The War On Fun

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Recently I learned something I could have gone my whole life without knowing: the war on fun is a bipartisan affair.

What do I mean by that? Oh, this week on Twitter, several Voices of the Right TM came out breathing heavy about how not just the Malfoid fan fic trend, (which honestly is THE MOST WHOLESOME trend we’ve seen in fanfic ever) but in fact all of fiction, including people like Larry Correia and John Ringo are a sign that everything is corrupted, and evil, and we’re putting bad things in children’s heads and the left is winning.

Look, guys, I got my antique partner’s desk refinished and up in the new office. I don’t want more dents on it, again.

That the left are ridiculous scolds who had their sense of fun ablated at birth, we knew. As we can tell from the game, movie, book companies they control, they think everything should serve the Marxist agenda or be worthless. Which is why every game, movie, book company is in the crapper. BUT apparently the right looked at that and went “That’s why they’re winning!” and they want to do that too. I’ve actually come across an article complaining about the Hardy Boys. Which I grant you have gotten rewritten, but the solution is not to eliminate it, but to find the old ones used. (I never saw the attraction of that or Nancy Drew, because I preferred Enid Blyton, but I knew most American raised readers grew up on those forever.)

Here’s the thing: The left isn’t winning the culture war. It looks like it, because it’s all you can find in the grocery book shelf (WHY are you buying books in the grocery store?) or even at most bookstores, but that’s because yes, the left owns the cultural pathways, and that’s what they’re pushing.

However, from the inside, each year the print runs are smaller and sell less. You know what’s winning? Indie authors. Okay, most of us ain’t making a ton (most tradpub authors didn’t either) but in aggregate, we’re making a huge dent. And a lot of us are doing pretty well. BECAUSE WE WRITE FUN STUFF. Or at least fun for us, and apparently some people agree.

This got into the whole ridiculous debate of art. “But just because you enjoy it, it’s just cheap thrills, it’s not art.” Well, let me tell you, just because you suffer to consume it, it ain’t art, either. It’s JUST suffering.

So, let’s talk about it: When I was tutoring, I got girls in who were failing at everything. Inevitably, I found their parents allowed them to read two things: The lives of saints and the Bible.

Now, it is possible to write the lives of saints in a riveting manner (Because my brain is broken I’m writing the story of the first Ellyan saint, which is mental as I have…10? books in the world to publish first.) However, most of it isn’t written in a riveting manner, and also, frankly, after a while you kind of know the pattern.

Do I read lives of saints? Sure, but not as my whole reading diet, because that would be boring.

What I inevitably found is that if I convinced their parents to let them read other stuff, their reading AND EVERYTHING ELSE went up grade wise.

Now, I’m not a utilitarian when it comes to reading. I don’t think you should be a good reader because it’s good for you. But there is no denying that being a good reader gives you a massive advantage in life, but no one — NO ONE — has ever become a great reader by reading only the required stuff for school and maybe 2 very holy books. No, not even in the middle ages. Did you know that until the eighteenth century, people moved their lips when reading? Because there wasn’t enough reading material for most people to get past that point.

But besides all that, and because this is not just about reading: Who died and told you that humans should never have fun?

In the dystopian hellscape the left is trying to herd us toward, there is enough worry. In our economy cacked by multiple government interventions, there is enough struggle to stay afloat. And even for those of us who see opportunity everywhere? We’re working harder than we ever did. You want us to never let up? That’s not how humans live.

Look, I can understand disapproving of some people’s way of decompressing: those that are bad for themselves and others: alcohol, drugs, gambling, unbridled sex. (Yes, sex is better with bridles. Seriously? Can you be serious for ten seconds?)

BUT movies, games, books? Because they’re fiction and don’t have a “deeper message” (to your mind.) That’s crazy cakes.

First, if you want to sell your message, it best be wrapped up in a sh*tload of fun. When the left was actually winning the culture war, 40 or 50 years ago they knew how to do that. People will swallow poison if it’s wrapped in fun.

