You, Ozymandias

[octavius_x]

This is an "I'm thankful for" post; BE WARNED!

About a week ago I had a bit of an ego bust when someone 3-4 years younger than me wrote something so complex I had to read it about 16 times. bellicosus, in her usual wisdom, told me to stow it and just be thankful someone that good existed in fandom. Wounded as I was at the time I did not really think about

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[octavius_x]

LOLLL Well I still think it's a good experience to have, esp for fandom writers because you have exposure to different writing styles and ways of critique or, you know, critique at all. There's definitely some residual distaste on my part for the thing as a whole, but I did end up meeting lots of wonderful people as part of it. Even people I argued with I got along with (in the grad class) outside of that. In retrospect I guess I hate the idea of being "told" what to do, or of people who sacrifice their works at the altars of their "masters" instead of trying to deconstruct, emulate and improve upon. Actually the worst comment I've ever received was from someone who took apart some of my sentences and diction and told me how I "should" have done it according to convention. How the word "marless" was not in the dictionary and should therefore not be used; if she'd straight up told me the whole thing didn't work for her that would have been about 500 times more useful and the thing was it wasn't a suggestion of what might work better but as blaring "HOW YOU DO THIS" sort of thing and her changes made the turns of phrase so fucking boring, no concept of deconstruction or playing with expectations or the idea that yes the author may actually have put thought into the word choice. The idea of a singular right or universal truth irks me on so many academic and personal levels, things should be composite, varied, multiperspectival, many-faceted--there's more than one way to approach a math problem after all--which is why that preachy sort of "improvement" just doesn't fly for me because you're molding something into a presupposed form rather than looking at how the format and meaning work together and whether it's successful or not. Anyway tl;dr version is more than one way to skin a cat.

Did we decided on the Yamato one? Or the izanagi one?