How To Write Values Dissonance

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ozy blog post, writing

[cw: Rape. Literally the entire post consists of an extensive discussion of societies in which rape is legal and not frowned upon and the justifications they may have for their existence. If that doesn’t sound like your thing, then skip this post.]

Occasionally, one might wish to write a story where the characters have values that the readers don’t (values dissonance). Values dissonance can add a lot of realism to your worldbuilding. Every historical culture approved of some things that 21st century Westerners disapprove of, and disapproved of some things that they approved of; it is likely that future cultures would do the same. Similarly, there’s no reason for secondary worlds to agree with us about everything. Values dissonance can also serve a variety of interesting thematic purposes.

Unfortunately, it’s very easy to write values dissonance in a way that doesn’t work at all. I am going to criticize the novella Three Worlds Collide by Eliezer Yudkowsky for several reasons: I like it; I have met him and am aware that he was definitely trying for values dissonance and not doing a poor job of advocating for beliefs he holds; the values dissonance is all in a particular passage which can be easily excerpted; and the book is freely available online.

The passage containing values dissonance is the following:

The Confessor held up a hand.  “I mean it, my lord Akon.  It is not polite idealism.  We ancients can’t steer.  We remember too much disaster.  We’re too cautious to dare the bold path forward.  Do you know there was a time when nonconsensual sex was illegal?”

Akon wasn’t sure whether to smile or grimace.  “The Prohibition, right?  During the first century pre-Net?  I expect everyone was glad to have that law taken off the books.  I can’t imagine how boring your sex lives must have been up until then – flirting with a woman, teasing her, leading her on, knowing the whole time that you were perfectly safe because she couldn’t take matters into her own hands if you went a little too far -”

“You need a history refresher, my Lord Administrator.  At some suitably abstract level.  What I’m trying to tell you – and this is not public knowledge – is that we nearly tried to overthrow your government.”

“What?” said Akon.  “The Confessors?”

“No, us.  The ones who remembered the ancient world.  Back then we still had our hands on a large share of the capital and tremendous influence in the grant committees.  When our children legalized rape, we thought that the Future had gone wrong.”

Akon’s mouth hung open.  “You were that prude?”

The Confessor shook his head.  “There aren’t any words,” the Confessor said, “there aren’t any words at all, by which I ever could explain to you.  No, it wasn’t prudery.  It was a memory of disaster.”

“Um,” Akon said.  He was trying not to smile.  “I’m trying to visualize what sort of disaster could have been caused by too much nonconsensual sex -”

“Give it up, my lord,” the Confessor said.  He was finally laughing, but there was an undertone of pain to it.  “Without, shall we say, personal experience, you can’t possibly imagine, and there’s no point in trying.”

There are three fundamental problems with the passage here.

First, it gives me absolutely no sense as a reader about how a society with legalized rape works. For example, here are some of the questions I have as a reader about how this society works, with possible answers and further questions:

• Am I at risk of rape when I’m walking down the street?
  • Yes.
    • What if I have an important appointment, or I’m giving birth?
    • Is ‘I was busy getting raped’ an acceptable reason to delay something or are you supposed to build in time for that?
  • No, because everyone carries pepper spray at all times.
    • Is it legal, or will you be arrested for assault?
    • How does that affect relationships with strangers? Do you have to be continually on your guard that someone might attack you?
  • No, because everyone has been genetically modified to be demisexual.
    • How does that affect other relationships? Casual sex?
    • Is it assumed that the rare non-demisexuals are all rapists?
  • No, because raping strangers is still illegal, only raping acquaintances is legal.
• Is assault legal?
  • Yes, only if you’re committing a rape at the time.
  • Yes, in general.
  • No, rapes happen using voluntarily ingested drugs/alcohol or social coercion.
• How often does rape happen? What percentage of people have been raped?
  • Everyone; it happens on about one in three dates.
  • Everyone; it happens about once in your life.
  • About one in five people; rapists are rare, but you know several people who have experienced rape.
  • Almost no one; we’re genetically engineered out antisocial behavior, and rape is only legal to add a little extra thrill to kinky sex.
• Is there a way to opt out and say you’d prefer raping you be illegal actually?
• Is there social stigma on rapists?
  • Yes; rape is considered morally wrong but is not illegal.
  • Yes; rape is considered kind of shameful because it implies you can’t get laid the normal way.
  • Rape is completely unmarked. No one notices or cares whether you’ve committed rape.
  • If you’re a rapist it’s VALID. If you’re not a rapist it’s VALID. STOP QUESTIONING PEOPLE’S SEXUAL CHOICES!!!!!!!
  • Actually, rapists are considered to be sexy, thrilling bad boys/girls.
• Is there social stigma on rape victims?
  • Yes; you shouldn’t have led them on.
  • Yes; you should have been able to defend yourself.
  • Being a rape victim is completely unmarked. No one notices or cares whether you’re a rape victim, including the victim.
  • Rape is an unfortunate thing that happens to people sometimes, like a chronic illness.
  • Being a rape victim is high status and sexy.
• What happens if you rape someone and you or they get pregnant?
  • Either party can force the other person to get an abortion; both people need to consent for a child to be created.
  • Rape victims can force rapists to get an abortion, but not vice versa.
  • Rapist has to raise the kid.
  • Rape victim has to raise the kid.
  • Who raises the kid is decided by something else
  • You are now married and have to be coparents.
  • Rapist has to pay punitive child support as a penalty for not using birth control.
  • Rapist is fined for nonconsensual child creation.
  • Rapist and rape victim are fined for irresponsible child creation.

And so on and so forth.

These are all very different societies! Eliezer has provided us with any details about how ‘rape is legal’ works– apparently women commit rape as often as men do or more often, rape seems to be something that occurs centrally in a date context– but not nearly enough to understand what it is like to live in a society where rape is legal.

Second, Eliezer provides only the most half-assed justification for why anyone would think this is a good idea. “It makes dates more exciting if you might get raped during them” is the beginning of a justification. But the reader is left with obvious questions. What about the very common preference to feel comfortable and safe on a date? Is that preference uncommon in this universe? Is it considered invalid for some reason? (Why?) Do people who share this preference have some way of getting it met (e.g. particular dating websites)?

In our world, rape is traumatizing. Are people in this society so jaded that running a risk of PTSD is worth it for hot dates? Do they believe (whether or not it’s true) that sexual trauma from rape is caused by thinking sex is something special instead of an ordinary recreational activity? Do they believe rape is only traumatizing because people believe it is traumatizing? Do they have incredibly good PTSD treatment such that being raped results in only a week or two of disability?

To be clear, you don’t have to have a good reason for a particular policy to be enacted. “Rape of people with no political influence is legal” has a perfectly understandable rationale: the people with political influence like committing rapes and are at no risk of becoming rape victims. But you need a reason that makes sense within human psychology.

Finally, I believe good values dissonance, where you really inhabit the alternate perspective, results in the values-dissonant position being appealing. What’s good about the policy? What might make people support it?

One way to make a policy appealing is making the tradeoffs of our current policy salient. For example, research suggests that between a third and half of all women have sexual fantasies in which they are raped. One might imagine a woman from the society where rape is legal arguing that it’s absurd to criminalize her fulfilling her own most cherished sexual fantasy; she is an adult making her own choices, and forcing her to confine her fantasies to her imagination or roleplay is fake consensualism. If she wants to let anyone who likes rape her, she should be allowed to do so.

