria is that it can only flag deviation from the expected shape, not absence within it. a story that inhabits the expected form, even hollowly, passes muster. a story that does something actually unexpected might fail on those same grounds, whether or not it's extraordinary. the AI machine got through to the prize list not because it fooled sophisticated readers into thinking they were reading a great work of literature, but because the reading operation in use did not require that experience of reading great literature to complete successfully. you just needed the vague shape, and the machines are good at making vague shapes.

what shape?

seemingly lyrical, lush, image-dense, located in rural poverty or landscape-as-metaphysical-weight, threaded with folk memory and unresolved grief, incantatory, myth-grabbing, rum shops, zinc rooftops, zinc-hair. what the AI has done is precisely what it is built to do: grab tiny scraps and fragments from actual prize-winning postcolonial stories and shoved them all together into an amorphous, senseless mass, knowing what it is supposed to do but not knowing how to do it. and so to me the most astounding/horrifying aspect of this scandal is how the judges who one can safely assume, based on their credentials, are very familiar with ‘world literature’, proved unable to tell the difference between a form inhabited and a form vacated.

and I really don’t like bringing up my literary/academic credentials (derogatory) etc etc on here anymore, because it at times positions me in an uncritical way I don’t intend or enjoy and I spent my early months in fandom realising just how very uncomfortable I was with the image I inadvertently curated as a result of coming straight from that sort of literary-academic space. so to put it very basically: I have spent my academic career broadly specialising in the very style and period of postcolonial literature that this AI story is attempting (badly) to emulate. my focus has always been south asia but i have also worked extensively with caribbean lit especially early on, and i’ve been taught/examined by some very well known caribbean writers and literary scholars, etc etc. ie i’m just trying to say that this post isn’t just me talking about a vague grievance with literary cultures but something i’ve been neck deep in for 10+ years now, ie i do know my shit and am not just knee jerk wanking, even though frankly i don’t think i should have to explain my background because way too many people are being way too confident with the ‘i have been writing for THREE BILLION years and they gave ARUNDHATI ROY THAT BITCH the booker prize’ atm…

anyway the reason I’m so brainrotted about this is because this exact literary-cultural problem was one of the things that led me to structure my longfic, Prayers to Broken Stone, in the way I did. the fic itself is totally irrelevant here so you’re not missing anything if you haven’t read it or are unfamiliar with the Silmarillion, I’m just referring to how the first quarter of that fic deliberately contains every single postcolonial miserycore cliché that appeals to a literary-prize, Western Anglophone, and diasporic audience’s ideas of what ‘Global South’ world-literatures should look like (and ngl I feel like I probably went too hard on this because so far I know at least 5 ppl familiar with the genre who justifiably almost dropped the fic before the mic drop because of the beginning being Like That… sorry guys. i will probably do it again 😭).

anyway after that, and very abruptly, the story takes a hard pivot to what it actually is, which is not an apolitical portrait of India, not diasporic literature about the Indian subcontinent, not even an Indian novel about Kozhikode, but a Kozhikodan novel about India, down to the style: my writing in general tends to lean on carnivaleque and incongruous tonal whiplashes between ‘lowbrow’ humour, abject tragedy and direct critical fourth-wallfucking commentary, but that whiplash is turned all the way up to 100 in Prayers and the humour especially is taken to borderline slapstick levels, and that style is evocative of Kozhikodan literary cultures (see—writings of Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, who is mentioned in the story in that Comrade Maedhros lies claims they are great buddies lmao), only that most writing from the region is in Malayalam, etc.

the reason i mention the fic here is that objectively speaking, those first few chapters, the ‘series of clichés’ ones, are the ‘clearest’ part of the story when it came to writing it. those chapters were written to directly evoke the vague shape of ‘prizewinning postcolonial giants’ of South Asian literature, both the brilliant and incisive writers and the floggers of diaspora-gaze miserycore, providing a series of aesthetic signals to those texts: the joint-family ‘madhouse’, the separated twins, the daddy-issues-as-father-of-the-nation-issues, the family-as-country, the dried rivers, the symbolic heirloom bangle, the utopian pre-imperial regional historiography, the diasporic returnee, the rotting house, the familial disconnect. Roy, Rushdie, Mistry, Lahiri, Desai, Seth, Ghosh, rinse and repeat.

do I personally enjoy every single one of these authors? no, I would probably cagefight two of them at least. what I am saying though, is that that their writing isn’t some kind of incomprehensible mess that nobody aside from their little tiny id-group can understand, not amorphous or vague or too overwrought to comprehend. their prose, all differing styles, can be rich, lush, playful, meandering, yes. but they are not unclear: they’re so clear that the positionality of the authors, their class and caste backgrounds, their educational and migratory trajectories, are often painfully evident (hence the cagefighting). the reason i used those aspects in my fic to signal towards a particular kind of globally lauded postcolonial literature is because those signals are clear, not confusing.

