like okay am i being too much of a hater or (bitching about the prose in this novel under the cut)
I can hear your objections mounting. That until this point, at least I'd been in the Fayetons' direct proximity. How could I have, even retroactively, achieved such intimate access to someone like Arun Patil? Simple divination strains credulity, and journalistic effort brands a fraud. Better chalk it up to delusions of grandeur—as if the difference between confidence and delusion hasn't generally been a little extra skin and muscle hanging between the legs. Women are always, on some level, unreliable narrators. Victims. But do not mistake my victimhood for weakness—this isn't like old times. There are advantages to victimhood, narratively, and I know how to take advantage of them. My unreliability frees me from any burden of proof. Consider that before Veblen there was George Eliot; before Girard, Flaubert. Remember every great novel is an unbelievable truth.
...so maybe this just reflects that i don't read much Literature Published Within The Past Ten Years, but this reminds me so distinctly of a style of post that was really popular in the play-by-post horse RPG scene of the 2000s
in which you'd open your post with some dramatic epigraph—like, "Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist," or whatever—and then you'd sort of riff in a free-association-y way thereafter, like—start with a description of the night sky, and then shift from the night sky to a vague meditation on the nature of sanity, and then link the sanity-meditation back to the character, and FINALLY get back to a backhanded callback to that epigraph, in a way dense with Reference and Vibe but otherwise kind of shallow, and like... this prose reads to me as the somewhat-more-sophisticated version of the horse RPG thing? but it's still the horse RPG thing? so i can't help but cringe?
(i actually dug through my files to see if i could find an example from an actual old horse RPG, but... those files are mysteriously missing, and i do not presently have access to The Dusty Attic In Kentucky Where A Bunch Of Those Posts Are Printed Out, woe. but hopefully someone here's familiar with the style?)
anyway idk. do readers get something out of this. it just seems so. airy and rootless
(may just be a question of "well are you good at doing it"; iirc Tokarczuk does similar vibing in her novels, but there i found it fine & interesting & did not think of horse RPGs even once)
@courtyardhound said: THE HORSE RPG SCENE??? (that’s entirely without judgement, that’s just not the image i would have conjured up for. horse rpg scene.)
oh i am SO excited to make you into one of today's lucky 10,000 (brief primer on the 00s horse RPG scene under the cut)
i imagine the horse RPG scene started out like most text-based RPGs do—you'd write a couple sentences describing your charater's actions/dialogue; someone else would reply in turn; things were brief and to the point. (i got started out on the neopets message boards this way.)
but something about the scene that evolved on geocities/brinkster+boardhost/voy/boards2go/etc started getting very... literary pretensions.
some of this arose due to a reasonable effort to try and set some minimum bar for quality-of-prose/quality-of-effort (e.g. a lot of games would make you "apply" with a writing sample, to verify that you could write grammatically-correct sentences and that you understood the overall tone of the game)
and some of this arose due to games skewing toward asynchronous formats (e.g. if your RP partner lives in Australia and you live in the eastern US, you probably want to implement something like "posts need to be at least 250 words" so that your opposite-time-zone partner has SOMETHING to reply to in the morning—this was a shift from e.g. Neopets or MUD-based RP, which largely relied on both players being online at the same time)
but imo the big thing that led to WILDLY INFLATED wordcounts was when games started making quality of prose (as judged by, uh, the game staff) a core game mechanic.
see, horse RPGs often had mechanics for fighting other horses (either to steal them into your own herd, to win a herd-vs-herd battle, or simply to gain rank/status), but by the time i came onto the scene, almost no games were using dice or numerical stats for this sort of thing.
instead, you'd challenge a horse to a battle, and you'd each make a specific number of posts in a specific format, and once you'd both finished posting, the mods would judge the outcome of the battle based on a rubric.
