Dingy

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

I’ve been reading a series of mysteries set in WWI which has been fine, except for a creeping realization that no one — not a single person — in that series is a decent human being. Momentarily, in the last book, I thought we’d found a woman who wouldn’t become an adulterous doxy at a nod and a wink. Until we find out this is because she’s actually a spy playing a part.

Meanwhile we’re supposed to believe that the main characters have these wonderful families and are honest and straight as an arrow, and you tilt your head sideways. Because by the third book you know they can’t be. The mind that conceived that universe cannot possibly believe in fidelity.

The problem is that this is more or less the default of popular entertainment. I don’t mean just infidelity. If that were all, we’d still be in relatively good shape, despite it being fairly horrifying. It’s everything else.

Dan watches a lot of stuff, and I kind of sit here on the sofa and blog and look at it now and then, and it’s like there isn’t a single honest or truthful or — worse– truly kind character. Even the main characters tend to be “practical” i.e. they don’t actually care, it’s just convenient.

It’s gotten to the point that if I’m reading something — oh, I don’t mean (by and large, though even there at times!) regency romances, or cozy mysteries, or sf — something historical, or something that has pretensions to being a little more intellectual; or if Dan is watching practically anything, if a character does something kind or appears to be an admirable person, I start to expect the big reversal.

Because there is always, lurking in there, somewhere, the manic rictus of “gotcha” or what I call the clever-fool bait and switch.

Look, hypocrisy exists. Adultery exists. Evil exists.

No one who has read my books can possibly imagine that I don’t think those exist.

It’s just that even in the worst societies, alongside them, there is heroism, bravery, kindness. And there are genuinely good people. I’ve met a lot of them. A lot of them have honored me with their friendship. One married me.

Look, I’m not calling for writing polyanna bright and shiny stuff. Actually I’m not calling for writing anything. I do that over at Mad Genius Club on the regular, but this is more a READER’s blog. And a thinkers.

What am I calling for then?

Well, I know how this trend started. If you’re used to stories going a certain way, the first time you subvert it, it’s a shock to the system and the person is likely to become famous. And the book too.

But at this point, encountering a decent person or an honest relationship is the shock to the system. I’m absolutely convinced that Friends became the mega success it was because they were…. friends. Not wonderful, not perfect — they were all sitcom characters — but they were and more or less remained friends throughout the whole thing. And also by and large (look, TV needs characteristics exaggerated. If those people existed, they’d all be in the loony bin) normal people, just trying the best they could.

The problem I’ve found, reading that series, otherwise well written, etc, is that it leaves a patina on your perception of the world. You start looking around at normal families and wondering who’s cheating on whom. I imagine if that’s all I saw and read all the time — I control the intake as it were — I’d become a lot more doomery and less likely to look at the future with hope.

One of the things that the world cup visitors kept saying was how optimistic, how confident Americans are. You know why? Because over there the darkness really is pervasive over everything. Europe takes itself a lot more seriously, and even the books they import from here are the ones from major imprints, by and large.

They live on a steady diet of doom gloom, no one is clean, no one is good. Of course it starts to reflect in the lives they live.

Honestly if I thought the would be oligarchs were half a turn smarter, I’d think they’d encouraged that kind of entertainment in order to rule over the dispirited populace.

It has become a funny joke for my fans who attend Liberty Con that I’m put on the dystopia panel. Yes, it depends on how you define “dystopia.” I like Black Tide well enough to have written now… four? five? short stories in the anthologies (the latest, whenever that comes out, has serious theological implications. Probably.) I like it because even though it’s post apocalyptic it’s a world where people are striving back. Striving back very hard, in fact.

And a lot of post apocalyptic stuff is like that. But not all. Perhaps not a majority. Either that or I’m seriously unlucky in the ones I first picked up which were reveling in the fall of humans and their civilization. And that makes me foam at the mouth. For that matter the “inevitability” of doom gloom, the end is coming soon makes me foam at the mouth. (Hence why you reprobates enjoy that panel so much. Because I TRY to be good but at some point it always ends up with me rolling up my sleeves, turning the Heinlein picture to the wall, and telling the truth in social situations.)

But the reason it annoys me so much is not (just) that I’m a depressive who carefully manages her interior balance and who thinks marketing doom is toxic, if not immediately then over time. No. The reason it drives me nuts is because it’s not logical.

It’s that whole “It’s too perfect.” Almost every history of “this is how civilization falls” requires you to swallow more coincidences and miracles than a rags to riches story. It’s too perfect, too constructed, and the good guys just disappear. The resourceful guys just aren’t there. Any luck is bad. And we’re not even in Russia!

As I said, I don’t expect stories to be all perfect and sweet and everything goes well. That’s not a story. (Though mind you in romances, everyone can be well intentioned and still screw up big time. In real life too.) But neither is it a story that everything is dingy and evil and no one can be trusted. It’s just an endless series of getting punched in the gut. And eventually you’re going to decide not to pick up a book by that person again. (And that’s not counting the unsubtle preaching.)

We shouldn’t settle for it. Now big publishing, and soon big Hollywood, doesn’t have all the control. We should seek out and actively promote and reward those authors who write books that make sense. Books that have, yes, villains, but also heroes. Evil, sure, but also good.

Because we’re not — thank heavens — communists. We’re not all dressed in the same dingy clothes with the same regulation stains.

Someone — P. J. O’Rourke? — said communist countries were landscapes bleached of color. I knew this just from footage from abroad, not to mention my parents’ tour of the East shorty after I got married. (To her dying day, my mom could do a skip on command, impromptu, which we will call “So many turnips.”)

I just realized while writing this that as the left took over the entertainment establishment they did the exact same thing to it.

I call it grey goo, and a lot of it, but even books that are readable and have characters still smear everyone in grey because in their minds good just isn’t realistic.

Well, I’m here to tell you it is. People still run into burning buildings to save strangers. People still try to protect innocents. And let’s not forget some years ago, in some Muslim hell hole, when the populace was getting ready to stone a woman who had been divorced/unmarried four years and turned up pregnant, even there her ex-husband came out of the wood work and said the baby was obviously his. And when they told him that was impossible, he brought up the sura in the Koran that says pregnancy can take up to four years. And rode away happily with the re-wived woman and the kid he’d adopted in the womb.

Was that man perfect? I doubt it. The culture wouldn’t allow it. And of course, because you’ve read and watched all the bilge they feed us, you’re now thinking he had a nefarious plan.

Well, maybe he did. Of course. It’s always possible. But it’s just as possible he was a decent human being who didn’t want his ex stoned to death for a peccadillo (or perhaps even for being raped). Isn’t it? Well, of course it is. Because decent people exist even in cultures where everything militates against their being any decency. Humans are tricksy that way. They’re not all one thing.

And yes, yes, if you write, you should beware the temptation to make everyone dingy.

And if you “just” read you should demand entertainment that gives you heroes as well as villains. Because it’s not a coincidence that as this type of dingy “entertainment” grew and took over everything so did the consumption of psychiatric drugs.

Demand entertainment that has light and dark, not just grey.

Stand for nothing less. The sanity you save might be your own.

268 thoughts on “Dingy”

  2. Quite an interesting observation and now that it has been mentioned, yes, almost everything my wife watches on TV fits the pattern, even the Britbox and Brit/Irish period pieces made since the 1990s appear so tainted?

    This leads to all the fiction (sci fi and detective) I read as a child say, 1959 onward. My memory does not dredge up all the infidelity and pervasive dystopian evil, beyond a single character or two that must exist for the hero(es) to move forward the plot. I think Orwell was a warning to my mind, more so than a novel as was Gulliver’s travels for it’s era. Perhaps even Candide fits this mold.

    I always referenced the bell curve when my children would bring up some of the things observed or learned. Humanity and pretty much all our created societies have individuals that fall to the lowest 5% and highest 5% of the curve while the other 90 remains inside the center bulk area below the line. It applies to behavior, ability and any other feature of discussion. Most work hard, knowingly or not, to be in the upper 50% of the curve as this tends to allow for more comfortable existence. Those who choose to beat down the upper section to make them a more uniform lower, simply do not understand human nature or are blinded by the sins of power.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. By happenstance, I was reading over it and thinking of the interchangeable cop shows my mom use to watch– although she stopped when there was a Very Special Episode about SWATing and my husband and I came down hard on the side of the poor SOBs who showed up and shot the homeowner, because the writers didn’t even check to see what was done since the ’80s that would’ve blocked the story.

      Basically everyone sucks and everything is bad.

      Nobody does even stupid little kindness type things, on par with “oh, coffee’s almost gone. I didn’t even get a cup, but I’m here, I’ll do that quick.”

      Which real people do because … well, just because.

      But on these shows? NOBODY does joymaxing. (I have no idea if this is a broader slang, but my 14 year old uses it for her Systematic Plan to make the world better by paying attention to people and giving at least one sincere complement per hour if we’re in public.)

      Liked by 5 people

      Reply

      1. Americans will take care of the coffee. But certain foreign types who shall remain nameless might see it as beneath them, and refuse. That’s not the case with all of them, but it seems some haven’t lost the attitude.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

        1. The French cop shows will have fetching the coffee be a friendly olive branch gesture, but they get theirs dispensed into paper cups out of some kind of vending machine, so it’s not really a big effort. The coffee pot overseers in my office spend so much time whining about the mooching and lack of support in emails and signs that I kind of wish management would authorize coffee machines in individual cubes. (Look, as a soda pop drinker and sometimes tea drinker, the idea that your coworkers somehow owe you caffeination assistance falls on deaf ears, in my case).

          Like

          Reply

            1. I bought a second Aeropress just to make coffee at the office. That cup right after I read my emails and reviewed my ticket queue was just too important to leave to chance.

              Like

              Reply

          2. I use to run the coffee mess for my office.

            The one time we had issues?

            …it was the never-convicted-drug-dealer stealing from the coffee fund.

            Couldn’t prove it, of course, but my office head kind of rolled his eyes, ordered me not to have the if-you-feel-like-it donation box there, and started handing me $20s.

            I still bought cookies and stuff and put them out…because they’d go bad before I could eat them, otherwise.

            Haven’t thought of that for years…..

            Liked by 2 people

            Reply

  3. I blame Gatsby. Wretched story by a second-rate writer; not a single sympathetic character in it. Everyone selfish and blind. Even Tom’s mistress’ husband is written as if he were not worthy of fidelity toward. And a century later, we’re still being told that this is Great Literature. Bah!

