TWO CAKES?!: link: the sociology and market dynamics of Finnish lactose-free dairy products

[cimorene]

Yesterday waxjism baked two cakes! One is a mascarpone-strawberry mousse cake and the other is a maple walnut bundt cake.

(I said, "You're like that meme about how the quality of fanfic doesn't matter*, but all by yourself!")

I also commented that this technically-a-cheesecake (because it's made with mascarpone) (even though it's still mostly composed of whipping cream like a mousse cake) had been made possible by the universal availability of lactose-free dairy products in Finland, and septembriseur asked why that was true. Wax and I didn't know for sure, so she googled it and ended up skimming somebody's thesis on the subject, lol.

Anyway, here's that long post about the sociology and market dynamics of Finnish lactose-free dairy that nobody really exactly wanted, but it is potentially interesting! And it makes the rest of the world where lactose-free dairy is hard to come by seem egregiously inconvenient by comparison.

 

*. I hate that meme because it's spreading even further the Compulsory Positivity message that readers universally love everything regardless of quality. To be clear: people do love the things that they love regardless of quality: your favorite thing isn't necessarily identical with the thing you earnestly judge to be the best written. And most of us enjoy reading a variety of types of things, some of them because they seem mind-blowingly good and others because they the author is skilled or simply enthusaistic about some of the same things we are, like tropes and genre conventions or pastiche styles or kinks. But the fact that people usually like or also like things that might not be dubbed 'good' by them or someone else doesn't mean that they like all things, even bad ones, or that they don't think anything is bad, or that they're equally happy to see everything. Personally, even if I'm desperate enough to still open them, my reaction to going to check a fandom tag and finding all the new fics haven't been betaed is disappointment. I would be too embarrassed to post a cake that hadn't been proofread, and rightly so.)

Comments

[torachan]

I think the two cakes theory is fine but people take it to mean the wrong thing. It's meant to mean that more is always okay. Like don't think you shouldn't write a fic about X just because it's been done before. I'm not going to complain if someone brought cake just because there's already a cake!

But that doesn't mean I am necessarily going to like that second cake. It might suck. But it's okay for it to exist.

People get upset when they write something and it flops and then whine about how the two cake theory is wrong, but the two cake theory never promised that everyone would love your fic. It just means it's okay for your fic to exist and that having multiple takes on the same thing is good.

[cimorene]

That's a very valid point to make and a good reading, but I think it's kind of moot if that's not how most people interpret it in the wider fandom conversation, unfortunately.

I personally run up against the interpretation that the cartoon cake-consumer represents readers in general, and it doesn't seem like a relatable reaction...