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Unpopular opinions we have on fiction

"Let's go! open up, it's time for Unpop!"
Alright, time for my mandatory Unpopular Opinions Post. Let's get this over with.
"You're late. You know the deal. You can Omelaspost for a Funny, or you can make an interesting post for an Insightful."
Here in Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation, no one chooses to make interesting posts. It's better to make the one joke everyone knows for the Funny, rather than risk your entire life for just one Insightful rating.
"Tomorrow you better not be late, or I'll have you posting for Informative reactions as punishment."
"Yes sir, sorry, I won't be late next time."

Down here, us Omelasposters only get one Rating a day. One Funny rating is just enough to get your post:reaction ratio to the next day. But that's the life of Unpopular Opinions Poster Civilisation. If you wanna survive, you have to Unpopular Opinions Post. Every Omelasposter has the same goal, and that's to make it to the top thread, where all the Brothers Karamazovposters live. Except, most Brothers Karamazovposters are born on the top thread. If you're an Omelasposter, there's only one way up, and that is through the Temple of Unpopular Opinions. The Temple of Unpopular Opinions is the only structure on SV that combines the bottom thread to the top thread. To make it up, you have to post an impossibly hard Unpopular Opinion Reply that no Omelasposter has ever completed. And that's assuming you even get the chance to post the reply in the thread. The inside of the Temple is protected by a barrier and the only way an Omelasposter gets past the barrier is if they've earned a gilded post. I've never even tried getting a gilded post before, but if I'm going to rank up to a Brothers Karamazovposter one day, I'm gonna have to.
 
Can we move on from worm and Nazis please?

I'm getting tired of sci-fi trying to make 'realistic' spaceships with boring designs. Can we please bring back weird impractical shapes in space like in Star Trek and Mass Effect?
 
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BossFight said:
I think that Worm has a serious issue with how it fails to engage with the Nazis as anything other than "just another gang" an issue very much exacerbated by the fact that it came out *just* before neonazis (and neonazis discourse) came back in a really big way.
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BossFight said:
That said, I think the arguments being put forth - that the team up against the ABB was "portraying an ethnic minority gang as worse than neonazis" - is reductionist and shallow.
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These two statements are mutually exclusive. When Worm entirely fails to show the evils of Nazism (and by extension Nazi gangs) and then portrays ABB as a threat worth teaming up with the Nazis over then it is quite literally portraying "an ethnic minority gang as worse than neonazis". That's not reductive, it's literally what the story did.

It's wild to claim that people are "reductionist to the point of untruth" and then literally confirm the very thing we're criticizing. No one's saying that Taylor looked at the camera and said "I Taylor Worm Hebert, approve of Nazism", it's that the plot doesn't treat Nazism as seriously as it should- to the point where the author was comfortable writing them as a lesser evil to a gang of immigrants (who to be frank are only as prominent as they are because of author fiat).
 
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Can we talk about how a lot of early Sci-Fi, especially works by Nivin and Hamlin, seem to feed strongly towards what appear to be sexual fetishes, and may have come from the same brainspace as 'fantasy romance' like interview with the vampire?

Like, Ringworld was literally 'Let's have sex with aliens the book', and I pity the producer stuck with turning that into a Netflix TV special.

And Starship trooper loves it's bridge full of naked women, and Stranger in a strange land is half about an old writer sexually harassing his assistants and orgies.

Like: No wonder people thought that early sci-fi geeks were outcast losers with the sensual nature of what they were reading, and these were from some of the 'great writers' of the genre. There is a reason that, other than Asimov and LEM, I usually prefer female writers of early sci-fi.
 
I suspect that a lot of that has to do with the fact that writers like Niven, Heinlein, and Asimov were writing during the same period of time that the 'sexual revolution' was beginning to pick up speed. For a lot of people a big part of the appeal of that kind of science fiction was that it presented the logical conclusion of breaking down sexual norms and taboos as being a generally positive and desirable thing. The fact that they were all stodgy white men with decades of internalized misogyny means that what they wrote doesn't really pass muster as 'sexually progressive' today, but that was the intention at the time.
 
Hmm, I've said it before, but Heinlein's best work is Double Star even if it's not as famous as Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troops and Stranger in a strange land.
 
Fourthspartan56 said:
These two statements are mutually exclusive. When Worm entirely fails to show the evils of Nazism (and by extension Nazi gangs) and then portrays ABB as a threat worth teaming up with the Nazis over then it is quite literally portraying "an ethnic minority gang as worse than neonazis". That's not reductive, it's literally what the story did.

It's wild to claim that people are "reductionist to the point of untruth" and then literally confirm the very thing we're criticizing. No one's saying that Taylor looked at the camera and said "I Taylor Worm Hebert, approve of Nazism", it's that the plot doesn't treat Nazism as seriously as it should- to the point where the author was comfortable writing them as a lesser evil to a gang of immigrants (who to be frank are only as prominent as they are because of author fiat).
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Enemy A is currently more dangerous than enemy b!= Enemy A is more Evil than enemy B

Especially when the actual situation is Enemy A is currently the most dangerous threat to my person so I will team up with everyone else - which happens to incidentally include B.


More than that though, the thing about messaging is it either has to be *repeated* or *deliberate* for us to reasonably infer a statement about the work or the author. Take, for example, an entirely fictional work I just made up where the MC spends 90% of the book beating up poor people while quoting Ayn Rand but then says like... One time that we should eat the rich. It would be ridiculous to take that statement in isolation as proof that the work endorses a communist message.

The message of the villain team up arc isn't "Asians are worse than Nazis" it's "Taylor is forced to compromise her morals by teaming up with monsters to 'get things done' and this works"

There is simply not enough focus on either the ABB as actors or the Nazis in particular for the idea that the message - or a message - of the arc is that Asians are worse than Nazis.


And the really frustrating thing is, Worm has actual, real issues with how it portrays race and Nazis. There *are* repeated patterns of writing which can be critiqued*. But nobody is engaging with those. They're pointing to a single, isolated incident and reframing it to make the Nazi element more prominent in ordwe to frame the Nazi's portrayal - and associated messaging - as more impactful than it is. The Nazis *barely* show up in this arc, and are never portrayed positively.

*Specirically you could point out how the Nazis are uniformly portrayed as the "civilized" villains. They way Kaiser is portrayed as calm and in control and clever in contrast to the "bestial" Lung. How they are the only villain group that Taylor doesn't take out. They way Purity is portrayed in her interlude. The way the work refuses to engage with the fact that they engage in hate crimes. They way the Undersides have 2 black characters and neither appears to have been impacted at all by living in Nazi city. There's a clear pattern here, and people's refusal to engage with that in order to condemn surface level optics of a minor part of an arc is frustrating
 
There's also a paragraph that describes every part of a naked woman moving in separate directions when they walk that's just... Gross. lol.

Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don't walk. At least not what we do when we walk. I don't know how to describe it, but it's much more complex and utterly delightful. They don't move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions . . . and all of it graceful.
 
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Tithed_Verse said:
No, they were not. I read the book, women were pilots, men were soldiers, and pilots had to be naked most of the time for reasons.

I remember this very clearly because it pissed me off.
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What reasons?

ScribePrincess said:
There's also a paragraph that describes every part of a naked woman moving in separate directions when they walk that's just... Gross. lol.

Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don't walk. At least not what we do when we walk. I don't know how to describe it, but it's much more complex and utterly delightful. They don't move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions . . . and all of it graceful.
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Yep, that's in there. Not naked though.
 
BossFight said:
*Specirically you could point out how the Nazis are uniformly portrayed as the "civilized" villains. They way Kaiser is portrayed as calm and in control and clever in contrast to the "bestial" Lung. How they are the only villain group that Taylor doesn't take out. They way Purity is portrayed in her interlude. The way the work refuses to engage with the fact that they engage in hate crimes. They way the Undersides have 2 black characters and neither appears to have been impacted at all by living in Nazi city. There's a clear pattern here, and people's refusal to engage with that in order to condemn surface level optics of a minor part of an arc is frustrating
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At risk of bringing the topic back into major discussion, wasn't all this actually brought up a few days ago?

Like, I distinctly remember people talking about the way the Neo-Nazis in Worm are always shown as the more civilized and put-together of the gangs who are involved in less distasteful things and who are treated as more "legitimate" with less emphasis put on the fact that they were Neo-Nazis and what that ideology would necessitate.

Like, it seems to me that what you're describing is the kind of consistent messaging about not thinking Neo-Nazis are all that bad that would be used as supporting evidence for the overarching critique of "wildbow wrote some kinda fucked stuff with the nazis including that one time he made people do a team-up to take out the asians". Like, if none of this was true I'd still think that the setup for the ABB's destruction was bad, but with all of this being true it feels like there's a lot more to support the critique?
 
Squirtodyle said:
At risk of bringing the topic back into major discussion, wasn't all this actually brought up a few days ago?