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

    2. That’s pretty much how I felt about Wuthering Heights when forced to read it in college. Everyone (but the baby, so far) is scum and they all deserve what they got. So that trend in “great literature” has been around long before Gatsby was inflicted upon us.

      Liked by 3 people

      Reply

      2. One of the best lines ever in a movie comes from an English teacher in the movie Ashby who assigns, “Catcher in the Rye, a story about a whiny narcissist who deserves everything that happens to him.”

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply

    3. That’s pretty much what I didn’t like about Gatsby, not a single character I could like.

      The best Gatsby related thing I’ve ever seen was an interview with actor Bruce Dern. It turns out his grandparents were part of the world Gatsby is set in. It’s a long interesting interview, but the Gatsby related part is at the end.

      Like

      Reply

          1. Heh. I don’t really have a problem with Bruce. I do have a problem with his daughter making bank off of Jurassic Park and then turning around decades later and whining about how the movie paired her with an older man. In a joint interview with the older man. Not long after the older man’s cancer scare. (Sam Neill was a class act as usual, but the fans roasted her online about it.)

            Like

            Reply

  4. I think, that they think, this dinginess is proof of a ‘well-rounded character’. Or so they’re taught in their literature classes. Maybe they were raise on film noir? But mostly the insipid ‘noone is pure, so highlight those failings to make them human’ lectures that were never balanced by ‘show goodness and decency so people have something to aspire to’.

    Me? I read fiction (especially sci-fi and fantasy) for hope and escape, however grim the setting.

    If I ever actually write this novel I’ve been poking at for the last few months (mostly doing some fun worldbuilding and piecing together the major plot beats right now)?

    I already know that despite some of the ensemble cast having dark or tragic backgrounds, despite the world being a much rougher place than our own… the heros are good people. The big villian is bad, not ‘misunderstood’. And it’s going to be epic fantasy as heck.

    (I even have a pattern figured out for if there’s ever a sequel. But, y’know. First book has to be written, first…)

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  5. Dingy fiction and stories permit dingy behavior. A person who assumes that everyone is a double-dealer feels far less guilt about being a double dealer, or double-dealing first. Given how much sleeze we know about in Hollywood, and I would suspect other film and TV making places, dingy seems to be the moral baseline, and the unusual people are the ones who avoid it. “Everyone” is dingy, so they write dingy.

    The TradPub editors and publishers operate on the edges of the political world, and the big business world, both of which are known for dinginess, and so they focus on the same thing. Heck, I’m now finding dingy cozy romances. ICK!

    Too much dingy leaves a bathtub ring on your spirit. I know there are books I regret having read, because that part of me did NOT need to be encouraged. Society likewise. Here’s to finding more bright and shining, or just tarnished-but-getting-better characters and stories!

    Liked by 8 people

    Reply

    1. “Everyone” is dingy, so they write dingy.

      I forget where I read this, but I remember reading someone, several years ago, saying that “The advice ‘Write what you know’ is why so many ‘literary’ novels feature a middle-aged academic protagonist contemplating, or committing, adultery.” It was more pithily phrased than my poor summary, though.

      Liked by 5 people

      Reply

      1. I particularly enjoy the number of writers featured in fiction. It’s amusing when it is filmed, and the struggling writer & family are living in beautiful houses straight from House Beautiful.

        Liked by 5 people

        Reply

        1. The funniest one I saw recently (admittedly French cop shows, so standards were low) was the woman who writes pulpy romances beloved of teenaged girls that are somehow ALSO pulpy PI mysteries beloved by men, and she has fans in such high places that the cops have to cater to her, and she has drama between her two (apparently paid) research assistants, and when the killer demands she rewrite the ending of her latest book in 24 hrs or he’ll kill someone, she goes all artistic diva about the demand. All I could think was Madame, Allez-vous a mistral.ai et ouvertez-vous “Le chat”. Le clanker l’ecrira pour vous.

          Like

          Reply

    2. This is sort of an ethical corollary to the proposed “an author can only write a character as believably clever as they are” rule.

      Can an ethically challenged author write a believably pure character? Certainly an author can write down, their character displaying ethics downhill from their own. But uphill, believably? Or would that character come out obviously one dimensional and whitewashed?

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  6. Some of the communist authors have themselves made a knowing or willing choice of evil, and have themselves set out to create a world of mostly evildoers hurting people so that their fiction would be a tool to harm and to warp their audience.

    But there is a wider range of story where the authorial choice is less deliberate, and where the statistics of authorial choice is sometimes less consistently ill.

    I have recently become more allergic to settings that set up a minor main character to think that they are responsible for saving the world, and for hemming in the main character to make them desperate. Buffy was the more recent story where I decided I did not care for that, Harry Potter was an earlier one(1). (To some extent, hemming the main character in can simply be effective story design.)

    I’m not saying that I will not reread Harry Potter, or that I will not rewatch Buffy.

    (1) This year, I saw the strings, and decided it would not be what I cared for to write a story that treated those strings on a viewpoint for children, that treat the strings as natural and inevitable. The world is not actually in danger so often, and also minors actually do have problems that do not require desperation or extremes.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

    2. Yeah, world ending stakes get dull. Related, I have found that fights to the death are also dull in fiction, because you know the protagonist cannot die, since the story would end.

      Lower stakes can add to tension because the main character can lose and still progress the story.

      Like

      Reply

  7. I could not agree with you more. Modern books are just jammed with crapweasels, liars, selfish pricks, and bums—and those are the good guys. I wonder what these writers think of themselves. Obviously they don’t believe anyone has superior morals to their own.

    i think one of the reasons people still love Superman is not the power, it’s the unironic good guy behind it. But even now they had to retcon his birth culture to being unspeakably evil.

    All symptoms of a society that has lost all faith and confidence—but not its egotism.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  9. I remember being struck by and impressed — watching the dash-cam video in a car stopped at a big intersection in Florida, which caught the collapse of a heavy concrete pedestrian bridge. Poom! The bridge caved in, crushing the cars stopped directly underneath it … and there was sudden shock and stillness for a few seconds. And then the dash-cam caught the spectacle of all those drivers and passengers leaping out of those undamaged cars and running straight towards the cave-in. I mean, the dust of it hadn’t even settled – and there were men – just ordinary commuters on an otherwise ordinary boulevard, stopped for a traffic light — and they were running towards the disaster.

    Ordinary people are capable of extraordinary deeds and often without even thinking twice.

    I had many of my own books at a Folkfest in New Braunfels this spring – and got to be part of the kid’s scavenger hunt as the “Author”. (The other stations on the scavenger hunt were for things like story-telling, making sauerkraut, back yard games and carpentry with 19th century tools.) I talked about the YA series currently in progress, about a family on the Western Frontier, and how I was modeling it after the family in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series – an affectionate and functional family. It was purely amazing to me how the faces of those kids lit up when I said that. They wanted stories about solid families – families having adventures in the old wild west — but families that any kind would want to belong to.

    There are a lot of readers who are tired of dysfunction, anomie, alienation and betrayal, and would rather look towards the better angels of our nature.

    Liked by 9 people

    Reply

    1. Yes! And actual video footage of disasters often show people helping each other, in contrast to Hollywood’s stories of people panicking and trampling each other.

      Liked by 6 people

      Reply

      1. CrossoverQueen has noted, several times, in footnotes and on her blog– the folks who actually save people usually aren’t all in on Being A Hero.

        They just see something they can do, and do it.

        Sometimes that’s being fascinated by a mark on the wall when someone is sneaking through.

        Sometimes it’s forgetting a lunchbox near the shed where you heard something odd.

        Sometimes it’s bailing out of the car and running over to see if you being there somehow levitates eight tons of cement.

        Liked by 3 people

        Reply

    2. “All available boats. This is the United States Coastguard aboard the pilot boat of New York. Anyone wanting to help with the evacuation of Lower Manhattan report to Governors Island.”

      Liked by 8 people

      Reply

          1. Our route before the RV broke accidentally took us by the Flight 93 memorial. We made it a point to go back the next day. Very dusty, very.

            Yet the actual crash site (after they’ve horrified you with the reconstruction of thr plane’s final moments) is very peaceful. So peaceful a doe stashed her two tiny fawns not far from the walkway.

            Liked by 3 people

            Reply

            1. Fox, you were very young: I and everyone else expected to be hit again and again. Those people sailed into the fear of being hit.
              G-d bless Americans. (All people do this, but Americans more than others.)

              Liked by 2 people

              Reply

              1. I didn’t get to see any of it when it happened, being in boot camp.

                But that scene in Spiderman, where the New Yorkers protect Spidey?

                Same vibe.

                This is part of our mythology. The way you play is the way you live.

                So these guys all went “there is a need. I am going to go help.”

                Liked by 1 person

                Reply

      1. I thought of THAT story earlier when I was scrolling through the discussion of ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘Wuthering Heights’, as I had managed to miss those in high school, but WAS forced to read the “great classic” ‘Lord Of The Files’. I could never figure out why this was supposed to be so great. It was a depressing story of a bunch of snotty losers screwing up the survival plans of the sensible kids trying to save them. (OK, it’s been a while, so that might not have been QUITE it, but it IS how I remember it.) This was a TERRIBLE story, and in my young teenage mind, certainly not well written at all. I’ve considered revisiting it to see if my tastes or insight might have changed, but I have yet to come across a review by anyone who seems at all trust worthy that reinforces that hypothesis. Just looked up a synopsis; OK, details have blurred with time, but hardly enough to tempt me to reread it.

        Like

        Reply

        1. My only attempt at reading “Lord of the Flies” at around the time of its initial popularity ended within a few pages. I found its premise disgusting and, whatever value it might have had, missing.

          Like

          Reply

    4. A great mostly functional family story is the Ashtown Burials series by N.D. Wilson, which is nominally a kid’s book, but really could be read by anyone with an affection for tall tales and myths and hair-raising adventure.

      In the same vein, Rachel Neumeier makes a point of writing kind, brave, competent characters who try their best in whatever situation they’re placed. I have liked every one of her stories, though of course I have my favorites – her Death’s Lady series has the Most Awesome Dad for a main character. And her standalone sci-fi No Foreign Sky is also amazing.

