because guns and mechs and boobs are cool and righteous; because a norm about the use of indirect vs direct description is both a key into a certain kind of classed, postured writing and also a decision about what is important between subtext v text. immediacy is sometimes vital, you can talk directly to experience without anxieties and second guessing it, the book also does have implication and suggestion and deep interiority (that routinely people seem to miss lmao) but not for the things it deems it important to be direct about. ujd is demanding on a reader but on the problem of 'how do you objectively relate to life transformed' rather than 'how do you subjectively relate to a partially known Other'. it just doesn't care about the same thing! both are interesting questions but i like it sticking to the first and using 'show dont tell' as a rule when you're so clear about what you do care about is just a bit basic

its hilarious actually. hating women is a time honoured tradition that goes hand in hand with loving them. we're just doing the oldest dance in the book.

i think good genre writing comes from basically every source possible because hot women with guns are cool and will sell, and the form determination doesn't really happen by funding source but cultural logic that it must respond to and incorporate. in the gacha that is endless content, recombinable flexibility and a woman-slot machine, in webnovels that is the serial format and the capacity of an fickle and time poor audience, in anime that is the flexible world with big bold refined characters and a deeply charismatic way of representing both character and violence enabled by genre convention. they are pretty much anathema, but just share a capacity for long extended narratives through which big action can happen slowly. the more interesting question is which forms and cultural logic disallow girls having big emotions and doing violence, and they are any in which history is not allowed to move. serial tv (esp professional procedurals) and movie franchises seem like the obvious target. there is no way to make the war epic that actually matters in those formats, not now. it just isn't intelligible. similarly the aaa video game needs to hold its narrative close to its chest and meticulously crafted 3d environment far too closely, and it needs to be far too generous to the player to actually employ the kind of scale and heft you'd need to the machinery going on Elsewhere all the time. there is no call of duty game which is a war epic. it's just not possible. every big shiny game i can remember that isn't a gacha or at least jrpg where you try and change the world, where you Do History, is deeply compromised by its love of the player's point of view. they aren't historical narratives in any meaningful sense, they can't replicate the historical novel at least. games where you can feel the weight of other agents are rare in design and form are rare and cool, even more so when that is the weight of history: im thinking about heaven's vault, pentiment. some do it with lots of historically sensitive writing, some with specific mechanics, some just by making a formally conventional game with the lesson of historical materialism weighing on the back of their minds. i know there are others with their own way of doing it. the thing to counterpose it too is the rival strategy of making narrative into a museum. every game about an abandoned home or space station freezes history so we're not forced to reckon with too much of it at once, it can still be on side, but it is formally constrained in its ability to show history acting versus imply its effects, potentials or dissolution in the frozen moment of the now. i havent played umurangi generation but given its a photography game im assuming it lines up here too. compare to the zone of interest maybe: in this moment we would struggle to represent the historical activity of genocide itself so we have to make our walking simulator version of a film to think it.

also to be clear hot women with cool weapons are really cool and fuckin rule.

ok yeah sure. it is very consciously tell instead of show because readers of serial fiction are dumb and impatient, and madiha's talked about her feelings re: the first two chapters to that effect before. i dont think im gonna convince you or anything, a thing can simply be not for you! its a strange case though, where it ultimately ends up, cuz i don't think it loses this instinct to tell about characters rather than stylise text to hide substance in the vibe. if there is anything that threads the line between 'you are absolutely looking at anime women' and a text with the confidence to know what it is not saying and why, ujd is the best i have to offer. style matters tho, dont let anyone tell you style is not crucially important. madiha tells quite a lot because there are, in the world of unjust depths, stakes to the style of mystification. i kinda read it as a speculative rebuke to the bourgeois novel: superficially styled in anime glamour, armour plated heart of communist consciousness. sometimes telling isn't to be second guessed. war communism as genre is not the epoch of formal experimentation

so many. spoilers i guess. in the pod i keep talking about the thing that strikes me reading it as a not-theosophy/Jung knower but a psychoanalysis reader, which is that the aether seems to be a means for materialising the medium of psychic exchange that more or less already existed, but making it visible and digestible and metabolisable consciously rather than unconciously. it is also the bridge between the affect-work and ideology-work and the material force of objects and things and people acting. and it works entirely well in this entirely horizontal ontology up until you remember that any theory of the interpersonal or psychic or material is not a flat array of nodes and relations but a densely swirling dynamic system of flows and resistances and axes of domination and subversion. so of course there are places of immense concentration and dissolution, of course there are well-springs with deep deep structures in the world itself. no one is going to pretend the oedipus complex is not a historical object, but it lies so much deeper than the stuff that trades back and forth between individuals. similarly no one is going to pretend that the nightmare weighing upon the thoughts of the living is a purely capitalist object, and the grieving and caring trees are a testament to a struggle to live and make sense of life that extends in history so so far back, but taken through this modality of life: a necklace without a provenance, a dream to be dismissed, a taste caught in a prey's flesh. we negotiate our relationships to these attractors of death and sex and life in very very different ways, but they will be there under the surface when we face their blinding light head on. sometimes we must, and most of the time they are far too brilliant and terrible to confront. so we live our lives with the colours snaking into our thoughts if we lose focus and the trees and the monsters safely tucked in our dreams.

complex. i use to act like my sense of self has been crafted in allegiance with my supposed social deficits, so i got attached to my loneliness. letting go of that to actually be close to the people i love means abandoning a way i held myself together, which is painful but deeply necessary. i still struggle to be sympathetic to the version of me ive been at my loneliest and most antisocial cuz that person sucked, but i do not this that person sucked cuz of some kind of deficit that was fixed. i found a more or less coherent way of dealing the social world in front of me which left me feeling bad but being functional, which worked until it didn't, and served me usefully until it didn't. i don't want to be so attached to that way of surviving any more.