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Sade Olutola
occasionally subtle
PR's Tumblrdome
Xuebing Du
roma★
No title available
YOU ARE THE REASON
Game of Thrones Daily
shark vs the universe
NASA
Keni
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Kiana Khansmith
untitled
One Nice Bug Per Day
Product Placement
TMBGareOK. The Official They Might Be Giants tumblr
★
titsay
seen from Germany
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seen from Vietnam
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@trying-not-to-overthink
Bingzu parts as the system... Doesn't that mean that he could hear his fated person sing praises about Binghe for the eternity of the plot in his head? That must have been very healing if bittersweet. Neither Bingmei nor Bingge had such a privilege after all
Why is socializing so hard. How do I tell someone online (who isn't currently responding to my messages) that I wanna be friends but it's okay if they don't want to but also it's okay if they just don't feel up to responding to me rn. Like I probably come off too intense already and I don't want to make them feel anxious or sth. At least irl I can measure people by their face expressions and stuff, but online it's really just shouting into the void and hoping for the best....
Watched "Withering Heights" (2026 movie) and it was so great lmao
I think I liked it cus I never read the book so I had no expectations (they really should have warned actual fans about how much they were going to deviate from the canon though. I heard so so many people critiquing the movie for thar)
But I really really loved all these stubborn and selfish assholes ruining each other's lives. It's fun to see such people act and it's even nicer when they aren't doing it at innocent people (as then I feel sorry for the innocent people and that ruins the fun quite a bit)
And I loved the unhinged and moral-lacking romance, I loved how Catherine and Heathcliff cared for each other but still made each other suffer, especially over their own hurt feelings
The movie was truly wonderfully bizzare and I only regret that Edgar Linton wasn't a worse person so he could fit in better with the other maniacs. I hoped he'd have caused Catherine's end but alas, it was still Nelly Dean acting as the devil on his shoulder...
But yeah, I had blast
WHO ARE YOU CALLING A PROTAGONIST???
Don't worry SQQ. The closest thing to an immortal WWX knew was WRH, so he'd rather be reverent about an actual immortal who's also a decent person lol maybe it would even remind him of Baoshan Sanren?
I'm starting to come to the troubling conclusion that some readers just like prose I would consider bad.
One of my models for writing is that most of what you're doing is creating things in the reader's head, and that this tends to be more powerful when you have explosive sentences that convey a lot of meaning and give the reader things to chew on. Restraint is powerful. Inference is what gives writing the sauce.
And for a certain sort of reader, they seem to want pre-digested, comfortable, familiar prose. And prose that I would consider to be purple prose ... gives them that? I'm not talking about ornate vs. spare prose, though there's definitely some of that, but a way of writing where you use 'dead phrases' that conjure nothing in the reader's mind but things they've seen a hundred times before.
I've spent a lot of time wondering why specific things are popular, and this conclusion, that certain "bad" things are popular because they're "bad", seems kind of inescapable.
Would you mind elaborating on your discriminating measures between "dead phrases" ("bad" writing) and "explosive sentences that convey a lot of meaning" ("powerful" writing)? e.g. rubrics and codes/themes across writing samples, clause complexity and information density, etc. I think I get your distinction but am curious if this is continuous or discontinuous.
The general idea is that a particular piece of writing can create vivid imagery and emotional impact for readers, or it can lose its power through repetition or simplicity.
Think of the expression "thinking outside the box". This was probably pretty powerful at one point! Then everyone started using it, and it became a useful tool that was no longer evocative. Everyone has heard it before, and it's a well-worn bit of text. Most of this is because its imagery has been replaced by meaning. You read that phrase and likely no longer picture the box, right?
Here's a quote I had lying around from Harold Bloom's review of Harry Potter:
Her prose style, heavy on cliche, makes no demands upon her readers. In an arbitrarily chosen single page—page 4—of the first Harry Potter book, I count seven cliches, all of the "stretch his legs" variety.
And this is generally true, Rowling goes heavy on stock phrases, many of which don't quite rise to the level of cliche. I'll part with Bloom here and say that I don't think Rowling has wholly bad prose in general, but she does like to lean on the stock, even if it's occasionally punctuated by a nice turn of phrase.
Compare this to a book that I somewhat liked, whose prose I thought was (overall) flatly good, The Ministry of Time:
Despite being out of uniform, he looked oddly formal, as if he was the only person in serif font.
This is a line that gets me to sit up, and the novel is full of them.
Distant conversation recalled the clatter of pebbles underfoot.
Isn't this nice? Doesn't this make you think, turn the gears in your head? It has an unfolding quality to it, which is something that, in my mind, "good prose" and good metaphors do well. There's specificity and force to it. The writing evokes things and makes connections in my head, and I read a little slower because of that, to give the disparate feelings time to sink in. To give a non-metaphor/simile version (still Ministry of Time):
As soon as she stepped in, I started making a tally of the evidence of unbeauty.
