i have met five year olds with a better grasp on critical thinking, human nature, and the creative mind than every single anti ive ever seen
you are so wrong, anti’s are the most critical thinking people I’ve ever met…sure they have a tendency of cursing in their blogs but anti’s are what you’d call critics. Literary criticism is actually a field of study by the way.
Um, no. My exact problem with antis is that they are NOT doing any proper criticizing. They misuse buzzwords to guilt trip anyone who doesn’t follow their rhetoric. You try to talk it out with them and nope, you’re terrible/bad/wrong and ‘just trying to get away with keeping your nasty fiction’. Antis know fucking nothing about proper critiquing of the subject matter they love to fucking harass and suicide bait people over. If they were just properly analyzing literature I would have zero problem with them whatsoever but their movement (meaning of course its not every single person who might call themselves ‘anti’ bc they probs don’t know the disgusting reputation other people with that label are developing for themselves on this hellsite) is based on purity culture, bullying, telling people to ‘piss their pants’ and generally acting worse than 5 year olds because they can’t understand that not everyone sees fictional topics in the same way they do and they can’t for the life of them keep in mind that its NOT THEIR BUSINESS TO POLICE OTHER PEOPLE’S FICTIONAL DESIRES. So….sorry. If you really agree with antis after I’ve said all this then I have nothing more to say to you at all, ever.
I know most people use “criticism” to mean “saying bad things about something,” regardless of the tone or depth of the bad things. But if you’re going to use “criticism” in that loose, colloquial way, you can’t then turn around and appeal to the academic discipline of literary criticism as if it’s the same sense of the word.
The discipline of “literary criticism” is not about crapping on great works of literature. It’s not even (primarily) about pointing out how socially Problematic™ they are (though that has become a major theme in recent decades…). It’s about sensitively interpreting literary works, drawing out non-obvious meanings, making connections with the historical context or other works of literature that shed light on the significance of features of the work. Have you ever seen an anti do that? I don’t think so.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea that an anti and someone critiquing a work can be regarded as the same. It just doesn’t compute. Antis have no concept of positive criticism. They aren’t trying to improve or applaud a work, they are trying to destroy it and its creator. There is no intention to allow the work to stand, tearing it down, removing it is all they are bothered about, along with converting everyone reading their vitriol to their way of thinking. That’s not rational thought, it’s intolerant and prejudiced.
Okay so I didn’t want to respond but I’ll just say this because you know an anti is clearly the opposite of a pro, so why would they talk about positive things about a work exactly?
You’re saying literary criticism is basically saying all the pros and all the cons, and what exactly is it arguing?
When I read the post I was thinking about an essay I read written by Chinue Achebe “An Image of Africa” where he’s arguing that Joseph Conrad’s work “The Heart of Darkness” is racist and is not ahead of it’s time as an anti-colonial work because it still endorses colonial racism. I mean if that isn’t as anti as it gets I don’t know what is. And whatever positives he’d write would be based on refuting the argument that Joseph Condrad wasn’t racist, and the “Heart of Darkness” was also not racist.
Achebe goes on to say we shouldn’t be reading this book at schools as an example of post colonial literature because it’s not, it may be anti colonialism, but it’s pro colonial racism and gives a false view of Africa.
Pros and Cons (or antis) are both critiques. And you can’t tear a work down just because of what people are saying. Hey just because “Heart of Darkness” is racist, doesn’t mean I’m going to stop reading it. If anything, I’ll read just to see that example, it was written during British imperialism, so I got a bit of history and general understanding of what the colonists were thinking, as well as how dangerous their thinking were. I don’t think a critique needed to be written, but it was and it just made people aware of it. That’s not a bad thing.
I get some of the antis on tumblr are a joke and aren’t meant to be used as actually literary critiques. I mean come on most people on tumblr aren’t professors, but if they genuinely hate a literature piece, then they should vent just as much as someone who loves it should endorse it.