      Like

      Reply

    5. That sort of thing dramatically affected my perception of the “brave hero firefighters” who responded to the World Trade Center on 9/11. Their media coverage ranged from over-the-top approbation to ridiculous.

      They chose the job. They went through competitive examinations (back then) to get it. They had months of training, and regular refresher and updated training. They had fire engines, oxygen tanks, fire suits, ladders, and all the equipment. Doing the job they were (quite handsomely, by my standards) paid to do. They were a lot of things, but they weren’t “heroes”, except maybe in the sportsball sense. They were doing a dirty job, yes, but at the lowest personal risk their society and profession could arrange.

      No one said jack about the bystanders who went into the rubble searching for people.. Well, except for some snotty comments about “should have left that for the professionals.”

      Like

      Reply

      1. As I always say, police, fire, ems, God bless them regardless, are ever at best second responders unless by some quirk of fate they happen to be on an incident site at the moment it happens.

        Like

        Reply

  10. We’ve had so much societal rot thrown at us through entertainment – and the alleged “news”, for that matter our society is crumbling. How else could a couple of generation be convinced that they’re in the wrong bodies?

    Ther were still adulterer’s in the previous century, but they didn’t advertise – evryone (well, most, anyway) still tried to maintain the illusion of upholding standards, and even that was preferable to what we see now.

    We need a return to heroic models and NORMALCY, but those currently blocking the gates seem to be allergic to standards. We (creators AND consumers) just need to push back harder.

    Thanx for the post, Sarah.

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

  11. It’s especially a risk in mysteries, because you need a murder victim with a bare minimum of three people who might conceivably want them dead, which means either an exceptionally scummy victim (blackmailer, rapist or that guy from Orient Express) or a victim of ordinary character flaws surrounded by exceptionally scummy people. The one mystery I’ve written (not published need two more to release with it), I think only the murderer and police chief come off as really total scumbags. (The murder victim’s former fiancee, who flagrantly cheated on him while pregnant with his child, twenty plus years ago, is no prize but she’s mostly the comic relief.)

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. It’s especially a risk in mysteries, because you need a murder victim 

      Why do you need a murder victim? Take Sherlock Holmes. Yes, many of the cases involved a death (murder or otherwise), but a number of the classics, such as “The Blue Carbuncle”, involved the theft or concealment of an object.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

      1. That’s a really good question. Why do most mystery authors feel like they need a victim, that their story needs to be a murder mystery? Means, Motive, and Opportunity can also be applied to other crimes. You’ve mentioned Holmes, so I’ll mention Peter Wimsey. Gaudy Night is perhaps the best of the entire Wimsey-Vane series, and there is no murder. (A few attempted murders, but none succeed). The other novel-length Wimsey stories are all murder investigations, to the best of my memory, but I believe there are some non-murder investigations in some of his short stories. (Or, wait, there was one of them that involved an old gentleman passing away from natural causes in the evening, and for inheritance reasons, his nephew or grandson or grand-nephew or some such tried to fake up the evidence to make it seem like he had lived through the night and passed away the morning of the next day. Which was also not a murder, even though there was a dead body.)

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply

        1. The way it was explained to me once was that it’s hard to get readers invested if the crime doesn’t have some stakes to it. I think more likely reason is that it’s hard to gin up enough suspects or plot for a novel without a suspicious death involved.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

          1. Yet Doyle’s Holmes stories survived his efforts to kill off the character, and are still in print 139 years later. And there are literally hundreds of Holmes spinoffs and fanfics still being written.

            Puzzle mysteries may not be as popular as morality plays, but their sales look steady over time.

            Liked by 1 person

            Reply

        3. And success in this genre of course yields the little town where the MC lives becoming the nations murder capital, with the MC the obvious prime suspect as the clever serial killer.

          Like

          Reply

          1. Which is why, even when they ended up in the country, many of the classic detectives headquartered in a large city. Lots more variety.

            Liked by 2 people

            Reply

      2. Cute. Now name a prominent novel-length mystery without a suspicious death that is investigated as a murder and airs a lot of dirty laundry in the process. Sometimes the suspicious death turns out to be suicide or misadventure, especially if you read Sayers or Knox, but a traditional novel length mystery needs multiple suspects and comparatively high stakes, which means either suspicious death (or less commonly a theft or impersonation with a wide circle of impact and therefore a bunch of suspects).

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

          1. It’s not precisely fair argumentation to arbitrarily declare that the best-known counterexample to your thesis does not count (more on that later, I’ve got a joke to tell you), but if you don’t want to accept Gaudy Night, then how about The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency? Are you going to claim that it’s not prominent? It’s been so long since I read it that I had to look its plot summary up on Wikipedia, but I believe that’s another non-murder mystery.

            Okay, now for the joke. I remember reading an exchange that went somewhat like this:

            Reddit commenter #1: “Name a famous vampire who isn’t Dracula.”

            Reddit commenter #2: “The Count, from Sesame Street.”

            Reddit commenter #1: “No, no, he doesn’t count.”

            Reddit commenter #3: “I can assure you that he DOES…”

            Liked by 6 people

            Reply

            2. Gaudy Night is the one case where I feel the frequent complaints about Sayers subordinating the mystery to the romance have some validity. In any case, it’s book nine or ten of a long running series and book three of the romance subplot within that series. It works because it’s an anomaly, even within the series it belongs to. You can’t build a whole genre out of anomalies.

              Like

              Reply

              1. My wife pointed out to me that I got the joke’s setup wrong. The initial request was supposed to be “Name a literary vampire that isn’t Dracula” (emphasis mine). In other words, the Count from Sesame Street truly does not fulfill the requested criteria, and saying “He doesn’t count” is perfectly fair, if you aren’t paying close enough attention to the implications of your words. So Reddit commenter #1 just stumbled into setting up the punchline, and that’s what makes it even better.

                Liked by 2 people

                Reply

        4. In Anne Perry’s mysteries, the solution usually involves the most lurid and sensational scandal possible, with a strong odor of “that age was so hypocritical.”

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

        5. Well, I wasn’t TRYING to be cute.

          novel-length mystery

          Now, length wasn’t in what I was responding to; the only specs were “mystery” and “murder”. I would have picked a different example if short stories weren’t a possibility. In fact, I’m not sure I could have picked one; Holmes is really the only mystery type I regularly read.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

      1. My wife used to watch the old Perry Mason reruns, and I noticed two things: the bulk of the story was about the victim and the host of suspects with very little about Perry Mason, Della Street, and Paul Drake, and secondly the victims were all painted as despicable and in dire need of justice being served. Made me want to sympathize with the murderer.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

      2. In one of his interviews, Falk said an ongoing problem with the series was the difficulty in getting workable “Columbo” scripts, because the closed-shop scriptwriters didn’t seem to understand how the show worked, and kept submitting ordinary cop-show or murder-mystery scripts.

        If you watch the series all the way through, you can see where they recycled more than one script, making only enough changes to make it a different episode.

        And just in case anyone didnt already know, there’s a life-size bronze statue in Budapest, of Falk as Columbo, and an adjacent statue of “dog”, his nameless investigative partner.

        Liked by 3 people

        Reply

        1. it’s not realistic because there’s no joy in it. That’s what annoys me about “realistic”. reality can be gritty, or it can not be. LIfe is much more complicated than they seem to be able to write.

          Liked by 3 people

          Reply

          1. Yes.

            Reality is delightful.

            Ok, sometimes you have to reach, but that old joke about how you can find the snow beautiful, or deny the beauty, but there’s no less snow, holds true.

            Liked by 1 person

            Reply

      2. It was a trend that initially appeared during the ’90s, when comic books tried to go edgier. It’s a pretty infamous era now.

        Like

        Reply

      3. I remember the exact moment I quit comics. I had moved to NY and had to find a new comic store. Found one but didn’t like it much, and I didn’t have much money.

        I was home reading a Wolverine or an X-Men, can’t recall exactly, and I was irritated because the book was half the number of pages they’d been a couple years before, it cost $3.50 US, and it was all hack-and-slash.

        I came to a two-page single frame. The book is half the pages already, the story is basically one long, lame fight scene, and now I’ve got a single frame of blood spatter blown out to two pages, with a hand in one corner. I said “Are you kidding me with this?” (Or words to that effect. Probably more swearing.)

        And that was it for my comic hobby. I will buy one every five or six years just to see, but honestly they only get worse over time.

        Like

        Reply

      1. It is somewhat also a matter of what other versions of the character the audience is familiar with, and has in their working memory.

        Shared corporate IPs with parallel executions of the property.

        Something like Star Trek can go awry, if the first subversion is tolerable and ‘novel’, but then the creators or managers escalate, and eventually the main audience has nothing in their context window but grimderp versions of the IP.

        (Star Trek arguably could have the different problem that the communists writing the communism in the IP doubted the magical potency, and kept changing it to give the communism more magical power.)

        Liked by 3 people

        Reply

          1. I wanna adopt grampa Sisko. He was very much a cranky American type. ^.^

            (Mostly I want to throw things at the Klingons for coming up with a security check that could be broken by a high school drama club. Yes, yes, cut your palm and bleed… guys….)

            Liked by 2 people

            Reply

            1. I really want some writer with basic knowledge of human anatomy to write a scene like this:

              Person about to swear blood oath: Puts knife to palm of hand to cut and bleed a few drops to seal the oath

              Other person, with actual medical training: grabs wrist. “No, no, NO! Not the palm! Do you know how many tendons go through the palm? Are you TRYING to cripple yourself? Use the back of the hand, idiot!”

              Liked by 2 people

              Reply

              2. Um, there’s a couple of tendons in the back of the hand, too. Try the web of flesh between the thumb and forefinger, AKA the web.

                Like

                Reply

                1. Having nearly lost a thumb to an industrial incident, I can testify that such an option is -contraindicated . . .

                  Like

                  Reply

              3. The Reader’s hand surgeon nephew would tell you that there is no good place to cut a hand.

                Like

                Reply

                2. Most of the ones I remember seeing would use a finger pad, and not much of one, if they were the donor. Usually a small knife; I don’t remember any of them using a diabetic finger lancet.

                  Like

                  Reply

              4. Heel of your hand, maybe. There’s a fair amount of meat there at the bottom of your palm; minimize the risk of hitting a tendon, get enough blood to satisfy the ritual, and bandage it up reasonably well.