Not a particularly complicated sentence, but it's got unexpected qualities to it. You do need to think a little more about it, and can't just let it skitter across your brain. Compare to this randomly chosen piece from A Court of Thorns and Roses:
The sun had set by the time I exited the forest, my knees shaking. My hands, stiff from clenching the legs of the deer, had gone utterly numb miles ago.
I personally feel like relatively little of this is about clause complexity, which is (generally) more to do with the specifics of how a sentence feels to us and how well it fits into the patterns of phrases and sentences we know. It's hard to evaluate, because you're evaluating it against the canon of English literature, and I'm not sure there are concrete rules to follow here.
Technically you could make frequent trips to Google's n-gram viewer and get some concrete information about how stock a phrase is:
But this seems like it's going too quantitative and prone to errors.
A simple sentence can be arresting and a complex one can be utterly forgettable. My opinion is that this comes primarily from predictability, of which cliche is only one (relatively severe) aspect. It's whether our pattern-matching brains delight in a new connection or gloss the familiar.
There are readers who would prefer to not engage their brains all that much when reading, they'll readily self-report that. But there are ways that "bad prose" in my framework can go beyond that, becoming repetitive and low in information. There are people who don't just like comfort and familiarity, they like for their brain to be doing less work per word.
And this is one of the things that adjective-heavy "purple" prose is doing, in my opinion. If you take a sentence and add an "expected" adjective to almost every noun (e.g. "green leaf") then the sentence can be read faster, or the meaning of the sentence comes slower, and you can float along with the writing in an opposite mode to how I generally like to read, and how I generally model people as reading.
I think it's interesting to consider in relation to this Lewis's defense of the style of epic poetry made in A Preface to Paradise Lost:
Also a review of Snow White:
On the other hand, Lewis seems to straightforwardly agree with OP in An Experiment in Criticism:
Good writing may offend him [the "unliterary" reader] by being either too spare for his purpose or too full. A woodland scene by D.H. Lawrence or a mountain scene by Ruskin gives him far more than he knows what to do with; on the other hand, he would be dissatisfied with Malory's "he arrived before a castle which was rich and fair and there was a postern opened towards the sea, and was open without any keeping, save two lions kept the entry, and the moon shone clear." Nor would he be content with "I was terribly afraid" instead of "My blood ran cold". To the good reader's imagination such statements of the bare facts are often the most evocative of all. But the moon shining clear is not enough for the unliterary. They would rather be told that the castle was "bathed in a flood of silver moonlight". This is partly because their attention to the words they read is so insufficient. Everything has to be stressed, or "written up", or it will barely be noticed. But still more, they want the hieroglyph—something that will release their stereotyped reactions to moonlight... Thus good writing, in one way or another, nearly always offends the unliterary reader. When a good writer leads you into a garden he either gives you a precise impression of that particular garden at that particular moment—it need not be long, selection is what counts—or simply says "It was in the garden, early". The unliterary are pleased with neither. They call the first "padding" and wish the author would "cut the cackle and get to the horses". The second they abhor as a vacuum; their imaginations cannot breathe in it.
WAIT, DOES IT MEAN THAT IF SHEN JIU WOKE UP IN (a*) SHEN YUAN'S DEAD CEO BODY HE'D FINALLY BE IN A PLACE OF POWER BUT /WITHOUT/ KIDS TO TAKE CARE OF? GOOD FOR HIM
*I do know that there's no sign of Shen Jiu in the extras, but c'mon, system mix-ups happened left and right, if it just oh so accidentally put Shen Jiu's soul into some other universe's dead Shen Yuan body, would it be so strange (for example cus it didn't expect Shen Jiu himself to die and maybe tumbled with the soul trying to keep him in the alive)?
Went to watch "Wicked for Good" and I've got some serious beef with this movie. Why do characters seem to run on half the braincells for most of the time? *sigh* at least it looked pretty ig
Although I do miss Shen Yuan the weeb, the no-life, the doesn't-leave-his-apartment, the good-for-nothing... I do find Shen Yuan the CEO hilarious. Before, you could have thought that he has such a low opinion about himself and his own influence on other's lives because he was used to being a nobody.... But that's not really the case... He really just IS like THIS. Love him
I’ve been seeing theories that the system lied to us about being bingzu, you may have already discussed this but if not what is your take?
The system was at least not lying about LBZ's existence, seeing how we were given crumbs of there being a third version of LBH, the one in Airplane's original drafts (definitely not a retcon either on mxtx's part so the concept of him being a legitimate character is something I fully welcome), but the system being either created by or being a part of LBZ? There's something about that, that's just not clicking with me.
The first impression that most of us had about the system is that it was a sadistic being that was completely willing to hurt both SY and SQH to get the story it wants. Like sure the system cared about LBH's satisfaction points, but that is only in relation to what creates a satisfying narrative to pidw's audience. What the system would deem as LBH's happiness, or his 'happy end' is superficial at best. So the extra claiming the system wanted LBH's genuine happiness, is hard to believe when that system deliberately forces SY in a position to create heartbreak (and anger) points for LBH, to again, please a narrative. And isn't that the whole reason both SQH's and SY's systems wanted them to follow to pidw canon events? The canon events that were meant to blacken LBH and facilitate his rise to power for a compelling story and protagonist? SY being able to break away from that, flip the pidw plot on it's head and BingQiu choosing each other in the end. . . wasn't that done despite the system's machinations?
