Ranter gonna rant

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

Like, I can get behind having more open and honest conversations around sex with minors so that they aren't just walking into sexual situations blind, and I think Romeo and Juliet laws are a really good idea

But like, there has to be a line

A 14 year old, no matter how mature and how knowledgeable they are, should not be pursued sexually by a 20 year old

Like I said, I don't think it's predatory for minors to get detailed, accurate sex education. I don't even think it's predatory for them to get kink related sex ed either. And I don't think anyone "of age" is inherently predatory to anyone "underage"

It is the 20 year-old who is not allowed to have sex with a 14 year-old.

It's not because of corrupting innocents, it's because we as adults know that young teens don't have a lot of life experience and knowledge, generally speaking, and that there are people out there who will absolutely take advantage of that, whether consciously and horribly, or unconsciously and just as horribly.

“Oh,” he said, “I think I will spend a few lifetimes on Tumblr, most likely.”

The warlord was astonished. “Your merit and virtue are renowned far and wide!” he responded. “Why on earth would you be condemned to Tumblr?”