                Or better, like Foxfier said, if there’s no requirement that the blood comes from your hand, make a cut on the left forearm where you’ve got a nice chunk of muscle and skin to handle the laceration, wipe your right palm on it, and shake hands with your new blood brother.

                Or maybe showing that you can handle a blade with enough steadiness and precision to get good blood flow without maiming yourself is part of the ritual? I dunno…all those shows where the guy SLASHES a great big knife across his palm with gusto…at least in Star Trek they’ve probably got crackerjack orthopedic surgeons. (Here, just slip your hand into the Tendonizer 3000, and you’ll be good as new in mere seconds.)

                Like

                Reply

        2. Come to think of it, grimderp suits the Star Trek Mirror Universe just fine. Just roll with it, it should be entertaining, at least.

          Like

          Reply

      2. Burton was fun, and got the characters, and was in a time when there wasn’t a lot of options.

        You don’t want to get me started on Nolan and his ability to cash in on things that are currently big so his fanbois can act like he made them big, rather than making a hoity-toity normie version of something geeky.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

        1. The best thing, for me, about watching Nolan’s Batman movies was realizing that Sam Vimes has so much in common with Bruce Wayne. Made me start planning out a crossover, whose opening scene would go something like this:

          Bruce Wayne was bored, and trying not to show it. He should be out there patrolling the city, not listening to Miss Whatever-her-name-was blathering on about how important philanthropy was, and how many Good Causes she was donating money to… self-importance and blatant bragging, dressed up in the disguise of good works. He stared out the window. Surely the Bat-Signal would come on soon, and give him an excuse for ducking out of this boring party.

          The Bat-Signal remained resolutely off.

          (Scene-break marker)

          Sir Samuel Vimes was bored, and trying not to show it. He should be out there patrolling the streets, not listening to Lady Whatwashernameagain blathering on about how important Charitable Works were, and how many good causes she was donating money to… self-importance and blatant bragging, dressed up in the disguise of charity. He stared out the window. Surely some copper out there would put up a message on the copper’s klacks, and give him an excuse for ducking out of this ridiculously tedious excuse for a party.

          The klacks remained resolutely silent.

          Liked by 4 people

          Reply

          1. OH OH OH did I throw Saul’s music at you yet?

            The screen cap I saw for this the first time made me think it was about Vimes’ time-travel book, but it’s actually Batman and Joker, and such a good song:

            Liked by 3 people

            Reply

        2. Adam West Batman is fun. Burton Batman is Burton obnoxiously parading his amoral quirkiness for its own sake, as usual. The Animated Series fans think Burton’s work is Authentic Batman because it’s the immediate precursor and style influence on their preferred version. (TAS is one of those perfectly well-made 90s-00s properties, like Beast Wars or B5, which I don’t love but can respect the craftsmanship.) The Nolan Batmans haven’t aged well, but they were different enough in tone from the Raimi Spidermans (the only game in town for comic book movies at the time) that I don’t think you can accuse them of riding Spidey’s coattails, and they were 8 years after the Schumacher Batmans, so you really can’t accuse them of riding those coattails.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

          1. They were riding TAS’ coat-tails– and no, actually the “difference in tone” is exactly the thing he usually does. “Hey this beloved super hero from when you were a teen, but with all the joy stripped out.”

            “Look, that popular thing? I’m doing the grownup version!”

            Should’ve seen my daughter’s eyes lighting up when she heard there was an Odyssey movie coming out– and then the absolute slump when she got a look at the trailer.

            Liked by 2 people

            Reply

            1. I’m sorry, you’re not going to convince me that Warner Bros commissioned a trendy director to make a summer tent pole out of a major IP, because a short-lived, ten year old series based on the same IP developed a hard-core fan following.

              Like

              Reply

              1. If you choose to believe that maaaaaagically they looked at “hey, a super hero movie was big money, what insanely popular super hero do we have the rights to?” and didn’t notice something they spent most of a decade milking from folks who were now the exact demographic with lots of money, that’s on you.

                Liked by 2 people

                Reply

                1. These movie studio ppl tend to think they’re too good for the live action TV branch of the same outfit, let alone the animated branch of the same outfit, so that’s where my skepticism comes from.

                  Like

                  Reply

                  1. In that, we’re in violent agreement.

                    That’s the real market for Nolan– “we’re so much better than that.” Sure, they’ll use the rights they’ve gotten, but it’s for better people than that stuff that is actually popular.

                    I am so very grumpy about how the animated Batman from the ’90s, in the BTAS/JL/JLU/Superman/Batman Beyond continuity, STILL has more mature and well adjusted character design than any movie has managed.

                    If they had a freaking clue they’d make movies that are purely live action versions of those characters.

                    But nooooo, we get the fake-deep nonsense.

                    GIMME JON STEWART AND HAVE HIM MAKE A JOKE ABOUT HOW HE’S NOT BLACK, HE’S GREEN, OORAH!

                    Liked by 5 people

                    Reply

                    1. I would watch the *hell* out of a live action version of JLU.

                      To me, the most recent Superman came closest to that vibe.

                      Like

                    3. He is a genuinely sweet guy in that. Lois is exceptionally annoying and the director tends to mistake shouting for DRAMA! But a lot of it was fun. I don’t know whether you’d find the dog realistically annoying or kind of a camera hog. 😉

                      Liked by 1 person

          3. The thing that makes TAS so distinctive is that in that iteration, Bruce seemed to *genuinely* want to help his villains recover. Whether it was covering mental treatment for Harvey Dent after capturing him, setting up a safe storage facility for Mr. Freeze’s wife, his treatment of Harley Quinn once he realized what had been done to her, his consistent attempts to talk Ivy down from her schemes, etc.

            That Bruce actually seemed to believe that “sure, I need to stop whatever they’re doing, but there is a maybe salvageable person in there”

            Liked by 3 people

            Reply

        3. I will give at least a qualified defense of Nolan’s Dark Knight. There was good in that world. There’s also a lot of evil and a lot of grey, but it seemed to explicitly reject the idea that deep down, no one was good or trustworthy—indeed, except for the Joker, even the worst people have a moral code. The most memorable exchange between Batman and the Joker:

          Batman: “What were you trying to prove? That deep down, everyone’s as ugly as you? You’re alone!”

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

        4. Helped that Danny Elfman did an excellent job on the music too. I think people underestimate how much the music can make a movie. Imagine Star Wars without John Williams.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

          1. Years ago, there was a PBS? series called “Movie Magic” mainly about Special Effects but they had an episode about “back-ground” music. They showed a scene with the original back-ground music and then showed that scene with the “Popeye The Sailor” Theme.

            Very different feel with the “Popeye” music. 😉

            Like

            Reply

      3. Batman was always a hero with a tragic origin, and part of the Burton success was fans were eager to see a Batman who wasn’t the TV series parody. In the comics, Neal Adams’ Batman of the same era was much more serious, but Batman himself was not a darker, more wounded character. Neither was Burton’s Batman. It was just that the villains were much more serious and imaginative threats.

        Superman, despite losing his biological parents and whole planet, had no memory of that and was raised by loving, wholesome adoptive parents on a farm in Kansas, so making him dark is counter-factual. If you want to know the influence art has for good, read J. Michael Straczynski’s autobiography, Becoming Superman. Nobody was more likely to become a supervillain than Joe Straczynski, but he chose Superman as his role model. If you’re too lazy or strapped for cash to buy and read the book, you can get the gist from my review.

        Like

        Reply

    3. It’s a matter of theme. Batman deals with (mostly) human evil and crime in a city that more or less defines dinginess and corruption as North American see it. Dark/gritty *works* for him. Heck, Bruce acknowledges that he *isn’t* a nice guy, and his rules are tp [revent him from going over the edge.

      Clark is a nice guy who happens to be the most powerful thing on planet, and mostly just wants to help people, dealing with things that a human more or less *can’t* handle because of the power scales involved. He is bright and shiny, and so too is (mostly) his world.

      Liked by 2 people

      Reply

        1. Because they have no idea about the characters they are writing. And I include some of the comic book authors in this.

          Dude, if you *want* to make a new character, make a new one, go for it. But odon’t pretend that [preexisting beloved character] is [your version that looks the same but misses the point entirely]

          Liked by 3 people

          Reply

          2. I’ve lost track now of how many positive characters they’ve skinsuited. “Hah! You thought this one was GOOD! Look how clever I am making that character…NOT GOOD!!” It’s boring and predictable and frigging everywhere. Makes me glad they killed off the ‘zon Stargate show.

            Like

            Reply

            1. It was fine when Marvel Comics did it as “What If…” stories.

              It was not fine when they retconned or skin suited heroic characters to be gay, trans, pedo/hebephiles, agents of Hydra, or any other variety of entire bodies of clay rather than just their feet.

              People are born selfish. It takes programming that child, training and discipline to turn them into decent human beings. And it takes reinforcement to maintain that decency.

              You mention the issue of infidelity. And I have to say that the latter half of Heinlein’s SIASL has quite a bit of ‘infidelity’ in it. And the characters do not behave like real human beings in how they deal with it. That might be misconstrued as RAH promoting infidelity, but it misses the deeper meaning in the story. That point is the people in the story are no longer fully human. Valentine Michael Smith was only a human incarnation, he was actually the Archangel Michael, and his followers were, by training and programming, the next step up the ladder of divinity from your average humans.

              It would be wonderful and awesome if it were possible, but I certainly can’t see it happening with humans in our universe.

              Liked by 2 people

              Reply

              1. I think I ended up going sideways halfway through that. What I meant to continue with was organizations like the Boy Scouts, various church organizations, and some sports organizations used to be bastions of truth, justice, decency and the American Judeo-Christian Way where boys and girls could hone the training their parents started them on to become better people. Yet most of those organizations were also infiltrated and subverted by The Greys, and their human product reflects that. Which may explain why we are seeing so much ‘dinginess’ in the world today.

                Liked by 2 people

                Reply

  13. A few years ago, I read an article about a Liberal complaining about Liberal Writers being unable to write “future worlds” that were nice places to be.

    IE Their future worlds were always worse than “today”. ☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️

    Like

    Reply

  14. Great. And how true. Frankly part of it is if you believe in nothing than you do what you want. If you have no moral compass then you behave like an animal. Read 20th Century Russian history. one sociopath after another. Reds, whites. And the whites who should have had something, didn’t.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    2. So, “Do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.” Unfortunately, they tend to ignore the preamble to that phrase, “An ye harm none other,” The principle of three-fold return can be a harsh lesson to learn . . .

