Hello and welcome! Thank you for visiting! I am Darcy and this is my book review/fanfiction blog where I will be posting about my thoughts, experiences, etc. regarding my book reviews/fanfiction and reading/fandom.
I love reading fantasy and realistic fiction and exploring themes and worldbuilding in fictional works. In general, I enjoy reading, creative writing, and finding intriguing fictional worlds to engage with.
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the thing that bewilders me about a lot of fantasy readers is that they read about settings and plots featuring imperialism, war, and slavery and then call the inclusion of violence, abuse, and sexual exploitation "edgy" and "gratuitous" and it's like what did you think was happening. why were you under the impression that you were going to get a cozy story about fascism or something. far be it from me to criticize anyone for not wanting to read about torture in their spare time, and there are certainly cases where heavy subjects are poorly executed, but is it not equally insulting to sanitize them for a feel-good adventure.. like no one put a gun to your head and forced you to give your fantasy novel an enslaved protagonist. sometimes writing is supposed to make you feel bad
Hi, all! I hope your June has been going well. My updates are below.
I actually wrote a book review this month for a novel I finished reading last year. Iâd been meaning to write a review for it for a while since itâs a novel I had supported on Kickstarter, and I usually try to write reviews to support indie books I like, so Iâm happy I finally got around to it. Iâm also lightly reframing the way I write my book reviews to reflect better how I currently engage with reading, so keep an eye out for those changes.
Anyways, I did a little more work on my fanfic projects, and I managed to catch up on commenting on some fics Iâve been reading. If youâre a fan of the Dunk and Egg novellas and/or ASOIAF, I highly recommend Mithrigilâs âThe Hall of Empty Sconces.â If youâre more into Fire and Blood, neekuâs âThe Son of the Dragonâ and the anonymously written âwe don't have to talk about itâ were both great deep dives into Aerea and Rhaena, respectively.
Thank you for stopping by! You are welcome to share any fic or book recs in the comments! This month, I urge you to support these two campaigns raising money for summer clothing for children displaced in Gaza and for fencing to protect Palestinian families in the West Bank from settlers. Additionally, please follow the Darfur Network for Human Rights, which tracks violations against civilians in Sudan. For more resources and organizations to support, please look here.
hey balls. based on the post about the writing competition debacle, what do u think is the proper role of the "vibes-based" element of reading/writing? it seems like you're saying it plays an overly important role in most people's style of reading but i struggle to imagine what an alternative would even look like? so much of my sentence to sentence enjoyment of a book is just do i like the word choice and the rhythm. the actual meaning of the sentences fitting together and what they say as a whole kinda (in my mind, necessarily) comes out primarily, though not exclusively, over a longer time scale than the word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence experience. do u think that certain mediums like poetry or essays are more or less suited to vibes-based understanding? how does that play into all this?
sry if my questions got a touch rambly, ur post got me thinking quite a bit
ok so I think "vibes-based" was kind of imprecise andâŠ. perhaps a vibes-based word choice from me â ïž so I did not mean the felt-sensory immediate experience of prose, I obv think that's legitimate also also pretty much the whole point. like the experience of a sentence landing, or doing something unconscious and unprocessed or word choice creating a feeling that can be analysed inside-out, thatâs a great reading experience etc etcâŠÂ Â
what I did mean by vibes-based is the use of that immediate felt-sensory response as a terminal judgment rather than the beginning of an inquiry. so the difference between "this sentence feels odd and I want to understand why" versus "this sentence feels off from the shape of what i think it should be, confirmed bad/fake, next" in, specifically, literary-critical reading practice.Â
so it's not that felt response to writing is unreliable, it's that felt response is somehow treated as self-explanatory, as not requiring any further account of itself for being where the reading stops. like the latter is totally fine to explain why i DNF a book where i didnât enjoy the writing style or main character, but not if iâm doing an expert read of a work of literary fiction for a globally renowned prize ygm. essentially i think the culture around reading+analysing âworldâ or âglobalâ litfic, specifically top-level prize culture and review culture, has gotten to a place where it doesn't really go further than âthis is what i think this should look likeâ. which imo is evidenced by how "evocative" is pretty much a complete sentence in that judge's citation, without ever explaining how it is evocative of what or to what end.