e.g., a rubric might be something like: "each post can contain at most 1 attack and 1 defensive maneuver; the combatants will be graded on (1) quality of prose, (2) inventiveness/quality of attacks, and (3) realism of defensive maneuvers"
so you might earn points for having really banger prose, and get points deducted if you were "powerplaying" too much with your defensive maneuvers (e.g. wriggling out of the way EVERY SINGLE TIME, etc), and so on
"inventiveness/quality of attacks" was an excuse to flex your comprehensive knowledge of horse behavior and anatomy—i was actually taking horseback riding lessons when i was in this scene, and you better BELIEVE every other lesson i was asking my instructor increasingly-alarming questions about "what's the most violent thing you've ever seen a stallion do to another stallion," "how sharp are horse hooves really," and so on. there was this incredible book at the library with detailed illustrations of horse skeletons, muscular systems, etc, and i scanned pages from it & taped to the walls of the computer nook at home for quick reference. and "realism of defensive maneuvers" was this very funny "push your luck" game where, if you just took every hit on the nose, you would lose the battle, BUT, if you tried to wriggle out of too much, the mods would Pass Judgment Upon Ye and you'd lose that way
but "quality of prose," well. that's something you had a lot of control over actually! and people went fucking wild with it
—here's a relevant spot to mention that the interquartile range for players of these games was probably, like, age 14 to 17?
so, uh, imagine the kind of prose that pretentious tryhard teenagers would be impressed by, and that's what we were all trying to write. longer = better, pretty much always without question. some games would actually set minimum lengths for battle posts of 500 or 1,000 words, and some games would give more points per word in the post, so you'd have people writing 5k word sagas simply to describe "so-and-so kicked such-and-such in the face," or whatever
and, er, since padding that out ALL THE WAY TO 5K WORDS actually is kind of tricky, we all organically developed... well, the prose style i described above! where you're just sort of free-associating between your character's tragic backstory, and then the weather, and then the dictionary definition of a random somewhat-relevant word, and on and on and on until you were pretty sure you had out-worded your opponent
also we all fucking wrote like we'd swallowed a thesaurus. thesaurus.com was my god. i memorized the dictionary.com word of the day religiously. so i could have my horse beat up other horses better. with purple prose attacks.
and, i mean, once you got used to WRITING in this style, once you'd earned ACCLAIM and HONOR and GLORY for it, you weren't going to go back and write like a normie in your non-battle posts, were you? ABSOLUTELY NOT. so you had this unbounded chain reaction of a bunch of teenagers scrambling to out-flex and out-purple and out-word everyone else all the time and that's what i spent uncountable numbers of hours in front of my computer reading & writing haha
i once explained all this to another friend and he told me, somewhat wonderingly, that this sure sounded like a bunch of online teens had independently reinvented Tang Dynasty poetry battles & the status games associated with them, and like... yeah kinda lmao
anyway i dug a little harder and managed to find a battle post from The 13th Dimension, one of the most popular/influential games in this scene. here are the first two paragraphs. so you can sense the Vibe. enjoy:
Sweet iniquity. Anthem made no pretenses and spoke no lies, and all the worse for the object of her wrath. A dazzling spectrum of fires swept a barren frame to adorn the rebellious patriot with the brazen chestnut gloss that she now called her own, and in the conflagration, her own soul had been forged. But ignition had led to ignition, and though Anthem often seemed plunged in ice and cooled solid, there was a veritable roiling holocaust shrieking to be released within. She was sensible and stolid, but there was passion concealed in the subtle folds of her being; and that passion came as hate, rage, love, or bloodlust all equally fierce in their magnitudes. Now the passion poured forth, as inexorable and lethal as a flood of lava exhumed from the depths of the cool-fired earth, devouring and scorching, utterly destructive: bloodlust. But her soul’s calm poise and unshakeable intelligence ruled over the primal instinct that drove her in battle, and she swooped in to examine her new nemesis.
if it isn’t valiente,
the princess of amazonhollow’s very own
c i n d e r e l l a s t o r y
where guard charming
was smitten with the lovely servant
Her tone was tranquil, though caustic; she was no longer consumed with jealousy as before, fool that Anthem had been. The departure of Default was certainly not something she would dream of brandishing in the other’s face; that would be cruel, gratuitous, and altogether stupid. She respected Valiente, and her voice was not taunting; if anything, it was a subtle, if somewhat inscrutable, joke of hers. Anthem, your sense of humor never did match up with others’, so you might as well shut up before someone takes offense. Ooh, speaking of offense! I believe we have a battle to fight, Valiente…
titsay
yousharknotpass
janainaart
romaincrisis
areudirty