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

        1. To be transparent in this, I do not subscribe to this credo. Just pointing out that narcissistic adherents to that worldview tend to truncate the Witch’s Rede to, as one might paraphrase, ‘Do whatever you want and the world be damned’.

          With the addendum, likewise paraphrased, Karma is a beatch.

          Liked by 1 person

          Reply

  15. Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and that crowd, Hermeneutics of Suspicion. Something went very wrong in the culture and the death of the best men during WWI, especially in Britain where the army was all volunteer until after the Somme, followed by the moral collapse of Europe in WWII ended it.

    Liked by 5 people

    Reply

  16. This is honestly one reason I was glad to stumble on Ethan Blackwood’s various Werewolf and Bigfoot novellas. Unlike most horror where you have a lot of dingy victims, almost all of his books have not just a moral hero, but most of the “ordinary” people are also basically decent. If they do something stupid it’s because they’re scared beyond rational thought, not because they’re out to get something selfish.

    For example, his “Werewolf – End of the World”. Colton Baker is a werewolf who’s killed. You’d think that’d make him automatically a bad guy. But no. He had no clue what made him a werewolf, not even a bite, and so had no warning before he woke up near a dead body. But he didn’t deny the truth; he knows he’s a monster, he has no idea if human measures can hold him – so he ran for the most distant place he could find where he wouldn’t hurt anyone else.

    And then, years later, an injured woman crashes on his doorstep, with hired killers on her trail.

    A selfish man would throw her back into the Alaskan snow to die. Colton does his best to save her.

    (Spoiler: He does.)

    Not dingy. There are bad guys, lots of them – but also good guys, and just folks. Gives me hope for the future.

    Liked by 5 people

    Reply

  17. Appropriate to this discussion: https://www.theatlantic.com/books/2026/07/jem-calder-i-want-you-to-be-happy-novel-book-review/688047/

    Headline to the article, “Why Most Millenial Fiction is Boring.” With examples. I, personally, wonder why anyone publishes boring fiction.

    Apple News includes The Atlantic, with many other magazines, which is a great help.

    There are good people. I would even say that good people are the majority, but you’d never know it from modern fiction.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. I wanna register my objection to being blamed for stuff that started before I was born.

      That said, if you read the designation as who it’s targeting, fair.

      And this video is more fun:

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  18. I suspect that it is that that is an accurate description of modern Hollywood and modern publishing. Which is sad in its own way. I’ve largely stopped consuming a lot of entertainment and social media because it is just about living the death of the soul.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  19. Well, it’s not as if anyone cares what I write, but I don’t see how someone could write all gray. Have you noticed all the tv shows and movies seem to have that blue cast everywhere? Lileks writes about that quite often. It is like “they” want you to get used to it. As an older person, I don’t like washed out scenes, mumbley dialog, or all evil characters. I want to see and hear what’s going on. Even the antagonist has to have something tempering the motivation to do bad things, unless a psychopath, I suppose. I don’t write characters like that, and I don’t care to read stuff with characters like that. I hope society isn’t really like they portray in most entertainment today.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. All the detective shows in which people don’t turn on electric lights when entering a room.

      I see the blue cast as teal. Although lately, gray is more popular.

      Like

      Reply

    2. I’ve noticed that too. The two big summer movie releases so far, Nolan’s Odyssey and Disney’s Moana remake, both had extremely washed out color palates. We’ve got the Mediterranean and the Polynesian Islands, two of the most colorful locations on Earth, and the goal seemed to be to make them look as grey as possible. If you can’t show a brilliant sky, bright flowers, and beautiful buildings there, where can you?

      Liked by 3 people

      Reply

      1. And ancient Greek buildings were BRIGHTLY GAUDILY PAINTED, in VIVID COLORS, and by the way were not stack-of-cut-stones ruins yet, you derps.

        Look up what the microscopic paint traces indicate the Pantheon looked like. Wowza.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

          1. I think basically all of the ancient statuary shows residue of paints, especially Greek and Egyptian, though the grave goods from Tut’s tomb still showed a lot of paint. The bare white marble look would look unfinished in ancient statuary workshops. But since the paint wore off ancient statues, especially those mostly intact and unweathered recovered buried or from rivers and bogs and such, bare white stone is “classical”.

            Like

            Reply

    3. Late last year, I read an article by someone (Naomi Wolf? don’t hold me to that because I’m probably wrong) who said that she was startled when she left the NYC-DC metro area and saw blue skies and colors. She said that the skies in the big city where she lived had been gray since 2020, and remained gray. Literally gray, not as figurative language. She attributed it to government interference in the weather. Yes, that’s where I bailed.

      I agree with the gray-tinted TV problem. It reminded me that when I revise the second Bard’s Song book, I need to add more color references. When I write at white-heat description gets dialed back in favor of action and dialogue. That lack needs to be fixed, because he’s in a very colorful place, wearing colorful stuff.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. I’ve lived and worked in NYC most of my life, still do, and can say that we have lovely blue skies. 😜 We just had three full days uninterrupted by Canadian wildfire smoke and it was lovely. raining now, alas, and the humidity is likely coming back.

        Like

        Reply

      2. You have to be careful with that. The very first line of Gibson’s “Neuromancer” says, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

        That was worth an “eh, what?” when I encountered it. Cascades of black and white dots? WTF?

        It was going on 20 years later before I was at someone’s house and saw their TV screen just went dark gray between channels. (and new ones don’t show dead channels at all; they just skip to the next live one, which probably adds a new layer of WTF for much-younger readers…)

        Like

        Reply

        1. The whole concept of “TV channels” will be impenetrable in a few years. And they will wonder why inputting someone’s voice contact address is called “dialing the phone”.

          Like

          Reply

    4. I see a lot of the “urine-colored filter” in modern movies and TV. They used to reserve that as an indicator of “something happening in the past”, but now they seem to use it randomly.

      Like

      Reply

  20. No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency is basically a series of literary short story collections masquerading as novels, closer to something like the Holmes or Wimsey shorts than to a proper mystery novel. You can have a crime thriller without it being a traditional mystery, and you can have a plot about a detective without it being really much of a mystery, and I would put Columbo and Ladies Detective Agency in the latter category.

    Like

    Reply

  21. For No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, I’m going to say that it’s not really a mystery series. It’s slice of life litfic about people who are allowed to be decent human beings because the author considers them to be exotic and foreign, and they do modest amount of detective work on short form cases (more similar to the Holmes shorts than a conventional mystery novel) because it’s a convenient way to show different aspects of their oh-so-exotic culture.

    Like

    Reply

    1. I would tend to agree about No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, at least the first book. It wasn’t so much a mystery as it was a literary novel about the lives of Precious and her father—and I’ll admit to the distinct suspicion that the author made Precious a detective mostly so that he could market the book in the mystery genre (something that I suspect happens a lot).

      I didn’t dislike the book, but I also wouldn’t have really called it a mystery.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. Yeah, same. It was a fun book about likable people, and my parents, who remember our time in a different part of Africa much more vividly than I or siblings do (I was kindergarten aged at the time), have a special soft spot for it.

        Like

        Reply

  23. I lay into Fallout’s “after the fall” setting from time to time. There are (or were; a lot of it changed over time) things to like about the setting. But parts get absurd when you start to think about them. For example, it’s been centuries since the bombs fell. Why do the hotel lobbies and all of the shops still have discarded newspapers on the floor, and look like it’s been months since anyone swept the floor?

    It bugs me.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

      1. That might be why it exists now. But originally it was about what the opening line said. “War. War never changes.” The ’50s aesthetic fit well with the idea of the post-nuclear world.

        And you didn’t have the specific problems that I mentioned above early on. It wasn’t until Fallout 3, which was the first first-person game (and also the first game by Bethesda), that you started to see a world where no one ever seemed to clean up. In the original game, the very first settlement that you find is Shady Sands, which is a “new” (as in, not built on the ruins of an old one) settlement, with buildings that appear to be made of adobe. In Fallout 3 and on, every notable settlement is built on the ruins of an old one, and their resources are clearly limited to what they can salvage from the ruins that they’re in. It’s the corrugated metal and plywood look (not quite that bad, but close). That sort of thing would make sense immediately after the war. But the later entries are set roughly 200 years after the war, and nothing’s seemingly improved.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

        1. Consider also Fallout 4, where you can build brand new settlements. Admittedly, from scavenged materials, but you’re not grabbing random walls for your new buildings, you’re reusing lumber… and you still put together what are essentially ruins.

          Which might make some sense if that’s your character’s idea of what a building should be. The problem is, in that game your player character has been in cryo storage since the bombs fell; you grew up in an intact world; you know better.

          Like

          Reply

  24. One of my “guilty” pleasures is J. D. Robb’s (Nora Roberts) Eve Dallas series.

    Some are “Read Once & Enjoyed it” but might not reread.

    But I do reread them and one that I recently reread was “Forgotten In Death”.

    Eve has two murders on her hands.

    One was of a homeless lady that nobody disliked. (She was in the wrong place wrong time and was murdered for it.)

    The other was of a thirty-five year old dead woman whose body was found at one of Roarke’s construction sites.

    This dead woman was nine-months pregnant and was likely killed because of her pregnancy.

    One of the suspects in her death was a very nice family man (Bolton Singer) who has a not-so-nice father and a “nasty” grandmother.

    Eve has suspected Bolton’s father of the murder but then discovers that Bolton had known the death woman in college.

    Eve is very annoyed and “confronts” Bolton at home.

    Bolton is believably shocked by the picture of the murdered woman and is open about his former relationship with her.

    Apparently, she had returned to New York City to talk with Bolton’s grandmother about marrying Bolton.

    Bolton’s wife is very positive that the grandmother knew about Bolton’s lover and Would Not Have Approve Of Her.

    Obviously, the grandmother had killed the woman and with the help of Bolton’s father had hidden the body.

    This book “hit home” with me about the subject of Sarah’s post.

    In the Eve Dallas novels, there have always been good people as well the scum-of-the-Earth people. 😊

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  25. The big thing about dingy in stories is that it’s the easy and lazy way to write drama. Especially for TV, when you aren’t sure if you’ll be around next season-compress all of that dram into a few episodes, rather than let it dribble out over the whole series run.

