she/her | 25+ | hi this is where I put stuff I want to look at and be happy about later, mostly fandom and arty stuff active fandoms: Destiny, Hollow Knight, Ghostrunner, Bioshock, Scarlet Hollow other: Hyper Light Drifter, Starling, Shovel Knight, Homestuck, MCU Captain America, Songbirds of Valnon, Tamora Pierce, Ace Attorney, VALVe, Mystery Kids, Pacific Rim, LAIKA, Star Wars, Imperial Radch, The Locked Tomb, The Murderbot Diaries
First, I’m relieved to be done with the story. That may sound weird, since no one was forcing me to write it. But this is the first time I’ve gotten a nontrivial amount of attention for a story while I was updating (the audience for Floornight before it was finished was around ~10 people). This was a new kind of pressure I wasn’t used to, and while its existence wasn’t surprising, I wasn’t really prepared for it. (This connects to some ways that I felt the story got out of my grasp, which I’ll describe under the cut.)
Also, it’s a spooky story, and it really kind of spooked me – there were a lot of times when I didn’t feel like writing it just because I wanted to write something more cheerful and less obsessed with inevitability and duty and stuff like that. Next time I’ll write something more cheerful.
I am proud of the story, mostly on the level of prose, characterization, and setting. I’m less proud of the plot as a whole, although I’m proud of certain parts of it.
More notes below, including some notes about how the story was conceived and written.
My interpretation of The Northern Caves is that Salby and several of the other characters have Tourettic obsessive-compulsive disorder. I say this because I have Tourettic obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it feels like a definite wrongness in material arrangements of things.
TOCD is a weird condition kind of halfway between classic Tourettes and classic OCD. Tourettes is marked by tics, most famously shouting expletives but more commonly moving your body, touching things, or performing odd combinations of motions. These are not quite involuntary actions; patients can control them if they absolutely have to. Rather than the action being primitive, an overwhelmingly strong urge to perform the action that comes from nowhere seems to be primitive; the urge is so strong that the patient will almost always act upon it even though it makes no objective sense.
OCD is usually marked by obsessive thoughts that you have to perform rituals to banish. TOCD is sort of in between these two. Patients perform complex compulsions and rituals not because they have obsessions per se, but because they have this feeling that something is wrong until they perform them. The IOCDF describes the condition as:
Unlike true OCD, in which cognitions (obsessions) lead to an emotional (affective) state and typically fear of the content of the obsession, TOCD sufferers report discomforting sensory experiences such as physical discomfort in body parts including hands, eyes, stomach, etc., or a diffuse psychological distress or tension for example “in my head” or “in my mind.” These localized or general discomforts in the TOCD sufferer tend to be relieved by varieties of motor responses, including “evening things up,” doing things to certain numbers, positioning items, touching and retouching things, doing things symmetrically, and so on, typically with the requirement that these actions are performed “just so” or “just right” in order to alleviate the somatic/psychological discomfort. Unlike reports of subjective experiences associated with classic forms of OCD, individuals describe a relative absence of fear or concerns about catastrophic consequences occurring should the required actions not be performed. Instead, there are likely to be concerns that the discomfort might be intolerable or unending if the actions were left undone or done poorly.
I’ve sometimes described this to people as “having an extra sense”. That is, we have a sense of cold that gives us a specific uncomfortable feeling if an ice cube is touching us, which is resolved by moving the ice cube away. We have a sense of pain that gives us specific uncomfortable feeling if we sit on a sharp object, which is relieved by standing up. I have a sense of TOCD that gives me a specific uncomfortable feeling in certain apparently unrelated situations, which is relieved by certain compulsions.
For example, if I’m in bed at night, and my foot touches the edge of the bed, I get the uncomfortable feeling until I extend my leg out as far as it can go over the bed, then bring it back in again without touching the edge. Or if I breathe on one hand, I get the uncomfortable feeling until I breathe equally hard on the other. If my fingernail touches paper, I get the uncomfortable feeling until I have scratched some kind of smooth or shiny object.
It’s hard to explain this uncomfortable sensation. It’s like but unlike pain, in the same way intense heat or crushing pressure is like but unlike pain. But Salby’s term “definite wrongness” is pretty spot-on.
My main difference from Salby is that, thank goodness, my feelings are almost always related to my body. There are a few exceptions: when I was younger, I used to have to have the shutters on the windows in my room at a certain angle (not necessarily the same for each shutter). Certain doors that always had to be closed. A garbage can that always had to be touching my door. If my parents got weirded out and wouldn’t let me maintain these things, well, I wish I’d had the phrase “definite wrongness in the arrangement of material objects” to describe it to them.
But if I imagine the feelings I have about my own body suddenly extended to encompass the entire world without losing any intensity, I imagine ending up pretty much like Salby. I could absolutely imagine being William Chen and writing several pages on everything that was wrong with a glass of water.
