We Sold Ourselves for Love but Now We're Free · 11:49pm Apr 4th, 2019
So back in 1925, they weren't called 'blogs'. They were called 'essays'.
I’ve been reading essays lately.
I know my audience, believe it or not—I am aware that some of you sneak into my room in the wee hours of night to caress my sleeping angel face and read my diary. For the sake of everybody else in the house, though, I want to explain something: there are two Latin American authors I really, really like.
The first one is called Julio Cortázar, and he’s sorta like James Joyce, if James Joyce had more talent and less dicks down his throat. The second one is Jorge Luis Borges, who writes as if the dude copyediting the Oxford Encyclopedia had a stroke halfway through.
All this to say, at some point last year I found a series of books that contained Julio Cortázar’s essays. They were pretty good! He was a university professor, and stupid fucking obsessed with French literature, so they all read like a lecture done by a rockstar that loves Honore de Balzac almost as much as he loves cocaine. It was entirely predictable, and extremely in-character.
At some point this year, I found a series of books that contain essays written by Jorge Luis Borges. I obviously bought them, eager to see what was inside—knowing the dude, I expected a laundry list of reasons why God is spherical, and Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge stole a flower from Paradise. The kind of stuff that you read when you want to be a cool bohemian, but you’re too much of a pussy to buttfuck a policeman to get there? That.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I open the book, and I don’t find that.
I just find shit.
But a very particular kind of shit. The kind of shit you see in Fimfic blogs when you follow a writer, and said writer immediately has a psychotic breakdown. Sometimes Borges rants incessantly on the color of the night sky (is it blue? Is it black? We don’t know). Sometimes he explains in careful manner how hard you must go fuck yourself if you use the word ‘blue’ in poetry. Sometimes it’s him telling you how he got drunk with another poet and they ranted about philosophy and now he’s discovered the meaning of life.
It’s all very rambly, it’s all void of purpose, and it’s all terrible. It is so shittily written.
Confusion soon turned into understanding, though. The moment I finished the book I looked at the cover, and I saw it had been published in 1925. Which means that, when Borges wrote and published his essays, he was only 26.
Then I dawned on me.
Talent doesn’t exist, man. It’s all one big fat lie.
There’s a point in which you have to accept that, yes, making someone else cry for Pinkie Pie is an actual skill. By this logic, I do consider any writer who manages to sell commissions on this website an “indie freelance writer”. This includes me, and that’s actually, no kidding, what I wrote in my resume when I started hunting for a job. Fuck it. My mother told me to flaunt what she gave me, but I can’t flaunt deep emotional trauma—so this’ll have to do.
I’m explaining this so you understand why I laughed so hard when I read Haruki Murakami—a person who likes the smells of his own farts so much he might as well be a James Joyce impersonator—saying that writers can’t be friends with other writers. The writer, he writes, is essentially an intellectual, a dark lonely creature who hides in the shadows. A prostitute of their own thoughts, who live by showing others the inner depths of their very minds—so why would they want to hear what someone else has to say?
I laughed because, Murakami, my man. My dude. The reason why nobody wants to hang out with you isn’t because writers are inherently antisocial. It’s because you don’t fucking shower.
I’m a writer, and most of my friends are writers, too? Never had any issue there, Murakami, mate. And, yes, we’re all fanfic writers mostly, which is as… Let’s call it ‘underground’ for the sake of our own dignity? It’s as underground as it gets. But the literary world is like the music industry: everything that happens in the mainstream scene happens in the indie circles too; we just have less sex and can’t find psychedelic drugs so easily.
So, yeah. Writers can be friends with other writers, I can sorta guarantee you that. Being able to befriend someone you once admired because of their work? That’s pretty sweet! It’s happened to me a couple times. It’s happened to others, too. Fimfic is essentially a community of writers.
I still believe talent doesn’t exist. I stated that thesis earlier, and I’m going to go back to it soon. But first, I want to address something else. I want to talk friends, and good writers.
I want to talk about this:
This is the table of contents of Equestrian Stories, a compilation of stories voted by the community to be included in one big fucking hardcover book. Here’s the Indiegogo campaign, which is still looking for backers.
