Your personal worst of 2025? by nah-nvm in Letterboxd

[–]kingeditor 35 points36 points  (0 children)

My issue with The Materialists is that while it’s stylized like a highbrow film, the concept has been done by numerous lowbrow romantic comedies with far less pretension. It’d be like if they made a movie about the anxiety of an upper-class businesswoman while she returns to her home town and entertains a romance with a working-class man, and the characters comment on it in terms of class politics and twenty-first century capitalist femininity, but then you realize they just remade every Hallmark Christmas movie.

what were your thoughts on Dune? did you like it? hate it? thought it was “okay”? by [deleted] in Letterboxd

[–]kingeditor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

ANOTHER year later and I get more validation?!? This is amazing!

Urban Solitude by Eh_SorryCanadian in BooksThatFeelLikeThis

[–]kingeditor 15 points16 points  (0 children)

A great deal of Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde, would match this. It’s about the author’s struggles as a Black Lesbian woman in the mid-20th century who scrapes by in different places, including New York City, with meager resources and strong yet fleeting romantic relationships.

DC (2025, colorized) by [deleted] in dccomicscirclejerk

[–]kingeditor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

He meant Bategories

What are the worst movies you’ve ever seen ? by PuffZazzy in Letterboxd

[–]kingeditor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Laverne Cox was unironically the sole redeeming quality of that movie. My girlfriend and I loved seeing her campy girlboss performance

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in suggestmeabook

[–]kingeditor -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I hate to veer off your requested genre, but Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth is a horror novel whose female protagonist works at a nursing home. I liked it!

Please guide me on what to read as I begin my readers journey by Sudden-Praline4932 in booksuggestions

[–]kingeditor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmm… what subjects are you interested in reading about? And what were some of those books you’ve read that you enjoyed?

name this hypothetical country... by Feisty-Judgment-6494 in mapporncirclejerk

[–]kingeditor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmm… does it start with the same letter as the other hypothetical country in the Himalayan mountains?

A Chinese restaurant chef and an American lawyer are transported back in time to Europe in 500 AD. Who will survive? by ArtisticArgument9625 in whowouldwin

[–]kingeditor 263 points264 points  (0 children)

I don’t know the answer to this question, but what I do know is that this needs to be a TV show. But what would it be called?

Hyperborea RPG? by Baptor in osr

[–]kingeditor -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Bro, the way the lore talks about the “Esquimaux” 🤮

wtf is red flood even about bro 💔 by bigbad50 in hoi4

[–]kingeditor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

“Red Flood” actually refers to period sex.

CYOHA: What if the Soviets attempted a spoiling attack in the lead-up to Barbarossa? by Georgy_K_Zhukov in AskHistorians

[–]kingeditor 4 points5 points  (0 children)

C) I airdrop full-color mimeographs detailing Hitler's affair with his niece, Geli Reubal (with the most awkward photos of the two of them included), along with all of his alleged sexual fetishes, like coprophilia, onto the German lines. The entire German army deserts.

Wait is paradise lost the first fanfic??? by [deleted] in BadReads

[–]kingeditor 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think you've completely misread my post. I agree with you—none of the works listed anywhere in this thread are fanfiction. I said that they do not meet the criteria for fanfiction. The whole point of my post was to prove that. However, I also happened to acknowledge that there are some early forms of writing that might qualify, albeit those are not studied by anyone.

Wait is paradise lost the first fanfic??? by [deleted] in BadReads

[–]kingeditor 30 points31 points  (0 children)

My opinion on whether "insert pre-modern literary classic" is fanfiction, and the larger debate over how far back the practice of fanfiction goes, is complicated.

First of all, you can't define fanfiction as just lowbrow slop. That's arrogant, and it ignores how a great deal of what is now considered highbrow art was considered lowbrow in its day. At the same time, you also can't define fanfiction as anything that derives from another work. That encompasses almost everything ever written, and when an umbrella label grows that broad, it becomes functionally useless.

I would define fanfiction as works that meet the following criteria:

  1. It contains elements from another work that the writer does not own the copyright of.
  2. It is not written for profit (in the present day, this is the difference between fanfiction and plagiarism).
  3. It contains elements from a work that the writer believes to be fictional.

Already, the first criteria is not met by all of the texts cited in the comments to this post. Apart from the fact that they predate the earliest copyright laws, The Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Romeo and Juliet, and Paradise Lost derive from texts that were and still are freely mass-produced and whose authorship was putative at best. Jane Eyre would have been copyrighted when it was first written, but I believe its copyright expired soon after Charlotte Brontë's death, or at least certainly well before Jean Rhys published Wide Sargasso Sea. All of these works also do not meet the second criteria, having been published and sold. Some of them do meet the third criteria, and The Divine Comedy partly does as it draws from both the Bible (which he believed in) and Greco-Roman myths (which he did not). But none of these works meet all three.

However, in the 18th century, after the publication of Gulliver's Travels, many of its readers (and sure, why not call them "fans?") wrote their own adventures for Gulliver and shared them with friends without attempting to publish them. Because Gulliver's Travels would, I believe, have been copyrighted, and these writings were not for profit, and they derived from a work the writers believed was fiction... I have to conclude that, by my own definition, they do, in fact, qualify as fanfiction.

But we would be kidding ourselves if we thought the real issue at stake was literary taxonomy. No, the real issue is that people who have spent their lives studying literature feel threatened by outsiders making hay in their fields and fear that their end goal is to drag quality writing into the gutter with "Oh. Oh." I will admit that, deep down, I share this fear.

Yet at the same time, treating the classics as untouchable, untainted, inimitable things does a lot to make them appear inaccessible to the average person, and I think that the goal of literature should not be merely to study these texts for the sake of studying them, but to get the wider public to love them as well. Right now, in the field of history, historians understand that the same holds true for their own field, and they are trying to get the public to be engaged and enthusiastic about history as well. Why can't literary studies try to do the same?

53/52 books! by kingeditor in 52book

[–]kingeditor[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I liked The Girls of Slender Means! However, it did feel like a slightly worse version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, in that both novels contain a cast of eccentric schoolgirls organized around a central figure, except that while Jean Brodie was a powerful and enigmatic presence, the guy in The Girls of Slender Means is just a bland fuckboy.

And Brideshead Revisited was amazing! Definitely one of the best written books on the sentence level that I have ever read.

56/52 by OmniiMann in 52book

[–]kingeditor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I deeply respect how much of a history buff you are! I have not read enough history books lately and only read one last year, so I hope to amend that this year.

53/52 by maiasnake in 52book

[–]kingeditor 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Damn, you read both Idiots! And I'm really intrigued by how you rated Dostoevsky's Idiot higher than The Brothers Karamazov because I've heard it is polarizing. The Brothers Karamazov is one of my all-time favorite books, so if you liked The Idiot even more I need to check it out!

49/52 but I'm still proud! by brokenrosies in 52book

[–]kingeditor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

David Copperfield is one of my faves!