So Roosh Valizadeh’s websites — Return of Kings, the Roosh V Forum, and his own blog — have been hit with DDOS attacks this week.
Roosh isn’t sure who’s to blame, but he has a few ideas. In a note on the DDOS attacks he posted to his site, he wrote:
I have so many enemies that it could have been organized by Canadian SJW’s, the American homosexual lobby, the Israeli Defense Force, or the nation of Denmark.
Denmark, huh? I always thought there was something sneaky about that country.
But I can’t imagine that many Danes are actually pissed at Roosh, really. After all, his Don’t Bang Denmark book explicitly suggested that his fans NOT visit the country. And generally speaking, the fewer Roosh fans in your country, the better.
I don’t think it’s Denmark, or any of the other suspects on Roosh’s little list.
There’s a much more obvious possibility: Toilet paper manufacturers.
Forgive me if this is just being ignorant, but why can’t Gandolf be thought of as a wizard in the earlier work and revealed to be much more in a later work? Don’t see why it has to be either/or here. Why can’t it be both?
@Berdache
This has nothing to do with story structure but rather stepping back and viewing the work as a whole. You know, meta stuff. It’s more like studying history rather than reading a story.
He’s definitely thought of as a wizard throughout the main books from the character’s perspective (except maybe Treebeard who I think knew he’d return), but he wasn’t a wizard but something else entirely the entire time according to the Silmarillion, I’m guessing. Once you, the reader, know he’s NOT a wizard, it’s kinda hard to go back and reread and think of him as that.
See, considering canon while reading is sort of meta work. It’s, like, in the Matrix when it’s established that Neo and such can only have these cool mystical powers because he’s in a computer program, right? But then later on he also has these powers outside of the computer program? That goes against established canon, it goes against the laws that the story set down before where the ONLY reason Neo has these powers is because he can manipulate the computer program. That shouldn’t work when you’re out of the Matrix.
Likewise to Gandalf, Neo is The One. He always was The One, even when people were in doubt. Gandalf was always a spirit thingy (or he turned into one) even if it was revealed in a later book. Ya dig?
Sweeeet.
Some stories leave the ending a mystery. The reader gets to decide whether the couple reunite or he comes back from war or she realizes her dream of becoming a doctor.
So why shouldn’t the reader get to decide everything? If the couple in a story don’t reunite and you want them to, that’s your version of the story.
And you might want to write that story down for others to read and interpret however they wish.
Or it might stay your own private story.
PS: This works for real life too. A woman who was bullied in high school can be the homecoming queen or win the science prize or play the lead in the school play in her imaginative memory.
@Jackie:
The more I think about it, the more I conclude that it’s a difference of approach to literature that forms our different views.
To you (and please correct me if I’m wrong) a world exists and a text is set in that world. Facts about that world exist which may be in the text or may be outside of it (in the metatext, if you will) but the world is primary. The characters may crop up in other texts and because they exist independently, truths about them carry across from one work to another.
To me, a text exists and the world exists within the text. Facts about the world can be gleaned from the text but nothing outside of the text can influence what’s inside it (that is, there is no metatext) because the text is primary. Characters may crop up in other works but because the character serves the needs of the story, truths about them cannot carry across.
Your view is vastly more useful than mine for analysing ongoing, living works which may be added to later by the creator or by other creators. This is probably because your view comes from the celebration and enjoyment of existing works as they’re coming out.
My view is, I believe, more useful than yours for analysing completed works which are no longer being built on by the creator. This is probably because my view comes from the analysis of works within their cultural context.
This is probably also because lit-fic doesn’t usually have sequels, while genre fiction consists mostly of long series of books with shared worlds and continuities. As such it’s easy to view my sort of works as finished, while much harder to do the same with yours.
Would you say that’s fair?
This is fascinating. I’m really enjoying this. It feels like a cross cultural exchange.
@EJ
Yeah, that sounds about right.
Although I don’t really like the term “living work”. I’ve read (and reread) series that are completed and still analyzed them the same way, I mean, you just did what I do with Gandalf. Nothing in any of the books mentions that he’s a spirit thing unless you look to the Silmarillion, which is meta in relation to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. The Silmarillion is no different than looking up information about Harry Potter on Pottermore.
I also think it’s because we analyze things in different ways. I usually go for more allegorical works, stuff that has actual real-world parallels. For instance, Harry Potter: racism, classism, Nazism – disgust of muggleborns and squibs, Malfoys versus Weasleys, Death Eaters.
You don’t really have that in Lord of the Rings. You don’t find allegorical stuff. It’s straight up non-allegorical. Anything you find is all up for interpretation.
You can’t really interrupt a group of individuals who want to take over the government and enact eugenics and shit as a metaphor for the struggling working class. Those shits are Nazis and Klan members. Ain’t no tip-toeing around that.