ie it is not a case of ‘global south’ writers being incomprehensible, it is a case of readers walking into a garden with a few flowers they haven’t seen before and immediately going ‘damn, look at this jungle. can’t navigate it but i’m sure it’s great, ok bye’ then turning the fuck around and writing the travelogue anyway. which is to say, applying a colonial reading practice to postcolonial writing.

and there’s a similar, though differently approached, aspect in globally renowned caribbean anglophone writing: a history of deliberate formal difficulty. where the difficulty isn’t some ambient mystery or marker of ‘serious’ literature but a formal consequence of a model of storytelling. eg. Selvon's Creole narration in The Lonely Londoners was a decision with costs+purposes about what it would mean for Moses Aloetta's interiority to be rendered in standard English versus in a voice that had not been, at the time, admitted to the Anglophone literary canon, rather than being the inevitable default of a Caribbean writer. Harris's dissolving frames in Palace of the Peacock are not difficult because Harris was apathetic to comprehensibility but because the Guyanese historical consciousness the novel examines does not easily resolve into stable subjectivity.

form is so often part of the argument across literature, across the English canon itself, and normally in literary criticism, ‘difficulty’ is approached epistemologically alongside aesthetically. this is common knowledge yet the first part is something that appears to be hard to grasp for people reading and commentating on ‘world literature’.

what is this form doing that another form cannot?

you can answer that question for Harris and Selvon and Ghosh and Roy and man, I think he’s so fucking annoying sometimes, but you can even do it for Rushdie. you cannot do it for "coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all". and this impossibility has nothing to do with foreignness or excessiveness but because the question, when applied to this AI generated piece of writing, has no answer.

and like… what does that tell us about what the judges were evaluating? imo it tells us they were at least in part evaluating surface-level compliance. compliance with recognisable genre conventions and an expected register, and so with the right signals of “authenticity”. and in the case of ‘Global South literature’, these conventions include an emphasis on the rural, the embodied, the rooted, the mythical.

an AI is very good at compliance because compliance is, quite literally, what AI does: every LLM is trained on the corpus of what has been rewarded before and thus it reproduces the patterns of that reward. if the judges were themselves rewarding compliance with a known type, then of course the AI passed with flying colours, because they were, in effect, running the same operation as the LLM model: matching input against a predetermined template instead of engaging with the work itself.

not to use my favourite cliché, but this specific scandal having played out in the way it did pretty much evidences how these two things, the upper echelons of the global literary prize circuit judging panels and generative AI, are less ‘warring factions’ and more ‘two frat bros fisting each other while saying no homo bro’, ie comorbid counterparts.

and so imo the question that should haunt every future Commonwealth Prize shortlist is not "did an AI write this?" but "what model of literary value are we using to judge Anglophone literature?”, and “why the fuck are we doing that???”

bc if your aesthetic criteria are vague enough that a sentence like "the grove isn't a ledger; it's a mouth — it closes only when it's satisfied" reads as "vivid, lush imagery" delivered with "quiet authority," then your judging criteria is less criteria and more vibes. you are literally just playing a high-stakes vibes-based game of Pin the Tail on the Mango whilst wilfully ignoring how vibes are precisely what AI large language models are the best at faking.

anyway, like I said in my intro, this scandal is already sliding into a secondary discourse in which ‘Oriental™️ opacity/incomprehensibility’ is being treated as the general category, of which this AI-generated confusion is just the most recent instance. you can watch it happening in real time, unbearably prolonged: people who rightly found the Nazir story incoherent, reaching way too easily for other examples of postcolonial prose they also apparently found incoherent or “purple”, prose that is, in fact, doing things they just didn't know how to follow. the AI story has handed a lazy, sneering and dismissive reading practice the veneer of clinical diagnosis.

that is the horribly ironic thing here. reader after reader, openly admitting to doing the exact same lazy, apathetic reading of postcolonial literature as the literary prize judges they are (rightly) criticizing have done with this AI story, have been doing for human-writing from the global south for all this time. “ewww this is what that writing looks like when a machine does it" (correct) is sliding so so so easily into "ewww this is what that writing looks like" (not correct). dog after dog, chasing tail after tail.

and that slide, from a machine having ‘successfully’ impersonated prize-winning prose, to a panel of judges who clearly weren't really reading, to the genre itself being defined as imitable machinery, is imo the most damaging thing to come out of this whole affair, and the people most hurt by it are the writers who have fuck all to do with Jamir Nazir, who is clearly just a chancer who fucked around and found out.

because somewhere in those 8000 entries, there is a writer, possibly many writers, who solved their riddle, who knew what every sentence was doing, who had made the thousand small decisions that constitute a story, and whose difficulty (if their story was difficult: difficulty is subjective and not a default, as we have established) could easily be accounted for. that writer did not win, because the judges were not looking for them. and now, in the aftermath, the interrogation of the incident continues to refuse to ask the questions that would have found them.

