This is such a frustrating and reductive response to the book. The character recounting the death of his planet is a criticism of millennial liberals.
SPOILERS but He’s like a Twitch streamer climate activist who you find out uses a private jet to travel. He’s like a well-meaning Christian who goes to a liberal church, but you find out never unpacked the sexism/homophobia baked into the belief system. He’s your friend you used to look up to, but as you get more mature, he stays the same, and your friendship slowly starts growing apart.
One of the key issues is that it isn’t just some victim recounting the death of their planet— he was a direct cause of it.
The framing of the tagger is a bit disingenuous because part of the point of that scene is that we’re LOOKING DOWN on this cringey millennial guy who is thousands of years old, yet still references a dead meme from thousands of years ago.
The point is that he’s still trapped at the maturity level he was at when he killed the planet, and THAT'S why he frames it in shitty memes and shifts the blame of his actions, like a toxic BFF who hasn’t matured since high school. He’s stuck in the liberal mindset that killed the planet, one where it paints itself as progressive or democratic or whatever buzzword you need to hear to hide the violence underlying the system. He’s the VILLAIN, and we’re supposed to be indicting him the same way we indict the cringe-y liberal characters in Get Out, where the cringe hides the insidiousness lurking underneath.
And the point is that it’s cringe-y and tonedeaf. This is a villain who isn’t a cartoonish evil mastermind, but instead a reflection of the author’s view on her liberal millennial peers. This is why it is “physically hurtful to read”—it’s intentionally invoking that familiar brand of millennial cringe for a point.
Like even the meme the author chose is resonant in this regard.
The “none pizza left beef” meme was huge with tumblr kids in 2012. It was a monument to how funny a corporate monstrosity of a food could be, both provocative and original. Like a piece of absurd art about internet commerce.
It was also created by the co-creator of Young Sheldon, Steven Molaro.
There it is again. That funny feeling that the Internet often inspires.
It’s not evil, per se, to write Young Sheldon, but it feels like stagnation, the way the author goes from creating THE absurdist meme on corporate food to creating THE symbol of corporate cashgrab TV.
And like, that’s the Harrow the Ninth character in a nutshell. He’s so stagnant that he’s become removed from his original context, until his mindset is as absurd and incomprehensible as his stupid meme that’s been dead for thousands of years. Until he’s BECOME the imperial corporate empire he was originally fighting against. Much like how the Internet/big tech/streaming itself has stagnated and become the very thing it originally stood against. There’s a reason internet meme culture is being used this way, and the book acknowledges the break in tension this creates in the reader.
But instead of mentioning any of that, it’s “Book makes fun of tragedy by making it into a tonedeaf meme. This is why memes shouldn’t be in books.”
Like… If that is what you take away from that scene,
And like, you can dislike what Harrow the Ninth is doing. It’s intentionally cringe-y to read in a very post-modern way, but that doesn’t take away the fact that it’s cringe. You can even call it pretentious or whatever.
This discussion is had about lots of post-modern works. Like the short film Wavelength. Or Duchamp’s Fountain.
But, if you’re at the point where you refuse to engage with the fact that Fountain is intentionally about the question “What is art?” so you can feel superior about disliking it
Then I don’t really think you understand the work, nor art in general.
And it frustrates me that this anti-intellectual take is being proliferated by someone who doesn’t even seem to get the basic facts of the book right. Like again, it’s fine to dislike a book for being cringe-y even if it’s on purpose or to find it pretentious for doing so.
But not even mentioning that the character is trying to cover up his warcrimes means that you inadvertently make it seem like he was meant to be a genuine victim. Which makes the author seem like she was somehow SO shitty at writing sensitive topics that she accidentally made her scene recounting planet death into a tone deaf meme. Which just… isn’t what’s happening here.
No, they don’t ‘read that.’ They’re reading a postmodern take on liberal imperialism/colonialism. My GOD those tags are creating misinformation in real time. Maybe read the book before reblogging tags about it next time.
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