Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
To give Gary Marcus credit here, HPMOR may not be erotic, but many of Eliezer’s other works are erotic (or at least attempt to be), the most notable being Planecrash/Project Lawful which has entire sections devoted to deliberately bad (as in deliberately not safe, sane, consensual) bdsm.
Eliezer tried to promote/hype up Project Lawful on twitter, maybe hoping it would be the next HPMOR, but it didn’t quite take. Maybe he failed to realize how much of HPMOR’s success was being in the popular genre of Harry Potter fanfic (which at the time had crap like Partially Kissed Hero or Harry Crow as among its most popular works), and not from his own genius writing.
Also I think there’s enough manipulation fantasy in HPMOR, and enough lack of agency from Hermione, that it qualifies—in it’s own way—implicitly as being erotic.
I know I’ve said somewhere on here before that “Harry Potter for pop science nerds” is fanfiction on easy mode, but I’ll stand by it.