    Dingy also allows you to have absolute moral relativism-the “good” guys just have better PR than the bad guys, hide their crimes better, etc, etc, etc…

    (A lot of these “crimes” are being people in an imperfect world, trying to square circles that can never be squared.)

    I try to write people that are people-imperfect but trying so very hard to be better. And angrier when the people they know dismiss personal and moral failings with a wink and a nod. Especially when they are caught and make a performance to deny their faults.

    (I wish I could find the clip, but a speech about infidelity, how it wasn’t just one mistake but mistake after mistake, mistakes that you could have stepped away from at any point before the protagonist discovered the infidelity isn’t a mistake or an accident. It was a deliberate act, and that you are claiming shame and guilt now isn’t real. It’s only because you got caught and you’re performing. Again.)

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  26. I first noticed this in about the mid aughts, with a lot of discussion about why the new Battlestar Galactica was the most amazing sci-fi ever, and why A Song of Ice and Fire was so much better than Wheel of Time or even Lord of the Rings. And while I did at least sort of enjoy BSG, and I liked at least the first three ASoIaF books, the tone of the praise disturbed me.

    The talk all centered around how the characters in BSG were so morally grey, the humans really no better than the Cylons. And how ASoIaF had ditched that ridiculous heroism stuff and made it clear that behaving honorably and trying not to get innocent children killed was for suckers: smart people lied and cheated wherever it gave them an advantage, and if kids died as a result of their actions, oh well, sucks to be them, but that’s what the world’s got in store for people. The implication was that what made these shows great WAS the grey goo, and heroes trying to make the world better would have ruined them.

    It’s only gotten worse since then. There are still some escape routes left, a few Baen books, some Indies, but for the most part, I read the old stuff.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. Yeah, I got sucked into ASoiaF bigtime…for the first three books. By the end of book four (I think), I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to skip to the end to see if Bran and the kids he was with were still alive, because if they had been killed off — and that author WOULD — I wasn’t going any further. The kids survived, but I didn’t go any further after that anyway. It just got…tiring. A couple of children and a retarded man serving as a pack animal were the only non-sociopathic characters left alive, and I didn’t want to read on only to see those characters drown in gray goo like everybody else.

      Like

      Reply

      1. I was immune to ASoiaF because I had read GRRM’s Tuf Voyaging series. When you’d like to drown the main character, it’s not a good sign.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

          1. I got through it. The first story was the best of the lot, the last the worst. His insistance on turning the stories into “population bomb,” cautionary tales got old fast.

            Just realized James Schmitz’s The Illusionists had a very faint echo – a planet with a mystery/problem – but a totally different, and much more enjoyable, conclusion.

            Like

            Reply

            1. I still have it in dead tree. Won’t inflict it on the local library (motto: “We’re broke, we’ll take most anything!”), but extra space in the office bookshelves can house a bit more of my exiled nonfiction. (Stuck in the shop mezzanine. I’ve been up there twice this calendar year. And paid for the trip each time. Ouch/sigh.)

              Like

              Reply

                  2. Mail of heat is whinging about not being able to send the mail. The message says it’ll try until it connects or until 8/2, whichever comes first. No obvious defects in the message.

                    Like

                    Reply

            2. Schmitz is one of those writers I *want* to like, but for some reason only a few of his stories were worth finishing, much less re-reading.

              I never figured out what the problem was. Characterization, backstory, plotting… nothing wrong with any of it, and some of it was outstanding, but the finished product just didn’t do anything for me.

              Like

              Reply

        4. Marxist conditioned writers destroy any and all hope, because Marxism requires there be no hope but Marxism.

          Ick.

          Also, shitty people write shitty books about shitty people.

          Ick.

          Fortunately, there is an underground of great stuff, past and present, and more good stuff to come.

          Liked by 2 people

          Reply

    2. BSG reboot got old for me – I said when I stopped watching it that nothing positive ever happened, so it was like watching the nightly news, but with CGI.

      Beloved Spouse and I watched the first ep of GoT and both said “nope.” More casts of characters portrayed so as to prevent the viewer from caring about any of them.

      This is one of the common reviewer observations about Nolan’s Odyssey from non-corporate media: They didn’t care about anyone in the film.

      Like

      Reply

      1. I couldn’t actually *see* the show for all the camera bouncing, waving, weaving, stutter-zoom, wiggle-waggle, high-rate scene cuts, etc.

        From commentary from others, I don’t think I missed much.

        There are a lot of shows now with so much jiggle-cam I get nauseous. I guess most people got used to them over time, because some people I’ve complained to can’t seem to see it at all.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

        1. Yes. Effective if very underused, otherwise annoying, And from what little I have seen of it, Ron Moore didn’t let the cinematographers do anything like that on Outlander, so it must have been a period tick.

          Like

          Reply

    3. I, science fiction nerd, completely skipped Battle Star Galactica. The only good thing about it was Tricia Helfer and that red dress. And while she was awesome, one lady can’t carry a whole freaking SF series on her back. I also completely skipped Game of Thrones, Trek, Star Wars etc. because same reason. They are not what I want to see.

      The consistency with which everyone EXCEPT JAPAN keeps making what I don’t want to see is remarkable. (Live-action One Piece is pretty fun.)

      They know this, because streaming services track every single click. They know when you skip episodes, they know when you fast forward past the stupid parts, they know when you lose interest and go to a different show. But knowing all that, they still keep making crap that I do not want to see. Even though it’s free, I still won’t watch it.

      And I am not the only one, the Netflix numbers reflect what I’m saying. Nerdrotic, Asmongold and the Critical Drinker have millions of views on YouTube saying what we’re saying. “This is crap, and you know it! What is wrong with you people?!” Netflix’s share price is in the dumper, it’s getting so bad.

      You can also tell they know it because of how much anime is on Netflix and Disney+ now. Bleach is the only reason I keep a Disney+ subscription. I watch nothing else on there, unless a Marvel movie comes on streaming. Then I can FF past the stupid parts.

      So yes, the really do know. And yet they persist. Leading me to think that there’s more going on here than mere intellectual fashion and virtue signalling. What it might be I can’t imagine, but then I couldn’t imagine Covid before it happened.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

      1. Our son had Disney Plus to watch UFC and encouraged us to use it. They had Forged in Fire, every season. That and the early Mandalorian were about the only things we watched.

        Liked by 2 people

        Reply

      2. Only a few shows on Netflex I watch, Dark Wind, Joe Pickett, and a few others. There is a reason why I only pick up Dark Wind Hillerman books on eBook sales of < $2.00.

        The Joe Pickett books, the older volumes, get picked up on discount sale. But the newer ones are purchased sooner, but after initial release costs. Do get a bit tired of the incompetent small town law enforcement and clueless feds. You’d think after all these years they’d get a clue 2×4.

        It will be interesting to see how the Anna Pigeon series (on USA, so Hulu for my source, I think) is handled on screen. Only read one book recently (read some of the older ones a long time ago). Draw for those books is not so much the murder mystery but the descriptions of the various National Parks settings. Again, recent purchase < $2.00 (okay, $3.00 these days).

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

    4. Some of the speculation regarding ASoIaF is that the real reason why Martin isn’t finishing the series is because he’s dead set on not allowing heroism… while simultaneously working toward an ending that pretty much requires heroism to resolve.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

    5. NuBSG worked…for about two seasons. Maybe three. Then, the whole concept just collapsed when you realized that they were never going to solve any of the plot points they brought up.

      It’s the reason why I sold my entire DVD collection of the series the first chance I could.

      GoT, on the other hand (and ASoiaF)-read the first book. Figured that the author wasn’t going to have anything happy to say about anything that wasn’t rape, torture, and showing how bad people were and noped out of the way as quick as I could.

      Reading online synopsis of the series makes me realize that GRRM has either-

      1-Written the canonical ending and that’s what we saw in the last season of Game of Thrones. If he publishes that, he will be lucky if he’s only tarred and feathered.

      Or…

      2-He is so committed to everything being terrible that any solution would require him to make a massive 180-degree turn to finish the series in anything approaching a readable condition. Which he will never do because that would require him to forsake his God of Grim Darkness. And the one thing he can’t be at his age is an apostate.

      Besides, he doesn’t need to finish the series. He’s in his…70s?…and HBO is still buying his stuff to make more spinoff series. He has all the money he’ll ever need at this point, so why work?

      Like

      Reply

      2. NuBSG also suffered from the “making it up as we go along” problem in writing meta arcs. I became aware of this when I heard about a writers meeting well after the TV series had started, and the topic was “Which characters would really blow everyone’s minds if they turned out to be cylons?”

        And that’s when they decided who the missing cylons would be.

        Liked by 1 person

        Reply

  27. Point of silliness: when I see ‘dingy’, i pronounce it internally with a hard ‘g’ – dinG-y, as dinghy.

    It takes a while to remember the alternate, used here, as ‘dinge-y’. So I envision – er, auralize, says Grok – a scene with lots of little bells going off.

    Same issue with ‘stingy’. That’s an unfortunate attribute of bees and wasps.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  28. I’m a writer because I hate the dingy “no one is a hero” trope, which I saw creeping into everything from the early 2000s (if not late 1990s) onward. There are heroes. There are villains. For all the yapping about “balance,” somehow, that never gets applied to fiction.

    Everyone’s all upset that comics, Star Wars, Star Trek, et al are being ruined now. Pal, where were you twenty years ago? Heck, where were you thirteen years ago, when I would receive pats on the head for predicting half of this? Although I admit that I didn’t see the absolute reductio in absurdum coming, when I read in the 2002 Star Wars Character Guide about Anakin Solo – youngest of the Solo children, the one heavily implied to be some kind of savior who would redeem everything that his grandfather had done wrong and be a great hero in his own right – was killed off for no discernible reason beyond “it’s realistic” (it was Del Rey interpreting Lucas’ “please make him not the central hero” as “kill him”) – I knew it was wrong. I knew we were in trouble.

    Yes, I beat Animorphs like a dead horse, but when a sci-fi series is unrelenting in its insistence that there are no good guys and the author refuses to end the series, leaving it on a cliffhanger while claiming that the fans want “airy fairy happy endings” and should instead think about being drafted for a war? Houston, we have a PROBLEM!!! A persistent problem which needs to be addressed, because what is the point of cheering for the Animorphs when they aren’t any better than the Yeerks – except by dint of not mind-controlling people?

