I have been following your RCBG live reads/reactions for a while now and have come to really appreciate them. I always feel like you get much more out of the chapters, especially the more recent ones, than I do. As someone who has followed the series since the first chapter of the serial, I increasingly find myself asking "What am I still getting out of this?" as the characters continue to do more and more awful things to one another, and so when I see how much you're extracting from the material... I kinda just feel like I'm stupid sometimes. Do you have any advice you might offer?
oh gosh, you're not stupid at all. I mean, RCBG the serial is complex in the sense that it genre shifted over time -- what was an absurd shitpost became something a lot more grounded over time, so it makes sense you're a bit thrown off.
But if I'm to try my hand at advice...
I guess my first thought is: read more? Unfortunately the first book I ever read that I feel like fully changed my perspective on writing is still getting chipped away on the author's computer (and I read it when I was the ripe old age of adult, lmao) so I currently can't recommend it, but I guess in terms of things I have read relatively -- as in the past few years -- recently (pardon me for these all having some very heavy trigger warnings, you should 100% check the trigger warnings before reading these!!!)
Books:
- The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones
- Appetite by M. Zakharuk
- The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes by Suzanne Collins
- Sunrise Over The Reaping by Suzanne Collins
- Henry Henry by Allen Bratton
- Les Miserables (which I am still in the middle of. but it's really good) by Victor Hugo (I'm reading the Isabel F. Hapgood translation, I believe)
- Estro Junkies, which you can pre-order here :3
Short Stories
- Triptych , Carrying Stones, Tadpole Prophecy by Avi Burton (who has a full list here)
- Dead Dog Mans The Lighthouse, After We Kill Our Father And Before We Reach The Mainland by Max Franciscovich
- Honeycrisp, Parthenogenesis by P.V. Vamsidhar (who has some bangers still yet to be released)
- I Wish You Died Laughing, by Lio Abendan
#notsponsored it's just that I genuinely feel like to get better at reading (and writing, tbh) you have to read messy and fucked up fiction where there's no good answers; stories where the motives of the villains can't be dumbed down to "the bitch is just evil," where you might even relate. This is NOT me saying that you have to read stuff that you legitimately can't stomach, but more, like, the stories that help me pick out character motivations are the stories that force me to question why a character is doing what they're doing, that takes me through a journey on understanding the motivations of the character doing messy things and also understand why they wouldn't choose the seemingly "better" non-messy option? Good writing challenges you, and that challenge helps you develop perspective.
More generally, I guess my overall process is just...asking questions about the story as I'm reading? I don't take anything the characters do for granted, I think about what the authors' intent might be, I think about the limits of the character's POV, what their motivations might be for acting this way? Of course it'd be easier if Kathy and Nichole had just talked in the beginning of all this -- why didn't they? What might push Katherine to assume the worst about Rashmi -- what biases might Katherine have that might influence her perspective? What other factors might be at play for why Katherine chooses to lash out at Rupali, versus Nichole? What applications does the rhetoric in the RCBG accord have in regards to real life? What is the authorial intent with choosing to pivot away from the server? How do race, gender, transness, queerness, class, etc., all intersect in these situations?
...which, this seems like a lot, but it's just "so why are the curtains blue?" and "so why did the character do xyz?" type literary analysis that after enough practice, it ends up second nature. It's like riding a bike. And I think it can be really enjoyable to ask, like, "Why? What was the point of all this? On an in-universe and authorial intent level, why?" I think -- at least in good fiction -- there's an actual point to the miscommunication/toxic dynamics/etc. It's much more fun to actually understand and reflect than it is for everything to just magically be solved through the power of Nothing Ever Goes Wrong, Ever.
