u/Exciting_Edge1398

I want to expand my collection more, but book prices are stupidly high lol

I want to expand my collection more, but book prices here in my country are stupidly high lol

I’ve been down an absolute rabbit hole regarding this topic for awhile, and I need to dump this brain-melt somewhere lmao

If you’ve read Jorge Luis Borges’ short story "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" (it’s only about fewpages long, classic Borges lol), you know he opens the whole thing with a five-line epigraph from W.B. Yeats’ poem "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen":

>So the Platonic Year Whirls out new right and wrong, Whirls in the old instead; All men are dancers and their tread Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.

Usually, when authors use epigraphs, it’s just a vibe check or just an opener, something to hook you in, they want to set a mood, but if you actually dig into Yeats’ poem and superimpose it onto Borges' story, you will realize that Borges didn't just use this stanza of NHAN as some narrative decoratio, he actually used it as the literal structural blueprint for his entire narrative/story.

I want to unpack how these two masterpieces of literature talk to each other, specifically how they tackle the terrifying idea of cyclical determinism, the total loss of human agency, and the weird, unsettling reality that our "history" is basically just a highly choreographed stage play.

LET'S GET FUCKIN STARTED! LOL

The "Platonic Year" and the Leibnizian Nightmare:

To understand what’s happening here, we have to look at the philosophical engines driving both texts.

In Yeats' poem, he references the "Platonic Year": the cosmic cycle where the planets eventually return to their original alignments, and everything restarts, Yeats had this whole mystical system (detailed in his book "A Vision") involving "gyres," which are basically interlocking cones representing historical eras, for Yeats, history isn't a straight line of progress but more of a spiral, just when you think humanity is getting smarter, the gyre shifts, the "Platonic Year" spins, and we plunge right back into barbarism. Borges takes this abstract concept and makes it a concrete, narrative nightmare.

His protagonist, Ryan, is trying to write a biography of his great grandfather, Fergus Kilpatrick, a legendary Irish revolutionary hero assassinated in 1824. But as Ryan digs into the archives, he notices some incredibly weird, glitch-in-the-matrix-style coincidences haha, the details of Kilpatrick's assassination perfectly mirror the death of Julius Caesar, down to a warning from a seer and a friend begging him not to go out.

Ryan literally starts contemplating the "transmigration of souls" and a "secret shape of time, a pattern of repeating lines" (he even name-drops Spengler, Vico, and Hegel to try to make sense of the repeating history).

And this is where Borges’ other massive influence comes in: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and his theory of "pre-established harmony."

Borges explicitly notes that he wrote this story under Leibniz’s influence. Leibniz argued that everything in the universe is perfectly synchronized by a higher power, moving together in absolute harmony, even if we think we have free will, in "Traitor and the Hero", Borges merges Yeats' historical cycles with Leibniz's synchronized universe, Borges shows us a world where individuals aren’t actually unique actors making their own choices; we are just lines in a script that’s already been written, forced to repeat the same tragedies over and over and over again

"All Men Are Dancers"

Let's look at that incredible line from the Yeats epigraph: "All men are dancers and their tread / Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong."

If you read the context of Yeats’ poem, this line comes right after he describes Loie Fuller’s famous dancers. Fuller was this pioneering dancer who used massive, swirling silk scarves under colored lights to create the illusion of a "dragon of air", the audience saw a mystical beast, but behind the scenes, it was just a human being frantically spinning sticks and fabric in the dark to create an illusion, Borges took Yeats’ dancer metaphor and freaking literalizes it lol

In the story, Ryan discovers the horrifying truth: Kilpatrick was actually a traitor to the Irish revolution, he was caught, but his co conspirator, a brilliant intellectual named James Alexander Nolan, realized that if the public found out their leader was a sellout, the rebellion would collapse. So, Nolan decided to execute Kilpatrick, but he staged it as a heroic assassination.

Because Nolan didn't have time to write an original "heroic death" script, he literally plagiarized William Shakespeare, he lifted scenes from Macbeth and Julius Caesar (which Nolan had actually translated into Gaelic years prior) to dramatic effect. He transformed the entire city of Dublin into a theater:

• The Act/Choreography: Nolan literally choreographed Kilpatrick’s final days, telling him exactly where to walk, what to say, and how to act.
• The Cast and Characters: Hundreds of ordinary Irish citizens participated in the event, shouting on cue, completely unaware they were actors in a giant, public play.

