u/Genoscythe_

Yes, I am riding on the coattails of the GOAT post of this subreddit, but there is one aspect of it that both u/OptimisticLucio Sensei missed, and that generally posters tend to miss whenever this comes up:

YOU DON'T ACTUALLY HAVE TO START BY JUMPING HEAD-FIRST INTO ARCHAIC LITERARY FICITON!

Every time the idea of nerds broadening their horizons beyond Digital Circus, Frieren, and JJK comes up, there is someone acting like the only possible alternative to that, is to immediately start deciphering the dated vocabulary of Moby Dick and Count of Monte Cristo. And yeah, sure, ideally we should probably be able get into those too, but...

Guys! There are SO MANY SF/F novels out there! Even contemporarily, so many are getting released! And so many of those are perfectly tailored for someone starting to complain about the usual isekai trash and Hollywood action blockbusters being too shallow and start craving to engage with something a bit more complex! A lot of them are also ranging from having fairly plain, YA-compatible journalistic prose that you don't need a whole new skill to cut through, all the way to others offering a pretty deep literary experience just with a spoonful of dragons and fireballs to make the medicine go down.

I made a rant a few months ago about how frustrating it is whenever someone makes sweeping claims about "the fantasy genre", and then they implicitly just mean games and anime, forgetting to include both the objectively most mainstream forms of it (GoT, romantasy), but also the forms of high fantasy literature that are most respected in the fandom.

There is a whole world out there, of stories that don't take place in a dungeon near a circle-town, but put effort into actual worldbuilding as well as storylines about characters organically existing in the world!

I don't want to impose with any personal suggestions, but seriously, if you are too confused with were to start, there are plenty of booktubers with all-time and yearly fantasy novel top lists with their own pitches that you can peek into, r/suggestmeabook is always there, and if you want to jump specifically into where the medium is right now, I would also recommend browsing into the past few years of Hugo and Nebula award winners for contemporary recommendations.

And this is doubly true for Sci-fi, that has pretty much always been more of a literary genre, with hard sci-fi barely existing on the screen, and soft sci-fi mostly being space operas and fantasy with a tech aesthetic.

Don't READ A BOOK just because you need to be cultured and elevated, READ A BOOK because it is a whole medium that is already doing most of the stuff that you already care about, but often better.

I am coming to the conclusion that over 99% of audiences would be better off not even bothering with rating stories by quality, or critically reviewing them at all. And it is not because their opinions are that bad, but for their own sake. Even if they are making correct points, it is just an unhealthy state of mind to keep approaching stories with.

First of all things, art is a communication between a creator and an audience, and if you think about it, it is kind of weird to treat grading the quality of the message that someone just tried to get across to you, as the primary way of engaging with it.

Just imagine having a big heartfelt discussion with a loved one, and afterwards mentally grading it on how successfully they stayed on topic, summarized their thoughts, how eloquent they were, and whether they repeated themselves too much: It is so forced and inhuman!

Even if there are objectively better and worse ways to exchange ideas, is scrutinizing someone else's skill at it, really something that should be anywhere near the front of your mind by default?

To be fair, other than being a personal communication, pop art is often also a commercial product sold for money, so customer awareness to give people a heads-up what they should expect is also a concern. That's what professional reviewers are already doing, but are YOU doing that? Is that what the average social media post, or forum debate, is really doing? Giving people a budgetary advice about the pros and cons of watching Hazbin Hotel?

Then there is the idea of giving constructive feedback directly to the author, but again, how often are we actually doing that? Is Kanehito Yamada going through your Frieren demon morality criticisms to educate herself? Is Disney going to look at the last decade of Star Wars discourse and summarise any productive lesson from it?

The third main reason to review art would be "just for the fun of it", to flex our media literacy brain muscles and overthink something, and that's the one I can't argue with if someone is actually getting pleasure out of. But then again, ARE YOU actually having fun with it? Or is it more of a social media induced compulsion at this point? It feels just like when everyone who reads a news report about a traffic accident, and feels the urge to go to the comments and play judge and jury over which victim was and wasn't in the wrong and did or didn't deserve to die, instead of just expressing sympathies for all involved. Do people actually make the conscious choice that this is their best way to unwind, or is it just an addiction?

Lately I have been noticing that whenever I am reading an obscure novel with no presence on any of my usual online communities, I feel actively relieved that I get to take it in on its own terms, without deciding whether will go in the Good pile or in the Bad pile.

Did I even enjoy this last one? Yeah I guess, although parts of it were a bit of a struggle: But was it a struggle in a good way that I was challenging myself with a unique perspective, or a struggle in the sense that it was "objectively flawed"? I don't know, and honestly I am happy that I don't have to spend a single brain cell on coming up with an answer to that question.

And by the way I don't mean that in the sense of turning my brain off, in a slack-jawed consumption of whatever happens to be in front of me, more like I get to put my brain into work interpreting the actual story while I am reading it, instead of fortifying myself for the Discourse on whether House of the Dragon season 3 is truly better than Season 2, or whether the Digital Circus ending had the Correct pacing and redemption arcs, or to decide what was the second best anime of the season.

Yes, critical reviewing is an intellectual skill, but also it is a very small slice of actually engaging with art. Being able to correctly put a finger on WHY a story made you feel the way it did is a whole professional skill, and I don't think we are actually doing it any favors by putting it into the front and center of all art consumption.

Idk, it just feels like way fewer people are doing the latter as a conscious lifestyle choice out of enjoyment, than as a compulsion encouraged by the way the internet and modern fandom culture works, who would benefit from giving a go to sometimes just watching a show, then when it's over, just say "well, all right then!" and turn it off, and then not have any hot take about it, or even put into any eloquent words how much fun you did or didn't have with it.

Every single rant on this subreddit that starts out with a complaint about a cliché being overused, or a stereotypical slop storyline being too common, I repeat EVERY SINGLE ONE of them, no exceptions, could be solved by not getting stuck in a niche hyperfixation on the very specific type of stories where that cliché shows up.

There is of course the r/CharacterRant classic of boldly declaring how tired the poster is of every single protagonist across all storytelling being such and such, and then looking inside, all the examples are shonen battle series.

But even when the poster at least did have the self-awareness to say in advance that they are only going to rant about harem anime, or isekai, or superhero comic books, or whatever, the most obvious answer to most of them is that there is an entire world out there that does have the same broad emotional appeal as the stuff that you like, that isn't stuck in the intent to be a copy of a copy by definition of its subgenre.

"Genre" itself as it is used nerd spaces with a habit for over-categorization, has come to mean not just broad emotional directions (tragedy, comedy, romance, horror), but labels for small clusters of same-y stories.

So the rant just ends up being a huge tautology of "I don't get why all stories within [name of the genre] always keep doing this and that", where [name of the genre] only ever got popularized as a genre name in the first place is because it is a snappy way to refer to a handful of stories following the exact same formula.

This is true even to the point that if there would be a sub-trend within the genre, it would count as its own genre label, as seen with for example "villainess isekai" stories being seen as doing their own thing, and therefore excluded from the complaints against all the other dungeon/party/cheat skill isekai.

The direct inspiration for this post was the recent rant about Superman clone stories being too derivative of Superman, with the writer urging authors to finally break free and write something more original instead (within the pool of Superman clone stories).

I'll also refer back to the subreddit's GOAT post READ A BOOK.

There are tens of thousands of new stories published each year. I can guarantee you most of them are not doing that one cliché that you are getting tired of. They might be doing another cliché if you get stuck with another niche hyperfixation within literature genres, but you always have an enormous option to broaden your horizons.