(Actually, I could probably write several pages on everything that has been wrong with my body position in the past fifteen minutes as I’ve been writing this post, except that it’s gotten to the point where I adjust 99% subconsciously the same way other people would fidget and adjust to uncomfortable positions.)
The description of Salby and Chen disagreeing about the content of Mundum also sounds like TOCD - although there are a few common patterns, no two people have exactly the same tics or compulsions.
Sleeplessness and Adderall both exacerbate most anxiety disorders, presumably including TOCD. I’ve never had Adderall, but my OCD becomes much worse when I’m low on sleep. In the book, two of the main characters go thirty hours without sleep, take some Adderall, and develop a bad case of Salbianism. I think they had latent TOCD. Maybe something about the Chesscourt books attracted people with latent TOCD for some reason and the stress of the Caves reading has brought it out. Or possibly Caves is some sort of infohazard that installs TOCD into the brain of anyone who reads and understands it.
In support of my thesis, @nostalgebraist has said that he has (had?) Tourette’s disorder, and I bet this consciously or subconsciously inspired his thoughts about Mundum.
This is all pretty much spot-on as regards the story, and also is very interesting to me personally, because I’ve been diagnosed with Tourette Syndrome, but my symptoms “shade into” OCD more than classic Tourette symptoms do, in pretty much exactly the way you describe. I’ve usually “explained” this by talking about the fact that Tourette’s and OCD are comorbid, but if there’s a distinct thing called “TOCD,” that’s probably what I have.
(Googling “TOCD” or “Tourettic obsessive-compulsive disorder” mostly turns up forum threads [ha!] and stuff like that – do you know of any more official resources I could look at?)
I love that the scarlet hollow subreddit is roasting Wayne for basically doing nothing but aura farming even as he says to think of him as your guardian angel because honestly it's true. What he's really good at is dragging you places you really shouldn't be for any reason but plot
#i'll not defend him against aura farming because that's true #he does not force you into places you shouldn't be. in fact the rule of thumb is that he REALLY doesn't want you there #he does it ONCE and it can be debated he only does it because sybil is starting her bullshit earlier #sybil and stella force you to where you shouldn't. wayne is resigned he can't stop you from that #do not assign my man things he didn't do. he does plenty of shit by himself (via cymatile)
PWHL Hamilton today announced that forward Alina Müller has been signed to a three-year Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) Standard Player Agreement ahead of the team’s inaugural 2026-27 season. Müller, who was under contract with the Boston Fleet, joins PWHL Hamilton on a new deal through the 2028-29 campaign and becomes the third of five players to be added during Phase 2 of the PWHL’s Expansion Roster Distribution Process.
now i don’t know enough about omegaverse to say anything definitively but from what i have seen it certainly looks like it emulates insects much more than wolves.
This is an excellent point and the Omegaverse genre has little resemblance to actual wolves. However, insects don’t strike me as any more similar. Ants and other colony forming insects do have strictly defined castes but the actual mating only occurs once and the majority of individuals never mate at all.
A taxa that does exhibit more than two sex morphs is, surprisingly enough, birds! Both the ruff and white throated sparrow have four sex morphs with distinct behavior and social niches! Unfortunately, this does lack the pheromone aspect as well as the hermaphroditism present in the omegaverse.
Hermaphroditism, biologically, is the ability to produce both male and female gametes. It’s not known to be present in birds or mammals, but does show up in aquatic species such as clownfish. All clownfish are initially male and the largest one of a group becomes the dominant female. Cuttlefish have so-called “sneaker males” that present a female color pattern to mate with a female in a larger male’s territory.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there is a perfect real world analog to omegaverse sex dynamics. To me, it strikes at a speculative biology angle for completely decoupling sex and gender into completely different axis, playing in the space of how biology and society intersect.
OP im so sorry for putting omegaverse analysis on your joke post I just have an obsession with evolutionary biology and media analysis
i never want to yuck anyone's yum but one issue i have with how star wars fandom tackles slavery is the concept of universal slave culture. a unique culture certainly develops in enslaved populations over time but it's by no means universal. one of the greatest evils of slavery is the mass displacement of people. they're torn from their families, home(worlds), languages and forced to assimilate to the culture of their slavers. in the friction between the cultures of the groups of people that make up an enslaved population of a place and the culture of the slavers, a new sense of identity is eventually created
i feel like the way fanon tackles it, it doesn't actually acknowledge the horror of displacement and the grief of being ripped from your culture because it seems to assume people will just embrace that being a slave is their new identity and easily give up their places of origin. this is still assimilation, in a way. it ignores that those people have an individuality beyond the traumatic experience that other people have forced on them and they have their own cultural origins. and even then, slavery in geographically separate locations is an entirely different experience. assuming that for example slavery on tatooine is generational, with people living long enough and reproducing often enough that you can have a somewhat stable population without a constant influx of new displaced individuals with their own cultural background, then anakin's experience is going to be very different from idk. a twi'lek on zygerria where people get sold or die too quickly to form communities. they might relate to each other in terms of traumatic experiences but the cultural background is different because shockingly, same trauma doesn't mean same culture. it seems odd to me to equate the two.