Another strategy is to play into cognitive biases and moral intuitions that the reader already has. In the example above, I appealed to the reader’s concern for bodily autonomy and distaste for paternalism. A similar strategy might be to criticize making marital rape illegal on the grounds of a right to privacy, which presumably the reader agrees you have.

Making the values-dissonant policy appealing is obviously not necessary to write values dissonance well. But I think it’s worth considering when you’re writing values dissonance.

In Eliezer’s specific case, of course, making Legalized Rape World appealing was necessary, because the setting of Three Worlds Collide is supposed to be better than our current world and the purpose of the rape section is to convey that the better world would contain many things we find morally horrifying (as our ancestors would find gay marriage and integration morally horrifying). If Legalized Rape World is not appealing at all even a little bit, that section has failed in its purpose (as I would argue it did).

Appealing values dissonance allows the reader to understand why people in the past believed evil things. Many people in the past were involved with things we presently consider atrocities and human rights violations: slavery, footbinding, legalized marital rape, the murder of gladiators for public entertainment, animal cruelty, rape as a weapon of war, the slaughter of innocent civilians, and so on and so forth. Presumably this is not because the people of the past lacked the moral fiber we have today; their character and “baseline goodness” is likely similar to our own, and indeed many people who owned slaves or were cruel to animals were otherwise morally admirable. I believe fiction has an ability to build empathy in us for aspects of the human experience which are very distant from our own, and (sadly) being a person who is not exceptionally evil but is complicit or even actively participates in atrocities is a common part of the human experience.

Further, appealing values dissonance may bring to the reader’s attention that certain thought processes they themselves use may be suspect as a means of morally reasoning. I believe this can be a powerful tool for causing readers to question their own moral intuitions. If they can be made to sympathize with things they find appalling due to their feeling that anything disgusting is evil, or their desire for the guilty to be punished, or their sense that people far away don’t matter as much as those who are nearby, perhaps these intuitions are in general suspect.

Also, it’s often intellectually interesting and a fun stretch as a writer, which can be its own justification. Art for art’s sake and all that.

How does one learn to write values dissonance?

In my experience, there is no substitute for reading smart people you disagree with, especially people who believe strange or morally repugnant things. (Presumably conversation would be better, but befriending people who believe morally repugnant things comes with its own problems.)

Old books are sometimes your friend, but not always. For example, Thomas Malthus takes “birth control is worse than a bunch of people dying in a famine” as an axiom with which he does not expect anyone to disagree, which is less than helpful for writing a society which thinks birth control is worse than famine. Better to read the writings of modern traditional Catholics, who have to defend their beliefs. Old books often defend their beliefs with claims the modern reader would find unconvincing. While “the divine right of kings exists because all kings are descended from Old Testament patriarchs” may have been convincing in 1680, it is unlikely to appeal to the modern reader. Conversely, modern people who believe weird things likely defend their beliefs with reference to modern ideas of autonomy, self-determination, fulfillment, etc.

On the other hand, many repugnant beliefs– such as slavery being legal– are difficult to find defenses of in the modern day, and it is necessary to make do with old books. Old books may also help to create a more genuinely alien moral culture, which is desirable for some worldbuilding.

It is important to choose authors you can respect. It is easy to choose authors that make dumb arguments, but that will not result in a society that rings true. (Perhaps that is the issue with Three Worlds Collide; “all rape should be legal” is not a position typically defended by people who make good arguments, so it is difficult to crib from others.)

The Irrationalfic Manifesto

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ozy blog post, writing

Many of my friends write rationalfic, in the vein of such works as Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality or Luminosity. As described on the r/rational sidebar, rationalfic features “thoughtful behaviour of people in honest pursuit of their goals,” “realistic intellectual agency,” and a “focus on intelligent characters solving problems through creative applications of their knowledge and resources.”

Rationalfic is really cool and I’ve enjoyed a lot of it (recommending people read Silmaril feels somewhat anti-social, because it will eat two months of your life, but Silmaril is so good). However, I personally am not interested in writing rationalfic. I write irrationalfic: fiction where careful attention is paid to the intricacies and subtleties of human irrationality.

Perhaps irrationalfic can be best summed up through a quote from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s essay on writing Level 1 intelligent characters:

The movie version goes like this: The thirteen dwarves and Bilbo Baggins have just spent one and a half movies fighting their way to the place where Thorin, leader of the dwarves, expects to find a secret entrance into the lost dwarven kingdom of Erebor. This entrance can only be opened on a particular day of the year (Durin’s Day), and they have a decoded map saying, Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks, and the last light of Durin’s day will shine upon the keyhole.

And then the sun sets behind a mountain, and they still haven’t found the keyhole. So Thorin… I find this painful to write… Thorin throws down the key in disgust and all the dwarves start to head back down the mountain, leaving only Bilbo behind to stare at the stone wall. And so Bilbo is the only one who sees when the light of the setting moon suddenly reveals the keyhole.

(Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O34oOCB_7Kk.)

That thing where movie!Thorin throws down the key in disgust and walks away?

I wouldn’t have done that.

You wouldn’t have done that.

We’d wait at least an hour in case there was some beam of sunlight about to shoot through the side of the mountain, and then we’d come back tomorrow, just in case. And if that still failed we’d try again a year later. We wouldn’t drop the key. We wouldn’t wander off the instant something went wrong…

We could say that these strange creatures lack a certain sort of awareness. The scriptwriter wants us to be yelling at movie!Thorin, “No! You fool! Don’t do that!” but it does not occur to the scriptwriter that Thorin might yell this at himself, that Thorin might detect his own idiocy the way we see it plain upon the screen. Movie!Thorin has no little voice in his own head to yell these things at him, the way that you or I are the little voices in our own heads. We could call movie!Thorin a Hollywood Zombie, or H-Zombie for short.

The rationalfic solution to the problem of Thorin is to write a Level 1 intelligent character who doesn’t do extremely obviously stupid things. The irrationalfic solution to the problem of Thorin is to justify why he is so extremely obviously stupid.

Perhaps Thorin is an impatient person, someone who gives up easily, who doesn’t put in the extra effort. Perhaps this is established throughout the movie series: he gets bored before they’ve checked that all the ponies’ bags are secure; he gives up when Bilbo tries to show him how to make some hobbit food and he doesn’t get it immediately; he decides on the kill-Smaug plan because he gets frustrated listening to all the potential plans there could possibly be. Sometimes it works for his benefit: he demands that the other dwarves hurry up and stop being so careful and they manage to leave just before a monster is about to attack them. Sometimes it bites him in the ass: maybe they leave the map at the campsite because Thorin didn’t double-check that they had it; maybe Thorin was in charge of preparing something for a fight and he only half-did it and some orcs they could have defeated easily almost kill them.

Once you have established all of that, Thorin is not an H-Zombie. Thorin is a person, an impatient and easily frustrated person, similar to many people you have met over the course of your life. And you might yell “aaa! You fool! Don’t do that!” at the screen, but your suspension of disbelief is not going to snap.

Following Eliezer’s convention, we can declare that an irrational character whose irrationality is always justified in some satisfying way and is of a piece with her entire character development in a Level 1 irrational character. A Level 2 irrational character is one where the character’s irrationality actually makes sense to the reader as a thing the reader would have done in the character’s shoes, perhaps to the point that the reader does not see the character as irrational until the full consequences of their actions are revealed. A Level 3 irrational character is one where the reader realizes some aspect of their own irrationality due to seeing it play out in the character’s life.

What makes an irrationalfic?

