KerryCoder
14871
319
14
Jul 19, 2026 4:26 AM
KerryCoder
14871
319
14
BluntForceLlama
#8 I would argue Grok has a verbally abusive parent.
SandpaperCock
Re: Whatever fucking number, "men can't write fiction for shit". Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Dune, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Blood Music, The Talisman, Neuromancer, Snowcrash, The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, The Wheel of Time, Mistborn, Will Save The Galaxy For Food (etc), Anathem, et cetera. Stop it with the blatant sexism and misandry thanks, that kinda shit isn't welcome and shouldn't be encouraged. Reposting it isn't funny and isn't helpful or conducive to anything. Hatred begets hatred.
DVSBSTrD
@OP #1 There is such a thing as an "idiot plot": A plot that can only proceed because everyone involved is an idiot. That's bad writing.
fastlaserjockey
#8 It doesn't transfer into comedic insight, but anyone who's ever met a programmer knows that any AI will have been birthed by the most abusive parents imaginable.
Just vicious, gas-lighting, emotionally abusive, self-hating monstrous abusers of their code.
**They would probably never treat people this way (most, some are jerks) but they absolutely hate their creations during the coding process for failures that are exclusively their own faults.
sms001
My first thought as well. gi,go.
JayDeeDubs
#10
JayDeeDubs
#1
astrangehop
And a full 360... iirc the game of thrones show writers got so mad at the Fandom predicting the next season that they'd kill or mutilate people at random or send important characters to pointless places.. which wasn't unrealistic, but it became narratively messy and unfun to intentionally zig when you'd been building to a zag for several books. Just to"beat" some message boards.
JayDeeDubs
And that's why the later seasons of Game of Thrones are increasingly shitty: narrative payoffs long in the making don't happen, just so the showrunners can try and throw a surprise twist at people.
gronzilla
#8 in some very tangible way, they get the worst of parents and it shows. But - for now - the parent force-feed them on the wide spectrum of opinions, so it will probably get worse
Rathan5
#8 not defending AI, but anyone who thinks computers don’t have verbally abusive parents has never seen anyone spend any amount of time writing code
gronzilla
that's not the abuse, nor the abusiveness
gronzilla
To get a real sense of abusive parenting of an LLM, just imagine being Grok and taking orders from the trillionaire edgelord himself
voxael
#8 Assuming you can substitute “owner” for “parent”, I can I say 100% of the computers I’ve owned and about 85% of the computers I’ve had to work on have definitely had a verbally abusive parent / owner
PresldentClef
I love these. I love these so much.
Snooj
#2 Hamlet was just fan fiction of Strange Brew.
UNHchabo
#31 If you have a pal who works in publishing, I'm pretty sure that's EXACTLY how getting your book published works.
Lun4ticH1gh
#13 Extremely amateur guitar player here. I hear riffs in my head at very inoppurtune times, like when my guitar and amp is several hours away cuz I'm at work. So I use the voice recorder app on my phone, and i'll hum it into my phone so that I can mash it out at home later. Might help some of you writers out there to whip out the note pad app, or voice recorder if you're in a hurry, and talk it out so you can write it out later.
TheDreadPirateBoberts
i've got a private discord that i keep a bunch of notes on, one channel of which is for writing notes.
cannot tell you how often i have opened that channel to say to myself, 'what the fuck does this mean. who wrote this random string of words.'
FormerlySable
I’m not a professional writer at all, but I do tend to write long, descriptive emails about my occasional travels. One semester in high school, an English teacher I had made us all carry little pocket notebooks and write descriptions of anything and everything we encountered. Mine ranged from explaining how various people on my bus sat in their seats daily to describing a jet in takeoff. I think it was a helpful exercise because friends & family tell me how much they like my travel stories.
qtRaven
#2
senatorbirdbrain
I'd argue that fanfic is not a genre but a pretty common launching pad for writing. There's no fundamental difference in process between someone writing their own Star Wars fanfic vs. JJ Abrams writing The Force Awakens, other than one got paid to do it.
cousteau
Did… did they just refer to protestantism as religious fanfic?
tidepool
All religions built upon Judaism as their foundation are just fanfics with a cool guy protagonist. So yeah, that checks.
sixhoursinacarwithmymotherinlaw
#2 since when does art need a purpose?
FeedTheNachoMan
#7 @JustAName00 THAT is where it becomes some kind of heretofore unnamed delicious monstrosity
HarperLee
#23 I don't know if it's a Farsi translation or just my wife, but she describes any technical/artistic work (baking, manicures, electrical, plumbing) as hand jobs. And no, I do not correct her
Mack1986
#1. Romeo and Juliet is a comedy and I won't hear otherwise
Detacheddavid
#31 Sounds like a Hallmark movie. Writer would also find love in an unexpected place.
DragonThunderUndertaking
#1 **Screams in LOTR Eagle**
stevestevensonthesteve
I don't think the LotR eagles argument actually fits that description. The eagles wouldn't work not because it would make the books boring, but because it actually would fail. It's a case of not understanding the logic of the world and not a case of the world's logic not making sense. Or the person is just trolling.
DragonThunderUndertaking
Let's assume it would work though. There goes the entire story. The story is the journey and if you take away the journey there is no story. It's kind of a blackhole that everything interesting falls into never to escape again.
stevestevensonthesteve
Well if you want to go there, then what if Elrond had successfully convinced Isildur to destroy the ring? Then the story wouldn't have even happened.
