Pageburn

hehe 3

3. What’s something you read recently and wanted to argue with (either with the book or the author or the fans)?

this is a hard one but recently i’ve really been thinking about the representation of “the east” in asoiaf by grrm and how it’s so deeply rooted in orientalism. i’ve kind of drafted an entire essay on it because i keep thinking of crazy instances of very harmful stereotypes he shows. it makes me crazy like i need to yell at someone about it 😭

i’m a bookseller so let’s analyze the books that asoiaf characters would probably be into in my expert opinion

sansa: easy answer, mass-market bodice rippers. true answer, horror. she is a vc andrews girly but she hates stephen king. also she probably read a bunch of colleen hoover at a very formative age and it fucked up her idea of healthy relationships.

jon: manga. i do not know jack or shit about manga but i do know he’d probably like that berserk one or whatever the fuck it’s called. he’s emo. nobody understands him. you get it. so on and so forth.

theon: he doesn’t read but he does go back into the kids department and stick gum in the pages of the i survived books. sometimes if he’s feeling really bold he’ll put his number in between the pages of novels that he thinks are for smart people. his concept of high lit is not very developed so it’s sort of a toss-up as to the books he does this to. they’ve found his number in the brothers karamazov and a taylor jenkins reid novel on the same day.

dany: ya dystopia. you KNOW she would have been so into the maze runner and divergent. somebody let this child have a hunger games phase dear lord.

arya: her idol growing up was junie b jones. she was obsessed with the boxcar children and when she was 7 she tried to run away but to her extreme dismay she couldn’t find a boxcar so she settled for an underpass frequented by various delinquents, vagabonds, etc. they unionized to get her back home and cat didn’t let her outside for a year. immediately after she was ungrounded she ran away again to murder pigeons en masse because she had just read wringer by jerry spinelli and took away the wrong message. now she just reads fencing instructional books. also a warrior cats kid.

my snake ate today. once again i am faced with the reminder that he is not a harmless shoestring and is in fact a danger noodle

i think eventually we're all just gonna have to come to terms with the fact that it's impossible to tell a story with any degree of subtlety or nuance without risking a portion of the audience taking the "wrong message", and that's ok. art isn't meant to be strictly a teaching tool, and if you're goal is just to convince people or critique an idea, just write an essay or a polemic

i got nearly 4k words down today for my wip??:!!:!:!;