re timescales: i agree that sentence-to-sentence pleasure and whole-text meaning work differently, the experience of âprose in timeâ is irreducible, and itâs not that iâm saying that should be âflattenedâ into a cognitive account where a sensation has to be connected to meaning. but the reason a sentence's rhythm works is usually not separable from what the sentence is doing semantically, and across the board (usually! not in all cases!) a lot of âgoodâ writing displays a high level of intentionality regardless of style. and intentionality comes through in a close read, because sensation isnât separate from meaning but rather sensation is meaning experienced at a speed faster than conscious processing, which is why when you go back to a sentence that hit you, you can usually figure out why.Â
you donât HAVE to but you can, bc the sensation is tracking a ârealâ thing. and when you push on a sentence that feels good and find nothing (like in said Commonwealth AI story⊠i mean the sentences simply do NOT sound good to me but even if it did to the judge, which it obviously did, thereâs clearly not been any attempt to figure out WHY it felt good to them) when the prose promises and the promise doesn't cash out, that's also âinformationâ that a reading practice committed to following its own responses should catch. the reader who notices a gap and and burrows into it is not the same as the reader who either accepts the initial impression at face value or rejects the whole thing as bad, and it would be the former that i expect at the level of a commonwealth lit prize judge.Â
and again like yeah obviously the existence of contemporary prize culture sucks, publishing environment can be rancid etc etc⊠but literary criticism and its frameworks have existed for a v long time, its a field that continues developing, and there are pretty established ways of âworking withâ and engaging intellectually with literature, and in either an academic setting or litfic review/prize setting, i would expect that level of in depth engagement with the intricacies of a piece of writing.Â
on poetry and essays, hmmm this made me think for a moment (hence my delayed response, apologies!). so i agree poetry is the form where sensation and meaning are most densely co-present and thus difficult to separate cleanly⊠but that also imo means itâs also a form that is most punishing of sensation treated as a pure terminus. like you can have a purely aesthetic experience of a great poem and it'll be pleasant/impactful/tragic whatnot, but a lot of work is happening under that experience-layer to make it read as both pleasant/etc and meaningful, wherein the sensation is so tightly wound around the thinking that separating them loses both. i am not a very poetry person to say the least though so i think others may have more to say on this.Â
iâm a very big fan of the essay form though, for a similarly âupside downâ reason, because the essay form is probably the one most suspicious of âpure sensationâ and one most traditionally committed to making its reasoning âfollowableâ⊠but also the very best uses of the essay form (and i think arundhati royâs stuff is an EXCELLENT example here â so is hanif kureishiâs earlier nonfiction work, where with the latter i donât even agree with most of what heâs saying but i find him very technically accomplished) are absolutely working at the level of rhythm and texture and the âfelt senseâ of an argument's shape. where again the âornamentalâ seeming prose is absolutely thinking for itself rather than clothing a thought of that makes sense. which is maybe why bad essays are so much more obviously bad than bad poetry: bad poetry can hide in affect and sustain a kind of readerly goodwill on atmosphere alone, while a bad essay shows its ass on even a relatively basic close read.Â
anyway all this is to say iâm not arguing for a reading practice that is less responsive to sensation - absolutely not! iâm more gesturing towards one that is more honest about exploring what sensation is doing, and where it comes from. essentially just that the âfelt responseâ is the beginning of the critical act, and what that prize (and, in a different sense, the âai detection witch huntâ culture on ao3, although ngl my main problem with that one is âwhy do you care and what makes you think youâre right in deducing something that litprize judges seemingly cannot deduceâ) is a shorter circuit of that process where the âfelt responseâ is a replacement of the critical reading, and what it does is actually move directly from âi have a response to thisâ to âi have evaluated thisâ.Â
and also itâs not even me saying itâs a fault with individual reading practice fyi imo the felt-response-as-verdict mode is cultivated by the infrastructure around contemporary reading and the âencounterâ with books (goodreads/algorithmic recommendations/prizes awarding specific âshapesâ rather than engaging in depth) is geared towards rewarding a quick-confident legible response and penalising uncertainty. and this just sticks out for me esp in âworld litâ because of the larger concentration of ppl writing in english in non anglophone countries who use âlanguage playsâ as epistemological argument, wherein the difficulty is often the point, is the writing most penalised by that aforementioned reading practice.Â
where the question "what is this doing and why" feels like an unreasonable demand to make of a judge, an affectation almost, when actually it's the baseline of taking a work of literature seriously, and again the writers who lose most from this are the ones for whom, due to existing class/racial/anglophone biases, the first impression was always going to require context, patience, and most importantly perhaps, a willingness to have your existing frameworks shown to be insufficient.Â
a lot of people have tagged this talking about survivorship bias, and that's part of it, for sure, but even more than that, "books i don't like show the moral decline of society" has been a cry of the conservative since the growth of novel-reading in the 18th century -- take the reception of gothic novels in the 18th century and sensation novels, yellow-backs, and penny dreadfuls in the 19th. Ruskin's "Fiction, Fair and Foul" is an early entry in the "grimdark is bad, actually" genre of post, and
"... writing in 1863, H. L. Mansel castigated the new subgenre [sensation novels] as "preaching to the nerves instead of the judgment" (357). Since early in his anti-Sensation diatribe Mansel refers to "A pale young lady in a white dress" (358), we can be certain that his chief target is Wilkie Collins, whose The Woman in White (1860) initiated the Sensation mania." (VictorianWeb)
mansel's dislike of Collins leads me to my next point: many novels that are currently held to be classics and assigned without objection in middle and high schools were the center of controversy when they were new. we're having the same panic about romantasy that we had about sensation novels that we had about gothics.