Irrationalfic protagonists are flawed. And they don’t just have grand, noble, heroic flaws either. Irrationalfic protagonists have the normal range of human flaws. They’re petty and careless and thoughtlessly cruel. They make big plans and don’t follow through with them. They suck at communicating with people they’re dating. They have anxiety and guilt issues. They don’t like doing things that are boring or involve a lot of hard work. They deceive themselves; they maintain intricate webs of denial of all their personality flaws and all the problems in their lives. They sell out their principles for financial gain; they stick to their principles even when it will cost other people’s lives. They make bad decisions when they’re hungry or tired or horny. They’re biased and prejudiced and xenophobic. They’re basically good people who fail to outperform the society they were raised in; they’re basically good people who try to outperform the society they were raised in and end up going off in a terrible direction and making everything worse. Obviously, I don’t mean that any character should have every one of those traits (…although if you manage to do it I want a link), just that these are the sorts of flaws irrationalfic protagonists should have.

Irrationalfic protagonists’ flaws make sense. Horror-movie characters splitting up and being picked off by the monster one by one is not an irrationalfic, it is just people behaving irrationally. At all times, the audience should be thinking “I understand why this character is behaving this way, even though I want to shake them.” One of the best ways to do this is by making the character get some sort of benefit from their flaws. This is realistic; people don’t usually do things that only hurt them and don’t have any good aspects at all. Try thinking about in what circumstances the character’s flaws are adaptive. What situation makes the irrational choice a good decision? For example:

• A character who ignores her problems and binge-watches Netflix doesn’t have to think about things that are scary or upsetting.
• A character who doesn’t do important but dull tasks isn’t bored as often.
• A character who doesn’t talk about their needs or set boundaries may have an easier time surviving certain abusive relationships.
• A character who agrees with her society’s prejudices is less likely to anger other people or make them feel guilty about their own prejudiced behavior.
• A character who never follows through on her plans doesn’t have to worry about failing.
• A character who practices self-deception doesn’t have to face uncomfortable truths about herself.
• A character who sells out their principles for financial gain gets money which she can use to buy things that make her life better.

Another way to add plausibility is by laying out the character’s reasoning process. Don’t just have Thorin stomp off; make us feel his despair about ever finding the keyhole, his anger that he’s come all this way for nothing, his shame that he got fourteen people to spend a year of their lives on this quest and failed because he believed some stupid map. Don’t just have a character decide not to ask about some important and incorrect assumption she’s making about her love interest; make us understand that her love interest clearly doesn’t want to talk about it, and she wants to respect his preferences, and she’s sure he’ll open up in his own time, and anyway from all the information she has it’s really obvious what the explanation is.

Irrationalfic protagonists have virtues. A person who is nothing but flaw is not a very interesting character, and it limits the field on which their flaws can play out. As C S Lewis wrote, “To be greatly and effectively wicked a man needs some virtue. What would Attila have been without his courage, or Shylock without self-denial as regards the flesh?” So give your character some redeeming qualities. Give her intelligence or compassion or a sincere and earnest desire to do good; make her witty or hard-working or good at people; make her brave or thoughtful.

Some virtues I think are particularly worth considering due to the interesting plot points they open up:

• Self-awareness. Most people who make bad decisions don’t know their decisions are bad. But scenes where the character goes “I recognize that this is a stupid decision and it is going to bite me in the ass” and then makes the decision anyway can be really interesting. Self-awareness can also allow the protagonist to explain why their decision is bad, which may be helpful for novice writers and increase the didactic potential of the story.
• A commitment to self-improvement. In irrationalfic, you basically don’t get a happy ending without this trait; I’ll talk about that more later in the post.
• Goals and agency. ‘Drifting through life without any particular intentions or plans’ is a perfectly cromulent flaw, but characters with goals make writing a lot easier. They spontaneously generate their own plots, whereas the other sort of character has to be forcibly dragged into a plot kicking and screaming. And there’s something particularly fun about watching a character destroy all the things they love and cherish because of their own poor coping mechanisms.
• Being a better person than she thinks she is. It’s true this is only on the list because it is one of my favorite tropes. But it is a really good trope! The character might identify as being selfish or cruel or mean, or she might share her society’s prejudices and flaws. But then she encounters a suffering person, or befriends someone from the oppressed group, or faces a problem that professionalism demands she solve… and suddenly, without really knowing what she’s doing, she finds herself rescuing slaves or hiding Jews from the Nazis or fighting the Big Bad. Maybe she thinks the good thing she’s doing is actually evil, maybe she’s baffled at her self-sacrifice for a cause, maybe she keeps thinking she’s going to quit but she never does. Anyway. It’s a good trope. There should be more of it.

Irrationalfic protagonists cause many of their own problems. How much this is the case depends on the irrationalfic in question. For some stories, the primary conflict is external, but the protagonist makes their situation worse. For other stories, literally the entire story would be over in two pages if not for the protagonist constantly fucking things up all the time.

Regardless, the character’s flaws must fuck them over. None of this shit where a character is an alcoholic but as soon as the plot starts they mysteriously never take a drink. If a character is an alcoholic, they should be drunk during an important fight scene, and it means their aim is wildly off and they end up hitting a little girl instead of the person who took her hostage.

Think about the most obvious and boring ways that a character’s flaws would create problems for her. If she makes cutting, snarky remarks that make the reader laugh, her victims probably shouldn’t also laugh– a lot of the time, they should hate her. If she is chronically sleep-deprived because she superheroes at night and goes to school during the day, she should make bad impulsive decisions and fail to think through the implications of her actions. If she skips important meetings, decisions she doesn’t like should happen at those meetings.

If irrationalfic protagonists grow, it takes work. If you have an epiphany that causes your character to realize that they’ve made some horrible mistake, it should take place in chapter three, and the rest of the book should be devoted to the slow and switchbacky process of putting that epiphany into action. Ignored epiphanies [cw: tvtropes] are also allowed. But the point is that in irrationalfic it never ever ever happens that a character has a sudden epiphany and it completely changes everything about their lives forever. I don’t want to say that sudden epiphanies never happen in real life but they’re definitely overrepresented in fiction and irrationalfic should push back against that.

A character in irrationalfic may decide that they’re going to stop being irrational. If they do, they might start off with a burst of good intentions and then a month later fall back into old patterns. They might give into temptation at exactly the wrong moment. They might half-change. They might start doing the new thing and halfway through just… stop. They might trick themselves into believing they’ve changed when they haven’t. They might have to come up with strategies to get around their own irrationality: a Facebook blocker, the Pomodoro method, bribing themselves with chocolate, locking away a tempting object and giving someone else the key, avoiding people who make them angry, taking deep breaths and counting to ten. They might try strategies and they don’t work. They might take medication or go to therapy. Regardless, it will take a lot of work and they will spend a lot of time aware of their flaws, trying to improve on their flaws, and being flawed anyway.

Irrationalfic pays close attention to character. You may notice the first five points in my irrationalfic manifesto happen to do with what the protagonists are like. My irrationalfic definition is different from rationalfic definitions, which typically include non-character things such as thoughtful worldbuilding and the fact that the plots can be resolved through intelligent decision-making. This is not an accident.

Irrationalfic, as a genre, is marked by its concern for character. In Orson Scott Card’s MICE system, they’re character stories: they’re concerned with who the character is, what she does, and why she does it. That is not to say that there can’t be world-spanning plot events or rich and detailed societies, but ultimately an irrationalfic is about people.

For this reason, I’ve found romance is a particularly good genre for irrationalfic, since romance focuses intensely on specific characters and the ways they interact with each other, and the conflict in romance often springs from the characters’ personalities rather than from some external force.