And when Yeats says "all men are dancers" moving to a gong they cannot control, Borges shows us the ultimate expression of that, the Irish populace are the dancers; Nolan is the one striking the gong, they are performing a tragedy they think is real life, but it’s just all farce.

The Return of the "Rogues and Rascals" and the Collapse of the Double

One of the most devastating parts of Yeats’ "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen" is the profound disillusionment as Yeats writes:

>O what fine thought we had because we thought That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.

He’s looking at the horrific violence of the Irish War of Independence (specifically the atrocities committed by the Black and Tans in 1919) and realizing that civilization is a fragile lie, the "rogues and rascals" (the monsters of history) never actually left, they just waited for the cycle to turn. Borges weaponizes this exact disillusionment by completely collapsing the binary between the Traitor and the Hero.

In a standard historical narrative, the hero and the traitor are opposites, one is noble; the other is a rogue. But in Borges' story, they are the exact same person. Kilpatrick is both the savior of Ireland and the man who sold them out. Nolan’s brilliant, twisted solution is to use the theater to "sanitize" this reality, ny staging a beautiful, Shakespearean death, he hides the "rogue" and immortalizes the "hero". He creates a myth to "engrave itself upon the popular imagination" and keep the rebellion alive, the real world dirtiness of politics and betrayal is swept under the rug, replaced by a clean, inspiring artistic lie.

Ryan’s Final "Whirl"

This brings us to the climax of the story, and the final connection to Yeats’ lines: "Whirls out new right and wrong / Whirls in the old instead"

Once Ryan figures out the whole conspiracy that his heroic ancestor was a traitor, that his death was a staged play plagiarized from Shakespeare, and that the history of his country is built on a lie, what does he do? He has the power to expose the truth. He could break the cycle, but he didn't.

Ryan "decided to silence the discovery" Instead of exposing the fraud, he publishes a biography dedicated entirely to Kilpatrick’s glory. Why? Because Ryan realizes that human beings cannot survive without the myth, if he exposes Kilpatrick, he destroys the foundational story that holds his country together. He realizes that history needs the theater to function, the truth is too chaotic, too "barbarous" to face.

By choosing to publish the lie, Ryan steps onto the stage himself, he becomes the newest dancer in Nolan’s play, he picks up the script, joins the act, and ensures that the "new right" (the heroic myth) continues to whirl out the "old wrong" (the treachery) for generations to come.

TLDR/Final Thoughts

Borges uses W.B. Yeats’s poem "Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen*"* as the literal architectural blueprint for "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero". Yeats’s concepts of the "Platonic Year" (cyclical time) and "all men are dancers" (the loss of human agency to a larger historical rhythm) are literalized in Borges's story, a traitor's execution is choreographed like a Shakespearean drama, turning an entire country into unwitting theatrical actors to preserve a national myth and in the end, the biographer Ryan chooses to publish the beautiful myth over the sordid truth, he willingly stepping onto the stage himself to keep the cycle spinning because humanity cannot survive without the illusion.

When you take a step back and look at the sheer structural economy at play here, the brilliance is staggering, Borges doesn't just borrow Yeats' words: he builds a perfect narrative machine that proves Yeats' point, that we aren't just passive victims of the "Platonic Year" but we actively choose to participate in it, we select the clean, staged performance of the myth over the messy, chaotic truth of reality, happily dancing to a gong we pretend we can't hear.

And honestly, this level of thematic density and structural perfection is exactly why real literature like Yeats and Borges utterly mogs your favorite manga, anime, light novel, or visual novel. I am dead serious, i look at these online spaces (including this sub) and see people writing pseudointellectual bs and comparisons, analyzing some copy paste, trash-tier works of generic shonen manga, faux deep seinen or some visual novel "masterpiece" where a character defeats "fate" through some brainrot ways, it is absolute, unadulterated slop.

Look at what Borges did here, in a measly four pages, he compressed the entire horror of existential determinism, Leibnizian metaphysics, historical revisionism, and the complete collapse of human agency, bro didn't need 80 volumes of bloated worldbuilding, a localized magical power system, or three hundred chapters of tedious, hand-wringing exposition to make his point and Yeats 5 line stanza was so dense that Borges was able to build a profound narrative out of it.