we look back at critics who say that courtship novels will ruin girls' idea of marriage as silly and misogynistic because we're not immersed in the culture of the time (and, of course, because they were silly and misogynistic). what will people of times future say of us?
okay the thing that i keep trying and failing to say, i think, re. this whole commonwealth thing (sorry! i will be over it soon!) is that like, there is already an assumption when white euramerican readers encounter a work that is about race or about a country in africa, asia or latin america, that it can fit only a few categories:
it is a moral educational fable and lesson about race or colonialism; this can either be heartwarming or tragic
it is a portal into a world of misery that is simultaneously designed to instruct and to affirm the fortunate nature of their own world
it is unreal and magical
it is impenetrable, incomprehensible and unknowable because it is a portal into the impenetrable, incomprehensible and unknowable
which really is just two categories: either you are easily knowable entirely through the lens of your country and race, or else you are inscrutable and incomprehensible. you are either a simplistic child, or you are the inscrutable and unknowable [oriental].
-- this was the beginning of, i think, the fourth or fifth draft of this post, which i have been writing and rewriting for the past week, trying to nail down exactly what i want to say about this whole wretched affair.
the first draft went into a long and winding diversion about the perils of how non-white authors are (mis)read today, no matter how they write. that was not what i wanted to say, but what i had to end up saying in order to justify and clarify what i wanted to say which is that non-white readers get to demand higher standards of style of their writers and interlocutors. i said "get better taste" then clarified all the ways in which i meant to absolve non-white authors of the burden of better taste because i recognised they work in a poisonously white industry.
the second draft went into a long and winding diversion in which i ended up trying to defend jhumpa lahiri's latest short story collection from being misread and cut down to being about "immigration", when in fact these stories are much deeper than review allows them to be.
the third draft required another long diversion, because i observed that the reviewer in the guardian who cut ms lahiri down to a writer who writes merely about immigration in the ways we imagine it - from the global south, characterised by precarity and poverty - was in fact not a white person. it was vital to discuss the problem of double consciousness and the processes by which we come to acquire the tastes of the very institutions that refuse us full personhood. no one knows this better than me, who speaks only english with any reasonable fluency, and grew up reading more english novelists from the 30s - 50s than the average english person appears to.
the fourth draft finally got somewhere that i wanted it to be: that we cannot mistake unintelligible writing filled with beautiful words with difficult writing that articulates difficult thoughts perhaps through not very exciting words, perhaps through the poetic. that deliberate strangeness and defamiliarisation deployed as literary technique is different from a mere statistical combination and shuffling of words done by a machine. that we must insist on our own comprehensibility on our own terms and legibility to the white gaze be damned; but we must not allow them to confuse our illegibility with a flattening incomprehensibility.
however, all of this is really just four different ways of describing a) the processes by which those four misreadings outlined above are enforced on non-white writers whether they like it or not and b) some thoughts on escaping this, or ignoring it, or doing our own thing. the object lesson was: no matter what we do we will be bundled into category 4 if we say anything too uncomfortable, but we must not mistake the difficult for the nonsensical and vice versa simply because white people cannot do this. in other words, what i was really asking us to do was to stop reading like white people.
