in an enchanted forest somewhere

Issy | 20s | She/her | Curious fan of many things | pfp by Justin Sweet

[katiehoughton]

The wildness of that howling wind called to her, seemed to whisper in her ear, "No more! No more! You are a woman of desire." She listened to the voice and knew what she had to do, even if it meant risking everything. From now on, she would live like blazes.

RIVALS | 2x06

[casasupernovas]

[bobigailmorris]

RIVALS SPOILERS!!!

The Archie x Caitlin ‘sex scene’ at the start of episode 6 is SO underrated I haven’t heard anybody talking about it.

In a show so driven by physical desire, it was so refreshing to see a more “realistic” scene showing two teenagers being silly and in love, instead of the heated passion of the other scenes. It was ALSO good because they’re significantly younger than the protagonists and I was worried about how they would handle that, but it reminded me of sex education in the way that it was romantic without being romanticised.

TV shows have got to be more realistic about sex because not only is it educational and relatable it also makes for good TV!!! people like to see themselves in media, and whats more universal than awkwardly being in love with someone. it’s awesome!!

Sidenote I LOVE Monica Baddingham she’s my absolute icon… more middle aged lesbianism NOW please

Side Sidenote the dinner scene… oh my GOD

[literatemisfit]

there is so much going on in that last episode of Rivals but what I find most devastating personally, is how Archie lashes out at Monica when she doesn't do anything about Tony's infidelity. The way he reacts rings so true to me (personal experience but not half as bad of course). I definitely recognised myself in him a bit and I know he will come to regret it (not that he is wrong in his reaction)(and also in his case Monica dies which makes it so much worse)

Yes, I think it's one of those moments where a kid is trying so hard to do the right thing but because he's so young he doesn't know the real life circumstances and rules around that - don't make it public, don't attract attention to the family etc, and tries to go straight for the moral high road

So when he finds out about what happened to his mum I can imagine he will feel guilt and trauma tenfold, just from being a kid in an impossible situation. And he has nothing to feel guilty about but of course as children (and as adults) we often blame ourselves for what we Could Have done after we have the hindsight of knowing what happens

[literatemisfit]

I find it so perfect that in the show we mourn Monica through Tony. The emotional impact of her death is delivered via Tony, the man ultimately responsible for her death. And the news is delivered by Rupert who is Tony's greatest enemy but in that moment they are both just grieving. It works so well but it is also ironic because a part of her tragedy is she died before she could build a life away from him. (I also think in the moment Tony does feel genuine grief and loss and also a good amount of guilt, I don't think it is all relief that she can't expose him like I've seem some suggest. (sliding in here to yap about rivals)

(hi fren)

Absolutely not, I don't think he feels any relief in that moment at all. I think he's had the rug swept out from under him (and his life, and his children's lives) and I think you see Tony struggle with understanding even what he's being told: "Monica, my wife Monica? Did you just say she's dead?"

I think that's such a real, visceral and realistic-feeling moment because huge terrible news like that can feel so overwhelmingly shocking and incomprehensible that I think it's impossible to take in all at once - and therefore impossible to see objectively enough to go "ah yes, my secret has been saved" (which is hasn't lol - Archie and Caitlin still know, Maud still feels guilty and is considering telling Declan) so Tony isn't safe anyway. I mean he himself TOLD Maud to tell Declan about the affair before Monica arrived so he can only assume she probably did, and people probably already know

So no, I think he's only thinking "oh my god the woman I love (awfully, but still) and literally my only trusted partner in this world is gone" he's burned all his bridges and now she's gone too, and because of his terrible actions driving her (literally) into a storm

I think it's also too simplistic to say that Tony doesn't feel guilt and sadness (and not just anger) for being threatened with divorce. Yes, he's upset bc of the social implications but I think you can tell in his reactions (tears, slanted brows, hanging his head, nervous fidgeting) and his conversation with Archie (raw, emotional, honest - although possibly selfish in intention) that he's really struggling with what this is going to mean for him. The man doesn't like to lose and he's being rejected by his own family "I fucking hate you dad!" and I personally think he's spiralling - emotionally, logistically, trying to find a foothold in this hectic moment

And so I think when Monica dies and he realizes that his problem is no longer "Monica is leaving me, I need to make her stay" and has now become "Monica is dead and I don't know how to go on without her" (which I think he says to Archie, or to some effect) his reaction is pure grief and dread and a complete loss of that foothold he was trying so desperately to find in the darkness of that storm, and he literally collapses without it