Unreliable narrators. In general, when you’re writing an irrationalfic, your viewpoint character should not be 100% reliable. She might misremember a scene that happened earlier in the story. She might incorrectly report what other characters’ feelings are. She might describe herself in a way that contradicts her own behavior. She might mention offhandedly as part of a list of six things something that the reader recognizes as extremely important. She might report the incorrect beliefs of her society as if they are actually true. Using an unreliable narrator requires a certain level of trust in the reader’s ability to realize that the narrator is not a completely accurate and objective reporter of events, but I think making the reader do that interpretive labor adds a lot to their experience.

Dramatic irony. Dramatic irony goes along with unreliable narrators, but can also come from other sources. If you have a character who is not particularly self-aware– as most irrationalfic characters are not– there’s a lot of opportunity for the audience to know something the characters don’t.

Every character’s actions make sense to that character. Expanding our focus beyond the protagonist, how do other characters in irrationalfic behave? Ideally, every character should be treated like the protagonist: they should have virtues, behave in a way that makes sense, and be someone the audience can understand and sympathize with, but they should have flaws that cause them to hurt themselves or others.

It is particularly important to pay attention to antagonists. Many stories will not have an antagonist: the protagonist is the cause of all their own problems, or the conflict is with some sympathetic person, such as a love interest. If you choose to have a villain, the villain should be characterized as carefully as the protagonist. In particular, since people don’t usually forget to give their villains huge flaws, it’s important to make sure that your villain is sympathetic and has redeeming qualities and that the audience can understand her point of view and why she’s making the mistakes she’s making. Give her the opportunity to speak for herself.

Irrationalfic characters have unhappy or ambiguous endings or earn their happy ending. This isn’t going to be true 100% of the time: sometimes, the most satisfying way for a story to work out is that the character gets the thing that they want, even though they do not deserve it at all. But if that happens in more than, say, one in twenty of your irrationalfic stories, I’d take it as a red flag that you should be meaner to your characters.

If the character is exactly as flawed at the end of the book as at the beginning of the book, then you have two options. You can write an all-out tragedy where their fatal flaws destroy them. (More books should be tragedies. I bet it would do great things for the prevalence of the just-world hypothesis.) But you can also write a story with an ambiguous ending: they get some of the things they want, but not all of them; they get the things they want, but at a high cost; they don’t get what they want, but they get something else that’s also okay; everything is terrible, but at least they’re alive, which was not a given at the climax.

If a character works hard on the process of personal growth and overcoming their flaws (even if they’re still imperfect), then they can earn a happy ending. However, you should strongly consider the possibility that the character should not earn their happy ending: even after a lot of hard work, the mistakes they made early in the story were large enough that they realistically should wind up with a tragic or ambiguous ending.

Careful attention to irrationality. Irrationalfic is, fundamentally, about human irrationality— about the ways that people come to have false beliefs or take actions that don’t advance their goals. Therefore, writing irrationalfic requires paying a lot of careful attention to the exact details of how irrationality works. The thought process must be plausible, the way that people making a particular mistake actually think. And a significant chunk of the story must be devoted to exploring the ways that characters are irrational, why they are irrational, and the consequences of their own irrationality. This point is the core of irrationalfic. If you have nothing else, but you have this, you have written an irrationalfic.

What are some good examples of irrationalfic? (My own writing is, sadly, too often unedited for me to in good conscience call it ‘good.’) Many tragedies are irrationalfic; so are many comedies. Many of the best characters in Amentumblr, such as healthesick and tidalwave-shiningsky, were excellent irrationalfic characters. A Song of Ice and Fire has some lovely irrationalfic moments, such as the death of Ned Stark and the fact that almost every character is ignoring the literal zombie apocalypse while they fight over who gets to sit on the Iron Throne. Amends by Eve Tushnet, a novel about an alcoholism treatment reality show, is a good earthfic example full of richly observed (and funny!) detail about alcoholics. I haven’t watched it personally, but from what I’ve read It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia is a good example. Do other people have good examples?

Some Representation Is Better Than None

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans, writing

There’s a bit of a perverse-incentives problem in writing about marginalized groups.

If you write a marginalized character, people are going to criticize you for writing it offensively. This is true whether or not the way you wrote the character is actually offensive, because there is at least one person who thinks any possible depiction of a marginalized character is offensive. You write a nonbinary trans character, someone is going to write a passionate Tumblr post about how you’re catering to the genderspecials. You write the most transmedicalist-approved depressed and dysphoric trans character you can imagine, someone is going to complain about how you’re depicting transness as endless misery. You write a trans character who’s happy and okay with their body, and someone will complain that the character isn’t really even trans if they aren’t dysphoric. If you’re popular enough, it’s going to happen.

What’s worse, some of those criticisms will be right! It is difficult to accurately depict the way dysphoria affects trans people without showing our lives as unremitting sadness and self-hatred, and many writers will err too far on one end or another. Even the most well-meaning person can reproduce transphobic tropes, and even if you get a trans person to be a sensitivity reader sometimes they won’t catch it.

On the other hand, if you don’t write a marginalized character, no one is going to complain. There should be more trans characters in general, but (except in certain unusual circumstances, such as a book that takes place at Stonewall) there’s no reason to believe any specific book should have a trans character. No one is going to write “actually, the Dresden Files should totally have had a trans character in it,” and they’re definitely not going to repeat this for every single book series that happens to not have a trans character in it.

So I see a lot of young writers who are concerned about giving offense just not writing marginalized characters at all. And that’s really bad, because most of the time, an imperfectly written marginalized character is much better than no marginalized character at all.

I don’t mean to say that it’s impossible to write a marginalized character that is worse than no marginalized character at all. For example, you could write Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. (Transmisogyny at the link, and in the rest of this paragraph.) The world would be a better place if the authors of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective had not written a story with a transgender character in it. If you are writing a comedy in which one of the punchlines is a trans woman being sexually assaulted until the protagonist reveals that she has a penis, at which point there is an extended vomiting sequence because of how disgusting it is to have kissed a trans woman, and this is all played for laughs at the trans woman’s expense, I ask you on behalf of trans people everywhere not to write any more trans characters.

If, however, you would not do any of that, because that’s horrible, then you should write trans characters. Even though you’re going to mess up!

By contrast, consider Wanda from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Wanda is, in some ways, a problematically written character. About half her characteristics boil down to “Wanda is trans and faces transphobia.” Her birth surname is literally Mann. She cannot participate in a moon ritual because the universe itself limits certain rituals to people who menstruate. She dies tragically.

But would it be better if she didn’t exist?

Wanda is, after all, a sympathetically written character. She gets to call out the forces of magic itself for not thinking she’s a woman, and the narrative is pretty much on her side. Misgendering trans people is unambiguously depicted as wrong, and the fact that the wrong name is on her tombstone is shown to be a tragedy. She has interests and traits unrelated to being trans. Her body is not shown to be repulsive.

And… as far as I’m aware, Wanda was the first trans female character in a comic published by DC or Marvel. If Neil Gaiman had been like “hm, I guess I don’t know how to write trans people, I should make Wanda cis,” it would not have summoned an unproblematically written character out of the ether. Trans people would continue to not exist in mainstream comics, and once they did exist, they might be written by one of those people who thinks vomiting after you touch a trans person is the height of humor.

I am confident that Wanda made some cis people empathize with trans people who would never have empathized with them otherwise. And I’m sure I’m not the only trans person for whom Sandman was one of the first places we learned trans people even existed.