the other problem with this is that the ode to difficult writing can be misused anyway. witness sam kriss' concern for us: "white people eat this shit up and hand out condescending prizes; Indians tend to prefer people like R K Narayan or Sadat Hasan Manto, who actually know how to write." mind you, sam kriss is not indian and this follows on from a tirade in which he deliberately decontextualises and misreads an arundhati roy quote from god of small things (a quote, if which, taken in context is actually an interesting and effective use of language and repetition to tie across a particular thematic strand across the novel) and where he accuses salman rushdie of writing things to the effect of "she fed me the chapatti of her lies and the rotis of her deceits". needless to say: that's kind of immensely fucking racist. i don't think more close reading is actually going to solve this problem and neither do i think more difficult writing will, because there is always some bozo in the world who is going to insist that it is, in fact, nonsensical.
so what to do?
anyway, i witnessed a very interesting conversation earlier today in which some people we talking about how a particular adaptation of a work had made the work "more racist". in this conversation, an essay by a very thoughtful non-white writer had been deployed as "proof" of how the adaptation had become "more racist". of course a close and thoughtful reading of the essay in question might have suggested that the "more racist" was perhaps something written with a level of anger or bitterness, or perhaps an emotional statement: the bewilderment of encountering something so vilely racist, seeing no one react to it, and trying to make sense of it by grappling at the nearest racist thing and gesturing at it. which in this case, is the actual literal source text. there is no "more racist" in this case, because the source text is essentially mired and dripping in it and the escapes from its racism are slim to none; accidental rather than intentional.
this is interesting to me because it reveals a very different reading strategy than the one deployed above: if non-white writers are read either as moral fables or unreal or as nonsensical, white writers are read as real, as universal statements about the human condition, as stylists; are given reparative readings of every kind. writing by white euramericans, therefore:
is universal and therefore particular: it speaks for all but it does so by speaking in specifics of themes and emotions and experiences
is a work of art, made with a particular style, whose artistic processes can be analysed and studied to yield greater appreciation
draws from the real to tell real stories, even when its magical and fantastical
surpasses and transcends politics, which is to say that nothing can be said about the text by looking at the world from which it comes
comes from a world which is simultaneously both a product of its time (exculpatory) and the vanguard of its time (laudatory) and thus, it cannot be held responsible for any of its views
therefore, there are no racist texts or authors, only accidentally racist ones. therefore, jonathan franzen writes about family, but arundhati roy writes magical realism and unreal people in an incomprehensible indian family. therefore, tim o'brien is writing about the horrors of war, but bao ninh is writing about the misery of vietnam, the country. therefore, tolkien is writing about the horrors of environmental destruction and war, but arundhati roy is writing about the unreal because a muslim character is displaced into living in a graveyard after a literal pogrom. therefore, jilly cooper, heyer, christie and sayers are all products of their time, but [insert woc author of the week getting cancelled here] is a racist, sexist, imperialist etc etc etc. wodehouse, is ofc, innocent of collaboration with the nazis (despite having made actual propaganda for them, tho he claimed he didn't understand what he was doing), but r f kuang is normalising genocide*. on and on it goes ad fucking infinitum.
provocatively, therefore, i would like to invite an experiment: what if we were to switch up modes of reading for the two? what if i was to say that since they're all from england, that therefore pratchett, susanna clarke and tolkien are only ever saying something about england and its miseries, and those miseries concern england's flirtations with eugenics driven aristocratic racism (remember, after all, clarke & pratchett exists downstream of and inherit from tolkien)? what if i was to say that wodehouse is writing magical realism, because surely no one can behave that farcically and surely nothing can shake out so improbably; surely jeeves must be a magical construct of some sort? or perhaps tim o'brien is, in his evocations of war and its aftermaths. what if i was to insist that sylvia plath is incomprehensible, because her language is rich and strange, or that victor hugo is writing incomprehensible word salad because of his digressions. what if, instead, you were to understand that arundhati roy is an artist, that perhaps brandon taylor is more interested in gay life than race, that there is no particular lesson to be learned from the sorrow of war except that war is hell, that perhaps jhumpa lahiri is telling you stories about women in unhappy marriages first, and immigrants second? what if you were to understand salman rushdie's midnight children as a real story about real things? what if you could stop feeling that thrill of glee every time some non-white writer gets taken down? what if you could feel less self-satisfied that the author you were told is important turns out to have been unimportant? what if your first instinct wasn't to insist that either the author or the text is unreal or impossible when encountering a piece of writing by a non-white author that you can't wrap your head around? what if you tried? what if you tried even a little?