and then moving backwards, not everyone is going to want to meaningfully relate to their status as a slave either. for some people rebellion might mean reclamation yes but for others it might also mean saying fuck you, i belong in xyz place and nothing you do or say will ever change how i see myself. i understand the appeal of making a powerful message but i feel the poweful message loses its sensitivity when it assumes the only reaction to an involuntary experience is to entirely embrace it to the point where it becomes the primary identity marker. whatever existed before a person was enslaved is erased and in a way slavery is then equated with being a minority group when it's not that, in the same way that prisoners of war and hostages are not a minority group
and to clarify the last bit, what i mean is you don't owe the social class that someone else forced on you a belonging. nobody is naturally a slave, it's something that's a violation of human decency in every manifestation. the same identity based reclamation that is empowering for a minority group might fall shallow here and i think the reason it irks me is that it feels like a very western liberal way of adopting a viewpoint that sounds fairly empathetic on the surface but is clearly not giving any thought to realities that (white) westerners aren't likely to personally encounter. unfortunately for my ever thinning patience with social media sites, i'm a hater and i firmly believe it would do us all some good to think about situations that don't affect us with a little more care
IIRC it was originally one author's Tattooine slave culture that people really liked, and then tried to export to everywhere slavery occurs. I think it works fine on Tattoine (when handled well), but trying to make it a galaxy wide thing strains credulity at best.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to have been a gradual thing with that one author's works as a starting point? (I've been in the Star Wars fandom for almost 30 years, but for the latter half, I've mostly only been popping in for a little while to gobble up some fanfiction before wandering off.) I don't remember seeing it before then. Was it Fillariel? Something like that? Anyway, I don't think people immediately jumped to making it universal. It was just Tattooine. (Again, correct me if I'm wrong. This is off the top of my head.)
I do recall one author making it so it wasn't an entire galaxy-wide culture, but certain stories that slaves take to new places when they're sold and then spread among other slaves, who spread it further. There are multiple versions of the stories adapted to local cultures. More of a cultural diffusion situation than an entire culture being clumsily transplanted.
Maybe because I'm not around consistently, I actually haven't seen a whole lot of people making it universal? Or maybe people who are that clumsy with this particular fanon are clumsy with other things too, and I stopped reading before it came up. Both seem likely. But I am curious about, like, the process by which people concluded this was a reasonable route to take. When did it become common?
I'm glad you brought it up, at any rate. It seems likely that people just saw something neat, became inspired and wanted to use it elsewhere, and didn't think through the full implications. An amateurish mistake that would normally only be annoying, except it's regarding a subject that should be handled with care. At least fiction makes for a good learning opportunity.
I like this question because I think it really gets at the power dynamics at the center of the poem!
The poem frames "him" as subordinate in several ways, not just to the narrator ("i fuck him on the floor": not that getting fucked is inherently subordinating, but the narrator has all the agency in the phrase, "he" doesn't decide what happens or where) but also to "his wife". She has filled the house with chintz, meaning it wasn't his decision or his actions. "Filled" is also a choice of words that suggests that there is no space for him in the home: the only place left for him, not already filled, is the floor. To me this framing invokes the trope of the henpecked husband, whose wife has taken dominion over the home and who has ceded its control to her because it, as the domestic space, is "supposed" to be hers.
This trope, of course, is misogynist in its normative rendition: it reinforces gender essentialism, it erases the significant material benefits such "henpecked" men derive from the domestic labor of their spouses, and it dismisses women's expressions of suffering and attempts at negotiating terms for their relationships as "nagging." In the narrator's dismissal of the wife's possessions as "chintz" (frivolous, feminine, contrasted with what is "real") we can see this same misogyny at play.
The narrator's misogyny, and the central fact of the poem which is that the husband is getting fucked by someone other than the wife, quite possibly flip the power dynamics of the poem on their heads. The wife is now subordinated: both by her social marginalization based on gender (a marginalization which drives her into the home and confines her there, like OP so cogently points out! As "he" has run out of room in the home and can only get fucked on the floor, so has she run out of room socially; the only place she can control and make decisions like filling it with chintz is the home), and by the narrator who is fucking her husband in her home.
