receiving a disturbing message from the stricken wreck of SF fandom. the signal is mostly nonsense but i heard them say ada palmer was “squeecore” what did she/they mean by this?
…
on closer inspection of the signals, it seems they are not calling ada palmer “squeecore” but don’t give a comprehensive shitlist because the game is complaining about cliquishness while at the same time nudging and winking and assuming you already know what they’re talking about when they vaguely insult people and works with this new slur (with one or two named parties)
regardless one person offers this:
Central characters can feel weirdly young, like they always think and act and feel as though they’re in their late teens or early 20s. They’re kind of inexperienced, naive, still very full of wonder.
it tends to be very uplifting and upbeat.
It is didactic.
It has a young adult fiction tone to it, even when it’s supposed to be for adults.
It has notable influence from films and a lot of influence from mainstream commercial narratives…
One such influence being three-act structure screenplays and the ‘save the cat’ style narrative.
Central characters can feel like they are intended to be reader-inserts like video-game RPG protagonist.
if this is indeed the current state of the fandom then i suppose i see what palmer is doing and it is somewhat like hideaki anno.
the above bullet points describe Terra Ignota pretty well, as well as this recurring thing I see in these posts about “it’s utopia!”. the people in these posts mention Terra Ignota in a slightly confused way, offering it as a counterexample or at least a very noncentral example of “squeecore”
palmer keeps up the ‘it’s utopia!’ attitude of the shounen protagonists even in that fucked up afterword where she assumes you are “still freshly in the glow of the emotions of the climax”. i note now she doesn’t say what valence these emotions she expects you to have been manipulated into having have, and it’s just an implication from “fresh glow” that they are positive and “squee” ones. she *does* call them the “changing-for-the-better Hives” so still idk
but the reading is that Terra Ignota is like evangelion in that Evangelion was consciously meant to be a warning to 90s Japanese otaku and a way to expose them to some unpleasant facts — how autism is fucking you up, your distant father was abusing you, you treat your mother like a giant robot that you live in, how working for the civil service seems like a good job but is full of demons, you want to fuck your sister and here is why that’s bad etc.
Terra Ignota similarly has warnings to squeecore otaku about how e.g. all governments (from the World Government to your local Science Fiction Association) are run by compromised paedophiles, that religion and sex are still powering you, if you are Forever Seventeen this is because the paedophiles above prefer you that way because you make a better tool, the people promising you magical technology are doing it mostly to fight battles against each other, ineffable child oracles presented to you by authority are probably just abused autistic children etc etc
valuable lessons, and i see why the intended squeeing targets would feel strange and uncertain just as Eva produced many similarly strange and confused otaku
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incidentally, whereas the answer to “what the fuck is wrong with you?” for Anno is “clinical depression”, the answer for Palmer is some sort of complex, Nietzschian, enteric disorder
…
also when someone is basically the Strauss Professor of Censorship at Medici University and has done a bunch of articles about her academic work about censorship in the Renaissance and now… shouldn’t you be actively looking for esoteric readings?
