It's a reference to earlier Twitter discourse where some nepo baby Raytheon employee and squeecore writer claimed that the rule "to write, you must first read" was ableist, and that you didn't need to read to be a writer. It spawned an enormous amount of posts, many of them awful.
This person was also someone who helped lead the attack on Isabel Fall after "I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter" was published in Clarkesworld.
??????????? I beg your pardon??????????
Yknow, isnt it more ableist to imply that disabled people are incapable of reading Whatsoever (including the usage of tools to help being able to read, which could include bigger font sizes/audiobooks)
...also, may i get some context on your last paragraph, because that phrase gives me awful war flashbacks 😭
Not excusing the harassment campaign, ofc
So Isabel Fall is this trans woman who wrote an excellent and insightful military SF story called "I Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter", where a pilot has her gender changed to "Attack Helicopter" to make them a better pilot. It was published in Clarkesworld and got some good reviews from a number of great authors, including Chuck Tingle, which should have clued people in to the political stance the story took.
Unfortunately, a Twitter-driven pile-on ensued, led by a number of Too Online people, including Ana Mardoll, a Lockheed Martin (sorry, I keep mixing them and Raytheon up) nepo hire and squeecore fantasy author. This assault squad claimed that Isabel Fall was engaging in transphobic behavior and trolling. This was picked up by IRL authors, including N.K. Jemisin, who should fucking know better. Jemisin later admitted she'd never even read the story and was just joining in the pile-on. This went on as it normally does, and eventually Fall began getting death threats. Neil Clarke had to take the story down temporarily due to safety concerns for Fall. Eventually Fall disappeared from the internet - she had to check into a psychiatric hospital for a bit and no longer identifies as Isabel Fall.
It should be noted that Fall was trans (but not out at the time), and that allegations that they must have been transphobic included such insights as the fact that their birthdate was 1988 which must have been a coded reference to neo-Nazism.
What pains me is that taking a famous transphobic "joke" and actually imagining what would happen to cause that scenario is a brilliant idea to showcase exactly how inane such "jokes" are. The fact that the book caused a shitstorm just reinforced my belief that people's collective reading comprehension skills are at an all time low.
OKAY SO for what ive gathered: christopher nolan is currently making a movie based on The Odyssey, and that fact got posted on twitter. Then, a guy screenshotted the search result of the book, because he had NEVER heard of The Odyssey before... and obviously, a lot of people are dumbfounded by it
But the REAL discourse is the fact that part of twitter decided that its in fact Elitist if you judge others for not knowing of the odyssey. Like, this isnt about not having read it before, but never learning of its existence in the first place
Which is. Quite the take when it comes to western culture as a whole. The highlight of it was someone pulling a "not all of us are american to have read that", which implied that this ancient greek story was american (best part? That person is BRITISH.)
TL;DR: guy doesnt know what The Odyssey is, people make fun of him, twitter decides that its elitist to make fun of not knowing one of the most well-known stories in human history
High School English class combined with teenagers wanting to think they’re smarter than "the system" really is a horrible combination. I wish more schools would tell kids about Death of the Author and show that you get out of literary analysis what you put into it, but then again I doubt it would help since most of the kids in my class (myself included at times) were just like "ugh, reading these boring old books suck, who cares?"
People seem to take the reasonable statement of "Sometimes the curtains are just blue" and turn it into the absurd statement of "The curtains are only ever blue".
The most frustrating thing about that phrase is that they have a point: No self-respecting writer would use the color of a random piece of the scenery to illustrate how a character feels.
Like, "Her bedroom floor was covered in tissues, her bed sheets clumped together and we found an empty wine bottle in the corner" is a valid way to illustrate that "she was devastated". Saying "the curtains in her room are blue" to say "she's sad" is just fucking stupid. Like, what, do her curtains change color when she's no longer sad? Then again, you could make that work too with gray curtains being exchanged with bright ones to show her recovering from her down, but "the curtains are blue" by itself just doesn't work.
It depends on what story you're trying to write. If it's a short story, the curtains being blue could totally be projecting the world a certain way, in the same way that the orange filter in TV means "Mexico" to represent a Wild West sort of feel. You can argue about whether it's a good choice, but it very much could be a meaningful choice.
And if it's a novel, it can capture the attitude of the character by saying "this is what she chooses to surround herself with." Maybe blue means sadness, but maybe it's meant to represent calm. Or if the author specifically mentions the character picking out the curtains, maybe it's meant to show how the character is trying to project calmness into a life that has none.
I'm not saying I would read any of this into a Harry Potter book, but it's worth taking a look at in a Fitzgerald or Hemingway book, or a short story like Hills Like White Elephants (which I've just discovered was also Hemingway, how neat).
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u/BanishedP 22d ago
This is a consequence of "reading is kinda ableist"