And now you’re saying that fun is evil. No. Fun is fun. The message you load it with might be evil, but then again it might be good, too. Removing the fun is not the way to improve things. The way to improve things is to make it GOOD.

Second- BUT! FUN ISN’T ART! Well, guess what? Peanut butter isn’t chocolate! Music isn’t painting! Shoes aren’t boats! Purple isn’t yellow! And other news of the obvious.

Sure, fun books/movies/games MIGHT NOT be art. And? Is only “art” allowed? WHY? Because we’re only allowed to create and consume “worthy” things? Worthy according to who? Exactly?

Because personally I don’t care. Yes, I’ve read “real literature” and even enjoy some of it, mostly Shakespeare and Austen, to be fair. BUT I also read fanfic. And everything in between. I read what interests me at the time, and I don’t care if it has the stamp of “art” or not.

Which brings us to “What is art?” And that got outright silly. I pointed out for most things the only real evaluation of “art’ is “that which has survived the test of time.” THAT’s IT.

And to survive the test of time, it needs to be FUN first. So it’s loved by a lot of people.

And then we got people arguing that’s not the only test, because you can look at something and know it’s art. (People, the Elgin Marbles, before being taken to England, were being used by the locals to make lime wash for their houses. No, seriously. And yeah, to me I look at them and they’re art. BUT obviously Greek villagers disagreed.) You can take reality apart and not find a single atom of “art” because that’s inside the human brain. And the “art” proclaimed by the elites is mostly stupid message bamf. And even the ‘test of time” thing, we won’t know until the decks are cleared, because in the age of mass media, it was easy to fake “popularity” and a lot of what’s now considered 20th century “art” your grandchildren are going to laugh themselves sick over.

So, the only test is “Has it survived the test of time” which means, to begin with, it was fun or enjoyable enough to a large enough group of people that it SURVIVED.

Oh, yeah, and let’s slap our foreheads for the people explaining to me that making a good screw is art (No, apparently phrasing is a dead art) and that making steel is an art and that… I had to point out that’s the OTHER meaning of art. Not worthy object/admirable product, but “art” as craft, as knowledge, and semantic confusing helps no one.

Though I suppose that person would love to go through a museum of art, admiring screws. (Start with la maja desnuda and… never mind.)

All of it to obfuscate that, as a wise rabbi once said “Not of bread alone lives man.” And btw, he spoke and taught in little fictional stories. Because it makes the “word of G-d” go down easier.

But fine, fine. If both sides of our utterly effed up political spectrum wants to make war on fun, let them come, they and their armies.

I’ll be standing here, holding stunt middle fingers aloft. Why stunt? Because otherwise it’s pretty hard to type and produce decent fiction that some people will find fun.

Probably not enough for me to ever be considered art. Which is fine. I don’t care. I’m having fun writing this stuff, and I hope my fans are having fun reading it.

In the end, that’s all that matters.

36 thoughts on “The War On Fun”

  2. “It’s comics, it’s not art!” Brother, Stratford Caldecott (may he rest in peace) had an article over at The Imaginative Conservative where he quoted an art teacher who had Jack “King” Kirby – comic artist champion – in his top three most influential artists ever. Comics are not picture books for kids – or they weren’t, before the Wokerati got their hands on them. Go back and read a 1960s, ’70s, or ’80s comics. Heck, pick up the Scrooge McDuck comics our hostess loves. Once you’ve read it, then you get to comment on it. Not before.

    Because here’s a secret: until recently, most comic writers and artists at the Big 2 were extremely well read. Most people were extremely well read for fun. You get nowhere with didacticism. You get everywhere with a “spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.”

    And as a friend likes to point out, all medicines are poisons. The only way to make sure they heal instead of kill is to measure out the dosage properly. And, brother, you’re measuring it way too darn high!

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    1. So many of those writers and artists at The Big Two taught so many kids about the wider world. My interest in Japan was borne out of 1980s and early 1990s X-Men comics, not the two days we spent on it in “World History” class.