Of course, you should always try to improve your writing, and working on not perpetuating oppressive ideas is part of that. But the hurdle to clear before writing a marginalized character is better than not writing one is very low. You have to avoid making any particularly glaring factual inaccuracies. You have to not do the vomit thing. Most of all, you have to depict the character as a person, with thoughts and feelings and dreams and fears, someone whom the audience can empathize with (even if they’re a villain). If you do that, it’s okay to screw up on something more complicated. You’re still making life better for marginalized people.

Why Is Harry Potter So Popular?

Tags

fandom, harry potter

[This post was requested by b, who wanted me to write about the enduring popularity of Harry Potter. If you back me on Patreon for $5 or more a month, you too may be randomly selected to tell me what to write.]

Because something had to be.

This paper is one I find absolutely fascinating. The authors created an artificial music market: participants could listen to an unknown song by an unknown band, rate it from one to five stars, and optionally download it. The fourteen thousand (!) participants were divided into two groups, one of which could see how often the song had been downloaded by other participants, and one of which could not. The first group was further divided into eight “worlds”: participants could only see the downloads from their own world.

The results are perhaps not surprising. In the social influence condition, there was more inequality in which songs were downloaded: the songs that were most popular tended to stay popular. (The effect was larger when the songs were ranked in order of how popular they are.) The social influence condition also caused more unpredictability: the distinct “worlds” were far more different from each other than randomly selected groups of participants from the independent condition were. Assuming that rank in the independent condition is an accurate measure of quality, then success in each of the worlds is positively correlated with quality, the best songs rarely do very poorly, and the worst songs rarely do very well. But it was quite common for an objectively mediocre song to shoot to the top of the charts, perhaps because an early participant happened to like it, and this snowballed.

Of course, in the real world, social influence is a far stronger force than it is in this study. You could pretty easily listen to all 48 songs in the study, and no doubt many people did, but it is impossible to read every book published in the course of a year. In fact, most of the ways we choose books to read– other than, of course, serendipitously stumbling across an excellent book in a bookstore or library– depend on social influence: recommendations from friends, book reviews, awards, bestseller lists.

Quality is an explanation of why a book has an ordinary amount of popularity: for instance, the popularity of George R R Martin’s Sandkings is no doubt because it is a wonderfully chilling horror novelette. (Seriously, check it out.) But I don’t think he improved that much as a writer between Armageddon Rag (which was an utter commercial disaster) and A Feast for Crows (his first bestselling novel). And it is certainly not because of any virtue of Martin’s that A Song of Ice and Fire got adapted into an HBO show while, say, the Lilith’s Brood series did not.

(I am so mad at HBO. When I was in high school, I quit reading ASOIAF until it was done, because I didn’t want to reread four thousand-page books every half-decade when the books came out so I could remind myself who the fuck the characters were. “All I have to do is avoid Martin fansites until the series is over,” I said to myself. “It’s not like it’s going to be turned into a wildly popular TV show and I will have to excuse myself from conversations at parties lest I have the ending spoiled.” Ha ha bloody fucking ha.)

(This is the TV show watchers’ revenge for all the gloating I did about the Red Wedding, isn’t it?)

Anyway, Harry Potter is not normal popular. It is stupidly, wildly, amazingly popular. It is a mistake to judge a children’s book by the same standards that you judge an adult’s book, but even as a children’s book Harry Potter is solidly good-but-not-great: I would put it roughly in the same class as A Series of Unfortunate Events or Animorphs, not as good as the Time Quintet. And yet there is only one of these book series where, despite not having reread the books since high school, I am familiar with the names of two dozen minor characters. (Marcus Flint, Lavender Brown, Terry Boot, Blaise Zambini…) Normal popularity is easily explicable by quality. Stupid, wild, amazing popularity is due to luck.

I am not sure what particular set of events caused Harry Potter to become more popular than A Series of Unfortunate Events, or if it was simply a lot of people’s individual decision to recommend this particular book. But it is easy to answer the question of why they’re so popular now, which is because they have been popular in the past, and therefore there exist many people who want to recommend the series to others and read it to their children, and even those who haven’t read the series know whether they’re a Gryffindor or a Ravenclaw.

On Romance Novels

Tags

idk what to tag this you guys, ozy blog post

It always makes me cringe when people say romance novels are porn. I mean, some romance novels are, in fact, porn. There is a wide range from “paper-thin plot wrapped around scenes of genitals being combined with other body parts in a variety of inventive fashions” to “the characters kiss a shocking three times.” But the latter category exists, and it is not because women as a whole get off on chaste confessions of love.

In my opinion, the purpose of a romance novel qua romance novel is to elicit in the reader the emotion of new relationship energy (or NRE, because I hate typing), in much the same way that porn elicits in the reader the emotion of sexual arousal. Naturally, these go together quite well (as do sexual arousal and NRE in real life). But they are separable and often separated.

A romance novel plotline goes through the entire process of new relationship energy: meeting someone; discovering their good qualities; wondering if they’re into you; finally having them commit to you. However, romance novels heighten the NRE by including lots of ludicrous things that do not generally happen in real life, e.g. billionaire cowboys, secret babies, conversions of troubled atheists by the power of your steadfast love and wholesome beauty. (This is, of course, similar to porn: real life contains extremely few reverse gangbangs consisting solely of conventionally attractive nineteen-year-olds.)

Romance novels also offer a sense of safety. You know that– no matter how dark the climax seems– the heroine and the hero are going to get together. Real-life NRE is full of uncertainty: sadly, many people fail to recognize your many charms, and those that do sometimes turn out, upon reflection, to be mean or boring or prone to cutting off people’s heads and storing them in the basement. However, a happily ever after is a genre convention of romance novels; if there’s no happily ever after, it’s not– by the Romance Writers of America definition– a romance. (Yes, this does mean that Romeo and Juliet is not, technically speaking, a romance.) You know that the hero’s commitmentphobia will turn out to be a misunderstanding, his gruffness will turn out to be caused by his dark and troubled past, and the fact that he doesn’t seem to be into the heroine will turn out to be because she smells so good that he’s constantly on edge trying not to suck all her blood. The sense of safety means that a lot of things that are wildly unpleasant in real life– such as being rejected– instead enjoyably heighten the suspense.

One thing which puzzles me very much about romance novels is that there doesn’t seem to be a version with men as the target audience. After all, there is a version of porn with women as the target audience (page 98-101 of the romance novel, or chapter three of the fanfic). I understand that there is significant stigma around men consuming romantic media, but capitalism is really good at the thing it does. Why hasn’t capitalism produced a genre of romances festooned with enough dead bodies and half-naked women that men can feel comfortable consuming it without it impugning their masculinity?

(Okay, the movie Deadpool. But why aren’t there, like, five hundred thousand versions of the movie Deadpool?)

Perhaps men as a group do not desire to read romance novels? I’ve seen people express this belief but I think it’s incorrect. First of all, men do experience NRE and find it quite enjoyable, so presumably men would also enjoy simulated NRE. Second of all, I know lots of men who claimed not to be interested in romances, but became passionately invested in them once they found the right sort of romance. For instance, they might have believed that they didn’t like romance because they think romantic comedies are kind of boring and stupid, but show them Hermione/Luna fanfiction and suddenly they’re awake at four AM going “but I HAVE to see how this fake marriage fic is going to turn out!”

