Chel. Like how Dave was joking about the walls of text earlier, this forum has a long history of everyone's instinct being to chime in to help Solve An Problem™, which regardless of good intentions frequently does not end up helping very much, but does generate a whole lot of words. :::')))
Damn. Honestly, the way you lay it out about Epstein, if Chel had actually cared about doing their homework, actually sticking to the facts about Epstein and, say, using that as a storytelling device for Pleasure Island and the Ark could have been more terrifying than what they actually came up with. And plus, I don't think Chel really cared that much about making the Ark members scary, to be perfectly honest, because there were definitely some instances where they tried to act like Ratigan's treatment of Basil was somehow easy to rationalize with "he just wuvs him so much" (which, no. I mean, I definitely played into that too and I take full responsibility, but when I look back on it, it's genuinely icky. I think I was trying to go for the idea of Basil trying to examine the utter horror of the idea that someone who claimed to love him did these horrible, horrible things to him -- killing his pet, raping him, forcing others to rape him -- and trying to embrace a healthier version of love and I think I was going for the idea of "He is not what other people did to him", but I don't think it's a stretch to think that I fucked this up) and even played some of the Ark members' stuff for laughs. I mean, it wasn't even like the Silver and Daisy thing where they were at least trying to banter amongst themselves to deal with the horror (I mean, if not for the whole Daisy-being-kidnapped-off-the-street thing, I think that it could have been pretty good. And on an off-topic note, I definitely thought it would have been better if Daisy's parents were the one to sell her and Gary. As in, better storytelling-wise, because they were already established as molesting her and Gary -- admittedly, it's slightly odd because I'm not a Pokemon person, but I don't recall the Oak parents being abusive in canon -- and yet somehow when Daisy goes missing and doesn't come back, the parents inexplicably have nothing to do with it for a change. I think it would have been more in line with what Sparkles said if someone didn't kidnap Daisy randomly but her parents were in on it; even Ash's grandfather brings up the possibility of the parents being involved even though they aren't. Hell, I remember there was one Cracked article on human trafficking where apparently the girl's mother was involved with hurting her own daughter in that way, which isn't really uncommon in cases like that in general from what I heard); they were actually kind of playing some of the Ark's stuff, like Ratigan's serial rapes, for laughs. (And I wrote for that bit too, and...I'm not proud of it. I didn't really go for the attempted "comedy" thing as much as Chel, I don't think, but I still fucked up.) So yeah, trust me, there's a lot of depth to this rabbit hole, Tez. There really is. So I don't think they can even use "We just wanted the Ark members to be scary" given that even by that logic, it's pretty much inconsistent at times as to what they were doing with the Ark members. And they did it to a degree with God's Will First as well, the whole "playing them for laughs" thing. (I'm not counting the part where Psycho humiliates them in public; Psycho actually did the right thing there and it was a form of protest against basically a hate group) And yeah, I think Chel just really wants nothing more than to come up with increasingly taboo forms of violence because they're an edgy asshole. That's pretty much what it boils down to. And in retrospect, it really drives me nuts that they stole the monologue structure from Haunted. I mean, having a Shout Out (as TV Tropes) is one thing, but this kind of feels like bordering on plagiarism. (Which actually makes it hilarious that they accused me of plagiarism. People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, Chel)
It should probably be said, I don't think most people here have an automatic objection to many of the extreme subject-matter spaces Chel is playing in. Haunted itself is shock fiction- allegedly when Palahniuk has done readings of the first story in the anthology, there have been people in the audience who passed out because it's so gross. But even people who hate the book because they think it's an exercise in cynicism and misery that relies on transgressing the lines of good taste to get people's attention will generally accept that Palahniuk knew exactly what he was doing and is very good at what he does. I've had my brain permanently rewired by a million-word visual novel series where the main character falls in love with an evil witch who repeatedly murders his entire family and tortures him to death. Chel had conniptions over Helluva Boss, which is about a relationship with unhealthy power dynamics and massive communication issues; I'm pretty sure that if they read just about any popular Cnovel they might actually explode. I own the official English release of one where the love interest keeps the preserved corpse of his homophobic teacher who pushed him down a pit to hell for no reason to cuddle with in bed like an anime body pillow. It's a comedy. It's all in the execution, though what people think is a good execution is still going to vary. IMO the reason Chel keeps handling things in ways that certified enjoyers of stuff that would curdle the skin of normies still find objectionable is that the same way they kept being completely certain that big challenges would be a nonissue even while they were panicking and asking for help over very basic low-level ones, they just... take for granted that they have the execution handled. I don't know if I've ever seen them say something like "I don't know if I can do justice to this," or "I'm not sure if I pulled off what I was aiming for." There's healthy levels of confidence, and then there's the kind where you, oh, I don't know, lose your shit at people for finding your story unintentionally funny because you provided too little detail for them to be able to tell what was supposed to be going on, or for not being able to keep the plot straight in a nonlinear novella-length story with 70 characters who all go by alternate names. And one of those two ways of operating means you're a lot less likely to notice whether your first instinct about the best way to handle something might not be a particularly good one.
Yeah, I wanna be clear that like, my main objection to the trafficking isn't that it happens in the story, or even that it happens in a way I feel is executed poorly; that I see all the time and mostly just roll my eyes at. It's the fact that it's presented within the story and apparently to the authors as having some level of realism WHILE actively promoting a harmful ideology. I don't remember what the disclaimer on the pleasure island story is now, but I do remember checking it a few months after the initial blowup to see a very passive aggressive one, and tone aside bc I'm so not one to talk, ironically the contents of that disclaimer would have satisfied what I actually wanted from chel re that chapter to begin with. (And frankly, if they just slapped a big ol "this is idfic" label on the whole thing I might think parts of it are *tasteless* but I would have much less of an objection to it as a whole. It's the presenting things as realistic and then the harassment for any criticism of that that's like, actually harmful, imo. God knows the amount of shit that's truly horrendous irl I've waxed poetic amount in fiction over the years; probably there's at least a quarter of wparg in words in various places over the internet.)
They have conniptions over Helluvaboss because, besides thinking that Stolas and Blitzo's relationship is rape (for various reasons), they love Stella, for some reason, and they think that she's horribly mistreated. For some reason. I mean, admittedly, I haven't really watched Helluvaboss, but I think they like Stella because she's a power fantasy for them: someone who can treat everybody in her path like shit and still get worshipped for it. Maybe Chel has that fantasy, the idea that instead of people calling them out on Kintsugi for being terrible, they can just do whatever they want to other people and still have people falling all over them telling them what a poor, put-upon martyr they are even when they're committing a felony. Which, I admit I don't understand. I mean, I can understand being upset and wanting sympathy, but it's like, Chel takes that to levels that I didn't think were possible. And yeah, I don't automatically think that dark stuff is awful. I've come across handlings of dark stuff that are surprisingly very well done. It's just that Chel isn't a good writer. They never have been; hell, even the better parts of WPARG have been handled by people like Dolly, for example. Like, Dolly's a terrible person, but she's not an incompetent writer, at least. Meanwhile, Chel's not a good writer. Even the friend I've mentioned before actually said that Chel's a terrible writer who changes tenses constantly, misuses words, has terrible grammar, and their biases are on display in the worst ways possible. And they still have this overinflated opinion of their own talent. Which I guess ties into the execution thing. Hell, maybe the overinflated opinion of their own talent thing ties into why darkfic enjoyers are turned off their content nonetheless. And I don't know why they're so arrogant and so resistant to criticism. I really don't know what's wrong with Chel.