*using this as an example to make a specific point, i am deeply uninterested in litigating whether or not wodehouse or rf kuang are guilty or not; i am interested in the reception these respective "misdoings" have received and how they've been narrated to the world
Iâve been spinning like a chicken on a spit ever since I heard about the whole âAI generated story places in renowned Commonwealth Writing Prizeâ scandal and now has come the time to regale you with my Opinionsâąïž about the matter, because itâs hit on some thoughts Iâve had for a while re: how I approach writing, both fanfic and original fiction⊠and thoughts Iâve 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 âprobably, but guess weâll never know!â (SORRY THIS PART IS SOOOO FUCKING FUNNY TO ME LMFAO đ)
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 panelâs 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 AIâs âthoughtâ 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 âin generalâ, 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 âfloridâ and âoverwroughtâ, 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 âtrim the fat cultureâ (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 âthis kind of writingâ 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-slopâ.
anyway. here is my favourite sentence from the shitty AI story:
"she had the kind of walking that made benches become men."
and like itâs 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 âthis is difficult to interpret which makes the reward of interpretation sweeterâ way, it is difficult to interpret in a âthere is nothing under this sentenceâ 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 worldâs biggest literary competitions did not apply that pressure. caribbean regional judge Sharma Taylor described Nazir's language as "sublime â precise yet richly evocative â conjuring vivid, lush imagery with remarkable economy" and like man this isnât 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: itâs evaluative language that doesnât touch the text itself, a string of compliments whose terms donât 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 âworld literatureâ, proved unable to tell the difference between a form inhabited and a form vacated.
and I really donât like bringing up my literary/academic credentials (derogatory) etc etc on here anymore, because it at times positions me in an uncritical way I donât 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 iâve been taught/examined by some very well known caribbean writers and literary scholars, etc etc. ie iâm just trying to say that this post isnât just me talking about a vague grievance with literary cultures but something iâve 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 donât think i should have to explain my background because way too many people are being way too confident with the âi have been writing for THREE BILLION years and they gave ARUNDHATI ROY THAT BITCH the booker prizeâ atmâŠ
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 âlowbrowâ 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 (seeâwritings 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.
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 isnât 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: theyâre 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 âglobal southâ writers being incomprehensible, it is a case of readers walking into a garden with a few flowers they havenât seen before and immediately going âdamn, look at this jungle. canât navigate it but iâm sure itâs great, ok byeâ then turning the fuck around and writing the travelogue anyway. which is to say, applying a colonial reading practice to postcolonial writing.
and thereâs a similar, though differently approached, aspect in globally renowned caribbean anglophone writing: a history of deliberate formal difficulty. where the difficulty isnât some ambient mystery or marker of âseriousâ 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, âdifficultyâ 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 âworld literatureâ.
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 heâs 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 âauthenticityâ. and in the case of âGlobal South literatureâ, 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.
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?â, and âwhy the fuck are we doing that???â
bc if your aesthetic criteria are vague enough that a sentence like "the grove isn't a ledger; it's a mouth â 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 âOrientalâąïž opacity/incomprehensibilityâ 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 âpurpleâ, 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. âewww 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 âsuccessfullyâ 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 ficâs 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 ânational literaturesâ, 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 readerâs 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 animalâs 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.
Hi, all! I hope your May is going well! My updates for this month are below.
I worked a bit more on my longer fanfic projects, which has been nice to return to. I have been struggling for inspiration over the last few months, but Iâm slowly starting to feel more and more motivated.
Iâm still gradually making my way through all the books and fics Iâm reading.
Anyways, thank you for reading my updates! Let me know what you have been working on or reading in the comments. This month, I encourage you to support AbCF, an organization working toward economic independence and self-determination for First Nation peoples through First Nation-led nature repair initiatives. Additionally, I once again encourage you to support the Basandja Coalition, which is working on the ground to support displaced people in the North Kivu province of the DR Congo. Finally, please support Pa'lante, a youth-led transformative justice organization in Massachusetts. For more resources and organizations to support, please look here.