[neurodivergentaf]

it's so wild when your parent changes when you become an adult. my dad is very cordial and non confrontational - he regularly helps me with adult stuff like changing the oil or providing insurance tips. he's always smiling when i call him on video and providing jokes when i complain about college

when i was a kid, i would have to tiptoe around his anger issues often, sometimes running quietly past his work table until he got his own place completely separate from our family, locked away for days. every so often he would start screaming in the car and trying to hit me or my brother for talking too loud while my mom attempted to calm him down as he swerved on the road. and now he, smiling, helps me with car insurance.

like oh, this is just who you are when you have power over someone, and this is who you are when you dont have power over someone. no wonder you can have a normal life, friends, work while scaring the shit out of your kids and wife. i see it now. i see why no one would have believed me. that, i think, is one of the core fears of trauma - seeing the outside of it from the perspective of other adults that brushed you aside, and understanding. of course, that understanding gives the opposite of solace; it just gives you more grief with nowhere for it to go

[she-wolfblood]

Thinking about how Lyanna had her little Cinderella moment in which for a brief moment Lyanna was able to dress up and be a knight, just as Cinderella was able to go out to a ball for one night and how both left an object of their identity behind, Cinderella the slipper and Lyanna the shield of a laughing tree.

And both objects found by a prince, now that i think about it. Truly Cinderella!

[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.

[maddie-grove]

I think an experience I had at a book club recently exemplifies the problems faced by today's romance novelists. One month we read a historical romance novel from 2021 that was fairly typical of 2010s historical romance in terms of gender/sexual politics. The heroine has sexual experience, her own money, and a group of female friends who are supportive but have their own stuff going on. The hero is a decent hunky guy whose worst fault in the relationship is emotional avoidance due to a Big Secret. There are background lesbians and the protagonists are chill about it. The sex is enthusiastically consented to. Most of the book club had a very "meh" response to it, mainly due to reasons that didn't have much to due with said politics (like not finding the relationship very interesting or thinking there weren't enough sex scenes), but, crucially, some people zeroed right in on two moments that could be considered in bad taste. The first one: the hero admires the heroine's silhouette while she's changing behind a screen and talking with him. The second one: the hero tries to curb his sexy thoughts about the heroine by getting her a glass of warm milk, reasoning that this is a very unsexy thing to do because it's the sort of thing you would do for a sick child. I personally thought the first thing was a total non-issue in context (he's looking towards her because they're talking, she knows he's there and how shadows work) and the second was kind of a silly, overdone joke but not creepy or offensive. But the people who took issue with it were genuine in their disapproval, even citing our current climate of misogyny as why it rubbed them the wrong way.

The following month, we read a dark romance where the hero (who briefly met the heroine while she was dating his friend/roommate and became obsessed with her after she started commenting on his kinky online account where he wears a mask but no shirt) uses his near-supernatural hacker skills to put secret cameras in her house and otherwise stalk her. Her reaction is "this guy is fucking insane and probably dangerous...but this is really hot and actually I have a feeling he's not dangerous." Which is validated by the story. The handling of the dark subject matter is basically a shrug before a continuous jerk-off sesh. And the book club LOVED this story. Everyone was like "oh, he's not really a bad guy and this is barely a dark romance."

And it's not that I think this is an entirely unreasonable response. If something's labeled "dark romance," most readers willingly engaging with it aren't going to be bothered by the romance being dark. Whereas an iffy moment in a "normal" romance novel might be an unpleasant surprise. But it does create a situation where characters in a "regular" romance novel can't do anything problematic or even anything giving the appearance of problematic-ness, even if it would be natural and/or interesting for them to do so, and where characters in a "dark" romance commit shocking crimes and it's never taken seriously either by the narrative or the audience. So the stories that get rewarded are (a) frictionless, pedantic "regular" romance and (b) equally frictionless set-ups for erotic scenarios. Which is a shame if you want to read a real fucking book, however lighthearted or pulpy.

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

very well meaning person commented on a post about briseis being excluded from from iliad reception because of the obsession with achilles and patroclus something to the effect of “yeah so true!!! achilles was bisexual!!!” which like. well. the point was a little bit more can we not forget about the women in the iliad literally called war prizes and traded like objects because people are willing to overlook that in favor of depicting achilles and patroclus as devoted, palatable, and morally acceptable lovers which the existence of briseis threatens. the point wasn’t really diversity win your favorite war criminal is progressive enough to abuse women

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

also like. responding that achilles is bisexual on a post about how women in the iliad are always erased in favor of achilles/patroclus is kind of exactly the point the post is making

[mostlyvalid]

A proposal

Sometimes, in fandom, we just want to write id-tastic fic that rolls around in tropes that might be viewed as problematic. But we don’t want to address the problematic side of things in this particular fanwork; we just want to roll around and wallow.