I like this indiegogo campaign for many reasons—first, because it will make my family’s dreams a reality, making it possible for me shove all this ponyfiction up my ass. Second, because this compilation is kind of a popularity contest? It was voted by the community, after all. And it was fair, too; they wouldn’t let me flash my nipples to earn votes, like I did in highschool. What you see is what you get.
How the fuck I managed to get in there, I have no idea. I think it’s a prank that got too real and now it’d be awkward to take it down. But there are names in there that I recognize, and that I like a lot; I don’t know about you, but a book that has stories by Ghost of Heraclitus, Blueshift, and Skywriter is like a dream come true for anybody who likes pony comedy. I can’t quite say that those three are the best comedy writes on the site, because that’s not a light statement in a world where King of Beggars and MagnetBolt exist? I’m just saying, if Fimfic were a thunderdome, those three would be calling who lives and who dies, is all.
Anyway, I’ll stop gobbling dick soon enough. What I wanted to talk about is—look at that list! You can absolutely recognize most of the people in there. There are some stupidly good writers in this site (not all of them in the list, sadly, but that’s a compromise you gotta do when you’re working under a heavy word limit), and I’ve managed to meet a lot of them because I have no sense of privacy or personal space, and they’re too awkward to ask me to stop once I start gently sucking on their toes.
And I know it sounds weird when I say I’m surprised to see they’re all different people? But you have to realize that every person I’ve fucked was a cackling moron; I sort of assumed smart folks reproduced by osmosis. Turns out they don’t. And this genetic individuality is reflected in their writing: all these very good writers are, obviously, great. But they’re all good in different ways.
This is another reason why I say talent doesn’t exist. Or at least, if it does, I don’t believe in it—because, more often than not, it’s said as an excuse. I look up to a lot of these writers, and not a single one of them relied on talent, let me fucking tell you that.
The year was 1925, and Jorge Luis Borges was 26 years old.
It’s actually a bit difficult to explain why the essays are shitty? Borges was from Argentina, so he mostly wrote in Spanish. And seeing how I’m Spanish myself, I’m obviously reading the original text—I can’t just copypaste it in here and show you. You’ll have to take my word when I explain that Inquisitions is the literary equivalent of playing Scrabble with a poet: it is not fun, it is not witty, it is not clever or insightful, but oh my fucking God the other person believes otherwise.
Borges keeps doing this fucking thing a lot of novice writers do? Where they use obscure or overly antiquated words for no fucking reason whatsoever. Sometimes people want their writing to sound “like real writing”, if that makes sense? So instead of simply saying what they have to say, they grab a thesaurus, make it wear a strap-on, and go to town.
Look, here’s an advice from someone whose literal only redeeming feature is to be able to read at a reasonable pace: never, ever, ever use a thesaurus when writing. The only fucking reason why you’d even want one is when you have a word on the tip of your tongue and want to fish it out. That’s it. That’s literally it.
Because what a thesaurus does best is listing synonyms that are both more obscure than the original word, and less useful for the reader. Always go for clarity when writing—having your audience fucking UNDERSTAND what you’re writing is the BARE MINIMUM. If you’re in love with a convoluted line or verse, if you think it’s the best thing you’ve ever written, but your editor has NO FUCKING CLUE what the shit you’re talking about, guess what. You have to delete it. Cut that shit out.
You want to use a thesaurus to avoid word repetition? Fuck you, rewrite the sentence that causes said repetition. Rewrite the entire paragraph. That’s a structural problem, not a grammatical one. If I’m having a psychotic break, I don’t poke my eyes out with a hammer just because I couldn’t find a spoon. I realize my eyes have to stay where they are, and then I bust my own kneecaps. Like a fucking grown-up.
Jorge Luis Borges didn’t have an editor with the balls to tell him to cut it out, I suppose, because Jorge Luis Borges could speak five languages and had forgotten more about poetry than you and I will ever learn. I understand this, but it’s still no excuse.
The essays are shitty. They’re not well-written. You read them not because of what they are, but for what they could be—they have potential, they hint at something great in there.
Borges tries, though. You gotta give it to him. He tries.