    Oh, you’re upset about comics? Where were you when I was telling people this would be the end state of Marvel if the companies weren’t universally told to stop misusing the characters? I have been shouting to get people’s attention for years, and I knew before that that we had a PROBLEM. But all I got were shrugs, or “you don’t understand the genre,” or “you’re so cute and naive” pats on the head that politely told me I was a fool for pointing out the emperor was paying clothes makers handling thin air. At least the ones who told me “there’s nothing you can do” acknowledged that there WAS a problem….

    You could say I’m slightly bitter about trying to get people’s attention directed toward the problem of dingy fiction. No one wanted to hear it then. No one wants to hear what the actual solutions are now. So, fine. Call me when you actually want the solutions. Until then, I’ll be over here working on my stories – which are not dingy, thanks ever so much. See you when I see you. Sayonara. Until next time. Good-bye, good luck, God bless, and all the rest.

    I have work to do, and I’m tired of hearing people complaining when they could be doing something proactive. At least pay people like Crossover Queen and Sarah for their uplifting fiction if you can’t be bothered to help any other way. Or better yet, request that your library buy their books. Do something to help besides gripe, will you?

    Liked by 3 people

    Reply

      2. :cracks neck: Do you really want to tempt me?

        :scimitar smile: I’ve put up with people who say we should make only new things or cling only to the old. They are both in error; we cannot build anything new without reference to what came before, and we cannot abandon the older material just because a lot of people are writing bad fanfic of it. “Star Wars made me mad” has given us a lot of good new fiction, some great, some just entertaining, some not so hot. There are people fighting that fight for space opera, at least.

        I don’t advocate abandoning what was good in Star Wars. I have kept a lot of the Expanded Universe material and bought more. Use it, enjoy it, then write your own space opera after you’ve read more widely in the genre (our hostess’ latest novel in three books comes to mind). Read, read, read. Build your mind. Find your happy place and write from there.

        Superheroes need more study, so study them. Learn why people like them, if you are not a fan, and don’t call them “capes**” unless you *want to alienate the audience that loves them. It’s a more expansive audience than you think. You don’t have to like it, but respecting those who do is a must.

        Learn, study, write, build. Don’t lock yourself into one viewpoint, one idea, or one genre. You never know what story will kick down your mental door screaming “WRITE ME!” when you are doing something completely different.

        But don’t (imperial generic) you dare tell me that “no one saw this coming.” Don’t tell me no one told you it would come. Plenty of people did, you just didn’t want to hear it. Welcome to the future your determination to live in Condition White bought us. Get with the Yellow, Orange, and Red program Lt. Col. Cooper gave us or get left behind. We tried to wake you up. You preferred to sleep. Right the bed yourselves or call us when you’re ready to actually be told the truth. Until then, Sayonara.

        Liked by 3 people

        Reply

        1. Superheroes need more study, so study them. Learn why people like them, if you are not a fan, and don’t call them “capes**” unless you *want to alienate the audience that loves them. It’s a more expansive audience than you think. You don’t have to like it, but respecting those who do is a must.

          Worse, don’t assume someone who loves them will show up to watch you attack them.

          It may work once.

          Maybe a few times.

          But it will eventually fail.

          Liked by 3 people

          Reply

    2. “You could say I’m slightly bitter about trying to get people’s attention directed toward the problem of dingy fiction.”

      I believe you’re being much too polite and understanding, Caroline. Given the five-year-long farce of Sad Puppies, I’m breathing fire. Oh, the things I like are not “Quality!” ? I’m bad for liking those things? Uh huh. Sure. We all remember how it was.

      A farce which continues today by the way, ten years after we declared victory and moved on. Sad Puppies Wikipedia entry starts like this: “Sad Puppies was an unsuccessful [1] right-wing [2] anti-diversity [3] campaign run from 2013 to 2017 and intended to influence the outcome of the annual Hugo Awards…” Emphasis from the original.

      Now, 15 years of supposed outrage and counting, that’s a lot of work. For a lot of people. The same people who did not have a problem with the Chicoms buying the 2023 WorldCon, AND kicking some books/authors off the awards with no explanation and no apologies. Three years later, still no word.

      Given all that and everything else we’ve been finding out the last 6 years (USAID!), dingy fiction looks more and more like a deliberate and very well-funded psy-op.

      For example, staying with the awards, anybody still paying attention to the Dragon Awards? No, generally not. And why not? Because after a good start, it kind of wandered off into giving awards to the likes of Mary-Three-Names and the usual dingy fiction crowd. And how did that happen? 15 years of effort by a lot of the same Puppy-Kicker crowd, including something called the Red Panda Faction which is far too on-the-nose to not be deliberate.

      That’s a lot of commitment to support something as fundamentally crappy as dingy fiction, right? Seems a bit contrived? Like they were doing it as a job, almost.

      So I have decided to boycott them all, let them fall into bankruptcy and despair. I will write my own, and self-publish, and be damned to the lot of them.

      Liked by 3 people

      Reply

  29. Somewhat related, especially for folks not selling books….

    The Road Trip metaphor.

    A book is a road trip.

    It has the folks you’re with, the route you’re going, and where you’re going.

    One of those will make some folks like it; two will make a lot of folks like it, three and you’re amazing.

    The ‘these people all suck’ thing removes the “people you’re with” option.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. And it tends to remove the “where you’re going” factor, too. What are the odds that those crappy excuses for people are going anywhere you actually want to be?

      Like

      Reply

  30. “… creeping realization that no one — not a single person — in that series is a decent human being.”

    Yeah.

    This has been a problem for me for quite some time now. The ‘hero,” the villain, the romantic interest, the NPCs, the fricking setting half the time, all a-holes. It’s everywhere.

    Except anime, so that’s what I watch. In books, it’s relentless. Has been since about 2010. Go to the bookstore, pick up random SF book published after 2010, everyone in it is bad. Slavery, torture, cheating husbands, cheating wives, murder, societal collapse, and that’s the first chapter. Didn’t even meet the villain yet.

    SO I WRITE MY OWN.

    There is no cheating, no lying (except to the enemy), no betrayals, nobody gets ditched because they are inconvenient, funny looking or socialy inept, no stealing that I can recall, and nobody dies. Even the bad guy doesn’t die. Oh, and no sex. Smooching at most.

    The enemy does kill a bunch of people, but we only see Our Heroes cleaning up the mess afterward. There is a bit of bullying here and there, but fully justified in my humble opinion. And funny.

    “But Phantom, how can there even be a book like that? What happens?”

    Alien invasion. Sentient machines. Gigantic guns shooting stuff in orbit. The goofball main character KEEPS his girlfriend when it all starts to get crazy, which I never see these days.

    Also the nerd gets the girl, which one reviewer had a real problem with. In honor of that reviewer, for the rest of the series the nerd keeps collecting new girlfriends, one of whom is in fact a genuine female human. The rest, no so much.

    Is it deathless prose? No. Is it fun? Readers say yes. In fact one reader said “Yay, not depressing!!!”

    This is what I’m going to keep doing. Because it’s what I want, and because nobody in the mainstream is doing it.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  31. Sarah, you made me go back and analyze my first novel. I didn’t exactly have any heroes, but then I really didn’t have any “I’m evil!!!” characters either. I just tried to make all the characters true to life, which resulted in some characters falling into reprehensible behavior, not as a lifestyle, but as a failing.

    Like

    Reply

  32. Shallow evil people hire those like them and find ways to remove others. That’s what Hollywood has become. They have no clue why people don’t eat up their movies. Same with publishing and politics. They are incapable of finding themselves at fault. It progresses until it collapses and they will never understand why.

    Like

    Reply

  33. There are two main outlooks writers can assume with their work: writing what they expect things to be like, and writing what they want things to be like. The second one is primarily the “bright” version of writing: the knight will slay the dragon, the detective will solve the crime, Horatio Alger’s plucky young protagonist will make a success of himself. The first version tends to be dingier, though version #2 can bleed into version #1 when a writer realizes that giving examples of good triumphing and virtue being rewarded can make it a little more likely that other people will act that way in real life.

    Today’s writers of dinge seem to be writing in the first mode, gray goo as expectation, but I suspect there’s an underlying level of wanting things to be that way. If other people are rotten, after all, it relieves much of the burden on oneself to be good. It gives one an excuse not to try to be better. Indeed, seeing things “as they are” by itself puts one directly on a higher plane, so one is already better, right?

    I say it’s spinach, and I say the heck with it.

    Republica restituendae.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  34. I realized something when I was trying to do a recommendation for Dave Freer’s Mad Genius post. Except for science fiction and fantasy, carefully curated, my books of choice were written pre WWI for the most part. Thank you Mr. Kipling and a couple others. That preference is/was subconscious but my bookshelves reflect it in spades. There are a couple exceptions that the gen pop would call cloying or something.

    Like

    Reply

  35. 《A cloud was on the mind of men and wailing went the weather,

    Yea, a sick cloud upon the souls when we were boys together.

    Science announced nonentity and art admired decay.

    The world was old and ended, but you and I were gay.

    Round us in antic order their crippled vices came,

    Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.

    Like the white lock of Whistler that lit our aimless gloom,

    Men showed their own white feather as proudly as a plume.

    Life was a fly that faded, and death a drone that stung.

    The world was very old indeed when you and I were young.》—GKC, To E.C.Bentley

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  36. THIS.

    With bells on.

    Giant bells that take two strong men on each rope. Or better pulleys.

    (Also, I admit, I passed on reading it because I kept mentally pronouncing the title with a hard “g”.)

    Like

    Reply

  37. Maybe I became a crotchety coot prematurely, but I never got into either Friends or the show about nothing.

    Friends finally booted me when Rachel told Ross they should see other people. Yet when Ross hooked up with comely Chloe(?) the barmaid, everyone was aghast. I guess ‘seeing other people’ meant Ross should sit alone in his room eating his own liver while Rachel was out getting run through.

    And if a show is about nothing, why should I waste my time watching it?

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  38. David Eddings comes to mind. He stated he wanted to write “realistic,” fantasy because he thought Tolkien was unrealistic. Which to him, worked out to, “Nobody is interested in making money.” So all of his series I’ve read have characters who adore money for its own sake. Who might really swim in it a la Scrooge McDuck if they had the chance.