It is considered courteous to give readers a heads-up via use of AO3 tags. I propose a tag that signals that a given fanwork is for rolling around, not giving a measured evaluation of anything. The MCU has carved out a space for this sort of fic with the “HYDRA Trash Party” tag, for which I commend them. Trash Party is a bit too specific to cover all of the ground I’m thinking of here, though; I propose “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.”

For those of you not familiar with Arrested Development, Michael Bluth finds a paper bag in the freezer labeled “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.” He opens the bag, finds a dead dove, and reacts as follows:

[gif of a white man saying “I don’t know what I expected” in a deadpan manner]

The “Dead Dove: Do Not Eat” tag would essentially be a “what it says on the tin” metatag, indicating “you see the tropes and concepts tagged here? they are going to appear in this fic. exactly as said. there will not necessarily be any subversion, authorial commentary condemning problematic aspects, or meditation on potential harm. this fic contains dead dove. if you proceed, you should expect to encounter it.”

(more at KnowYourMeme: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-dont-know-what-i-expected)

[lazy-universes]

WHOA WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS THE POST THAT SPAWNED DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT

[yourlocaltinsmith]

Happy dead dove do not eat birthday!

[pengychan]

I mean I know a certain level of projection on fictional characters and situations is inevitable and even healthy, but sometimes you got to step back into the real world to remind yourself that Character X is not your shitty parent/abusive ex/asshole boss/bully from high school, and that people who like Character X are not personally victimizing you.

[decepti-thots]

[spiribia]

I genuinely love when a story makes up its own fable and then has current events within the story explicitly parallel the in-universe fable. The story I made up is just like the story I made up 🤯

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

I’m blindsided by authors using ai in their works. how can readers and writers tell if the writing is ai generated?

I’m gonna assume writers know whether or not their own works are ai because they either write them themselves or have ai write for them.

but as for readers (or writers who read other writers’ works), no, you can’t tell unless the writer themself says their works are ai generated. anything else is witch hunt, speculations and possibly wrongful accusations — all of which harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more.

so if at any point you think an untagged work is ai and if that bothers you, quietly click away. but you can never know for sure based on vibes. because everything ai writes, a human writer does. that’s what ai was trained on and what it was trained to mimic.

I’ve already talked more about this here, here, here. and more on my other blog @writingdose here and here.

[littlepagodatree]

You can notice certain telltale signs in some of the writing, such as short sentence stacking and usage of "not x not y but z" structures. But you have to be familiar with AI writing styles to be able to notice that.

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

I’ve been writing “not x, not y, but z” way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve read works that have “not x, not y, but z” in them, and I’ve read those works way before gen ai became a thing. I’ve also been using em dash way before gen ai became a thing, and I’ve seen em dash used in so many written works way before gen ai became a thing. I know for a fact some human writers actually prefer short sentence stacking too.

every “ai telltale” is something humans write before, otherwise ai wouldn’t have been able to mimic it in the first place. because it needs human-made works to mimic on.

when I say ai witch hunt, speculations and accusations harm the writing community as much as ai does, if not more, “not x, not y, but z” and em dash are one of the main things I’m talking about.

[seananmcguire]

As I saw someone say recently, when you start declaring "obvious tells," from punctuation to sentence styles, to be proof of AI, what you're actually spotting is trace amounts of the original source material.

[jennelikejennay]

Very often, all you can really say is, either this is AI or not very well written.

AI cannot pass for good writing at any length; you may not know what's wrong with it but you can see it's short on meaning and completely uniform in tone and emphasis. But it can pass for amateur writing, and amateurs need to be encouraged and not accused.

So that's why, even though I am pretty good at detecting AI, I don't throw out accusations. Because maybe they're just starting out and they haven't yet learned their individual voice, how to pack writing with meaning, how to vary the tone and emphasize the important parts.

You do not ever need to change your writing to "sound less AI." As you pass "competent" and move on to "inspired," your writing will distinguish itself easily.