Of course, this makes perfect sense. People find that different things trigger their simulated NRE. Continuing the porn analogy: if you’re vanilla and the only kind of porn you were ever exposed to was Kink.com, you’d probably think porn was repulsive and mean and maybe you’d say you don’t like porn at all. But that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t enjoy the hell out of loving, affectionate lesbian porn. I myself find that the average romance novel leaves me cold: the heroes are often a hypermasculine alpha male archetype that I find approximately as sexy as a potted plant, and I sometimes feel too much of an urge to slip the heroine a domestic-violence hotline number to be really invested in the relationship. Fortunately, I have also read Pride and Prejudice, which stars Darcy The Socially Awkward Penguin, and (on a less highbrow note) a truly mind-boggling number of fanfics starring shy coffeeshop employees who can’t confess their feelings to each other.

In conclusion: men, if you think you don’t like romance, consider the possibility that you have been reading the wrong romance, and maybe you’d enjoy the hell out of the movie Deadpool or Jane Austen or A Civil Campaign or something.

(If you do like A Civil Campaign, it’s a pastiche of Georgette Heyer IN SPAAAAACE, so you would probably like her books too.)

Epistemic Closure Reading Challenge

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

Based on the challenge not to read books by white men…

Since the election, I’ve noticed a lot of people who are worried about epistemic closure– the tendency of people to be part of a self-reinforcing system of beliefs, an echo chamber in which empirical facts that go against your ideology cannot enter. I share this concern. Unfortunately, the commonly suggested solution to epistemic closure appears to be friending people you disagree with on Facebook, which seems to me to have the failure mode where you’re still getting all your information about the world from Facebook. So I propose a challenge. For three months, only read books by people you disagree with ideologically.

I’m planning on taking the challenge myself, and I’m also throwing this out there to see if anyone else is interested. If people are, I will start biweekly open threads where we talk about what we’re reading.

Here are some Questions I Predict Will Be Frequently Asked. I will update this list as more questions become Frequently Asked:

What positions count as disagreeing?

Fundamentally, “disagreeing” means disagreeing on any fundamental ideological issue. For instance, disagreements on religion count: if you’re an atheist, you might read books by sincerely religious people, while if you’re a Muslim, you might read books by atheists, Christians, pagans, or people who subscribe to a different branch of Islam. Political disagreements also count. I mean more than “votes for Democrats”/”votes for Republicans” here: if you’re a centrist Democrat, reading books by Communists and anarchists would count; if you’re a transfeminist, reading books by trans-exclusive radical feminists would count, even though you’re both feminists.

You might also read authors that disagree with you on other issues that are really important to you. For instance, if you write for Science-Based Medicine, then reading books by homeopaths would count. If you’re paleo, reading books about low-fat diets would count. If you’re very strongly anti-postmodernist, reading Lacan would count. If you practice positive discipline, reading books by pro-spanking authors would count. If you are a regular participant in programming holy wars, reading a book by an advocate of Insert Your Least Favorite Programming Language Here would count.

While it is possible to rationalize your way into “well, this person disagrees with me on whether the word ‘bisexual’ is biphobic!” counting, please note that engaging in Judean People’s Front/People’s Front of Judea nonsense goes against the point of the exercise.

What books count as disagreeing?

There’s a lot of gray areas here. One clearcut rule is that anything where you disagree with the thesis counts: if you’re an atheist, you can definitely read a creationist book or an inspirational romance in which an atheist finds God through the power of love.

On the other hand, books where the disagreement is obviously totally irrelevant to the topic of the book are sort of missing the spirit of the exercise. You can’t read a pro-evolution book or a novel about deconversion by someone who uses Insert Your Least Favorite Programming Language Here and then claim you’re exploring the viewpoints of people who disagree with you.

That said, a lot of books fall into a gray area. How should an atheist taking the challenge treat a pro-evolution book by a theistic evolutionist or a gay inspirational romance in which the hero finds God in an affirming church? I would suggest using your best judgment while reminding yourself that only reading books you agree with is sort of missing the point of the challenge.

In particular, in fiction there’s a lot of gray area, because most books do reflect the worldview of their authors in a more-or-less subtle fashion. Again, it’s hard to put down hard-and-fast rules, but just use your best judgment and remember that the only person you’re cheating is yourself.

A complete exception to the challenge: any books that provide practical knowledge of direct relevance to your job or hobby, or that you have to read for religious/spiritual purposes. If you want to learn how to bake a pie, to speak French, to knit a sock, or to use a new programming language that’s relevant to your job, I’m not going to make you go find a pie-baking book that’s written by a faithful Catholic. And I’m not going to go around telling people to do things that go against their religion, either.

Why are you including fiction?

Fiction often reflects the authors’ beliefs and worldviews. For instance, Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series emphasizes the wonder of science, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld reflects a humanist sensibility, and Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive is deontologist as fuck. Fiction can help you understand not just the facts of an ideology but why it emotionally resonates with people– and maybe you’ll emotionally resonate with it too.

In addition, fiction builds empathy. By putting yourself in the shoes of other people, you can understand what it’s like to be them better. People you disagree with are likely to have a different set of people they understand and empathize with, and thus you will get practice putting yourself into a different set of shoes.

I’m an atheist libertarian and my three favorite authors are Eric Flint, Orson Scott Card, and C S Lewis, are you saying I can take this challenge and just read my favorite authors for three months?

Yep! If you already read a lot of books by people you disagree with, this challenge will be super-easy for you! Good job on avoiding epistemic closure! I still encourage you to branch out from your current favorite authors– diversity in reading is a good thing.

Can I combine this challenge with other challenges?

Be my guest. If you want to spend three months only reading books by creationist women of color, I wish you luck.

What if I just spend the entire time hate-reading authors because they’re stupid?

I encourage you to read books by people you can respect and who can enlighten you about what other people think, but I cannot actually stop you from spending three months reading books by people who enrage you. However, this behavior seems self-punishing.

Against Gwern On Stories

Tags

fandom, ozy blog post

A while back, Gwern wrote an interesting essay arguing against the reading of new fiction. Since there are innumerably more books than any person could reasonably consume, there’s no reason to read fiction that hasn’t been filtered for quality by time. Reading just the Hugo and Nebula award winners in science fiction could take years; why waste time on other books that are probably significantly less good?

However, I think his argument fails to take account of two benefits of reading new fiction.

First, fandom. The experience of being in Harry Potter fandom around the Goblet of Fire/Order of the Phoenix era is indescribable, and permanently addicted me to fandom as a form of consumption. The rampant speculation about every aspect of the book! Ron/Hermione versus Harry/Hermione! The reams and reams of Year Five fic! The frantic attempts to finish your Year Five fic before Order of the Phoenix came out and turned it AU! Knight to fucking King! God, remember when Mugglenet put out a book before Deathly Hallows came out about their predictions of what would happen in Deathly Hallows? They gave Dobby 100:1 odds of surviving and to this day I wonder if Dobby’s death was solely to spite Mugglenet.

Now, obviously, most fandoms are not quite as… uh, big… as Harry Potter fandom. But it remains true that– with a few exceptions, such as Good Omens and Lord of the Rings– fandoms mostly happen to book series that are coming out right now. If you are reading the 1966 Hugo winner for best novel, it is very unlikely you will get to meet a whole bunch of other people willing to talk to you about how great it is. And you don’t get to play the intellectual game of speculating what is going to happen with a book series that has already been published; either the question has already been resolved, in which case few people are interested in arguing with you about it, or the question will never be resolved, in which case you do not get the glory or shame of having totally called it or completely missed it.