If your favorite medium requires hundreds of hours of self-indulgent filler just to deliver a cliché about breaking the "cycles of hatred" or some other superficial bullshit, it is objectively inferior, this is the difference between a flawless master of the craft against wannabe amateurs, put down those slop and go read some actual books.

So did The Matrix actually rip off Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles? this is the question that we will try to answer.

Okay, so I’ve reread The Invisibles recently (specifically the invisible kingdom arc) and it got me thinking about one of the oldest and most exhausting conspiracy theories in comic book history. Did the Wachowskis actually steal Grant Morrison's ideas to make The Matrix?

Usually when this comes up, people just write it off as "ambient 90s vibes" or simple coincidenc, film nerds will start talking about Baudrillard, Gnosticism, and anime as the crux of The Matrix, but the actual history here is way more weirder, and tbh, the specific details are much more damning than most Wachowski fans admit or realize.

This isnt just a case of "both had guys in cool trench coats" This is a weird mix of behind-the-scenes Hollywood gossip, a literal storyboard-level scene copy lmao, and a promotional contact that proves the Wachowskis knew exactly whose work they were looking at.

The Interrogation Scene (The real visual copy)

Everyone always points to King Mob and Morpheus both wearing patent leather trench coats and designer sunglasses, or Jack Frost and Neo both having to jump off a building to prove gravity is fakem, ok that's cool, but anyone can write that off as general 90s style.

But if you want a visual parallel? that’s hard to ignore, look at the interrogation scenes.

In The Invisibles (which started in 94), the leader King Mob gets captured by the conspiracy, he's cuffed to a chair, injected with a mind-altering drug to break his psychic defenses, and tortured.

• Visually, there's a panel where the interrogator holds his hands flat against the sides of Mob’s temples.
• Then we get a hyper-specific close-up of Mob with a single, slow trickle of blood coming out of one nostril.
• He has to be rescued by a high-octane tactical team before his mind completely breaks.

Now go watch The Matrix. Morpheus is captured by Agent Smith, he is cuffed to a chair, injected with a serum to hack his mind, and interrogated.

• Smith holds Morpheus's head with his hands placed flat on either side of his temples.
• We get the exact same close-up of Morpheus with a single bleeding nostril.
• Neo and Trinity launch a massive, dual-wielding gun rescue.

When Morrison talks about the movie copying their work "image by image," this is the kind of stuff they mean, it's almost a direct storyboard lift.

What Morrison actually said (The SuicideGirls Interview)

For a long time, people thought Morrison was just being a bitter comic writer crying from the sidelines, but Morrison’s annoyance wasn't just a hunch, in a 2005 interview with SuicideGirls, Morrison dropped some massive context.

First off, Morrison wasn't guessing about the visual similarities. Morrison claimed they had actual sources on the production crew who told them that design staff on The Matrix were literally handed copies of The Invisibles trades and told to make the movie look like the books, Morrison added that since the Wachowskis are comic book creators and fans of the medium anyway, it wasn't really surprising. But Morrison had a bit more bite to their comments than people usually remember. He basically complained that the Wachowskis made millions off what was essentially a copy of his work, and joked that they would've settled for just one million dollars so they didn't have to work thirteen-hour days anymore.

But then, in the very same breath, Morrison said this weirdly tragic thing: he was glad the ideas got out there, but he wished the Wachowskis had "befriended me instead of antagonizing me." To Morrison, the real bummer wasn't just the missing paycheck lmao it was that the Wachowskis lifted their entire aesthetic but shut him out of the club.

Was it all coincidence?

Here is the real kicker that kills the "coincidence" defense: The Wachowskis knew exactly who Morrison was before the movie even hit theaters.

Right before The Matrix came out in 1999, Warner Bros. and the Wachowskis actually contacted Morrison and asked them to write a promotional short story for the movie's official website. Now, we don't actually know what happened after that and fans love to speculate that Morrison turned them down in a huff, but there's no clear evidence for, it might have just fizzled out in corporate email chains, or Morrison just ghosted them, who knows.

But how it ended doesn't actually matter, the fact that they reached out is the real story, it proves the Wachowskis and their team were fully aware of Grant Morrison and The Invisibles. You can't claim you had no idea a comic existed when you literally tried to recruit its creator to write promo material for your movie's launch. It doesn't legally prove they stole the script, but it completely destroys the "ships passing in the night" defense, they knew exactly who he was.