    His work makes more sense when you realize he grew up in the Depression and his parents were almost certainly FDR Democrats. All his attitudes toward “conservatives,” and “organized religion,” have that 30s vibe.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  39. OT but interesting, they’re releasing, “Coyote Vs. Acme.” The trailer was pretty funny. Basically Wile E. has found a young lawyer willing to fight the Big, Evil Corporation which has been deliberately selling him defective equipment.

    I know it was held back, but I forget why. I guess we’ll find out.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. “Communist Party supports the working class,” they explained. “This [gun control] is going to harm the working class of course, the vast majority of Americans.”

      When your gun control attempts lose the Communists…

      Like

      Reply

  41. Ah, coincidence. Honest or truthful — just as my WIP heroine has confessed that her motives for something were more pragmatic than another character thought, when no one would have suffered if she had held her tongue.

    Like

    Reply

  42. Speaking of dingy, look at any sizable university campus, and you can tell exactly when communism skinsuited the profession of architecture. Suddenly all the new buildings, especially the fashionable ones, became awkward, featureless boxes, the only change being when it somehow got even worse with the advent of brutalism. Every campus has a shockingly ugly, dingy collection of buildings constructed between the 1950s and the 1990s. Then somewhere around the early 2k, people started designing campus buildings humans might actually *want* to be in and look at again (not sure what to attribute that change to…maybe the Soviets no longer paying architects to be stupid? but it was welcome).

    Like

    Reply

    1. The old architects who made their careers with the stack a-prole boxes died, and architects who thought those were boring came to prominence.

      Architects tend to have long working careers. Changes to the discipline happen nearly at the same rate as in scientific fields – i.e. one funeral at a time.

      Like

      Reply

    2. Soviet architects had to be members of… basically the national architect’s union, though they called it something else. They could be fined or arrested for practicing the trade without membership.

      A lot of the official “stack-a-prole box” problem was that the USSR was stony broke for most of its existence, and those featureless boxes were all they could afford.

      An architect who could shave a few roubles by dispensing with useless fripperies like elevators would be lauded (stairs are healthy exercise!), architects wasting State funds on non-essentials would be condemned.

      Like

      Reply

      2. When the revolution came (or just collapsed of internal contradictions), one of the first things that happened was the stack-a prol boxes were repainted in pastels, had gardens and window boxes added around and on them, and people were allowed to take ownership of their spaces. Now, some neighborhoods are almost attractive. Others … are still depressing Soviet gray, inside and out.

        Like

        Reply

  43. This comment is in reply to Crossover’s comment about Anne Perry, but WordPress isn’t letting me post the reply. Technical difficulties. Anyway, here’s my reply to Crossover:

    Oh wow. Wikipedia cites Perry as saying that in the court case, “as a minor, I wasn’t allowed to speak” — welp, now I know she’s lying. She might have been advised by her lawyer not to speak. But does she actually think anyone is going to buy that as a minor, she wasn’t allowed to speak in her own defense? What actually happened was that as a minor, she was spared the death penalty.

    Sheesh. I’m with you on not reading her, though I hadn’t read her before I learned about this so the word “again” doesn’t apply in my case.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. It is fairly unusual for anyone accused of murder to be allowed by their lawyer to testify, because cross-examination is too rough for almost anyone, even the most innocent, to come out well.

      Teenage girls are known to be susceptible to becoming pair murderers, whether with males or females as partners in murder.

      Shrug. Perry did her time and apparently kept her nose clean afterward. Not a big fan of her books before or after her backstory was revealed, but plenty of people did like them.

      Like

      Reply

  44. I write to get away from this. Not as fast as I should, but I am writing. If I ever somehow got hired to write for Black Library, my characters would be snarking about the absurdity of GrimDerp until the cows come home.

    I’m reading manga because you can usually avoid the crappy stuff, easily (a love of gore early-on is a good sign). I honestly want more happy sex between happy people, not crappy porn…which I can occasionally find.

    I love watching anime because it has to sell and you can only feed people so much wallpaper paste (especially since studios seem to be going back to the ’90s for their design stylings).

    I read old books.

    I try out stories on Amazon (and dear GOD…I know, indie publishers can publish anything, but there are so many books that a competent editor and a few dope slaps can work wonders to make them better…).

    I curate my DVD and BluRay collection.

    And I don’t think I’ve been in a Barnes&Noble for almost a year now.

    Not missing it by a long shot…

    Like

    Reply

  45. Good things are just as real as bad things and I’m tired of literary pretentiousness about tragedy and evil being so much deeper than good things.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

    1. Reminds me of a comment I saw once about wine vs. grape juice. Grape juice tastes good. Everybody (well, almost everybody) likes it. Therefore, liking grape juice doesn’t make you special. Wine is ‘an acquired taste’. Liking it (or pretending to) sets one apart from the common herd. Going beyond mere consumption, devoting time and effort to elaborate wine snobbery, demonstrates a lack of anything more important to do.

      So it is with literature. Anybody can enjoy a happy ending. Getting emotionally invested in a sordid story, despicable characters, a world of pervasive corruption and an ending that punishes everybody takes committed effort.

      Like

      Reply

      1. “Getting emotionally invested in a sordid story…takes committed effort.”

        Since the onset of Sad Puppies, I don’t think ‘Those People’ actually read that stuff they give awards to. Or indeed care about it in any way after the event.

        I mean, the crap that got an award in 2016? Does -anyone- remember the author or the story? The characters? No way. We remember the controversy, not the straw men that were thrown around.

        I think they’re just lying, in the same way that wine snobs do when praising some expensive, exclusive plonk that’s one degree away from vinegar. Because supercilious lying liars lie. >:(

        Like

        Reply

        1. Hey, don’t knock vinegar. I find an occasional swig of pickle juice refreshing. 😛

          What I don’t understand is paying more for a bottle of spoiled grape juice than an entire steak dinner with dessert. There’s just not that much difference between a $10.00 bottle of wine and a $610.00 bottle.

          Why pay $50,000 for a watch? It won’t add one second to your day. It won’t keep you any more on time than a $50.00 watch.

          The useless things rich (and wanna-be rich) people spend inordinate amounts of money on just to impress other shallow, vapid people offe nds a practical person like myself.

          As one of my characters tells an ex-girlfriend: “You called me controlling and abusive because I wouldn’t pay $3,000 for a fugly purse.”
          ———————————
          Dr. Arensky, to the Kildar: “Yeast,” the microbiologist replied. “A microorganism that excretes alcohol as the same sort of by-product as urea, the stuff that makes the strong ammonia smell, in human urine. So what you’re drinking is, in effect, yeast piss.”

          Liked by 2 people

          Reply

    1. That’s what I *expected* from the movie “Ready Player One”, but despite the dystopian setting it wound up being quite upbeat.

      Like

      Reply

  47. A lot of Greek myths are pretty grim, full of people and gods doing ghastly things. But I’ve always liked the story of Baucis and Philemon, an elderly couple visited by the gods in disguise, who brought out the best food and drink they had for them, and were granted a single wish. What they wished for was that they would die at the exact same time, so that neither would have to outlive the other. And the gods granted that. That has long seemed to me to be evidence of real humanity in the ancient world, and of an understanding of love in a form that’s not destructive.

    Like

    Reply

  48. https://spectator.org/hollywokes-war-on-heroes/

    Further to the subject at hand, this article by Lou Aguilar from a couple days ago regarding why there are no heroes in movies these days. Mr. Aguilar used to be a screen writer, so he’s got war stories.

    Pretty much recapitulates Sarah’s “dingy stories” concept. (Which I am shamelessly stealing for my own use, by the way. It’s a beautiful coining.)

    Like

    Reply

    1. Steve Rogers in the first Captain America movie was great. Consistently refused to compromise on Doing The Right Thing. So, 15 years ago at least part of Hollyweird still had some standards.
      ———————————
      It is a fixed belief among Leftroids that they can force people to be ‘better’ and if we resist their benevolence, then obviously we are Eeevul and more force is needed. The world is littered with the mass graves which are all that remain of their failed utopian delusions.

      Liked by 1 person

      Reply

  49. I just got a thing in the mail. It starts off with:

    Under the Voter’s Choice Act, every active registered voter in San Diego County will automatically receive a ballot in the mail for the upcoming election.

    Wait a minute. If it’s the “Voter’s Choice Act” why can’t I have the choice to not get a fraud-by-mail ballot sent to my house? Sounds more like the “Government Will Force All Its Choices On You Act”. Bad choices, at that.
    ———————————
    Statistically, the Democrats should elect at least a dozen dead Congresscritters to represent all their dead voters!

    Like

    Reply

  50. I’m reminded of Chandler, and Noir when reading this. See, the whole schtick was of the one upright guy who was genuinely good, and maybe a few throwaway bit characters that got stabbed or shot could have been, but everyone else was either utterly depraved, crazy, or at the very least highly morally questionable.

    There’s reasons for the style, of course. No sympathy for the villains and all that, but you could dance all the way up to that thin little line.

    Treating the honestly good with respect rather than portraying the characters as rather dimwitted and easily led seems to have become the norm. For Hollyweird, I get it. Good is not their culture, they don’t understand it. It’s like trying to explain American hatred for HOAs to the local invasive species (deer, RLF, burbs, et cetera). They are mired in story, but their stories are dirty and quite often dull.

    The negative emotions are easy. I believe it’s evolutionary, too lazy to google it right now (long day). Greif, sorrow, wrath, betrayal, envy, lust and so on hook right in to those basic primate emotive wriggly bits. It’s not hard to yank on those levers.

    The higher registers require more sophisticated tools. To show things like steadfast loyalty, devotion, tested and tough honesty, nobility of spirit, these thigs take longer to create than quick little stabby stabby phrases and bits that yoink the reader straight into the bad stuff.

    But, like any good building, a solid foundation allows for a more robust structure to stand upon it. Creating, growing, and maintaining a good character takes work. The best things in life, by utterly bizarre and strange coincidence, also require effortful labor to enact.

    Also, side note, but redemption stories are crack. Readers tend to love the crap out of them. Taking the bad guy and turning him into good guy material seems to speak to something basic and primal in humans.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  51. at the panel at LC this year there’s one point i wanted to just look at one of those guys and say “Bullshit.”

    Like

    Reply

Leave a comment