      I’d add a note about the print runs Sarah mentioned in today’s column: in comics, the print runs are microscopic compared to what they once were. I worked on and off at my local comic book shop. The first year I was there, 2006 or so, the best-selling books the owner would order at a rate of 100-150 copies each month. When I came back in 2010 his orders had declined by a third, and in 2015 they were another third smaller. It is conceivable that today’s comics could appreciate into the future based on their rarity alone, however, they would have to be objects that people actually want, and it doesn’t appear that anyone wants joyless scolds lecturing them, even in a colorful medium like comic books.

      Bonus fun fact: a single Japanese manga outsold the entire American comic book market all by itself in 2020, a claim “journalists” have been working feverishly to discredit.

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    2. I remember the first (that I saw) of a Warner Brother’s theater release of Bugs Bunny and company movie. Would have been ’90s. We did not have the only kids, son, and nieces, who could not understand why their parents were laughing hysterically. Not new material, exactly. Which made it even more fun. Just subtle enough that it was slapstick going over the younger audiences head. But their parents and guardians got it.

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      1. Every single time I show one of the Disney or Bugs Bunny WWII cartoons at Day Job, I catch some new detail. The language flips, or the pinup in the background, some sign on a wall, nods to then popular culture … Especially the use of German, and how the characters change from formal to informal for insults. Subtle, but funny and apt.

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        1. I learned to love classical music from watching cartoons as a kid.

          And also, because I was a great reader and loved historical stuff, fairytales, science, etc. I got many of the jokes.

          The more “adult” stuff I got later.

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  3. This has been a thing for a while, with certain non-leftist killjoys in the past five years inveighing against video gamers (and possibly tabletop war gamers, from the number of people posting rebuttal memes of celebrity wargamers). Their counterparts on the left included a bunch of wine mom boomers complaining that young women were insufficiently “sex positive” in their tastes in media. (Might have been a straw(wo)man, or an elaborate way of sideways complaining abt certain non-Western cultural norms). And every so often you get some stuffy, pole-up-backside Catholic or Christian apologist who’s offended by the continuing popularity of GKC and the Inklings. They’re spiritually not very different from the hard sci-fi people who diss space opera, the table top gamers who proclaim that Gaming System X is for pussies, and a zillion other forms of virtue signaling that have comparatively little to do with the signaller’s core values and a lot to do with their personalities.

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  4. I’m currently sitting in Florence Italy, and just spent a goodly chunk of my day touring the Uffizi Gallery. There is a vast amount of art contained in that building, much from the 14th through 16th centuries. In that era, “fun” was pretty much what you could put in a church (I started saying “Everyone wants an Annunciation painting” after seeing the vast number of them in the gallery). So the art HAD to have a message. However, even with that restriction the painters and sculptors took plenty of risks in both subject matter (using classic Greek and Roman mythology to display Christian ideals) and presentation (nudity was quite common, but only for the non-humans…who looked amazingly human). Violence and gore were prettycommon too – there was an entire room showing beheadings.

    It all survived (sometimes just barely, the flood of 1966 was of biblical proportions in Florence) because people along the way enjoyed it. There’s fun for ya!

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    1. for some of us, Images of The Annunciation, The Nativity, The Passion (series of 12), and the Assumption are not just ‘pretty paintings,’ but reminders of what we should strive towards.

      I’m about as lapsed an Existential Orthodox as I could be, but it still fills me with awe to recall those and other Icons used to teach Church History, and provide focal points for Spiritual Communion with the Ineffable.

      Ecstasy (in three of the four common meanings) and Joy come from many sources.

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  5. Will hold up Middle Fingers in solidarity. The fun suckers are Legion, and deserve all The Middle Fingers creatives can muster. What scares me a little, though, is the thought that they (both L and R) are merely a Mask for The BLOB™ and that the fun-sucking is a symptom of a bigger problem.

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    1. Vaguely related to “holding up Middle Fingers”…

      In the Museo Galileo in Florence, one of the items on exhibit is Galileo’s middle finger from his right hand. Centuries after his death, he’s still flipping the bird to the powers that be. Be like Galileo.

