tfw a book suddenly & completely turns you off, or: manic pixies, femmes fatales & dimensionality

Last summer some time I read Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead, the first book in the ( Craft Sequence. )

(I'd heard of it vaguely before but without running into a more specific recommendation or review.) I enjoyed the world-building, plus I LOVED the female protagonist & multiple central female characters. I couldn't put it down and started the sequel immediately after, filled with bonhomie and confident in Gladstone's female characters and views on gender - or at least confident that this aspect of his worldview wasn't going to skeeve me out the way male writers all too often do.

The second book, Two Serpents Rise, takes place in a different part of the same world, with a new cast of characters. Unlike 3PD, it has a single male protagonist - a disappointment, but the cast of characters is still well balanced. But the next day, I hit the 60% point or something like that in the book, and something I couldn't quite put my finger on in a pivotal chapter put me off so decidedly that I put the book down and didn't finish it for nearly half a year.

Now that I have, I think in retrospect that what happened was this (in abstractish, unspoilery terms): when the mysterious, cool woman who becomes the protagonist's love interest was introduced, she tripped some Manic Pixie Dream Girl (or rather, Manic Badass Dream Girl) alarms for me. She isn't written to a formula, though, and it was clear that there was more going on than mystery for the sake of titillation, so I was willing to trust the author to not use such a sexist trope and kept reading with misgivings. But the levels of mystery, or should I say, ~~mystery around her and the protagonist's relation to her continued to taste bad, and at the aforementioned turning point, she reveals a portion of her ~secrets to the protagonist in a rather Hitchcockianly tense scene. It's the way the novel presents her and this pivotal plot point that I didn't like. In essence, it became clear to me which way the book was going with her, and while I couldn't foresee how the story was going to end, I knew I wasn't going to be happy with that part of it. ( Now for the spoilers. )

Signal Boost: [zenolalia's beautiful shitpost explainer]

zenolalia commented in rydra_wong's post O hivemind seeking to crowdsource a good definition of the 'shitpost':

In jokes, memes, and shitposts ALL derive their humour from a certain level of surrealism.

A meme is not funny because it's true, but because it's an accepted set of ideas and responses that is not, in fact, tied to any objective reality. Nonetheless, it is known to a great many people--people who often do not know each other, but rather, operate in a shared culture--and thus there is a familiarity in its absurdity. It's absurd, but it's absurd in a way we all known and share in, which is comforting. And the combination of unexpected/absurd, and comfort, is what creates humour (as opposed to fear, which is the unexpected/absurd without comfort).

An in-joke is basically a meme for a very small group, usually a set of friends, or other small gathering where everyone knows (at leat, is passingly familiar with) everyone else. Friends, families, military units, people working at the same office, students in a single class, etc. An in-joke tends to occur when everyone knows everyone, and thus has a very specific shared context that does not exist in the greater culture.

A shitpost exists between these two scales.

This isn't the whole explainer! This is just a good introductory sample! Read the whole thing (or the whole post).