I do really love it when women write graphic and fucked up things. I feel like so often people react to fucked up fiction with âof course a disgusting man would write this đâ and it often carries an unspoken (honestly sometimes spoken) message of âa womanâs PURE and DELICATE and FEMININE mind could NEVER think of something this VILEâ. Thank you women in fucked up fiction đ«Ą
obsessed with people who stan side characters itâs so funny like youâll see them talk endlessly about count gobbledegook IV and then you go to wikipedia and find out theyâve been in five episodes total across a 300 episode series
reading a good interesting book after a horrible reading slump and suddenly you can feel the sun shining again and the sky is more beautiful than ever and birds are all singing songs to you
in the past week or two i think i've read 2 books of dune, all three books of howl's moving castle (though they're not particularly hefty), and i'm now 30% through les miserables and will probably be about 40% by the end of the day!!! yahoo!! the first time i read it some years ago i think it took me like a month. but i've finally liked reading again after i lost a lot of interest after finishing a load of brandon sanderson books and then realising i shouldn't spend money on more.
and honestly it's brought so much more joy back into my life! especially after a period of my mental health being mad at me. joy and whimsy is apparently the answer
You can enjoy things in fiction that would be awful in the real world. Like playing a murderhobo in a game! In the real world, being or supporting a murderer-thief would be pretty damn awful, while in the game it's just good fun. Same with anything else you choose to do with the pixels on the screen, like kinks that don't affect anyone real, so they're okay in fiction, but would be pretty damn bad in real life.
No one else is responsible for your online experience. They are required not to harass you, but they are not and never will be obligated to not post about ships, kinks, or tropes you dislike just to avoid you seeing them. It's up to you to blacklist words or phrases, block tags, or even block users as needed to avoid seeing content that upsets you.
No one can force you to read anything against your consent. Any content you don't like seeing can be instantly avoided by closing out of the offending post/fic.
You are not owed an online experience free of discomfort.
Nothing that happens in your imagination can ever make you a bad person. Words you write or read about fictional characters will never make you a bad person.
The claim that media consumption influences real-life behavior is intellectually dishonest and serves only to excuse the behavior of real offenders.
Fiction is a safe way to explore horrifying or confusing concepts. Therapists agree that fiction, even (or especially) about taboo topics is a good coping mechanism, especially, but not exclusively, for trauma survivors. Fiction is to adults what play therapy is to children. This doesn't stop being true if the work in question is of a sexual nature.
Sex isn't an inherently worse or better motivation than anything else. A work written to create feelings of arousal isn't dirty, shameful, or in any way less pure than works written to entertain, provoke moral questions, or for other reasons. And worth noting is that multiple purposes can exist in the same story, especially fanfiction.
You aren't entitled to an explanation for why someone reads, writes, or otherwise enjoys certain works, kinks, tropes, ships, etc.
May 2nd, 2026 Drabbles (Departing for Aman, Morwen and Laughter)
Drabbles written based on prompts from the Silmarillion Writers' Guild's May 2026 instadrabbling event. https://archiveofourown.org/works/79098601/chapters/222061596
The sea was glistening? No, that felt too cliche. There had to be more words to describe the dazzling sight before him. To depict the way the waves rose to the horizon, brushing the bright twilight sky. And, oh, the stars. Barely gleaming in the deeper purple that hovered above. But there was something more to this beauty, too. A fear, a longing, a loss. Was this truly his fate to leave? To go West? He had felt that pull, that yearning for that other land. Yet now that he was here, on this shoreâŠhe watched the waves roll on.Â
How could I have known I would need to remember your laughter
What had her sonâs laughter been like? She could almost picture him running on the grass with Lalaithâno, Urwenâtrotting after him. His dark hair all tangled from tussling outside and his hands brown from the dirt he had tumbled in. She thrust the memories aside. Those recollections would do her no good now. So many people she had lostâŠShe hugged Nienor, her only child still with her, tighter to her breast. Would this girl grow up to laugh, too? Or would there only be silences to share between them, filling in for all their missing spaces. Morwen loosened her grip.
Hello! I hope you had a great April! My updates for this month are below.
Iâve slowly begun regaining some of my creative fanfic energy from last year, and Iâm feeling more motivated to work more on the larger project I started in August. I did more outlining for it and talked about it with some friends, which was nice.
Iâm still reading, which has been pleasant. I finished Awakening of Roku, which I thought was alright. There were some sweet moments and some intriguing arguments, but overall, I felt the book was struggling to decide whether or not it wanted to be a more complicated tragedy or your average YA fantasy action-adventure novel, making it hard for the story to pull off either.