The structure is good. He knows how to make a point, or at least he’s got the theory down; I can’t tell if he gets better with every essay or if I just got used to the way he keeps hitting my mother tongue with a crowbar with every sentence. If you told me he yelled “Who’s your FUCKING DADDY” every time he wrote an adjective with over five syllables, I would fully believe you.
But the structure is good. Intro, thesis, reasoning, antithesis, rebuttal, conclusion. Clear and concise. He never jumps between points, he never skips the important bits.
At a macro level, he’s concise. At the micro level, go fuck yourself, you can take half the words of every sentence out and it’d end up better. But at the macro level, fuck, he makes a point in three to five pages, and saying the same thing would take me at least fifteen. That’s a level of self-constraint that is borderline paradoxical with his use of the language, but it still shows you that he’s not half-assing it.
The points themselves are cute? They’re—they’re cute, really. He mostly talks about poets you don’t know or care about, and says why they’re bad, or why they’re good. This book is interesting because it lets you investigate the person writing it, not because of what the person writing is writing. I compared it to a Fimfiction blog earlier, and I repeat my point here: part of the fun of binging someone’s backlog is the hints of a personality you can see behind the text. That’s why 80% of people who look at my profile think that I’m a very stupid twelve year old boy, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Reading this book was baffling. I was in denial at first; I assumed I was just too dumb to get it. Only after finishing it I had to sit down and accept the harsh reality that this book was bullshit. And it wasn’t easy, because, man. Jorge Luis Borges is my literary hero. He’s been one of my favorite writers since forever.
Here’s the thing, though.
I have a second book of essays by Borges.
This one is titled Other Inquisitions (Jesus fucking Christ, man), and when I opened it—why. The first thing I saw was a laundry list of reasons why God is spherical. Then I saw a treatise on how Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge stole a flower from Paradise.
Other Inquisitions was written in 1952. Jorge Luis Borges was over 50 years old when it came out. The writing is excellent, the essays are thought-provoking, the way it all flows is beautiful. It’s an incredible book. It’s humbling.
It took Jorge Luis Borges over fifty years to learn how to write like Jorge Luis Borges.
Ambiguity is cowardice wearing a trench coat and a big hat. I talked good writers, and I said they’re all good in a different way. So here’s my mouth, here’s my money, watch me place both on top of your mother’s privates.
I have a—let’s call it a game. I have a game that I play with my friends sometimes. It goes like this: they don’t say anything, and I try to describe a person’s writing style, their ‘voice’, in just one word. Half the time, the friends leave halfway through, but I stay. I stay, speaking into the void, getting progressively more worked up over this thing nobody cares about. Somebody has to. I am a very boring person.
The idea is that you define everything that makes said person’s writing special in just one word, usually an adjective. I do it all the time and it all started when someone asked me why I keep saying King of Beggars is such a good writer, and then I replied with just, well. Uh. If I had to describe it in one word?
I’d said: “sentimentality.”
And that’s the gist of it.
King of Beggars has range, I’ll never tire of saying that—he can write stupid comedy and heart-wrenching drama in the same story, in the same paragraph, and it all works. Because he keeps the feelings consistent, he works at a very clear, very deep, very compelling sentimental angle. Every character feels human, they feel realistic, they feel charismatic and they feel like they would make good friends.
It’s sentimental prose. He likes doing this thing where he takes a premise that’s stupid even by my standards, and then plays it absolutely straight. Here’s a story about two characters falling in love over a glory hole. Here’s a story about Applejack and Dash fucking each other to death because they’re too competitive to be the last one to cum. Here’s a story about Fluttershy not getting punched.
King of Beggars is a boisterous flower, he’s your drunk friend suddenly reciting a poem that makes your mom cry. He can, and will, talk loudly about how he wants to fuck someone with floppy tits and heavy Mexican makeup during your godson’s baptism. But his stories have feeling, they’re sentimental, they’re emotionally complex. Precisely because King of Beggars knows when and how to be crass, he knows when to go the opposite way.
Then I talked to Monochromatic, who at this point might as well be the only person on this website who still intimidates me a bit. I mean, like, King of Beggars is a really good writer? But I could probably outrun him if we ever ended up in a bar brawl. Knighty? Please, everybody knows he’s allergic to bees, that’s easy to exploit. I have it in good faith that Gardez is bound to challenging you to a chess match before reaping your soul.