It seems we’re using the word ‘anti’ REALLY differently then. People can vent about anything they want! Pointing out a legit issue, objectively, in a work of fiction is not the problem The problem is when I’m talking about ‘tumblr antis’, when people say ‘anti’ on this site, the people they are talking about are trying to control/insult/tear down anyone and anything they deem too ‘problematic’ to enjoy. They aren’t critiquing. They’re blindly judging people’s character, intentions, morals, and a slew of other things based on a person’s fictional taste alone. And they are holding their opinion up as law, not listening to anyone who tries to explain to them anything contrary. Because to them, ‘you’re normalizing this bad thing in real life by liking it in your fiction.’ and ‘no! i don’t care that you don’t endorse it in real life! you should be harassed for liking this ship/story/subject matter because this means you’re *insert incredibly harmful and serious buzzword here*’
And that is bullshit, plain and simple. Dangerous bullshit that takes away all the nuance and freedom and rationality of exploring fiction both for fun and for cathartic OR coping purposes.
I cannot believe someone just compared Tumblr antis to Chinua Achebe (while getting his name wrong).
He was not “venting” about Joseph Conrad or Heart of Darkness; he was making a reasoned argument with careful attention to its literary features and historical context. “Antis” – not critics of mainstream media and its presentation of race, class, and gender, but people who attack the shipping and kink habits of fan creators – do not pay attention to the actual features of the work or the intent with which it was created. They see a tag for a ship or a kink and they assume that the author is endorsing it or even practicing it in real life (hence all the calling people “pedophiles” for writing fic about underage characters). Even if the very presence of a tag like “underage,” “abusive relationship,” “dubcon” or “rape/non-con” gives you a pretty big hint that the creator knows it’s not normal or acceptable in real life. Attention to context and the ability to figure out the stance that the work may take implicitly are features of good literary criticism. Antis don’t even fucking try.
Antis are not Chinua Achebe. Antis are the people who would call him a colonialist for writing a novel depicting colonialism. And then doxx him, probably.
ugh I wasn’t saying that people on tumblr are like Chinua Achebe and sorry I got the name wrong, I was working through memory of his name and didn’t bother to see if I spelled it right. Considering I just mistaken the a with an e, it’s not really that big of a deal, right? Please don’t try and insult my intelligence just because I misunderstood what you were going against. I thought when you said “anti” you mean people in general who dislike a general literary work or having something negative to say about it hence why I used him as an example since he had a negative thing to say about “Heart of Darkness”..
Usually when I see arguments against anti, it’s more like “why do you have something negative to say about this. Just move on.” and you know sometimes people don’t. Sometimes people are so offended by something an author writes or a direction the author takes they write about it. And that’s their stance.
But obviously tumblr blogs aren’t going to be that analytical or professional in their blogs about a work. Hell they aren’t literary professors or academics like I had said. But they could still write about their opinions and stance on a literary work even if they aren’t going to be professional and unbiased because they don’t have the training for that and tumblr gives them a platform to put their opinions on their blogs. Some of it isn’t all bullshit in my opinion but that’s because I’ve been disappointed in tv shows I thought were really going to be good but instead ended up ruining an adaption I was fond of, or the writer decided to go this route with a character and I thought it didn’t give that character justice and so on so forth. It’s nice to see people with similar opinions. And with shipping, I don’t follow it much but seeing people’s views on relationships is always interesting to me.
And by calling “him” a colonialist, you mean Joseph Conrad right? Well luckily Conrad doesn’t live in this age of technology where people could doxx him…
This has been an excellent demonstration of the principle that the parties to a debate should get clear on what they mean by their key terms before entering into it. “Anti” means something very specific in Tumblr fandom, as has now been pointed out. The “don’t like, don’t read” principle is intended to apply to ships and kinks, not mainstream media. It’s “Don’t read (or pretend to read) a fanwork just so you can leave a comment telling the author how depraved they are and/or threatening to out them as a pedophile/rape apologist.” Thoughtful critiques of certain tropes or interpretive tendencies in a fandom are fine, but that’s not what the people properly referred to as “antis” do.
I meant (somewhat hyperbolically) that antis would call Chinua Achebe a colonialist for writing Things Fall Apart, a novel about colonialism, because they seem to have trouble with the idea that you can depict something in fiction without endorsing it.
Loki is the Philosopher King 