#lit crit

[earlgraytay]

It's kind of incredible just how much the Country House Murder Mystery genre is, at its roots, a reaction to WWI and the social change that sprang from it.

[malcolmschmitz]

I've seen a lot of incredibly lukewarm takes about progression fantasy/LitRPG/isekai fantasy/whatever you want to call The Fantasy Genre Where Numbers Go Up.

A lot of traditional fantasy fans don't like it because it's, well, missing most of the stuff that we love about traditional fantasy. There is often very little character development and very little philosophical musing. There is often no nuance or complexity.

But I've seen folks say some very mean things about the subgenre and the people who like it. ... And I don't think they get the fundamental draw of LitRPG. I'm mostly coming at this as an outsider, so I could be very wrong about this; I've seen a lot of people talk about the LitRPG/progression fantasy settings they're building on r/worldbuilding and r/fantasy, and I've read a wee bit of it but not much. I'd love to see someone who reads a lot in the genre weigh in.

But it seems like the main draw of this genre, the main daydream powering the fantasy, isn't actually about the leveling up or even about the clever tricks that the heroes use when they're under-leveled. It's that in a LitRPG world, if what you can do is reduced to a number, that number means something.

Like, the whole 'isekai with power scaling based on video game mechanics' genre came from Japan and Korea, right? And it's aimed at teenagers, right? ....Think about it for a sec. Across the world, and especially in East Asia, a lot of teenagers' lives revolve around one number: their school grades (and/or test scores). If your grades suck, you are treated as subhuman until you get your shit together. If your grades are good, you are under an incredible amount of pressure to keep it that way. Your grades/test scores are A Number That Defines Your Fate.

And like, grades are a terrible measure of human worth for a whole bunch of reasons. But one of the biggest ones is that, as a high schooler, they're not actually under your control. There are absolutely things you can do to raise your grades if you're struggling, but a lot of your life circumstances, as a teenager, are defined by someone else. If your parents are fighting and keeping you up til 3 AM? Or if you get a teacher that hates you and grades you accordingly? Your grades are going to suffer, through no fault of your own, and there isn't much to be done about it. Everyone knows that The Number That Defines Your Fate is garbage, and yet you have to obsess over it, or you're going to suffer for the rest of your life.

The fantasy of LitRPG is that the Number that Defines Your Fate is an objective fact, that hard work and persistence can actually change that number for the better, and that having a higher Number makes you cool rather than 'tired, stressed out, and unable to have any time to be yourself'. It isn't focused on relationships because most of its target audience doesn't have time for relationships, romantic or otherwise. There isn't room for philosophy or nuance, because most of the kids reading this stuff are tired to death and want popcorn fiction they can read between juggling 16 different assignments.

... And when you look at it in that light, it is much less an indictment of the people reading it and much more an indictment of the crappy system we're all trapped in. It's not that the kids reading it have zero empathy or interest in human connection; it's that they're stuck in a world that has no empathy for them.

[librarycards]

The Inherent Poetry of Horror, or Horror in the Poetic by Cavar | Northwestern University Press

In times of crisis, I find myself turning to strangeness, opacity, unsettledness; we are always in crisis, and so I am always unsettled. I h

Both horror and poetry provide me the same combination of tension and release I find deeply satisfying and also, in many ways, unsettling. I invent a world that is dark, even to me, and as I navigate it, I discover it conceals things that can hurt me. I am compelled, line by line, to seek out the hurt, share in its exquisite effects. My first-beloved horror film, Carrie (1972), did this to me, just as does my now-favorite poet, Kim Hyesoon. Both identify processes fundamental to human bodies — particularly, in this case, to feminized ones — and render them startlingly close and yet distressingly alien.  Carrie was the comrade I needed when I started my period; Hyesoon when I was in what some call the “depths” of an eating disorder. The draw of horror/poetics involves a willful, willing return to these depths. Just a visit, a blend of the real and the fantastical: a body, covered in holes, dripping in blood, wielding the power to destroy its enemies the way it has so effectively destroyed itself.  In a sociopolitical environment in which trans bodies and Mad bodies (“transMad” bodies, as I tend to stylize them in my work) are understood increasingly both as vectors of contagion and as contagious in and of themselves, I am as invested in reclaiming and reexamining the inherent horror of living in an ableist, transphobic world as I am in reclaiming and reexamining what makes bodily noncompliance so scary to those outside of it.  I have found horror in looking in the mirror at a body I don’t recognize, hearing in my head a voice that is not my own, the visceral understanding that I am coming up to the very limits of my own survival. I feel able to look at subjugation frankly in this way, even and especially if what comes out doesn’t “make sense.” Instead, it is a generative nonsense-making, generative in that it makes not sense but space for something else, someone else. That someone is me, and maybe you, too. 