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  6. I think it’s two main groups.

    First, the Conservative Inc folks are the ones who built their industry by being able to profit while losing. Because otherwise they would have been wiped out. So they’re fine losing on fun. They stay afloat when the right is losing.

    The second are the Radical Anti-Leftists. They’re the former leftists that the left ejected from the society for some immutable characteristic or some faux pas they didn’t know enough to avoid. They’re aligned against the left, but are still running on the Leftist source code. Which include Absolute Moral Dogma at All Times.

    I think the radical anti-leftists will mellow out a bit once they discover fun actually is allowed and its really good at spinning up the leftists. And I think Conservative Inc will mostly crawl under a rock and die when they’re no longer useful controlled opposition.

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  7. Sarah, I think that you’re still thinking in terms of Left and Right when you should be thinking in terms of UniParty. These people are happy to provide the illusion of a choice between the them as long as they are in charge.

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  8. reference:

    “”So, let’s talk about it: When I was tutoring, I got girls in who were failing at everything. Inevitably, I found their parents allowed them to read two things: The lives of saints and the Bible.

    Now, it is possible to write the lives of saints in a riveting manner (Because my brain is broken I’m writing the story of the first Ellyan saint, which is mental as I have…10? books in the world to publish first.) However, most of it isn’t written in a riveting manner, and also, frankly, after a while you kind of know the pattern.

    Do I read lives of saints? Sure, but not as my whole reading diet, because that would be boring.””

    Taylor Caldwell’s novels about Sts Luke and Paul, as well as her work on Cicero, stand out as entertainment and more than a little requirement of thought on the part of the reader.

    I’ll admit that Dear and Glorious Physician, among an eclectic collection of works by other authors, did influence my choice of vocation.

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  9. The “no fun” impulse reminds me of the canard about Puritans worrying that somewhere, someone might be having a good time (and thus they need to put a stop to it.) And the late and unlamented Ayatollah Khomeini declaring that “There is no joy in Islam.” Happiness and fun mean that you are not working hard enough for The Cause. I observed in College 1.0 that when someone took up a Cause, he or she promptly lost any trace of a sense of humor about other things. The Cause devoured and tinted everything in the person’s life.

    The October issue of Texas Highways is about books, bookstores, reading clubs, and authors. All the featured authors write LITERATURE, with angst, social causes, commentary on current social problems, and so on. Several are multiple award winners, and almost all check a minority box of some kind. They write six course gourmet meals that have to be explained by the waiter. I write a Ruben sandwich, or a good cheeseburger. Some people really enjoy fine dining. Other folks want a sandwich or burger. For me? It varies with my mood.

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  10. However, from the inside, each year the print runs are smaller and sell less. You know what’s winning? Indie authors. Okay, most of us ain’t making a ton (most tradpub authors didn’t either) but in aggregate, we’re making a huge dent. And a lot of us are doing pretty well. BECAUSE WE WRITE FUN STUFF. Or at least fun for us, and apparently some people agree.

    The interesting thing is that they’re still doing the “wow, this indy series is successful, let’s sign them” and go three or four books, cranking up the Prog nonsense, then the series doesn’t sell anymore. Sometimes they’ll have someone do a different series, sometimes not.

    There’s also a lot of reprints showing up, at least of authors I can remember being on grocery store shelves when I was a kid.

    So if you go get into the weeds of individual books, instead of broad-brush going off of flags, there’s a lot more readable stuff around.

    ….it’s just a lot more available via Indy, and heaven knows that I’ve been spoiled by having options on if my entertainment will attack me.

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      2. Clearly we need a gofundme for a nerfed rubber desk to be placed next to Sarah when she’s perusing the intertubes, so if she becomes seized with the headdesk urge she can redirect safely there without derailing her next eleven books already plotted in her devious yet attractive mind.

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  12. You have an antique partner’s desk? Shades of Sleuth!

    If you don’t have to move them often, those are fun.