Second, his argument neglects the fact that things change. Consider language. For me at least, most books published before about 1900 are not useful junk-food/leisure reading, because of the amount of effort I have to put into understanding the prose; Elizabethan-era works may be utterly incomprehensible without footnotes. (Interestingly, this suggests that junk-food books have a much faster turnover than classic works of Literachur, as you have to put effort into understanding Literachur anyway, and that ‘read old books, avoid new ones’ is a much better strategy for the latter.)

Similarly, technology changes. If I am reading a book set in the present day, it will be extremely weird to me if none of the characters have cell phones– and even weirder if they’re talking about how they can’t get on the computer when their mom is using the phone. Again, this doesn’t apply to all fiction: historical fiction, science fiction, and other-world fantasy fiction survive unscathed, as does any present-day fiction that can seamlessly transition into being a period piece. But nevertheless I feel like I would sacrifice some quality in order to get to occasionally read books in which people use Facebook.

More importantly, values change. Of course, values dissonance can be valuable– it gives you insight into what people believed in other times, and makes visible the historical contingency of your own values. But again that isn’t necessarily what people want out of their leisure reading: sometimes I don’t want to be improved, I just want to see things go boom and clever people be clever. I do not want my things going boom to be interrupted by comments about how the place of women is in the home or villains being stereotypically greedy Jews or conniving Asians. That is likely to annoy me, throw me out of the book, and generally make my reading experience less pleasant.

Furthermore, I would like many of the clever people I read about to be women, LGBT people, or ideally lesbians. Only in modern books can I both read about lesbians and not have to put up with tedious long lectures about how Accepting Lesbians Is Morally Right and Love Is Love and Lesbians Are Just Like Us. (I mean, have you read the Last Herald Mage series? Historically important, I know, but Jesus Christ yes I get it gay people aren’t pedophiles move on with the plot.) And God forbid if I want a trans character: we’re still not in the stage where trans characters can just be people. Similarly, while of course many older books have excellent roles for female characters, if I pick up a random book in the twenty-first century it’s much more likely to pass the Bechdel Test. As a person who was female for nearly half my life, it is a bit annoying to only read books that are sausage fests.

On Taste

Tags

behold an art, ozy blog post, writing

We can distinguish, I think, between the aesthetic pleasures that people can appreciate immediately and the aesthetic pleasures that must be developed. For instance, anyone can tell that a picture is of an attractive naked woman with large breasts; however, it takes effort to appreciate the subtle interplay of light across her cleavage. The latter is called ‘taste.’

Having taste tends to make you dislike popular things and to dislike more things. This is, I think, because taste does not so much change the things you care about as give you more things to care about. A reader who doesn’t have particularly good taste in literature wants a protagonist who’s engaging, a plot that keeps them reading, and an absence of grammatical errors so glaring that it throws them out of the story. A reader who has good taste, conversely, wants all that and a world that feels so real you could step out into it, a thematic argument that coheres, a plot that continues to hold up a week later, psychological realism, and prose that sings. The former reader is perfectly satisfied with the Da Vinci Code; the latter spends the entire time going “OPUS DEI DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY.”

A lot of things that people with taste like are just completely inaccessible to people without taste. I think this happens for two reasons. First, sometimes you have to put in effort to learn how to appreciate things. My understanding is that in filmmaking there is something called “cinematography”, which possibly has to do with camera angles and things, and which is the reason that Hannibal is so trippy and the fight scenes in Mad Max Fury Road make more sense than those in other action movies. There are certain directors the cinematography of whom various people I know are excited about. I have absolutely no idea what they’re so excited about, because I don’t have taste in cinematography, but I’m glad they like it.

Second, when you appreciate a lot of different things, books can be good in different ways. For instance, you might read a book with absolutely gorgeous, lush worldbuilding and prose that is kind of lacking on the plot front. Since you appreciate more things about the book, you can enjoy it. Conversely, the reader who just wants an interesting plot is like “nothing happened in this book! 0/10.”

Unfortunately, a lot of people have decided to pretend that they have taste when they actually don’t. Perhaps this is because taste is a Veblen good, a way of showing off that you have enough free time to listen to all of Bauhaus and enough intelligence to understand what they’re going for. Some areas people try to cultivate taste in are just fake: for instance, even experts can’t reliably tell apart good wine from bad. This is of concern for any aspiring connoisseur. How do you know if you actually are learning more about poetry, or if you are just deluding yourself?

If you’re interested in not deceiving yourself about whether you have taste, I’d recommend running an occasional blind taste test (pun completely intended). Ask a friend to pick an unfamiliar song by a popular and widely disliked band, and an unfamiliar song by a band you like and think is generally good. If you don’t consistently pick the liked band, then you are probably engaged in self-delusion.

In my opinion, it is a good idea not to develop taste in anything where developing taste will cost you more money. For instance, I would strongly advise against developing taste in chocolate. You will no longer be able to appreciate the two-dollar chocolate bars at your local convenience store! You will find yourself dropping two hundred dollars at the Godiva store and thinking to yourself ‘wow, this is really a bargain’!

Conversely, there is no cost in developing a taste in literature. The Warrior’s Apprentice costs exactly as much as Storm Front, it’s just that one of those books is not written by a hack. Indeed, my understanding is that developing a taste in music may even save you money, because instead of spending a couple hundred dollars on the Fall Out Boy concert you’re spending twenty bucks to see some obscure hipster with an acoustic guitar.

You should absolutely not develop taste about anything that is necessary for your life. Personally, I require three to four cups of tea daily to remain a coherent and functional person. Quite by accident, I developed a significant enough amount of taste that I am repulsed by drinking Lipton tea, which I wind up drinking anyway when I am (for instance) on vacation and away from a steady tea supply. If I had better taste in tea, I would be equally grumpy when I had to drink Celestial Seasonings and I’d be unhappy any time I was in a restaurant.

There are some kinds of experiences where developing taste ruins the experience. For instance, I am a big fan of modern, non-representational art. I appreciate it on an instinctive, gut level: it makes me grin and wiggle and bounce up and down and flap my hands. I understand that many of the artists are attempting to question the nature of art and so on, but I see no reason to develop taste in this matter. I fear that developing an understanding of what Rothko means for painting would interfere with my instinctive delight in the big yellow-and-red square. I suspect that taste tends to be higher, more intellectual, more rarefied, and thus might interfere with pleasures that are childlike or animal.

Sergeant Bothari and Severus Snape

Tags

ethics, god bothering, harry potter, lois mcmaster bujold, ozy blog post

[content warning: rape]
[spoiler warning: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar]

I have recently read or, rather, inhaled the Vorkosigan Saga. The character of Sergeant Bothari is similar to Severus Snape

Bothari is, in many ways, a terrible person. He has raped multiple people, tortured many more, and murdered still more. He delusionally believes that he is married to a female prisoner of war and repeatedly rapes her.

Snape, similarly, is not a good man. One need only consider his nigh-abusive treatment of Neville Longbottom– a child whose parents were literally tortured into insanity, but whose biggest fear is Snape. He seeks petty revenge on Remus Lupin for a prank decades earlier that wasn’t actually his fault, getting Lupin fired from his job; his actions lead to increased stigma against werewolves which causes discriminatory legislation to be passed that, among other things, prevents them from finding jobs.

Both Bothari and Snape are sympathetic as well. Snape has an abusive childhood and is bullied horribly in school. His passion for Lily, a woman who never returned his affections, is put in a different light when you realize it’s very possible Lily was the first person who was ever nice to him.

