I am so happy that Homestuck is making the present tense and second person more of a thing. THE TYRANNY OF THIRD PERSON PAST HAS REIGNED FOR TOO LONG AND FIRST PERSON PAST OR PRESENT TOO. it is time to tear down the building and rebuild it it is time to do what joyce did even if only slightly destroy the concept of the novel and reinvent it
wait. i'm confused. why should we destroy the concept of the novel? it's a good framework for telling stories. not the only one, but i don't see why we should destroy it? or am i horribly misreading a tongue in cheek comment? help a poor autistic plz.
Its a joke. One with some truth. Conventions exist to be toyed with and broken and rebuilt constantly, alongside the birth of new ones. Finnegans Wake and Ulysses are in some ways the violent murder of the novel and their rebirth.
And now a short explanation of how it was killed and reborn because I am bored. So Ulysses is the better known and more highly regarded of Joyce's two really weird books. And even then many hate Ulysses. Ulysses was an effort to capture the feeling of how waking thought is. It was also an effort to capture the essence of Dublin during Joyce's lifetime. Stylistically the book is odd. Instead of standard indents he precedes every paragraph with a dash and has done so since A Portrait of the Author as a Young Man. He also uses no quotation marks, meaning that narration and dialogue flow together. At times it is very hard to tell what is narration and what is dialogue. To make matters worse he also frequently goes on stream of consciousness ramblings. So you are attempting always to figure out if you are reading the narration, dialogue, or thoughts. Also like halfway through the book becomes a play and then we go back to being a novel because James Joyce. Finnegan's Wake took this concept like ten steps further. So much so that even people who really love Ulysses may hate Finnegan's Wake. Now Ulysses tried to model and capture waking thought, the thoughts of the day. Finnegan's Wake is an exercise in capturing night thoughts: dreams. The plot of Finnegan's Wake is heavily disjointed. There are several things we can all plot threads and we have several theories on what the plot is, but what the intended plot, if any, is we do not know. And can't know because Joyce is dead. This is confounded by the cast. Sometimes characters will just go missing without a word. Other times the names of the characters might just change for no reason. This is of course assuming you hold to the theory that these characters are the same ones under different names. As with Ulysses the prose is a lot of stream of consciousness rambling. However words often run into each other, anagrams are used in place of the actual words, entirely new portmanteaus are created constantly, and sometimes words are just made up because they sound evocative. This goes hand in hand with Joyce's trademark frustrating use of untranslated Greek, Latin, and French. Sometimes sentences or words just repeat. At some point there are pages that are just the word look repeated several times in upper and lower case. There is also no ending to Finnegan's Wake. The last sentence abruptly ends in the middle of it leading on back into the first sentence of the book. Meaning you can never, ever finish reading it. It is a highly acquired taste. Now while neither work permanently murdered the novel or its conventions it did do something significant. It changed the game. It left a lasting impression in the minds of those who studied it and read it. Some left entirely frustrated and just forgot about it. Others though? Others took his lack of plot (or traditional plot depending on your theory), his fondness for messing with form, and his love of making new words to heart though. To say nothing of the effect that the stream of consciousness style that he and several other authors of the time used. We have to thank James Joyce for the existence of authors like Caitlín Kiernan. Kiernan writes what are traditional novels, yes, but the spirit of Joyce's two primary novels inspire and inform a lot of what she does. There's been several other things and authors in existence and history that have done similar shit. Art is constantly dying and being reborn and that's just lovely. Even when I don't care for the stylistic changes made. HEMMINGWAY.
Thanks for the clarification! We are definitely in agreement that breaking or bending convention is where interesting storytelling happens. I won't say good or bad, because that is both a matter of personal preference and will vary wildly by work. But it's certainly interesting, and even if one attempt at pushing artistic boundaries falls flat, it was still worth it to push those boundaries. ...perhaps we should get back to fanfic gripes now?
Can we also have a novel analysis thread? Because that makes me want to look into Ulysses (although I think Finnegan's Wake might be too advanced for my tastes) and also I wouldn't mind having a place to talk about House of Leaves once I pick that back up.
Made it open to the analysis of other forms of media too because it will probably be a quiet thread anyway.
Authors who are either too embarrassed to let someone edit/beta their smut or are too busy shoving their hands down their pants to edit it themselves. Sometimes it's adorable. Most of the time, though...
(And then there's a fanfic about Papyrus being such a smut writer, which is hilarious and tragic in some of the best ways) Awful tag:description balance ratios. AO3 fics where the tags take up the whole screen and there's a single sentence description of the story, fics where the description is just a quote from the fic that doesn't necessarily tell what it's about...
Spoiler: nsfw. absurd terminology and inaccuracies abound but it's nsfw. SAUCY FICTION!! and EVEN SAUCIER FICTION!!. The former is very silly, the second is mostly silly.
I'm remembering a Homestuck fic with a similar premise, from which the line which stuck in my head was "Piece of ass before piece of pizza, except when it's already occurred."
I have always thought not, just because so much of sexual arousal is in your head when you're sapient. I do however think ace people in a species that has an estrous cycle would badly want to suppress the fuck out of that.
I picked a ferret as my fursona at age eight, before I was familiar with either the furry community, sex, or ferret biology; specifically, the bit about how female ferrets have an inbuilt fuck-or-die system. It can be controlled with hormone injections, and I think a sapient species that worked that way would have invented said injection much sooner than humans did.
Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness, which I think someone may have mentioned already in this discussion, features a human-adjacent people who go into heat every so often but don't seem to do much sex outside of heat, and who are perpetually bewildered by the regular-human Genly, who they consider to be always in heat; he is sometimes viewed as "perverted" or "deviant" due to this. (This is compounded by the fact that they don't have gender (biological or otherwise) unless they're in heat, and so Genly being always-male is doubly strange to them.)