And I haven't even mentioned the punishment protocol! If we're running with the whole 'LBZ created the system with his soul so another version of him could be happy' then you mean to tell me that that System! LBH took the most violent version of himself to torture SY because he made one mistake and System! LBH didn't like that? What kind of sick punishment is that? And let's say SY happens to actually fail and LBH comes back wanting to imprison and torture him like pidw LBH, then System! LBH would've just let it happen and start a new world with new transmigrators. (The unrevised version made it clear that the system would've let that happen.)
Back when the system was separate from LBH, the system was a cold non human entity to us with its own agenda that wanted an improved version of the pidw world. Since when was the system concerned with the well being of any of the pidw characters or transmigrators? The system's punishment was meant to be a calculated move to get SY to follow the script with no other implications attached to it other than a way to make SY get the story back on track. The punishment was a technicality based on the loss of points issued for derailing that one meeting. But now it just seems like something done to be intentionally cruel because it would have no reason to care for an overarching plot.
As for the headcanon about the system lying about being LBZ so it can garner sympathy from SY and so he doesn't destroy/disable it. . . as far as I know there isn't an argument against or contradicting it so I say if that's what people want to headcanon, they should be able to. For the people that like the idea of the system being LBZ, that's also great, but don't just take it at face value because that puts all of the system's actions in a new light.
I have some different thoughts on the matter, that I think might be worth considering :)
I personally think that
a) it wouldn't make much sense for mxtx to have SY be lied to at the very end of the story which already takes place after the main story ended (since then it's obvious that it would never be resolved or mentioned again and used in any way but alas, maybe she did do that for the fun of it),
b) the system isn't actually Luo Bingzu. It was made from him, an embodiment of his last wish and will. How much of LBZ is in it is debatable, but it would make sense for it not to act like we would imagine a Luo Bingzu (an actual person) to behave and
c) the system's officially stated goal wasn't Luo Binghe's happiness afaik? It was meant to create a "better ending" whatever it meant.
And it's so unspecified that even LBZ himself didn't know what it would take for him to reach it (hence the system trying out different approaches to begin with).
If it was about reaching "happiness", it could probably be accomplished by, for example, putting LBH in a happy well-off family, having him live a normal and medicore life - but I don't think that's what LBZ would have been looking for.
I rather understand the system's goal as "giving meaning to LBH's existence and his life". And a way to do it would be to make LBH's life be like a story, make him the protagonist (someone with goals, with hardships, relationships and achievements and all that make one's life colorful and maybe even meaningful) - and this is something that the system could have thought of while looking at SQH's original storyline.
It would make sense, then, that the system would clutch onto what it originally thought would work (the original storyline) and force both SQH and SY to work towards such a "better story", no matter what it took.
(Conversely speaking if the system isn't a person, but just Something executing an order/will, then it wouldn't care about being cruel to SY (or SQH) if it meant "making him behave". And it was said that SY was very receptive to any kind of push from the system, so if the system was unhappy with SY, why wouldn't it "correct" him by giving out a punishment? Would Something made from a cold uncaring god, with the power of resetting worlds anytime it thought it "failed", care about such a thing like "being nice" vs "being cruel"?)
And that lasted until the system got convinced that what was created by the transmigrators' influence IS good enough to be called a "better ending".
I do admit that I haven't read the main story in a longer while so I might have a warped view of what happened, though, I do hope I made at least some sense
I find the stupid comments from Duolingo so damn entertaining. The images are also ridiculous lmao
Odysseus: Let's cut the charade, you are no wife of mine! My real wife knows I don't have a daughter!
Penelope, who along with Telemachus made a pact with some god to become sirens(female) so they can find Odysseus: 😶
I could make a whole theory out of it. The god agreed because it's a challenge (you gotta get Odysseus into the water to succeed)
That god could be Poseidon himself but I can't find a way for it to fit into the "ruthlessness is mercy upon ourselves" hmh
Also Penelope could assume that Odysseus started being afraid of the water at some later point but got confused and thought that Penelope would already knew it! Plus maybe the change into the siren changed her more than just on the outside. That would be also why she'd say such unnatural sounding things
Odysseus: Let's cut the charade, you are no wife of mine! My real wife knows I don't have a daughter!
Penelope, who along with Telemachus made a pact with some god to become sirens(female) so they can find Odysseus: 😶
Recently I find myself sick of too much negativity so whenever something or someone is being very criticized, I automatically want to defend it/them.
Speaking of, the newest "Snow White" movie really doesn't deserve so much hate... I'm actually quite fond of it, as my easily scared niece didn't have trouble watching it. So it serves its role - it's a nice kids movie even if the plot could have been more refined
I deluded myself and started playing love and deepspace. As expected I got irritated with the need to click so much to go through the story and probably won't play it again. I really do suck at enjoying romance games even though I love romance stories so much...