I first thought it would be blowing smoke up my own ass to finish this post with a quote from my own story. and then I remembered that this is my circus and you are all my monkeys, so I will indeed be ending with a (spoiler-free, context-unnecessary) quote from the final chapter of Prayers, from one of the fic’s multiple fourth-wall breaches, this one explicitly addressing both the character of Maedhros, a gay Muslim man in postcolonial India, as well as the attritional impact of global Anglophone prize cultures on ‘national literatures’, explaining the structure of the story and touching on the reading-practice I talk about in this post, this cold, dismissive flattening based on the reader’s refusal to comprehend the unfamiliar. Emphasis obviously made just for this excerpt:

Humanity has tried many times, with fanfare and floodlights, to hold the great white shark within glass walls. When a young female was placed in the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, its keepers marvelled for a day, two days, then watched as she rammed herself against the tank walls, snout bloodied and refusing food until her body yielded to exhaustion. In San Diego, one was found dead within two weeks. More recently, in a public aquarium, a six-foot juvenile circling its tank like a condemned spirit, colliding with the corners until its skin peeled raw, was released after months only to die on the way back to the sea. Each attempt ended the same: a slow unravelling, a remarkable animal’s vast strength curdling inward, its shimmering blue-mapped body drifting in a pale echo of the life denied to them.

I do not deny they are vicious creatures. But it is not viciousness that makes it impossible for them to survive in the aquarium. The old fables and new films, the man-eater, the blood-frothed wave, the lurking fin, have all mistaken the matter entirely. The thing that kills the great white shark in captivity is the billowing cage: the narrowing circle of water, no current to guide their gills, the confiscation of the horizon. In captivity they turned to self-excoriation, scraping themselves to ribbons on the glass, starving in protest, dragging their bodies into stillness. As if potential had been so thoroughly written into their marrow that the denial of it was a kind of murder. What we mistake for noble resilience is in fact the beginning of a long derangement. A creature built to know the endless universe, driven into madness by the closing-in of incomprehensible walls.

And so we, in our hunger for marvels, have reduced an oceanic immensity to an ornament, a sole symbolic bangle on a slender wrist, a riddle turned spectacle. In that act of enclosure, the essential vastness of the creature is stripped away, its thousand-mile wanderings and salt-scored pilgrimages compressed into a parody of itself in a ghost story projected on glass.

What is offered to the crowd is no shark but the space where a shark once was: a wonder gutted and repackaged, its enforced silence masquerading as our unspoken understanding even as a scream writhes in every bubble.

As we behold the captive great white shark, Arwen, we do naught but applaud its absence in our lives, gild the blade which vanquished its truth, and heave a sigh of relief for the barrier between ourselves and the beast. We build shrines to the wonders we swallow whole. We raise gardens tomorrow from the cities we raze today.

But perhaps there is light on the horizon for humanity. Perhaps one day, we will learn how to keep the great white shark in a cage. And in turn, maybe it will learn how to rasp itself down for the onlooker and pace circles into borrowed water, each turn narrower, each wall closer than the last. What is witnessed is not the beast but its mutilation, a spectre stripped of horizon and turned inward on itself, a hollow spectacle mistaken for a radiant life.

The tank allows for neither possibility nor invention, and so the tale of the great white shark contracts into a pattern of bruises, the persistence of a body against limits it was never meant to know. The water becomes a neverending sentence, telling the story of a ruin that can only end in its own undoing. I wanted to be a writer, Arwen. I have always wanted to be a writer. You know that. You have always known that. And yet anything I ever write will only ever be an un-writing of the things other people have already written of me. Even my letters to you.

It is amazing, now that I think of it, what desperation can do to a story.

[renthony]

I see so many arguments over what is and isn't "good queer representation" that really just boil down to "y'all are actually arguing over matters of taste and genre preference, which is incredibly subjective and personal."

Worldbuilding where being queer is normalized and queerphobia has no impact on the plot? THAT'S FINE. Worldbuilding that includes queerphobia and tackles the effects of it as part of the story? THAT'S ALSO FINE.

Low-stakes queer romcom where the characters are fluffy and cute? THAT'S COOL. Messy queer drama with toxic people who fuck each other over and clash repeatedly? THAT'S ALSO COOL.

Stories that center the characters' queerness, show a trans character's transition, and are about the queerness as much as the rest of the plot? AWESOME. Stories where the characters' queerness isn't treated as a big deal, and have trans characters whose transition happened before the story entirely? ALSO AWESOME.

You may PREFER one thing or another, but it is actually good to have all these things. It's about variety. It's about queer characters being allowed to exist without censorship. It's about queer artists getting to make things without being told we're a "niche issue" or "adult content." It's about having as many goddamn cakes as the bakery can produce.

At the end of the day, I'd prefer a media landscape with fifty pieces of problematic queer representation over a media landscape with one single piece of queer representation that's trying (and usually failing) to be 100% perfect for everything and everyone.