#folio

I'm a little tired of hearing about Tara, her credibility as a theorist was already in question prior to the last incident, and after that whole debacle I genuinely don't understand how anyone could continue to take any of her "work" seriously. Spurrious online arguments don't make a great foundation for groundbreaking theory, and neither does a single bad relationship. I want to never have to hear about her ever again, but only because I'm already seeing the beginnings of her being treated as a leftist lolcow or something. Leave her alone, don't touch her writing with a ten foot pole, and generally just try to not platform someone who has revealed that she's either actively grifting or else is just another worthless online pseudo-academic whose work is not worth anyones time or attention. I don't care if she continues to write bad substack articles where she conflates personal moral judgement with theoretical praxis, she can do whatever, but seriously you have got to stop the widespread hate train where someone ends up being a discursive focus for a whole week solely because their work is worthless dogwater. Cut that out.

It's always a little awkward when people online assume I'm like, doing a bit where I identify as an elf just bc of the username...... i'm not like one of those ____-girl blogs, and I don't really want to be referred to as an elf (or as just "Elf," which is how people in multiplayer games abbreviate it). The username doesnt even really say that I'm an elf!! And that's because (and trust me I am being somewhat vulnerable here), it's a veiled reference to that bit in Lord of the Rings where Aragorn is referred to as "elf-friend." I'm sorry you all had to find out this way. My blog was originally a tolkien/silmarillion fandom blog. I was 15 and in the trenches for the hobbit movie releases, and got really active in the community. I never meant for people to assume I was a friendly elf, to me it has always meant that I was a friend to elves, which is a completely different statement. All this confusion is just because thirteen years ago I wanted to reference to a throwaway title from Tolkien's books.

I really like fantasy as a genre but modern fantasy is kind of all unilaterally terrible.... I despise hard magic systems and masturbatory worldbuilding clumsily delivered through characters. Fantasy should be about coming to an implicit understanding of the fictive world's logic through repeated exposure to concepts in action. It's why I like Malazan Book of the Fallen so much, it's why The Black Company is so effortlessly evocative, and it's why the fictive history in the Lord of the Rings comes across as mysterious and wonderful rather than cut and dried and withering. The author trusts the reader to comprehend something like the abstract shape of magic or history through being shown what those things do and mean, rather than wanting to pull back the curtain on their beautiful fictive logic underpinning all the coolest shit in their settings. Because once you explain something, it loses the magic of mystery and you have stolen the joy of experiencing those things through plot and narrative. Brandon Sanderson might be a good storyteller but I couldn't suffer through even 300 pages of his books before I got sick of him trying to explain his convoluted (and yet somehow not complex at all) magic system. They shouldn't be systems, they should either be natural parts of the world that your characters take for granted or else abstract concepts that the pov characters need not understand fully. The cloying need for approval from reddit-dwelling nerds should never be the goal, because the things that make powerscaling nerds excited are pretty much universally all awful and make stories worse through their inclusion.