We are talking about FANTASY here, not earth's humanity. Is this so hard to understand?

I would like to see some scientific evidence for your claims though. Why is Africa the only place where the human race could have developed? Why couldn't this have happened in another place? And if we knew the perfect conditions for the human race to develop (spoiler - we don't), why is it not possible for these conditions to be found in a darker and colder part on our FANTASY planet?

I had to both read it and write a paper on it in college, and it was probably one of the most difficult assignments I ever had to do.

It was originally published in pieces and I kinda wonder if that's not the better way to read it. Just a chapter here or there over the course of a couple years, rather than sitting down and plodding through the whole thing.

This was how I felt about "Blood Meridian", but I kept trying to 'get' it myself, then one day it just clicked and I understood. I think "Finnegan's Wake" is probably the same. There's probably more there than I'll ever see without the patience to keep at it.

Edit: lol, people downvoting me for having trouble understanding a books appeal, and sharing my enjoyment in finely connecting the dots with the praise for it.

It's not a matter of disclaimers, it's a matter of not asserting objectivity. "This is an opinion" is always the default.

The rest of your comment is a confused mess.

I love Cat’s Eye. I think a lot of it is based on her own girlhood and people she knew, so that’s why people make poor decisions or stay in bad situations. Sadly, it rings true for most people.

I wouldn't put it as drastic and hateful as you. An American writer in today's society would probably be more inclined to write more diverse.

But America is not the only country in the world that has writers and today's society is not what it use to be through history.

Good to know- Thanks for this. I'll have to check out some of her other novels as well.

This sub, you mean?

As long as there’s a reasonable explanation for the diversity. Large trading city? Not gonna bat an eye at all types of people. Isolated village in the mountains? Makes no sense.

It is fun to read, but only if you're into that kind of thing.

I feel like the only writers who would be opposed to it are the racist ones, because as I said it has no bearing on the story. And how much do I really care about their opinions on that matter? When you produce a piece of art like a novel, especially in genres like fantasy, you're creating it in the hopes that people will love it and will immerse themselves in it and use their imagination in this fantasy land. If people love it and they stay true to the important parts of the story they should be thrilled more people are imagining their diverse selves into that world no matter their race. And at some point when you introduce a fantasy world into the public, if and when it becomes so loved it inspires movies and adaptations, feeling anything other than pride and fulfillment in bringing joy to others and just being mad about what color the characters are, well then you can pretty much go fuck yourself

I liked it a lot. I just wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Admittedly it is most people that have this issue. Look at ordinary folks who are either liberal or conservative. Most unthinkingly parrot the vocabulary of ideas that often have more nuance or substance. They also have little understanding of the other side’s argument.

It’s frightening in its polarization.

Well, how far is too far for one extreme, is certainly subjective, and you should have put disclaimers yourself your metric is of course just subjective, and as such it is only, like, your opinion.

And anyway, the opinion quoted was not in reply to me, it was to somebody stating somebody which IMO (yay for people who say that) that it was one of the worst books THEY themselves had ever read. Which seemed more than fair. If it was unfairly combative and alienated people of differing tastes (who by the way could not or did not bother to spell) that seemed fair enough and that is the people I want to hang around digitally with.

And because I was replying to replied to /u/pornplz22526 and blocked me automatically, here goes my reply to them!

>>"This is an opinion" is always the default.

I think it is unnecessary when a statement is "one of the worst books I ever read" (or such phrasing), since it is clearly a relative statement and to do with what the person saying it had read.

Also if always the default (and it is) surely one does not need to type it all the time? Or maybe we can get a short cut, maybe reddit can nicely fill some autotext for us so we can add "this is an opinion" is added automatically for all posts, for those who need to be reminded of it.

>The rest of your comment is a confused mess.

Oh, sorry! I see you blocked me so I am sure you will be spared ever more needing to think about anything I might have to say and will not ever encounter any opinion slightly diverging from yours. Very on topic actually, now I think of it.

This made me laugh

The expression "Tighter than a Dick's hatband" really threw me for a loop as a teenager.

The other platforms make dissent visible. Even if 30 people are screaming at me in the tumblr notes, I can see that 20 people clicked the little heart to like my post. But on reddit, I'm sitting at a -10 and I don't know if that's because ten people disagree with me or because 30 people disagree and 20 people agree. The little controversial dagger can be helpful with this, but only if the values are very close.

Add in the downvoting issue, and it's very easy to bury people with the feedback threat of "shut your mouth if you don't want to wind up muted" which...is what downvotes are. Subreddit karma is used in the crowd control official mod tool to auto-collapse your posts and send them to the bottom of the thread to die. A new user who comes to a subreddit and, say, wants to discuss ableism in RPGs(because they are themselves disabled and are interested in the subject) only to be met with heavy downvotes because reddit hates the word ableism is going to just walk away from that subreddit. And so views continue uncontested.

I grew up in a house hold where "What does this word mean or how do you spell (word)?" was met with "Look it up in the dictionary." I still look words and phrases up to this day and I am retired. My first experience with a word in a non-english language was in a "Hardy Boys" book. It was OUI which I found out was "WE" and French for yes. My grandmother had to tell me this as I was getting frustrated trying to find it in the dictionary.

Yeah, I avoid the toxicity of social media by just not going there.

100% success rate.

And then what's the explanation of how humanity came to be in the first place?

Any worldbuilding that suggests white people were the originals and everyone else came later is both completely inaccurate to how humanity actually evolved, and uncomfortably in line with deeply racist thinking from the 19th century to explain the different human phenotypes.

If you want to us "oooh just evolution!!" as an explanation then actually follow it. Darker skin is the default setting for humans.

Finn = end, egain = again, wake.

That's all I remember from class. It seemed to me that Joyce wrote a book to entertain himself because he had such a live of words and literary gymnastics.

I've read every novel by Atwood, and Cat's Eye is one of my favourites.

(My top list: The Edible Woman; Murder in the Dark; Cat's Eye; Alias Grace. Everything else is good.)

There are diagnostic criteria for mental illness, and many are linked to physical conditions and causes, it's not meant to be something arbitrary.

From excerpts I've read (not going to subject myself to the full thing), it's an odd book in that it wants to be a profound look at one man escaping a powerful system which has been dragging him down, but the sheer amount of gossip and the dreadful way it's written for the most part means it ends up being really comical in ways that were probably unintentional. Most people will be reading it for the gossip but I don't think he necessarily wanted it to be that when he wrote it.

Well somebody makes a post on it literally every day on this sub, so it is clearly still selling...