Why Morrison hated the sequels (Clue: they stopped stealing lol)

There's a common idea that Morrison just hates everything about The Matrix, but he actually hold two totally opposite thoughts at the same time:

1. He thinks the first movie is a genuine scifi masterpiece.
2. He thinks the sequels sucked because the Wachowskis stopped stealing.

Seriously, this is the most Morrison take ever lol, when Reloaded and Revolutions came out, Morrison wasn't happy that the films moved away from The Invisibles, Morrison was annoyed because the Wachowskis fell back into boring, traditional, muddled Christian theology (the singular, tragic Savior sacrificing himself to a machine god).

Morrison argued that if they had just kept stealing from The Invisibles, specifically the crazy, non-dualist Gnostic ending where everyone is the savior and the "bad guys" are just another part of our own collective consciousness, the sequels would have been way better.

Now, obviously, Morrison didn't invent these ideas either.

If you look at 1998 and 1999, everyone was having the exact same existential freakou, you had Dark City (1998), The Truman Show (1998), eXistenZ (1999), and The Thirteenth Floor (1999) all coming out within 18 months of each other. It was akk just pre Y2K anxiety, we were moving into the digital age and no one really understood it yet, Gnosticism, was just the perfect metaphor for the early internet, the whole ancient heresy that physical reality is a fake prison created by an evil god

The Wachowskis took Philip K. Dick, added Ghost in the Shell, threw in some French philosophy, and wrapped it in Hong Kong wire-fu and meanwhile Morrison built The Invisibles by aggressively strip-mining The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Aleister Crowley, and Terence McKenna lol

So what's the verdict?

On a big picture level, IMO both works are just drinking from the same cultural river, ut visually? The debt is super clear, between the crew members passing comic books around the art department, the shot-for-shot interrogation parallels and "we didn't know about The Invisibles" isn't a believable excuse. They’re both great, they just do different things. The Matrix is a masterclass in making complex philosophy digestible for teenagers who want to see cool gunfights and martial arts lol while The Invisibles is a chaotic, messy, borderline incomprehensible magical spell disguised as a comic book.

Everyone steals in art, its just a shame that the Wachowskis didn't buy Morrison a drink lol

Let’s talk about a classic debate that has been raging in literary circles, writing workshops, and book forums since basically the dawn of the written word: The Substance Writer vs. The Stylist Writer.

If you spend any time on bookish subreddits or literary forums, you’ve definitely run into this battle line, onn one side, you have the plot-and-character purists who want a gripping story, rich psychological realism, and a fast-paced narrative and on the other, you have the prose-aesthetes who want to be hypnotized by the sheer, shimmering beauty of a single sentence and frankly, if nothing "happens" in the plot for three hundred pages, they couldn't care less lmao

But here’s my take: this is a completely false dichotomy, while categorizing writers into these two camps is a fantastic tool for literary analysis, the absolute pinnacle of literature (the stuff that echoes through centuries) only happens when these two seemingly opposing forces collide. To prove this, we’re going to look closely at both extremes, explore the deep nuances and hidden dangers of each, and then dive into two absolute masters: the modernist poet W.B. Yeats and the American novelist Herman Melville, to see how they shattered this boundary to create something eternal.

Category 1: The Substance-First Writer

For the Substance Writer, language is just a vehicle, they subscribe to George Orwell’s famous dictum from his essay Why I Write: "Good prose is like a windowpane."

Think about that metaphor, w hen you look through a window, you aren’t supposed to be staring at the glass, admiring its polish or looking for bubbles in the pane. You are supposed to be looking through it at the world on the other side, for these writers, if the prose is too flashy, it actually distracts from the truth of the story.

Core Priorities of the Substance Camp:

• Narrative Momentum & Pacing: Keeping the gears of the plot turning, every scene must move the character or the conflict forward.
• Character Realism: Crafting deep, psychologically authentic human beings, the goal is empathy; the reader should feel like they actually know these fictional people.
• Thematic Resonance & Subtext: Delivering profound moral, philosophical, or societal questions without letting flowery language get in the way of the message.

