Fiction Purists (and Why They're Annoying)

It's about time I vented about this because I've had about enough of the type. Every couple of years, it seems, my feed fills with Opinions from people who want their fiction to be Pure. I can only presume that they've been raised in a blank, white box for approximately fifteen years before they were allowed loose in the real world.

Why?

Because their takes on what makes fiction "Pure" are absolutely buck wild.

• If you write about anyone who's even the slightest bit overweight, you're glorifying obesity
• If you write about anyone described as 'thin', then you're promoting eating disorders
• If you write about anyone who's queer, then you're pushing the LGBTQ+ agenda or "making people gay" [though it's usually the former]
• If your villains are at all sympathetic, then you're promoting abuse
• If your male characters show any kind of 'effeminate' skill or talent, then you're also pushing the LGBTQ+ agenda
• The same applies if your female characters show masculine skillsets. Either that or your book is "too woke" for their fragile sensibilities
• If you write teenagers falling in love, then you're a pedophile
• The same applies if you write children at all
• And if you write about kids in bad situations, then you're promoting child abuse

Basically, you have to write your men being Real Men, your women being Real Women, your villains being Absolutely Villainous and then Justifiably Punished. And if you write children, they must be cute, enigmas, and properly parented. Or else.

And only they decide what proper parenting looks like. Heaven help you if you get it the slightest bit wrong or (gasp) introduce weird pronouns.

Not one of these people have written a single thing outside of schooling. If they've written at all. They have no idea about the investment of time that it takes to write anything good. And now we have generative AI to make things fucking worse for us.

Because now that there's generative AI, they can use that to create the book of their dreams. And may they get sincerely bored of Elias Thorne and Alara Voss being blandly heterosexual in a book with literally no suspense, drama, or conflict.

Before generative AI - or the Plagiarism Machine, as I like to call it - these folks would be an utter pain in the bum for a decent handful of months. Then - I can only guess - they touched grass for the first time or came to the stunning realisation that Grownups Write Everything.

Or they found works about teenagers written by teenagers and came to a similar, stunning conclusion.

They used to vanish after a while because of that learning journey. Not that they don't cause a lot of damage in the process. They bullied the author, John Green off of social media with their shenanigans... whilst missing the actual sex pest and serial sexual assaulter on the same social media site.

I am kind of worried that they'll continue to be their willfully ignorant selves for the rest of time. Setting their puritanical sights on author after author as they drown the world in their boring, bland, 'pure' slop from the Plagiarism Machine.

They're not going to stop me, though. I've said many times that I can't not write, so I shall continue forward in my way, and when they appear again, I shall be ready with this: