thank you! time/clowns go a-tumbling on in my life rn...
i grabbed dinner with a friend yesterday and we had a long long complain about tropes as ways of marketing books. and obviously claims of representation and tropes are not the same, but the way they're used in marketing feels very similar (grim), so that your comment here feels like an exact continuation of that discussion. it's so tough (we were saying), when everything gets boiled down to a few plot or character details, to judge if something's going to be good. (the other thing we were saying was that popularity in marketing/on semi-commercialised spaces like booktok isn't actually a guarantee of something being good either.) like you say, expectations become impossible to form.
it's so irksome as well, when things are framed in terms of representation, because it makes criticism or even taste feels irrelevant. like you're encouraged, not just to be surprised when the form isn't to your taste, but to overlook it completely - the next step from what i was chatting about before. enjoying this story about [x] person is actually a moral good, because you don't see stories about them elsewhere, so to not enjoy is therefore bad - even if it's simply because it's just not your vibe, it's hard to articulate that (i have this often when reviewing films on letterboxd, where i'll hesitate to make any critical points, because it feels weird, and slightly possible there might be pushback on what is purely an opinion). which then, i think, makes things like style or structure or genre less relevant, because the important thing is the story exists. so that in a way, stories can become little more than the representation they're marketed as, because that's the only way to engage with it.
i just read this article earlier too, about how we don't have great spaces online to talk about books anymore: https://www.tor.com/2023/07/27/what-do-we-want-from-the-bookish-internet/. which also feels deeply relevant to this discussion: the rise of shortform platforms, plus the capacity to actually get famous online, makes everything about 1) snappiness, 2) having the 'right' opinion. i also thought of you whilst reading it, because it made me nostalgic for the livejournal experience i never got to have, so i'm glad to have a reason to share!
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i grabbed dinner with a friend yesterday and we had a long long complain about tropes as ways of marketing books. and obviously claims of representation and tropes are not the same, but the way they're used in marketing feels very similar (grim), so that your comment here feels like an exact continuation of that discussion. it's so tough (we were saying), when everything gets boiled down to a few plot or character details, to judge if something's going to be good. (the other thing we were saying was that popularity in marketing/on semi-commercialised spaces like booktok isn't actually a guarantee of something being good either.) like you say, expectations become impossible to form.
it's so irksome as well, when things are framed in terms of representation, because it makes criticism or even taste feels irrelevant. like you're encouraged, not just to be surprised when the form isn't to your taste, but to overlook it completely - the next step from what i was chatting about before. enjoying this story about [x] person is actually a moral good, because you don't see stories about them elsewhere, so to not enjoy is therefore bad - even if it's simply because it's just not your vibe, it's hard to articulate that (i have this often when reviewing films on letterboxd, where i'll hesitate to make any critical points, because it feels weird, and slightly possible there might be pushback on what is purely an opinion). which then, i think, makes things like style or structure or genre less relevant, because the important thing is the story exists. so that in a way, stories can become little more than the representation they're marketed as, because that's the only way to engage with it.
i just read this article earlier too, about how we don't have great spaces online to talk about books anymore: https://www.tor.com/2023/07/27/what-do-we-want-from-the-bookish-internet/. which also feels deeply relevant to this discussion: the rise of shortform platforms, plus the capacity to actually get famous online, makes everything about 1) snappiness, 2) having the 'right' opinion. i also thought of you whilst reading it, because it made me nostalgic for the livejournal experience i never got to have, so i'm glad to have a reason to share!