Monochromatic, though? I have no fucking idea how she does what she does. Like, for real—she’s the exception to this list, because I never described her in one word. I just asked her. “Mono,” I said. “Mono, how. How.” And she sorta patted my shoulder and shook her head, and said, “I’m honest.”
And that’s it, really.
Monochromatic’s prose is honest. This is something you also don’t get until you read it. Everything works in tandem, there’s never one big thing that calls to you as the Thing That She Does Best. Her characters ring true, because they feel like an honest portrayal. Her prose is hypnotizing because there is power in speaking the truth; that’s why storytellers lie so much.
Mono has made a name out of herself with romance, because the only way to love—according to my doctor—is to sorta learn to tell yourself the truth about your own situation. Mono’s got that shit down, and it’s the one thing I can never imitate, so she scares me a little. She could shoot me in the face and she wouldn’t even blink. We’re both aware of this. You gotta respect that.
The list goes on and on: Cold in Gardez is surgical—he always explains exactly what he has to, and that’s all you need, and that’s all you get. He told me once that he sees his own prose as ‘detached’, which I sort of understand? But if you ask me, that’s why it’s so good. It’s markmanship writing: it loads one bullet, and hits the bullseye. You ever wonder why he can do drama and comedy and slice of life and adventure without ever feeling like he’s deviating from his usual voice? It’s ‘cause of that. Not a single wasted word. He writes like a man drinks in the desert.
MrNumbers I describe as hopeful: he’s a bit like King of Beggars in that his strength as a writer lies in his characters, in this undercurrent juxtaposition of misery and twee optimism they all share. The characters he writes are usually happy in self-defense, if that makes sense? He once described his usual characterization maneuvre as “a person gets an easy way out of a situation, but refuses to follow it, because it wouldn’t be right”. MrNumbers saw that people can cry when they’re too happy and went, oh, hey. That’s my fucking aesthetic right there.
Pearple Prose is oneiric. Dreamlike. When he’s editing for me, his main advice is always to not be a coward. He doesn’t hint—he states. . His strongest stories are fantastic, because that’s where his strength is clearer: the weird imagery is pushed to its logical extreme, the concepts are exaggerated until they stop being abstract. A dead monster is not just big, it’s so big it encompasses the world, it’s so big it is the world, you live inside of its stomach. The eye of a hurricane has an iris and a pupil, and you can scoop it out and cover it with an eyepatch. Everything is literal, everything is memorable.
If I actually keep going down the list in detail, this blog is never going to end, but I at least want to mention the rest. Skywriter is cozy and warm, Blueshift is gigglish, and Ghost of Heraclitus is ornate (that’s the Big Three Comedians right there). Chuckfinley is punk, Posh is intimate, Regidar is melancholic, and Oroboro is thematic. So on, so forth.
It’s a fun game, to try to describe what makes a writer ‘click’ for you. Try it out yourself! I’d love to be told for once that this is not the absolute fucking waste of time I know as a fact it kind of is.
I can’t tell you what I am. Monochromatic has an honestly scary degree of self-awareness; I don’t. I can’t tell you what my hair smells like and I can’t tell you what my writing sounds like—not like it matters, when it comes to this blog. What matters here is: fuck you, I said that I do believe every author is good in a different way, and you all believed me because yes Aragón that is common sense but then I fucking explained myself anyway. Does this count as proving anything? I don’t think it’s proving anything.
Personally I find this kind of meta-analysis of the website really interesting. I like looking at the intricacies of Fimfiction as a society, because when I was a kid the family dog drowned while trying to push me into the ocean, and cold onanistic self-reflection is the only way I can fill this void.
But, y’know, I’ve talked to all the people listed above, personally. Admittedly, I’m not very close to some of them—Skywriter is consciously aware of my existence but he believes I’m an abstract shape made of pure light that speaks solely in riddles; Blueshift named his pet pigeon after me because he thinks I died in that car accident four years ago. But even then, I’ve seen enough to tell you that talent, it fucking ain’t. Talent is an excuse, as I said. Talent is a lie.