A group of trees in a meeting they call a “moot” which can take decades to complete? That can be anything. Parliament, bureaucracies, old people talking politics – or it can be just a group of trees, which are practically immortal, not having the same scale of time as the rest of us. It’s likely the later, considering it’s Tolkien, but media isn’t made in a vacuum and all that jazz.
I’m also all for world-building which is something you can’t do in just one book so, naturally, anything I read will likely have supplementary materials like maps and histories that likely aren’t part of the main body of work but still are considered canon. Since you seem to not read series, you don’t get world building. You don’t have to remember another world’s rules to understand something, you just apply our own and maybe the few they establish, like dragons and magic existing and shit. Often authors do have an internal consistency when writing one-shot, non-interconnecting works although it’s unneeded. For series, you need to keep the rules consistence or else you can break your own canon and continuity.
I’m also not an academic so I’m not doing this…”professionally” or whatever. Anything I analyze or whatever is for my own pleasure and maybe the pleasure of others if I want to publish what I figure out. I’ve never been to college for this shit so those essays about the Chantry in Dragon Age I read and all the theological lingo I had to look up was for my own shits and giggles. And the essays I’m planning on analyzing dwarven culture in the DA universe, whenever I get around to that? Shits and giggles. The theory I wrote about spirits and demons being sentient magic that everyone is possessed by? Shit and giggles.
I mean, yeah, people in academia get paid for this shit, but I do it for the shits and giggles.
I hope I’m not repeating stuff you’ve already said here. It’s 3:30am right now and I should get to bed.
@Jackie (for when you wake up):
You raise some very interesting points. I’m not a professional academic either, although I read serious literary criticism in order to up my game. Shits & giggles is an excellent reason to do anything like this, and I fully endorse it.
I see where you’re coming from when you distinguish between allegorical and interpretative works. However, I think you give too little credit to the sorts of works you enjoy. To say that Harry Potter’s Death Eaters are an open-and-shut allegory for the Nazis or KKK is to say that the Harry Potter books cannot be as understood by people who live in places and times where those groups are unfamiliar. For example, a Korean young adult reader might not know who the KKK were, but will understand the Juche racial-supremacy ideology and so can adapt the text to their own culture. Equally, a reader living three centuries from now may know who the Nazis were from history books, but will be more concerned with the giant robotic space wasps which are invading their civilisation. As such, the more rigidly you tie your work to a specific allegorical meaning, the more you prevent other readers from appreciating it on a personal level.
On the other hand, I feel that the Death Eaters are more open for interpretation as a reactionary splinter of a rigid ruling culture which is terrified of losing power to a more democratic groundswell. This is something that every person understands, because this is part of every culture. I might read Harry Potter and think, “Aha, this is a metaphor for #GG, with Malfoy representing the ‘gamer culture’ and Weasley representing the influx of casuals.” Someone in China might read it and see it as a metaphor for the crumbling Communist party cliques and their desperation to hold onto power. One can probably make atheist interpretations, communist interpretations and so on. The people three hundred years in the future will make interpretations of it in their own cultural milieu.
If we chain the text to Joanna Rowling’s interpretation of it, then when she’s dead and we’re all dead and the specific issues she thinks it’s about have been forgotten, then the text is meaningless. If, on the other hand, we make the text open to interpretation, then it belongs to everyone and can never die.
That said, it’s not for me to tell you what to enjoy and what not to enjoy. If you like works with a narrow applicability then your tastes are your own.
On the subject of series: I do enjoy some series, but tend to see them as a single joint work rather than several individual ones. For example, Lord of the Rings is one work despite being in three volumes. Battlestar Galactica is one work despite being in three and a half seasons (the latter half of the last season never happened.)
Thinking about it, there’s no reason not to combine the metatext in with the text when doing this: one can see Pottermore and the whole Harry Potter series, together, as a single text which can then be analysed. The moment Rowling agrees to leave it along and stop tinkering with it, that is.
On the subject of worldbuilding: Dune did some amazing worldbuilding in a single volume. So did The Years of Rice and Salt. So did Consider Phlebas. So did The Goblin Emperor. So did The Hunger Games (the first book, which stands alone as a novel very well.)
Uh, so #GGers are bragging with how much money their family has, proud of their ignorance of muggle culture, and obsessed their pureblood status and making sure their children don’t marry muggles and mudbloods?
Wait, you know, forget that. They are.
And, yeah, someone with a different look at history or different culture would likely interpret it differently. That was my Western bias talking.
Exactly, that’s exactly what I do.
I’m sorry but I never finished Dune. I don’t even think I got that far in. All it was was political squabbles and war rhetoric. If I wanted that, I’d pick up…a Tom Clancy book, I guess?
Although The Goblin Emperor sounds interesting. I like goblins. o3o
As a Swedish-American, I must say that those Danes are treacherous little bastards.