Post by sturgeon on Oct 26, 2022 15:41:41 GMT
Two buddies party Seth Rogen-style in Vietnam.
Sometimes the doctrines taught in Creative Writing pedagogy feel stifling, like "show don't tell" and "abolish the adverbs". But then I read a cap like this and remember why they're so important. Is there such a word as adverb-arrhoea? I'm confident that this cap would be improved by cutting every single adverb.
Improved, yes, but from a low bar. Let me level with you, I strongly disliked this cap. It had - and I quote from the cap itself - "the feel of poorly scripted reality tv." But more sinister than that, it had the feel of dog whistle politics, of cultural imperialism, and all the isms that us leftie liberal snowflakes get so oversensitive about. Freddy had the gall to lecture the protagonist about his entrenched cultural biases, despite his most profound insight about the culture being "Ooh, look how weird Vietnam is." I kept holding out for a sign that this cap was being self-aware, ironic, clever - but its final scene only served to convince me that this was a poorly conceived male white-supremacist fantasy.
If the cap was designed to make me feel like it condemned the behaviour and attitude of its characters - or that the protagonist's half-hearted resistance was a sign of hope for moral redemption - it failed.
An emphatic no.
Sometimes the doctrines taught in Creative Writing pedagogy feel stifling, like "show don't tell" and "abolish the adverbs". But then I read a cap like this and remember why they're so important. Is there such a word as adverb-arrhoea? I'm confident that this cap would be improved by cutting every single adverb.
Improved, yes, but from a low bar. Let me level with you, I strongly disliked this cap. It had - and I quote from the cap itself - "the feel of poorly scripted reality tv." But more sinister than that, it had the feel of dog whistle politics, of cultural imperialism, and all the isms that us leftie liberal snowflakes get so oversensitive about. Freddy had the gall to lecture the protagonist about his entrenched cultural biases, despite his most profound insight about the culture being "Ooh, look how weird Vietnam is." I kept holding out for a sign that this cap was being self-aware, ironic, clever - but its final scene only served to convince me that this was a poorly conceived male white-supremacist fantasy.
If the cap was designed to make me feel like it condemned the behaviour and attitude of its characters - or that the protagonist's half-hearted resistance was a sign of hope for moral redemption - it failed.
An emphatic no.