[anonymousyellowlizard]

On choosing eternity and the 'return' in adventure genre:

If you've read quite a bit of children's and young adult literature, or been familiar with the adventure novel, and especially if you've studied these genres, there's a structure to it that you may be familiar with.

Whether it's something like your Robinson Crusoes or all the way to stuff like Wizard of Oz which may seem closer in comparison to Deltarune's genre (more in the Wonderland territory) these works have never been as simple as what they seem on the surface, of a heroic character going through hardships in a different world and being victorious/learning a lesson. They have elements throughout of a rhetorical nation and identity-building that makes one aspect of the structure very important: The Return.

The protagonists will often start in a familiar place, importantly something homely, something that is for the Family, and something that represents the nation on a microcosmic level. From there they are thrown into a different land: it is exotic and it is challenging but ultimately it is there just to build character for these protagonists. Ultimately they have to leave it behind and remember, as Dorothy does, that "there is no place like home". And these are elements less subtle in a book like Robinson Crusoe for eg where the "other" world is more clearly representing all of the "uncivilized" world against which the image of the Home, of the Nation, of the civilised world is created. Similarly with Wizard of Oz starting at the Homestead - a symbol of American domestic life that Dorothy very clearly shows to be "boring" but ultimately is the place she must return to. That is ultimately always what the adventurer, the protagonist is working towards: to return.

The thing that drives the heroes forward within the dark worlds in Deltarune each time is the need to close the Dark Fountains: to return home. Home is the base around which the adventure must be: the home is Real. The home is what you really are. The home is civilised world.

The land of the adventure? Yeah that's where most of the story is happening, but it's not real. It's the Other, the Exotic, the Uncivilised, the world that you enter and get to play around in and decide the fate of and then you return, leaving all those high stakes behind. The world that is real is defined against the unreal.

And traditionally, as I'm sure you see here, this structure to the adventure novel has had quite oriental and colonialist implications, there is a horde of literature that talks about this, about how this 'other' world often taking elements from other cultures is denigrated to a two-dimensional level of just serving the adventurer's purpose (like the Darkners serve the Lightner's purpose) before being put down against something better and more Real - the Home, and in this case literally named Hometown, the Light World.

Deltarune takes the adventure novel trope and really names and shames it for what it is: the othering and exoticising of a world that's meant to serve you and have no interiority of its own beyond that and not be seen as real. And though Ralsei, knowing the "rules" of this world, bows down to the trope (like Friday in Robinson Crusoe the noble savage, like the Scarecrow and the Lion and the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz furthering Dorothy's purposes) Susie does not see it as common-sensical.

Susie cannot take it on face value as just "how things are". So when Susie says she doesn't want the story to end, it's more than just holding on the fantasy.

She is rejecting the adventure novel structure.

She is rejecting the return.

She is saying fuck the expectation to let this other world and these other people burn just because they're not "real" enough, fuck this subservience and closing it up to back home.

Others have pointed out that Toby is unlikely to just repeat some old tired "too much escapism is bad" trope, that isn't where the story here seems to be going. And I think it's particularly about placing the story in a tradition of this kind of trope and structure and then ripping that expectation out from it and challenging the vantage point from which you view worlds that you just enter to "have adventures" in.

Just like Undertale challenged the idea of a world you enter where you view all residents without interiority and use and kill them for your gains because they're nothing more than NPCs in a game.

Deltarune challenges the idea of creating an "other" that it is acceptable to not give interiority to, that it is acceptable to treat as less than, that it is acceptable to leave behind after you get all the development for yourself you could get out of it. When Susie chooses eternity she rejects that quiet acceptance of the other as something to be cast aside.

And if nothing else I hope this will be the kind of rejection that can stick with people when they engage with the adventure genre and see its historical issues with this quiet colonial attitude that carries on to this day.

[victusinveritas]

I went through the trouble of finding all of the above on a friend's Facebook page, arranging and cropping it so it would look pretty, and then I fell asleep because it was 5 AM and the dogs had settled down around me. I had that odd variety of hyperreal morning dream that was, in equal parts, about Jane Austen's work (Pride and Prejudice mostly)and an alternate history of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (France and Poland got involved, Europe wasn't exactly the safest place to be at the dreamed-moment).