The Examples: Brandon Sanderson & Stephen King

Love them or hate them, these two are absolute titans of narrative architecture

Take Sanderson for example, hiis prose style is famously (or even infamously) plain, almost utilitarian, he rarely uses an obscure vocab when a simple one will do, and his sentence structures are straightforward, but because of this, his world building is incredibly clear, he can construct massive, multi tiered systems and complex, clockwork political plots that keep millions of readers turning 1,000-page books late into the night. the language does not call attention to itself because the substance (the sheer scale of the epic) is the star, but we have to be careful here: calling clear, accessible prose 'substance only' sells short the immense craft involved in writing that way, writers like Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, or Cormac McCarthy write in a stripped-down register that is as highly constructed and aesthetically deliberate as any baroque stylist's. Sanderson's readability and King's conversational voice are stylistic achievements in their own right, designed to make complex worlds and raw terrors completely immediate. Second, look at Stephen King, King’s style is conversational, colloquial, and highly accessible. He doesn't write poetic prose, but his character work is legendary, he can make you feel the claustrophobia of a snowed in hotel or the raw terror of childhood in a small Maine town because his "windowpane" is incredibly clean, you see the characters' fears with total, unvarnished clarity.

The Nuance:

The major risk of "substance only" writing is that, when stripped of aesthetic ambition, it can feel flat, dry, or journalistically sterile, if the language is merely serviceable, the book can read like a glorified Wikipedia summary of a plot lol, furthermore, once the puzzle of the plot is solved or the climax is reached, there is often very little aesthetic joy left to savor on a second or third reread, without the stylistic flavor, the reading experience can feel transactional: you give the author your time, they give you a sequence of events, and that's it.

Category 2: The Stylist Writer

For the Stylist, the medium is the message, they are formalist masters, linguistic gods, and supreme technicians of prose or verse, the don't just write sentences; they compose them like music. They are constantly innovating, playing with syntax, testing the limits of language itself, and experimenting with narrative structures.

Core Priorities of the Stylist Camp:

• Aesthetics and Euphony: A relentless focus on how words sound, their rhythmic cadence, and how they feel when read aloud.
• Form and Experimentation: Shattering traditional chronological structures to mimic the chaotic nature of human thought or memory.
• Atmosphere over Action: Prioritizing a vibe, like an impressionistic painting of a single moment, or an emotional state over "what happens next."

The Examples: Vladimir Nabokov & Virginia Woolf

For a Stylist, a book is an aesthetic object.

Read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the plot of the novel is deeply uncomfortable and morally wretched, it is the confession of a monstrous predator and yet, Nabokov’s prose is so dazzling, so manipulative in its beauty, and so rich with wordplay, alliteration, and hidden literary puzzles that it practically hypnotizes the reader, Nabokov uses style as a thematic scalpel; he makes the language so gorgeous that we are forced into an uncomfortable complicity with the narrator. As for, Woolf, in novels like Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse, Woolf completely abandons traditional linear plotting, instead, she uses a fluid, poetic stream-of-consciousness style, she realized that human consciousness doesn't experience the world in neat "plot points" Our minds jump from a memory of thirty years ago, to the sound of a clock chiming, to a sudden flash of existential dread, her style (dense, rhythmic, and flowing) is the only way to capture the raw, unfiltered experience of being alive.

The Nuance:

The danger for the Stylist is self-indulgence. When style completely untethers itself from substance, writing becomes hollow, if an author has nothing of genuine human value to say, all their beautiful adjectives and complex syntactic structures turn into purple prose, it becomes a gold plated kinetic sculpture: beautiful to look at for a minute, but ultimately empty inside. If a reader cannot find a human anchor, be it a character, an emotional truth, or a compelling idea, they will eventually put the book down, exhausted by the sheer effort of reading "art for art's sake."

The Synthesis: This is Where the Magic Happens

The truth is, the absolute greatest masterpieces of human literature do not choose a side. They understand that style and substance are not locked in a zero-sum game, but instead, they use style to amplify substance, and substance to anchor style.

Let’s look at two incredible examples that prove this synthesis is where literary history is made.

Exhibit A: W.B. Yeats

Yeats is the ultimate exemplar of this synthesis, first and foremost Yeats was supreme technician of the verse, he was a master of the traditional forms, hence a pure stylist, but he was also a bit of a eccentric, in the 1920s, Yeats's intellectual life was dominated by two parallel streams: his automatic writing sessions with his wife George Hyde-Lees (which began in 1917 and eventually formed his eccentric occult book A Vision, published in 1925) and his deepening study of Neoplatonic philosophy, particularly Plotinus.