These writers all have a voice, a series of ‘things’ that they excel at, that you can use to identify them among the masses. This is a big deal for a writer—the only thing worse than a bad story is a forgettable story, because those fail to leave a mark. Yet a voice doesn’t come from nowhere, and it’s not a latent thing. That’s what I keep coming back to. Voices evolve, the way in which you write changes with time, since you yourself change with time.
That’s why I dislike the term ‘talent’. Talent is inherent. Talent implies that by writing well you’re fulfilling some kind of destiny, you’re doing something that comes naturally to you. It was always in there, you just manifested it with your writing.
Bollocks to that. You create a voice by writing and honing the skills you like the most, or focusing on the bits you like or want to tell. You put in effort and it naturally ends up creating quality. True, some people get there faster than others, so in that sense ‘talent’ as a concept does exist—I’m making a general point, I’m not discussing metaphysics here, I’m not that stupid yet—but ya get me. It’s about doing the wet work.
Is the point to muddled? I think it is. Let me state the thesis of this entire blog again, but this time in a clear and concise way:
Your don’t “find” your voice. You create it.
It took Jorge Luis Borges over fifty years to learn how to write like Jorge Luis Borges.
This blog was born out of two coincidences—a table of contents (here’s another link at the indiegogo campaign) and a book I didn’t like. But they both eventually collided into one single thought in my head, cause it’s all about that name recognition. That name recognition, and the literary voice that I assign to each one of them, at least.
I’ve talked about developing your own voice a lot in my time in this website; heaven knows that’s how I’ve approached writing ever since I started. And that’s ‘cause I genuinely think it’s important, and I think it should be brought up again and again and again.
But voice isn’t an end goal, as I’ve said sometimes. Your voice evolves with you, and what you might think is your ‘definite’ level of writing will have evolved massively in a couple years. You just keep writing and keep trying to get better—and your voice is simply a byproduct of that. That’s why you can’t rely on talent, or why you can’t believe in the lack of it. Because talent is a lie, it’s something you’ve always had in you. It’s intrinsic.
It took Jorge Luis Borges over fifty years to learn to write like Jorge Luis Borges. I had always thought he was just smarter than most, or more talented than most—but in truth, he sucked a lot during his youth. And after seeing this, I look at every writer in this website whose style I recognize and admire, and I realize—they sucked too, before they got to this point.
So fuck talent. Fuck this weird pedestal we sometimes build under the feet of other writers just because they feel like they always knew what they were doing. I can assure you, they didn’t. And after seeing the bloody fucking crime against humanity that is a book of essays written by what I consider one of the absolute best writers of the last hundred years?
What the hell. I realize that everybody can get there. You just need to keep at it. Good writers exist, and great writers exist, but talented writers don’t—they’re just people who started writing and improving long ago. And if all that’s keeping you from being as good as Borges is a little bit of patience, and a little bit of perseverance?
Well, I don't know. I find that idea very uplifting. It means it’s never too late to start.
I think this might be one of the most aimless blogs I've written in a while. It's a bit more stream of thought than usual? But I wanted to write about all this shit and at least there's some cute literary analysis halfway through if you don't like anything else, so hey, that's that. I had fun writing it! That's what counts.
Anyway, these are my Patreon supporters with a $5 tier or higher, and this is the special small-story shoutout I do for them.
I feel like this blog is a contextual self-own
I completely agree with the fundamental thesis here. 'Talent' is a bullshit term. If nothing else, 'talent' derives from your previous experiences and your general mindset and how well it meshes with a given thing you try to do (someone who's never learned English isn't going to have an easy time writing an English book), but that's about where the buck stops for me.
Inspirational stuff, delivered in your own signature blend of deep insight and humiliating reminders that I'm the same species as you.
If I had to describe your work in a single word, it would be "fractal." You layer the same simple patterns and recurring forms over each other in a way to produce incredible, intricate designs that are breathtaking to behold. Not necessarily for the best reasons, but breathtaking nonetheless.
Tsk. Didn't even mention me once. Never again will I discuss with you dog masturbation in Spanish in public.
Also. Cortázar. You must be drunk.
This is both incredubly encouraging and depressing.