Anyways, thanks for reading my updates! Let me know what you have been reading and/or writing in the comments. This month, I urge you to support Project Muhammad, which provides shelter, food, and other necessities for displaced children in Gaza. I also encourage you to follow and support Feminista, a feminist initiative in Kazakhstan supporting women and queer people. Their Instagram can be found here. Finally, I encourage you to support the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which provides aid for activist youth and the children of parents who have been attacked for their progressive activism in the US. For more resources and organizations to support, please look here.
Omg this, exactly. *Exactly*. The world the author believes in is the one they write.
Iâm about to go on a tangent.
This is basically what I tell my daughter when she reads Harry Potter or Enders Game or whatever book a teacher or a friend etc. recommends with an author who has upsetting views that arenât necessarily explicit in the text. You can read and love the books, and you can take away wonderful things from them. But you need to be thoughtful about which themes you take away, because the world in the book is written the way the author thinks the world IS. The politics of that person will show up in ways you donât notice, and you can walk away with them being part of the lesson and never thinking about it.
This is what being critical of your media really means. It means remembering that the author is the god of their own world but not ACTUALLY the word of god, and noticing, considering, and discarding lessons you disagree with.
You need to consider the authorâs argumentâ this is how you build a worldview beyond your own experiences. But you need to actually *consider* it, thoughtfully, and know your own values.
Good authors USE this. NOT being thoughtful about character actions is why so many people were shocked by The Boys when Homelander was so much more explicitly evil in seasonâŠ3, I think it was? You were supposed to notice the whole time and they didnât.
Now nowhere (that I remember) does Harry Potter say anything against trans womenâ in fact I remember a study showing that kids who read HP were significantly MORE empathetic of others than their peers. But the seeds in JKR that could have gone different ways but later turned into transphobia are present: a motherâs love being so exceptional it became the plot point everything revolved around, for example. Minor things that arenât even a flag at all. Things you donât think about until someone says âwomen are just *different* than menâ and means âtrans women arenât REAL women.â
Neil Gaiman wrote a lot of dark shit that characters had to struggle through, and so much of it was queer and humanizing and empowering. Thereâs a *reason* so many survivors or otherwise victimized or outcast people loved his workâ the dark shit was the fire his characters rose from. But the central and powerful theme running through his books, that you can be different and imperfect and a little dark and still be worthy, can also be taken to mean humanizing and overlooking actual evil acts. In Anansi Boys, for example, the main characterâs wife falls in love with his twin, despite him starting their sexual relationship with rape by pretending to be her husband instead.
You arenât going to know the full life story and background of every author you read, either, so never reading a problematic author isnât possible. This doesnât mean we shouldnât do better when we know better; I donât give money to bad people if I can possibly help it. It DOES mean, though, that sometimes thereâs a Trojan horse in any text and you need to learn to go:
âŠAnd set it aside without letting it grow in you.
people have to write "bad" fan fiction in order to write "good" fan fiction. and people have a right to post their "bad" fan fiction on ao3 because it is an archive, not a bookstore. and people writing "bad" fan fiction are just as entitled to comments and encouragement as any other author
We do so much damage to creatives when we treat artists like they come out of the womb masters of their crafts.
People are naturally talented at different things. This is true. Some people have a better eye for color and detail. Some people have a better memory for words. But you still need to cultivate the actual skills it takes to create great art. No master painter is birthed with a set of acrylics and a canvas. They have to learn and practice and create bad paintings and try again. A master painter will never achieve mastery if she expects perfection the first time her paint meets canvas.
I need the twins to resent Maedhros and Maglor for destroying their home and killing their people, I need Maglor resenting Maedhros for not playing at being parents with him, I need Maedhros to think that taking the twins was an unkindness and that they should have killed them instead, which he doesn't shy away from mentioning infrontof them. I need the twins to be terrified of him.
Maybe Elrond has decided to lay all the blame for the third kinslaying on Maedhros so he doesn't have to feel guilty for clinging onto Maglor, the only parental figure he has left. Maybe Maglor unconsciously (or consciously) leans into that narrative. Meanwhile Elros blames both brothers equally, which causes problems between the twins. He doesn't understand how Elrond can trust one of the monsters from Elwing's stories. Maedhros doesn't allow himself to grow close to them, because he knows what happens to the people he loves, especially after his history with twins.
I need them to be complicated, broken and messy, and I need love to grow between them anyways