Like, I distinctly remember people talking about the way the Neo-Nazis in Worm are always shown as the more civilized and put-together of the gangs who are involved in less distasteful things and who are treated as more "legitimate" with less emphasis put on the fact that they were Neo-Nazis and what that ideology would necessitate.

Like, it seems to me that what you're describing is the kind of consistent messaging about not thinking Neo-Nazis are all that bad that would be used as supporting evidence for the overarching critique of "wildbow wrote some kinda fucked stuff with the nazis including that one time he made people do a team-up to take out the asians". Like, if none of this was true I'd still think that the setup for the ABB's destruction was bad, but with all of this being true it feels like there's a lot more to support the critique?
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Me. I was the one bringing it up.

Unless someone else did I missed it, mostly I remember people hammering on the incidental teamup
 
Squirtodyle said:
Like, it seems to me that what you're describing is the kind of consistent messaging about not thinking Neo-Nazis are all that bad that would be used as supporting evidence for the overarching critique of "wildbow wrote some kinda fucked stuff with the nazis including that one time he made people do a team-up to take out the asians". Like, if none of this was true I'd still think that the setup for the ABB's destruction was bad, but with all of this being true it feels like there's a lot more to support the critique?
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It would be, for the broader critique that likely wouldn't generate much disagreement but was consistently ignored in favor of saying Nazi Teamup a lot.
 
Tithed_Verse said:
No, they were not. I read the book, women were pilots, men were soldiers, and pilots had to be naked most of the time for reasons.

I remember this very clearly because it pissed me off.
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You're misremembering about them being naked. I have no memory of that at all. And to double check, I control-F'ed through a text copy for the words 'naked' and 'nude'. Nothing relevant turned up. Then to double double check I went through each mention of pilot. Again, nothing about them being naked. The closest is the (male) main character being naked during part of his wilderness survival training. It's possible I missed something but I think this qualities as a good faith effort.

If you want to sustain this claim - with multiple people saying they remember nothing of the sort and my own check - I think you need more evidence.
 
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Tithed_Verse said:
No, they were not. I read the book, women were pilots, men were soldiers, and pilots had to be naked most of the time for reasons.

I remember this very clearly because it pissed me off.
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Can you actually cite this scene, because I never remember reading that sort of thing. Like Glimmervoid said, outside of Rico being nude during his survival training, there is no other mention of nudity. Word "nude" doesn't appear at all, word "naked" appears six times. Twice when Rico describes how he feels, twice in relation to his survival training twice in quote "naked force".

Closest I can get is "women make better pilots". Not "women are pilots, men are soldiers", but "women make better pilots than men". Nothing about men being better soldiers.

In case you need to access the text, here you go:

 
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BossFight said:
Me. I was the one bringing it up.

Unless someone else did I missed it, mostly I remember people hammering on the incidental teamup
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Aineko said:
It would be, for the broader critique that likely wouldn't generate much disagreement but was consistently ignored in favor of saying Nazi Teamup a lot.
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I feel very confused at this point, because now it feels like the team-up was both in and of itself poorly thought out, and also yet another aspect of Wildbow's pretty consistently poor handling of the neo-nazi gang even given the timeframe Worm was being written.

If it was ill-advised to do the teamup in the first place and there's also a lot of other supporting evidence to show that Wildbow was consistently poor in handling the fact that he made one of his gangs a neo-nazi gang, I'm not actually sure where the argument is coming from.
 
I suppose the closest is when Rico meets back up with Carmen once they've both been in the military for a while he notes that Carmen shaved her head since having long hair and says that's pretty common amongst pilots.
 
Squirtodyle said:
I feel very confused at this point, because now it feels like the team-up was both in and of itself poorly thought out, and also yet another aspect of Wildbow's pretty consistently poor handling of the neo-nazi gang even given the timeframe Worm was being written.

If it was ill-advised to do the teamup in the first place and there's also a lot of other supporting evidence to show that Wildbow was consistently poor in handling the fact that he made one of his gangs a neo-nazi gang, I'm not actually sure where the argument is coming from.
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Given how incidental their presence is in the arc, I don't think the mere existence of the anti-ABB coalition including Nazis is strong enough evidence to argue that Worm has a pro-nazi (or sufficiently neutral Nazi) message.

And so it is very frustrating hearing people repeatedly reframing the teamup as being both more important and Nazi centric in order to push the idea that Worm has such a message instead of engaging with the actual content of the work and listing the plethora of actual evidence in favor for that stance.

Basically, there is nothing more frustrating when you agree with someone's conclusions but their argument is bad
 
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