Author-ized L.J.Tfw my girl Ursula K. #LeGuin made such a big deal in #TheDispossessed about the fact that a toilet is called a "shitstool" in plainspoken Anarres and that's... almost exactly what it's called in #languages like #Chinese or #Korean, like literally 便器 biànqì, "excrement tool." Like she wasn't totally ignorant of East Asian cultures & languages even if her translation of the Tao Te Ching was kinda atrocious, but maybe modern Asian cultures/languages didn't capture her interest as much--and it's true Laozi didn't have a whole lot to say about the Way of the Crap xD
Yeah I've decided to CW critiques of UKL because it seems to upset people For Some Reason. Like @ me if you like but you can't say I dinnae warn ye
amanda, pastry paladin@ljwrites I CW my critiques of Terry Pratchett for the same reason lmao
@alpine_thistle Haha oh no, can't assail the fort of the Beloved Progressive White Author and come away unscathed! 😂 I respect Pratchett and bring up Vimes Boots Theory all the time, but the most I can say of his works is that I tried several Discworld books and they never entirely clicked with me so I basically never bring him up. (Good Omens lost me in the first chapter at the very scene that cracked everyone else up, which is probably just as well.)
@ljwrites I have a love/hate relationship with Good Omens lol. A book published in 1990, which purports to be tolerant and woke, asserting that "humans conquered Plague, which has been replaced with Pollution as a horseman of the apocalypse," gets a huge [gay judgment side-eye] from me
I never got into much other Pratchett, because I always found his writing so smug and windbaggy
@alpine_thistle bro I feel like I need to disavow you to keep my street cred with the libs xD (I do not, in fact, have street cred with liberals) But yeah, that line does make me slide down my figurative seat in vicarious embarrassment, like hello, AIDS crisis in Africa and the U.S., among other places??
I also entirely failed to find him funny either in the Discworld books I read or in Good Omens--the airport phone jamming scene was so underwhelming I DNF'd then and there. As for the social justice aspects, Equal Rites was supposed to be the book that hooked me even if The Colour of Magic and the second book didn't (they didn't), and instead I found the feminist takes of ER so tepid I simply lost the will to continue the series. I figured I was getting the best of Discworld from the quotes I came across on social media and called it a day.
queer as in fuck your borders@ljwrites wait, people actually recommended those early books to you?? I consider myself a pretty big Pratchett fan and I've never read more than a few sentences of The Colour of Magic, never touched the second one. Like, obviously the book I'd recommend for you is The Thief of Time! (But actually not because it's probably way more orientalist than I had the ability to detect when I fell in love with it.)
It's fine not to like things I like ofc. I'm just sad you tried some of the worst of it!
@bright_helpings omg I never even heard of The Thief of Time, Equal Rites and maybe Guards! Guards! were the social media darlings in my circles. Plenty of stanning for the first 2 books, too, which is fair enough because they're the ones that not only kick off the series but got shows made out of them and so on. I might give Thief of Time and maybe Guards! the old college try.
@ljwrites Guards! Guards! is a favorite of mine, I do love Vimes as a character so much.
Satsuma@bright_helpings @ljwrites i appreciate his strong writing style but it definitely does rub some people the wrong way — my aunt who often shares similar tastes to me in SFF bounced hard off his writing
however also lots of discworld fans dislike the first two books, or at least think they’re the weakest books in the series so there is that