[golfwolfmagazine]

Pretty amazing how centuries of human civilization coalesced in such a manner that, when it came time to make "A Muppet Christmas Carol," the Fozziwig pun was just right there waiting for them.

[wordcubed]

When you think about it, Shirley Jackson's The Lottery is a wholesome story about preserving beloved community traditions in the face of a judgmental and hostile modernity.

[papenathys]

What I'm trying to say is, I hate performative and pretentious depth so much. And it's always white authors, especially in the Gothic/dark academia genres. Whatever had to be said has already been said around the late 90s-early 2000s by actually inventive writers, and now white authors are just milking the contemporary fandom fascination with ships like Loustat and Hannigram (that are actually well written and complex in their respective works), stripping them of their essence completely, diluting them to empty hollows like "toxic queerness" and "the intimacy of violence" and "cannibalism as a metaphor for all-consuming desire" with a splash of Catholic imagery and witchcraft and tarot and smut and poetry that is losely marketed as something like "a bloody sumptuous feast of hedonism and queer desire".

It's not even disaffected in a halfhearted way like Donna Tartt, no, every axis of (supposed) oppression milked by these books is 100% serious and self-absorbed. You got the completely unironic Anne Rice and Sylvia Plath and Oscar Wilde worshippers and the tired, FLACCID endless poems about pomegranates and dog metaphors and knives and stigmata like stop stop stop REINVENT RETHINK BE ORIGINAL it's so overdone it's dead it sounds like regurgitated tumblr metaphors it's accumulating flies just stop!!!!!

No wonder we get those tweets fifteen times a day about how "x line sounds like it would be from the Bible but it's actually from tumblr"– followed by a line/quotation that actually sounds exactly like it's from tumblr. STOP overdoing the metaphor to the point of insincerity!!! stop turning once-novel things into edgy marketable words about bloody girlhood and erotic desire and religious passion!!!

And to take a break from negativity, here are a few books I really, really enjoyed that handled a mix of grimdark, gothic, horror and/or queer themes with originality and substance:

**The Wicked and the Willing by Lianyu Tan: a historical sapphic romance set in 1920s Singapore that examines the "Carmilla" vampire motif from a postcolonial lens.

**House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson: a very short, very eerie sapphic gothic romance (?) story, examining race, class and gender discourses through the allegories of vampirism and a centuries-old hunger.

Mexican Gothic by Silva Moreno Garcia: a historical gothic horror story about a 1950s Mexican heiress who discovers the hideous history underlying the family estate of an aristocrat English family; this is a genuinely disturbing but also great work of postcolonial horror (heavy eugenics storyline be warned).

**Providence Girls by Morgan Dante: a Lovecraftian retelling of two women in 1950s New England who discover love while battling the horrors both monstrous, cosmic as well as societal. genuinely beautiful, disturbing and a wonderful exploration of grief in horror.

**Walking Practice by Dolki Min: a shapeshifting alien stranded on earth lures victims via dating apps and seduces people of both genders before killing and consuming them. translated from Korean and a disturbing, funny (but also tragic) and dark satire about trans bodies, queerness in 21st century South Korea, violence and alienation. PLEASE read this.

Tender is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica: in an alternate history where ethical cannibalism has been legalized globally, and humans are bred as livestock, a narrator grapples with ethics when he rescues a live female "specimen" from his meat factory. super disturbing, satire of the author's experience under the Argentinian dictatorship.

**Chlorine by Jade Song: a Chinese-American girl in 1990s USA grapples with sapphic crushes, adolescence, trauma, racism and her immigrant identity while taking part in competitive swimming and dreaming of mermaids. absolute fever dream masterpiece of a debut novel combining teenage queer sexuality and body horror, with a narrative that challenges norms of beauty and gender a lá Julia Ducournau films.

(?) Bunny by Mona Awad: psychedelic, colorful, pop neon horror satire about an all-female MFA creative writing cohort at an elite arts college, and the lengths they go through to achieve their literary success, as observed by the outsider loner girl. this was such a direct, targeted and brutal parody of dark academia/ femcel unhinged women books lmfao??? but also witty and disturbing without sounding condescending.

**= explicit LGBTQ rep. there is a question mark before Bunny because it has– neither explicit rep nor queerbait– but a secret third thing, schrödinger's representation.

Also first person to write "let people have fun" should donate 30 dollars to my kofi promptly