There's an additional dynamic in reading the narrator as male, which most readers seem to have done: it invokes the particular, bitter misogyny that men-loving-men sometimes direct at women expressing femininity. There's an envy to it, of course--straight and straight-passing women get to (are forced to) express desire for men, have sex with men, marry men, love and be loved by men. His wife gets to be his wife: the narrator gets to fuck him, in their home. Straight and straight-passing women also get to (are forced to) perform femininity: they can buy chintz and decorate with it, without being devastatingly punished for it like people presumed to be men are from the time they're babies. The envy mixes with misogyny to produce disdain, disgust, dismissal. We can read the narrator fucking him on the floor of their home as an expression of power and dominance (again, not that the fucking has to mean the narrator is topping, or that topping is inherently dominant, but the phrasing is stark: "i fuck him", the narrator acts upon him as an object/recipient), not just over him but over the wife in absentia as well.
Noting that "to keep it real" is AAVE, we can also introduce race as a potential lens; is the narrator, despite their dominant language, subordinated based on race in this dynamic? Is the narrator not just claiming a dominant role, but perhaps also stereotyped and limited into it as a Black person? Is the disdain of the chintz also an expression of class difference, of a rejection of the display of white wealth on the part of the wife? This is pretty speculative, of course: the use of AAVE could also be appropriative, which would suggest another tactic by the narrator to lay claim to masculinity and toughness, since non-Black people often use AAVE to try to invoke racist stereotypes of strength, violence and resilience.
I think one of the things that makes the poem so compelling for being so short is the struggle at the heart of it, this complicated jostling for power between three people and their actions over time (the wife "has filled" the house, in the past: the narrator fucks him in the present, perhaps in the habitual). Who controls the house? Who controls "him"?
Great poem, great discussion question, love everyone in this bar <3
i gotta be real with you guys im just sort of stunned tumblr has been running an open-front ZenDesk form for tumblr TOS reporting this whole time that doesnt require any kind of validation except a fucking email address. this one fact alone explains every single "why did so and so get banned for no reason" event of the past X years. however it is equally baffling that i didnt notice it before now. i would say it is baffling they implemented it in the first place but like i said, the management of their website is verifiably not well
#idk man #given how big tech does things generally #this is not surprising in the slightest at any step of the way #I actually did figure this was most likely the cause #I did not think it was as feasible that a content moderation team was actively targeting people and banning them so incredibly fast #it felt way more probable that lax tos reporting coupled with automated tos reactions #driven by profit motive decisions to make the site suitable for marketers and shareholders #was the most likely culprit #classic adage of never attribute to malice that which could be explained by incompetence (via casataco)
tbh i think the funniest phenomena that’s been happening in the last couple years is “youtuber, having gone too deep into the research hole, has been made an investigative journalist against their will”
this guy started out poking fun at australian politicians and ended up investigating the firebombing of his own home, during which he uncovered connections between the same politician he was making fun of + major organized crime
“So I did what any normal person would do, okay? I bought a hat and some makeup and disguised myself so that I could go undercover and do some digging on what I thought could be an illegal gambling operation that was fronting as a kebab restaurant.”
I watched the second video and I feel it’s vitally important for people to know that the question “who firebombed my house?” isn’t a rhetorical one or a hyperbolic one, he genuinely doesn’t know because his list of proven enemies includes, in no particular order:
The cops
The terrorist surveillance branch of said cops
The government
No, seriously, multiple current and former government officials have openly stated beef with him
The most violent crime family in Australia
The gambling lobby
Money launderers
Other journalists
Drug dealers
The seventh richest man in Australia
Property Developers
And a partridge in a pear tree
He legitimately doesn’t know which one of his enemies might have done it (even though he has strong suspicions) because they’ve collectively already attempted to shut him up with legal attacks that could’ve resulted in actual jail time and many, many more shady tactics, including smear campaigns, outright lying to authorities (who also hate him) and lying under oath (the courts probably also hate him but are more quiet about it).
He legitimately went into hiding for a few months to assess the threat level after being firebombed and escaping with his life by sheer luck.
And you know what? He went right back to being an annoying little pissant to the most powerful people in his country and has become more prolific than ever after that video up there. I personally subscribed to his patreon because frankly? Anyone with that many enemies who legitimately want him silenced or dead deserves a few bucks a month.
I started watching the LEGO video by Reckless Ben because I have a few rooms to paint and “small town LEGO thief” sounded like the perfect low-stakes, long-form background noise to keep me going. 4 hours later and what the fuck what the FUCKKK
My spouse and I have been watching the updates that are actively being released and calling each other like
a lot of toxic mom and daughter relationship in fiction are about a mother that either doesn't love her daughter at all and makes her pay for it, or loves her too strongly without understanding her at all and suffocating her slowly. these are both really good but there's something to be said about the mom who looks at her daughter and understands her fully and despises her, while also being protective and loving her in a warped way. im going to fix you into what you should have been for your own good. i will mold you in what you need to be to survive. i will do this for your own good because i do understand you and i love you and the more you squirm and fight back the worse you make jt for both of us. ughhhh need more of this so so bad
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.