I do other things. Sometimes when I am observed to be doing those things, a person will remark that they wish they had my talent. I very politely do not scream at them, "I DON'T HAVE ANY FUCKING TALENT, I'VE JUST BEEN DOING THIS FOR MOST OF MY LIFE! YOU JUST WISH YOU COULD DO THIS WITHOUT SPENDING YEARS LEARNING AND PRACTICING!"
Unless there is something actually wrong with your body or brain, you can learn to be fucking brilliant at almost anything. That's what people do.
You're goddamn right it is.
Interesting blog, and sentiments I generally agree with (though I've never read Borges myself) except for this one:
There's another use for a thesaurus that all pony writers should be made aware of: Use it when you're writing Zecora. Rhyming dictionaries are useless for trying to write rhyming prose; who needs a list of totally random words that would work if they had anything to do with what the character was saying? Instead, figure out what you want Zecora to say, hit the thesaurus entries for the words you would write if she spoke normally, and find the easiest synonyms to rhyme. It's the easiest way to avoid her sounding like a Dr. Seuss character.
Edit to add: It also can help with meter, when you need an extra syllable somewhere.
5038375
I love that word for Aragon. Fractals are controlled chaos. They're patterns that look random but have an underlying structure that's beautiful and elegant and painfully obvious once you see it. But if you're not looking, then it's just a beautiful mess.
"the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago, second best time is today"
quote from somewhere on 4chan, feels like it fits pretty well with this blog
Very aimless, but I love the way you tie the sections together. Feels good in my brain.
Every Aragon post is an adventure and a half. That was worth every word
Really interesting blog, both for the point about talent and the look into how you view other authors.
*Stops. Blinks. Silently sneaks back out*
I will admit to the B&E but I’m only there to move things ever so slightly off from their original position so as to breed paranoia.
Whenever you write, I feel like you're a drunk person rambling at me, yet you're coherent enough to get some strangely insightful point across anyway.
I’m going to start collecting all these Patreon shoutouts in a Google Doc.
It's always nice hearing this kinda shit, makes me feel better about my garbage. Aggressive optimism or something like that.
5038375
Nailed it in one, as far as I’m concerned.
Anyway, whether you think you made a powerful point or not, I’m of the mind that you did, and it’s an important one too. In my view, having a voice IS the “talent” aspect of writing, insofar as it’s the component of storytelling that makes a particular teller unique and comes from some ephemeral inherent place that can and must be changed and refined, but—like all matter and things that do matter—can’t be independently created or destroyed.
Of course, the implication there is that, like talents, not everyone has a unique voice, which is an awkward and cynical thing to claim, but... yeah. Can’t claim to be an optimist personally, in this or any other context. Still, though, it’s the best way in my view to describe what truly differentiates artists within their respective fields: virtually anyone can put in their ten thousand hours and master the mechanics, but the best of the best are the ones who develop their talent as well, and dedicate most of those hours to shaping and fine-tuning their perspective on the world rather than the prose through which they reflect it.
Also, dibs on “intense.” Sort of a calling-yourself-a-philosopher thing to do, probably, but it was the first thing I thought of and it’s definitely a pattern, for good and ill.
Aw man now I wonder what my one-word-oeuvre-descriptor is. Apart from, say, “hackneyed” or “overrated” or “who?”
Well put. Very well put indeed.
Oh, also:
When you talked about the game of describing someone in a word, I immediately went "Hold on how would I..." and the word that I came up with, near instantly, I am amused to note, is not far from yours. I went with 'intricate.' Things I write tend to have a thousand moving parts apiece, and like most things with a lot of intricate clockwork in them, bits of them occasionally go cuckoo.
It's a hazard.
Also also:
Nice to share a book with you.
1. I am so jealous of those Borges essays, even if one set is terrible and the other is wonderful. I regret not knowing Spanish enough to read them in the original, I will have to settle for a translation and hope I can find a really good one.
2. Dammit, Aragon, now I have to reread a bunch of your stuff and try to analyze why it makes me happy so I can try to define your style in a single word. Drat you and your linguistic challenges.
Edit:
3. The suggestion in earlier comments of "fractal" sounds good to me but I still feel like there's some aspect I'm missing that can be better described with a different word. Hm. Back to thinking for me.