Bothari is schizophrenic and undermedicated. Although stable and functional when in the service of the Vorkosigans, his mental health falls apart when he works for the sadistic torturers and rapists Ges Vorrutyer and Prince Serg (the latter of whom is so awful his father the emperor engineers a war to get him killed). Bothari is as much a victim of sexual violence as a perpetrator: he did not exactly get a whole lot of choice in whether he would commit the rapes he was ordered to commit.

The thing that interests me about both Bothari and Snape is their moment of redemption. They are horrible people, violent and pointlessly cruel.

But both of them have a little bit of light. Not a whole lot of light, mind you. One tiny, gleaming virtue that has managed to survive the muck of their lives. For Bothari, it is his perverse loyalty to Aral Vorkosigan; when ordered to rape Cordelia by Vorrutyer, he recognizes that she belongs to Aral Vorkosigan, refuses, and kills Vorrutyer instead. For Snape, it is his love for Lily; he spies on the Dark Lord himself, one of the world’s greatest telepaths, risking torture or worse, in honor of her memory.

I don’t mean to say that either of those are particularly good motivations. I don’t think that women belong to men who have asked to marry them, and I think it is probably wise to get over people when they reject you instead of devoting the rest of your life to honoring them. But I think it’s a lot to ask someone who’s generally sort of evil to have a completely decent moral system. And the core of their morality is good: honor, love.

Neither Bothari nor Snape becomes a good person afterward, which is remarkably realistic. People who make a habit of being kind of evil will no doubt continue to be kind of evil. Both Bothari’s rapes that he wasn’t coerced into and Snape’s bullying of children and attacking of Remus Lupin happen after their moment of redemption. Bothari, once medicated and in a more stable environment, becomes something approaching a good person; Snape, perhaps because Albus Dumbledore is a lot less awesome than Cordelia Vorkosigan, never does.

It is something I can only call grace. A person can wind up trapped in the muck, hurting others and hurt themselves; it seems as though everything good inside them has been crushed, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a redeeming feature. And then something happens to tug on that one little bit of good left in their soul, a bit they maybe don’t even remember they have themselves, and… they are heroes. And it doesn’t fix anything, they’re still the same people they were before, they still hurt people, but they do this one astonishing piece of good that perhaps even they didn’t realize they were capable of. I like stories about that. It gives me hope. No matter how trapped you are in hell, you can still have the moment of heaven.

On Literary Criticism

Tags

ozy blog post, rage against the academy, writing

I think a lot of people are fundamentally confused about what literary criticism is.

Some literary criticism is like TVTropes [content warning: will eat your entire afternoon]. TVTropes is trying to understand how stories work. Its strategy is to catalog all the recurring things that happen in stories, from Asian characters wearing conical straw hats to characters in love sharing an umbrella to a love triangle being resolved by the protagonist marrying both of them. Some literary criticism is intended to do a similar thing: for instance, Freytag’s pyramid, which you were probably taught about in elementary school, attempts to explain how most stories are structured. This is useful for writers: if your plot isn’t working and you don’t know what a ‘climax’ is, learning that stories are generally more interesting if they have a point of great tension can help you write better stories.

However, a lot of literary criticism– perhaps most– is not doing that, and if you think it does you will wind up very confused.

Consider Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men, a classic work of queer theory, which argues that much of nineteenth-century literature can be understood as being about homosocial desire and love, often reflected through both men’s putative desire for a female intermediary. If one assumes that the thesis of the book is something like “factually, a lot of nineteenth-century literature is about male-male bonding, and maybe if you put some male-male bonding in your book you should include a female intermediary they can both act like they’re in love with!”, one instantly falls into difficulties.

For instance, there’s the question beloved of high-school students everywhere, which is “did the author actually intend that?” Probably, one assumes, Dickens wasn’t thinking for even one second about the homophobia of empire while he was writing Edwin Drood. Of course, this isn’t a complete disproof: authors were writing rising and falling action for thousands of years before Freytag gave them names; presumably they were not intending to write rising and falling action. But it still feels intuitively that while climaxes, rising action, solving love triangles with polyamory, Asian characters wearing conical straw hats, and so on are all easily identifiable features of various books, the homophobia of empire is not, in fact, an easily identifiable feature of Edwin Drood. In fact, a reader would be perfectly justified to say that there was absolutely no homophobia of empire in Edwin Drood whatsoever.

Books are often assumed to be the product of their authors: the writer puts some words down on the page and the reader sees what they obviously mean and a story happens. The reader does not contribute much beyond basic literacy. But, in fact, the reader plays a huge role in the creative process. Some readers interpret Rorschach from Watchmen as a flawed yet admirable tragic hero who holds to his convictions even in the face of death; some readers interpret him as a Lawful Stupid sociopath who’s proof that moral absolutism cannot deal with the complexities of the real world. Some readers interpret Christian Grey as a sexy, kinky, masculine hero with a tragic past; some readers interpret him as an abuser grooming the naive and easily victimized Anastasia. Some readers interpret the violence against women in Game of Thrones as gratuitously signalling how edgy the writers are; others interpret it as a reflection of what women experience during war under patriarchy. The difference is what you bring to the story: your worldview, your preconceptions, the books you’ve read in the past, whether that one particular character happens to remind you of your horrible abusive ex-boyfriend.

Now, some people feel that their interpretations of texts are objectively correct: by God, Christian Grey really is an abuser, and if you disagree then you are wrong and probably an abuse apologist. But I’m not sure what the ‘real meaning’ of the text even means. If Christian Grey ‘really is’ an abuser, what predictions does that allow us to make? How is anything about the world different if Grey is an abuser, compared to if he isn’t? If the answer is (as seems likely) “nothing”, then it doesn’t really mean much to say that one meaning is objectively correct.

Some people care a lot about authorial intent: if the author intended Grey to be a kinky, sexy, masculine hero, then he is a kinky, sexy, masculine hero, and none of your abuse checklists have anything to say about it. This seems silly, though. Tommy Wiseau appears to interpret The Room as a serious drama; everyone else interprets it as a so-bad-it’s-good comedy. I don’t think that everyone who isn’t Tommy Wiseau is making a mistake.

The Eve Sedgwick kind of literary criticism, I think, is not empiricism: it’s not trying to make predictions about what features stories will have or what characteristics will make readers like stories or whatever. It’s art. It’s a very unusual kind of art that takes other art as its raw material. It’s the task of the reader– interpreting a text, creating a story out of black lines on a page– taken to its highest form. This kind of literary criticism is about making interpretations that are more interesting than most people’s, that make you go “oh! that’s clever!”, that enrich your own rereading of the text and make it more interesting than it previously was. Asking whether or not it’s ‘true’ is like asking whether or not a painting is ‘true’.

Between Men is not TVTropes. It’s not trying to be TVTropes. It’s meta. Does the text actually say that Steve and Bucky are dating? Not really. Does it improve my experience of Civil War to read thousand-word close readings about what exactly Bucky was thinking when he clenched his jaw muscle? You bet your ass.

Of course, this sort of literary criticism should be justified in the text. You cannot say “Hamlet is a Klingon!” without providing some sort of reason in the text of Hamlet for why he ought to be a Klingon– because “Hamlet is a Klingon” is not an interpretation anyone would normally make. You have to lead the reader to be able to see for themselves that Hamlet is a Klingon, to have “wow, this is really something a Klingon would say” wandering across their mind during random scenes– or, for that matter, to see that Steve and Bucky are dating, Tennyson is hella gay, and Edwin Drood involves the homophobia of empire.