While A Vision itself is famously a complex, wild grab bag of Golden Dawn occultism, astrology, and Theosophy, Neoplatonism provided a crucial, rigorous philosophical framework that directly fed his late poetry, this fusion of personal mythology and Neoplatonic thought culminated in his late masterpieces, specifically the Byzantium poems: "Sailing to Byzantium" (1928) and "Byzantium" (1930).

Let’s look at the famous closing stanza of "Sailing to Byzantium" (My all time favorite Yeats poem btw lol):

"Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come."

On a stylistic level, this is a masterclass in tension, the poem is written in perfect, stately ottava rima (an eight-line stanza in iambic pentameter with an ABABABCC rhyme scheme). The rhythm is completely controlled, mirroring the rigid, changeless beauty of the thing he describes.

But look at the substance, Yeats is dramatizing Plotinus’s hierarchy of existence: the descent from the Intellect and the Soul into corruptible matter and choosing to abandon the decaying, biological world ("that is no country for old men") to be gathered into the "artifice of eternity." He treats historical Byzantium as a mystical, ideal civilization where art, religion, and practical craftsmanship were unified as one.

By analyzing "Sailing to Byzantium", we see a true synthesis: his massive, complex metaphysical system is perfectly packaged inside a rigid, gorgeous formal structure, his style isn't a distraction from his philosoph but the ultimate, indestructible container for it.

Exhibit B: Herman Melville

On paper, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is the ultimate "Substance" novel, if you ask the average person what it's about, i'm sure they’ll say, "It’s a classic adventure story about a crazy captain chasing a giant white whale", it has a clear plot, massive physical action, iconic character studies (Captain Ahab is one of the greatest psychological portraits in human history), and deep themes of existential dread, colonial ambition, and human obsession.

Yet, Melville completely demolishes the "serviceable prose" rule of the Substance category, he refused to write a simple, clean "windowpane" adventure novel. Melville’s prose is incredibly dense, hyper-stylized, and aggressively experimental, he doesn’t just tell the story of the Pequod; he stops the narrative entirely to write Shakespearean soliloquies, insert random taxonomic chapters about whale biology, mock the scientific community, and suddenly switch the format of the novel into a stage play complete with stage directions and theatrical monologues.

When Ahab speaks, the prose morphs directly into Shakespearean blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter):

"I leave a white and turbid wake; pale waters, paler cheeks, where'er I sail. The envious billows sidelong swell to whelm my track; let them; but first I pass."

Why did Melville do this? Because he understood that a simple, realist style could not support the weight of his substance, to make a story about a whale feel like a battle between humanity and the silent, indifferent cosmos, he needed a style that was biblical, epic, and wild, he proved that you can write a massive, plot driven epic of substance while simultaneously acting like a mad scientist of formal experimentation.

TL;DR / Conclusion:

At the end of the day, trying to separate style and substance in great writing is like trying to separate the melody from the lyrics of your favorite song. Yes, you can analyze them separately, and yes, some artists favor one over the other. But if you want to write something that echoes through the ages, something that hits the reader both in the emotional gut and in the aesthetic funny bone, IMO you have to bridge the gap.

If you lean toward the Substance camp, never settle for "good enough" prose, push your language, experiment with your syntax, and make your sentences sing.

If you lean toward the Stylist category, remember to ground your beautiful linguistic acrobatics to genuine, raw human truth. Be a technician like Yeats, but keep your eyes on the profound, write an epic story like Melville, but never let your prose become invisible.

What do you guys think? Do you find yourself naturally leaning toward one of these camps when you read or write? Let’s get a discussion going in the comments.

Categories:

1. Pure writing skill: Sentence-level excellence independent of content: elegance, precision, control, and craftsmanship of prose or verse.

2. Command and mastery of the language: How powerfully and flexibly the author uses their language as a tool: clarity, precision, expressiveness, and ability to stretch or bend language without breaking it.

3. Craft, technique & writing style: How controlled and refined the writing is at a technical level: sentence construction, pacing, structural finesse, and how deliberately the author shapes the text.

4. Compression & economy of meaning: How much weight the author loads into minimal space: how dense with implication a single sentence, image, or scene can be, such that nothing could be removed without loss.

5. Narrative voice & persona: How distinctive, controlled, and purposeful the narrative voice is, and how much the choice of who is telling the story and how it shapes the work's meaning and texture.