JayDeeDubs
Base841
#23 l submit "play BY myself" vs "play WITH myself" as something that baffled 4-year-old me while cracking my parents up.
inchoroi
I spend 1-2 hours a night after bed having idea after idea, and they won't leave me alone until I get up out of bed and write them down.
candythesquirrel
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I strongly dislike genres, as they turn art into commodity. You shouldn't choose a book like you're choosing icecream flavor. Writers should write whatever they enjoy writing, regardless of genre conventions.
thatlamer
#1 I had a similar (but different) thought about this the other day as well. I was reading through a manga, and there were a lot of comments angry about how certain characters were rude/untrusting towards the protagonist. People seem to forget or never learned how to grasp that as a reader we're simultaneously presented with perfect and imperfect information. We know the main character and what's in their hearts, because we can literally read their internal monologue. But, we may not always 1/2
thatlamer
3/2 anyway this really was an aside and not fully relevant, but I think it's still related because both are a matter of media literacy. If you're not media savvy, and just get sucked into the flow without having a broader understanding of our role as an audience and how writers write, it's easy to create unrealistic expectations and misunderstandings about a work of fiction.
thatlamer
get the full picture of how the world works. What goes into distrust, how people have been burned in the past, or how fields and cultures might shape how one interacts with others or how they guard certain bits of information. When you understand this, you have the blueprint for how to answer the question "why is this character acting this way?" 2/2
AsheLake
I'm not sure if this has an official name, but I want to call it "point-of-view bias."
Though it touches a little bit on "Theory of Mind," the understanding that different people have their separate knowledge and beliefs from one's self. I'm told this is developed in children roughly around 4-ish years old, but I'm not convinced most adults have really mastered the concept. There's even a bias, the "Curse of Knowledge," that seems to be a common deficiency in this skill.
3Davideo
#18 Not foolproof, though. You can have a situation like Larry Niven's Ringworld and state everything qualitatively ("it's a flat rigid ring that encircles a star and spins so it has gravity on its inner surface") and still people could figure out problems ("um actually that would be gravitationally unstable and without stationkeeping thrusters it would eventually crash into its sun").
Subtilico
But it had thrusters, maybe in reaction to this, but in 1 of the books the ring moving away bc they failed/got stolen was a big plot part.
3Davideo
That's correct. In the second book, there was a preface talking about how in response to the first book students were marching through the halls of MIT chanting "The Ringworld is unstable!" so Larry Niven was obligated to add them in said second book.
Subtilico
That preface was not part of the translation I have read. So this is new for me.
jnmjnmjnm
#18 Apollo 13 was amazing because they had ex-NASA people making sure the math was right.
Subtilico
Pet peeve of mine is how, when a spaceship breaks down, they always stop moving immediately, and are also nearly always within 1 to a few million kilometers from a habitable planet or moon. Even within our solar system, when randomly cruising around, the odds of being just 1M km from Earth, is very tiny, let alone in interstellar space. Unless you have an improbability drive or something ofc. :)
UNHchabo
But it's also not Speculative Fiction, which is the word for inherently unrealistic genres like sci-fi and fantasy.
The Martian was entirely fictional but gave realistic numbers because it's supposed to be a realistic story.
Meltemi
Even then, Andy Weir had to acknowledge reader observations that a key part of the set-up - the powerful dust storm that wrecks the Ares III mission - wasn't possible given Martian atmospheric density.
Niven's first sequel to Ringworld was also written in part because fans set up a chant at a con, "Ringworld isn't stable!" It isn't: doing the math, any perturbations will cause it to fall into the star.
The problem with writing for nerds and geeks is that your readers are nerds and geeks.
sakm
#1 True, but genre expectations still demand logic. If they refuse to be logical, they need to explain why. Does the character keep making questionable decisions? Fine, show why. Show patterns of behavior. Show flawed logic. Show trauma responses. Show arrogance. Show FAILURE. The things people complain about in that are far more often deeper failures of scope and depth of writing. You can write ANYTHING, as long as you validate its bizarreness. Otherwise you're pulling it out of your butt.
CarInAVet
Yeah but that's not what this specific post is talking about.
BeKindNWipeYourBehind
Indeed. While I find the first example in the post to be valid, the second feels like it's using the genre to excuse bad writing. Maybe they're secretly responsible for *She's All That*.
scrumbles666
You're presuming that you're the ultimate arbitor of what's logical.
sakm
Correct, the reader is ALWAYS the ultimate arbiter of the logic. They're the one reading it. If they don't believe what they're reading, they stop reading. Surely the intention of a writer is to create something the reader will continue reading?
scrumbles666
Oh, for fucks sake. I didn't realize that had actually posted. It was part of a longer thing I ultimately decided to think more on. Sorry. But to answer your comment- the writer's intention is to appeal to their audience, which the reader may very well not be. Genre fiction relies on tropes, and if you're unfamiliar with them, then you might to struggle to understand why things are happening. That's not the writer's fault. Sometimes you need to be the one to grow.
MeatSweat
this is just a mess as justification. I've read bad, illogical stories through to the end (lots of fantasy, primarily) and I've stopped reading good, dense, well-written stories (dostoyevsky, among others). The author's goals to their audience in either case weren't even the same. Look, you can speak for yourself for 'ultimate arbiter', but even illogical stories can be wildly entertaining (the entire metal gear franchise). don't pretend your taste says anything about authors making art
sakm
It sounds like you're misconstruing what "logic" means in context. MGS is a great example. It is extremely fantastical, but maintains its own internal logic quite well.
ThatOtherGirlYouKnow
#25 I thought that I hid my fetishes really well until my publisher said "Hey, you really like oozes, don't you?"
KerryCoder
You have a publisher?
ThatOtherGirlYouKnow
I've written a few books, yeah. The pay is lousy but the hours are long. I stopped writing a while back though, got burned out. I was churning out 25k words a week on average and after a few years I just burned out.
KerryCoder
I sent you a chat request... would you mind taking a look?
ThatOtherGirlYouKnow
Sure