Do we have a thread for SlackerInc yet? Maybe we should

[MandaJo]

Slackerinc is a terrible person because of the racist shit and the misogynistic shit, but it’s the way he talks about art that is just nails on a chalkboard to me. It’s never enough for him to like or dislike something: he has to make these claims about it’s empirical quality, as if he’s a perfectly objective Aesthetic Scientist who has the complete list of what is “good”. It’s never just not to his taste: it’s objectively bad. It’s honestly shocking that the gatekeeping experts–the editors, the producers, what have you–would have let this artist make this mistake (which is an extension of his overall bigoted paternalistic approach to women and minorities).

There is thisthread, where he goes on for pages about how Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy is badly written–and then goes off on how Connie Willis is even worse. This despite admitting he only read a couple pages of Jemisin and never clarifying if he’d actually read any Connie Willis. Not, “I don’t like it that kind of writing” but:

Not a chance. “I don’t personally appreciate the emperor’s new clothes, but I understand that everyone else seems to love them.” Nope, not going along with that.

Jemisin? I stand by my criticisms, which are in a nutshell that she uses informal language as though we are hearing from a character-narrator, but then the character intermittently disappears, as does the second-person voice, and we get standard third-person omniscient author descriptions of scenery and of the internal mental state a character would not know. To me that inconsistency is just an automatic fail. Still, there are some good, writerly sentences in there even if it’s a confused mishmash overall.

In the Willis, there is just nothing to hang your hat on there. You can cite experts all day long, but that doesn’t change anything. I already knew she won a zillion awards—that was my point, that I was utterly flabbergasted by this fact! I would like someone to look at the reasonably long excerpt I posted and tell me what’s good about it. In a specific and detailed way, just as GreenWyvern did when criticizing McDonald’s prose. How am I wrong to say it sounds like Tom Swift?

That’s right. After several people dug up pages of citations from literary scholars taking these authors seriously, it’s all people falling for the “emperor’s new clothes” because he knows, authoritatively, that these women can’t write, they are BAD writers, they needed a (implied, male) writing partner or editor to teach them the craft. All those awards and scholarly recognition is virtue signaling.

And his proof? Here’s a quote. You have to demonstrate exactly what makes this exact quote “good writing” or else you’re just an establishment stooge. You have to hold these 300 words up to the “good writing” paint chip and the “bad writing” paint chip and argue which it matches. He doesn’t have to make an argument: he can just see which one it matches. You have to prove to him that this writing matches what he considers “good writing” , or admit it’s bad writing.

I think the worst part is the condescending admission that there are a few “writerly sentences in there”, as if good writing must be evaluated on the sentence-by-sentence level, and as if modern writers must adhere to writing models long dead, the models handed down by the old masters–and any deviation from that is not deliberate aesthetic choice, it’s unskilled flailing.

Anyway, I was pretty infuriated by all that, but then he drops these gems in the thread about Into the Spiderverse

@SlackerInc

Wow, talk about MMV.

I found the film really hard to grade. I’m honestly not sure if I’m rating it way too high or way too low.

I loved the script, the acting, the music, the editing, all that jazz. But I hated the animation style. Not the use of comic book elements like word bubble type narration and such. That was totally cool. I just can’t stand the “uncanny valley” computer animation used through most of the movie.

So I can see an argument for just giving this a D-, lamenting that they didn’t make it a different way, and moving on. But all those other elements of the film are strong enough that I was kind of into it regardless. So ultimately I went with a C- grade.

@SlackerInc

I’m also not anti-animation, BTW. Studio Ghibli stuff, most especially “Spirited Away”, is awesome. If this Spidey movie had been hand-drawn, it could have been something great.

The terrible burden of “having to grade” it. He can “see an argument” for the other side, but ultimately, that’s wrong. He’s right: the animation style is bad. It could have been a great movie, but “they” messed up.

This isn’t as appalling as his behavior in that first thread, but it has the same tone: this smug sense that he just KNOWS what’s good, what’s right, and that other people are wrong: they don’t see the flaws that are so glaring to him, with his princess-pea level sensitivity to aesthetic lapses. What a burden!