6. Phonetics, lyricism & rhythmic cadence: The musical quality of the writing: sound, rhythm, flow, poetic resonance, and how the text feels when read aloud.

7. Metaphors: How strong, original, and effective the author's metaphorical thinking is, especially in conveying abstract ideas through concrete imagery.

8. Symbolism: How extensively and effectively the author uses symbols to carry layered or hidden meanings across their works.

9. Psychological insight: How accurately and deeply the writing captures human thought processes, motivations, contradictions, and internal conflict.

10. Emotional resonance: How strongly the writing evokes emotional response in a broad readership, including empathy, sadness, awe, tension, and catharsis etc.

11. Moral & ethical complexity: How honestly and without easy resolution the work engages with moral ambiguity, ethical dilemmas, and the difficulty of judgment: behavior, guilt, complicity, and conscience rendered in human terms.

12. Philosophical density: How directly and intensely the work deals with philosophical questions and truths (existence, free will, morality, suffering, faith etc.), especially when those ideas are structurally embedded within the writing.

13. Intellectual depth: How deeply the writing engages with complex ideas (history, politics, psychology, morality, society etc.) at an analytical or conceptual level.

14. Thematic scope & complexity: How many major themes are handled and how interwoven and complex those themes are across the author's body of work.

15. Structural architecture & cohesion: How well the work is organized at a macro level: narrative structure, pacing across long works, coherence across complex plots or systems.

16. Originality & innovation: How groundbreaking the author is in terms of form, technique, or ideas compared to what existed before them.

17. Timelessness: How enduringly applicable the author's works are across eras: whether the core concerns, tensions, and human truths of the writing transcend their historical moment and continue to speak to readers across time.

18. Stylistic evolution: How much the author's style develops or transforms over time, including experimentation, reinvention, or formal innovation across their career.

19. Versatility & range: How many different types of writing the author can successfully execute (epic novels, intimate character studies, poetry, satire, experimental forms, etc.).

20. Entertainment value: How engaging and readable the work is for a general reader: narrative drive, immersion, pacing, and sustained interest.

To avoid confusion, each category is not “vibes based” but tied to a specific literary dimension, dfferent categories can favor different kinds of writing (poetry vs. novels, experimental vs. realist etc.)

Categories:

• Craft, technique & writing style: How controlled and refined the writing is at a technical level: sentence construction, pacing, structural finesse, and how deliberately the author shapes the text.
• Command and mastery of the language: How powerfully and flexibly the author uses their language as a tool, clarity, precision, expressiveness, and ability to stretch or bend language without breaking it.
• Phonetics, lyricism & rhythmic cadence: The musical quality of the writing: sound, rhythm, flow, poetic resonance, and how the text feels when read aloud.
• Intellectual depth: How deeply the writing engages with complex ideas (history, politics, psychology, morality, society, etc.) at an analytical or conceptual level.
• Philosophical density: How directly and intensely the work deals with philosophical questions and truths (existence, free will, morality, suffering, faith, etc.), especially when those ideas are structurally embedded within the writing.
• Symbolism: How extensively and effectively the author uses symbols to carry layered or hidden meanings across his/her works.
• Metaphors: How strong, original, and effective the author’s metaphorical thinking is, especially in conveying abstract ideas through concrete imagery.
• Emotional resonance: How strongly the writing evokes emotional response in a broad readership, including empathy, sadness, awe, tension, catharsis etc.
• Psychological insight: How accurately and deeply the writing captures human thought processes, motivations, contradictions, and internal conflict.
• Thematic scope & complexity: How many major themes are handled and how interwoven and complex those themes are across the author’s body of work
• Stylistic evolution: How much the author’s style develops or transforms over time, including experimentation, reinvention, or formal innovation across their career.
• Versatility & range: How many different types of writing the author can successfully execute (e.g. epic novels, intimate character studies, poetry, satire, experimental forms etc).
• Structural architecture & cohesion: How well the work is organized at a macro level: narrative structure, pacing across long works, coherence across complex plots or systems etc.
• Originality & innovation: How groundbreaking the author is in terms of form, technique, or ideas compared to what existed before them.
• Pure writing skill: Sentence level excellence independent of content: elegance, precision, control, and craftsmanship of prose or verse.
• Entertainment value: How engaging and readable the work is for a general reader: narrative drive, immersion, pacing, and sustained interest.