[razielim]

i think too many fans have become disconnected from just how truly terrible plenty of fic is NATURALLY. Idk if it's bc they:

sort their Ao3 queries by popularity and only read stuff that enough other people have approved of,

click away from bad stuff too fast to really appreciate how bad it is and how much worse it could have gotten,

have in the past few years mentally shifted to attributing ALL bad fic writing to AI, thus creating a feedback loop for themselves where bad=AI always, with no chance to correct this perspective, or

have benefited from Ao3's, let's say, reputation as a site for "good writing only," (not true, but many believe this) which has resulted in many beginner, young, self-aware, or self-critical writers sequestering themselves to wattpad or other platforms. this is purely anecdotal, but despite still only ever sorting by date, i believe i'm encountering far less "bad" writing in any given fandom than i used to back on fanfiction.net, which didn't have the potentially intimidating reputation for "high quality" writing that Ao3 enjoys. this might give someone who hasn't been in fandom for literal decades the impression that most fic is average at worst, so that when they do see the "outlier" bad fics, they feel there must be some explanation for why those exist. "since they don't fit in with the rest, must be AI"

meanwhile, the fics they're reading:

anyway, bad writing is good and should be left alone.

it might be bad for you, but it may be plenty fine for the author's friends and they're having fun together so don't be sour and go read something else

it might be bad for you, but it's actually doing a bit, and you didn't understand, aren't privy to the joke, or are too young/old to "get it"

it might be bad for you, but the author is fighting for their LIFE trying to write in a language that isn't their native one, and they know. they KNOW it's not the best thing you've read. just shut up and let them express themselves, learn a language, and have fun

it might be bad for you, but the author is 14 and has literally never written fiction before in their life outside of a prompted school assignment short story. they may or may not be aware of the "quality" of their writing. doesn't matter. leave them alone. i can't even imagine the damage being accused of sounding like AI would do to someone at that stage, before getting even half a chance to develop their own voice, perspective, style. you could leave them questioning whether they have anything worth saying or are capable of doing anything uniquely so bad they'll never write fiction again til the very day they die.

it might be bad for you, but it belongs on Ao3. full stop

it might be bad for you, but Ao3 isn't a writing pageant or a "good fiction" vending machine; it's an archive. think of it specifically as a historical archive if you have trouble with the idea

it might be bad for you, but this person hasn't tried writing anything since graduating high school five decades ago and a) needs practice just as much as the hypothetical 14yo above bc skills can't just be plucked off a tree on a whim b) this person is doing something for fun in their limited time and they can either get the chance to grow into a unique voice in the community or you can chase them off with your prickly standards c) doesn't "get" all your ideas of "good" writing that may actually just be a collection of fads, tropes, and styles that enjoy popularity at the moment, and they are actually just doing things their own way that might be way more interesting and good than your narrow taste can recognize

it might be bad for you, but it's actually good for you. seeing your own mistakes in someone else's writing, where those same mistakes are finally revealed to you by being laid bare without the fig leaf of a brain working hard to supplement what you wrote with what you had intended to write, is a great way to grow as a writer. seeing something that makes you cringe and swearing to never do that yourself is a great way to find your voice and style. read some bad fic once in a while; enjoy it; learn something

bad writing is a good and natural byproduct of humans writing. many different kinds of people (with different levels of language proficiency, different experiences, different tastes) sitting down and writing results in a huge variety of content, aesthetics, and quality. such high natural variability means no one here is a big enough expert to reliably sort the failure of inexperienced humans (to form something ~like what they have read before) from the failure of AI (to form something ~like what it has been fed and given value data for).

the cost of accusing bad writers of using ai is too high for the questionable benefit of playing whack-a-mole with "potentially" ai fics

it would be really nice if we could somehow reliably separate "generated by ai" (boo) from "cooked up by a gremlin" (yay) but, for reasons previous replies have detailed, we can't so leave it be.

many fans are excessively worried about the number of kudos and comments they get over just having fun, but no one more so than people who are using ai to "post content" and "generate engagement," so simply clicking away and not leaving any feedback is the least harmful thing you can do to an author whose writing you don't want to read while still having the effect you were going for of denying someone your positive feedback.

[romelzacarnes]

♪ Ninety-nine dreams I have had ♪ ♪ Just to prove the world was here ♪ ♪ And here is a red balloon ♪ ♪ I think of you, and let it go ♪

RIVALS - 2x04

[romelzacarnes]

THE O'HARAS - 2x04

[romelzacarnes]

Goodbye, Freddie. Goodbye, Lizzie.

RIVALS - 2x04