    Long ago had an old (hardly antique) wooden desk; don’t recall where it came from. Had it dipped and stripped (it was already dead) and used it for our first computers and such. 1983-ish. Quite the geometry problem to get it up the switchback stairs and into the tiny office room.

    ==

    Having just returned from Athens a week or so ago, I’m avidly reading the Valavanis book on the Acropolis through its museum. Our tour went to both the Acropolis and then the museum, and I was wiped out, and didn’t really appreciate the museum. Didn’t help that they don’t allow folks to carry water around with them. (I get that; lots of exhibits out in the open. But that’s tough on me when it’s hot.)

    I literally stopped at about 80 pages the other day – I don’t want it to end! My kind of fun.

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      1. We may be gloating over our less fortunate young friends.

        Nah, not really. Spent significant $$ to fly to Rome, do a 13 night cruise, and end in Athens, because neither my sister in law (77.5, traveling companion) nor I (76.9) had ever been in that part of the world. One of those ‘bucket list, last big trip’ things.

        I mean, what would my children do with an inheritance, anyway? Fritter it away on things like house payments and education for my grandchildren, I suspect.

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  13. This topic has Ambassador Londo Molari’s voice in my head saying “Moon faced assassin of joy!”

    “It’s not art unless it’s from the Art region of France…”

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  14. “… the only propaganda that stands any chance of influencing people is packaged so attractively that editors will buy it in the belief that the cash customers will be entertained by it.” — Robert A. Heinlein _Expanded Universe_

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  15. Quibble: The Elgin Marbles weren’t being used as lime wash for people’s houses. People were indeed using marble and limestone from the Acropolis for whitewash and as raw material for various ad hoc building projects, but the sculptures that became the Elgin Marbles weren’t in any real danger from that — if only because they were way up in the architrave, and people mostly couldn’t reach them. And it’s not like there was a shortage of marble and limestone lying on the ground out there.

    It is true that the inhabitants of Athens at the time (subjects of the Ottoman Empire) actually were routinely destroying bits and pieces of irreplaceable masterpieces of art and architecture out there…just not those particular ones.

    The damage Lord Elgin did in removing them is actually quite tragic, and removal was not actually necessary to protect them. Far more tragic is the fact that the entire building remained intact until 1687, when 1/3 of it was obliterated by an explosion as a Venetian army fought against the never-sufficiently-to-be-damned Muslims who had used it as a gunpowder magazine. If not for that, the Parthenon could’ve made it to the modern day pretty much intact — that’s how well it was built.

    In related news, I am very happy to announce that, for the first time in…23 years?…some small part of my thesis research has at last proven useful…ish. (If pulling a “well, ackshually…” on Sarah Hoyt’s blog isn’t simply a health & ego hazard, that is. You do that here, you damn well better be right.) :D

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    1. The Greeks are still miffed about Elgin and his collector crew, to the point that our guide accused them of using dynamite to free the sculpture. Seemed odd, so I asked Grok – 1) Dynamite wasn’t invented until a couple decades later (I suspect nitroglycerin without the Kieselguhr may have been available) and (2) not even the 19th century robbers/vandals/preservers were generally that stupid.

      Bunches of fragments in the Acropolis Museum have been assembled into ‘whole’ artifacts; seems that British Museum or Berlin have some of the other parts, and casts of those were made for Athens. Weird when all one sees of the original is a foot.

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  16. The good thing is if the usual country club killjoys on the right are joining with the you-are-not-allowed-any-unapproved-fun left, you know we’re winning.

    Those dufuses from the reach-across-the-aisle clique never complain when we’re losing.

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    1. *yoink*

      (Don’t know how to upload images but I’d be putting a “meme acquisition” meme up right now if I could.)

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  18. Today I got a Thing from the State, complaining that my fraud-by-mail ballot is DUE NOW and they’re all upset that they don’t have it.

    Election day is NEXT F-ING WEEK! That is when we’re supposed to vote!

    I get it, they won’t know how many ballots they’ll need to ‘find’ until they get the real ones. That’s not my problem. 😡

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