Edit 2: - regarding the tags
4. I work someplace I have to card everybody under 40 - however, the last time I was at a wedding, last year, my little sister (3 years younger than me) got alcohol, no question, and I got carded. Sort of. The waiter didn't actually wait to see my ID, so he may have been flirting or something. Point is, I'm 26 now and I regularly have people guessing my age to be much younger than that, which I find immensely entertaining.
Hey I only snuck in the one time,and it was to steal your tooth fairy money. Pity I only got the tooth.
What word would you use to describe FanOfMostEverything?
5038375
5037096
I finally got it; it's "shocking!"
Because at first, Aragon looks like he's about shock humor. Cow are almost slaves, Luna's a really cheerful pyscopath, everyone in Equestria is Twilight and their dead, so on and so forth.
But then after that, he shocks you by revealing he really did have a point the whole time. The cows assassination plot is why Celestia pretended to go evil is still.my favorite, but every one of his stories is like a rube Goldberg machine of things that should be random but work like dominos.
And then, and then on top of that, he has to go and just be brilliant. "Pride doesn't say you won't fall, it just tells you the fall is worth it." Or everything about representing Sunset and Twilight relationship with a card game played by abstract concepts, and despite the fact that they're really playing for.love, they forget to see if love want to play. Or the one we're Celestia is a god, but she's in denial because gods don't have peers.
He'll.shock you with a joke, and then he'll shock you with a really damn good point, and everything he's written will have something that will make you go "well, shit. That's right."
(FoME might be 'technical' but I'm not sure. Estee is ' care' because I dare you to find one single inch of her worlds that hasn't been shined. I'm hoping I pull off 'cool' but I'll settle for 'comprehensible.')
5041325
Just saying, lightning bolts are fractals.
In all seriousness, may I ask what you meant by "technical"? I'd love to get an outside perspective on trends in my work.
5041422
All the stuff you write is focused on exploring ideas. And don't get me wrong, all writing is about exploring an idea of some kind, but you don't put a lot of focus on people or plot. Each story has an idea, and the other stuff is there just to make sure you have room to look at that idea properly.
Maybe I should have said educational?
5041489
While I haven't read enough of FoME to have an opinion here -- this is the kinda thing you do when you're overly familiar with someone's work; hence why I kept the list short to a point, since I read very little fanfic nowadays -- I think that from the way you describe it, FoME's writing is conceptual ratjer than technical. No?
5041494
Conceptual works, but it implies the ideas he's studying abstract philopshy stuff, when it's mostly nerdy magi-technobabble. And there's how reading his stuff makes me feel like I'm learning something. (As a sidebar, has FoME tried writing educational fiction? He should.)
I think I'm going to choose Scholastic.
5041422
5041551
I will happily take scholastic.
So it's no secret that I'm a much poorer reader than I am a writer. I can't pick up context for shit, I routinely gloss over critical hints and have a bad habit of deciding based on the first sentence of a paragraph if it's worth reading the rest of the paragraph. I'm pretty sure I have never managed any kind of deep reading of any text in my entire life. Sometimes I'll be reading through a review of a story I liked by someone smart, and they'll mention all the little things I missed, the recurring themes and motifs, how certain events are ironic in the context of what occurred before, and I'll realize, "God damn, I'm a terrible reader."
That's why I have trouble coming up with good assessments of other writers, I think. Pretty much all I'm able to do when reading is note how smooth or immersive the writing is, how skillfully it's done. And often I just let myself be amazed by the creativity of it -- your short story A Woman Tearing Herself in Half was one of those. Just the voicing and the situation and the imagery... I know not all the reviewers liked it as much, but you can't write stories to appeal to everyone. Better to write a story that a few people will absolutely love than one the entire world will find inoffensive.
So I guess, if I had to chose a word for what I thought of your writing, it would be electric. Not always pleasant, often shocking, buzzing with energy. Often invisible but still filled with power.
5044181
Wait, what is this story (A woman tearing herself in half) and where can I read it? I didn't realize Aragon had a platform other than fimfiction.
5057595
It was on the Writeoff site. He took it down (I assume to prepare for publication somewhere legit), but if you ask nice he might send you a copy.