YOUNG BROWN AND BLACK GIRLS: IGNORE THE WHITE INFLUENCER TELLING YOU TO GET BOTOX OR A NOSE JOB!!!!! YOUR FACE IS BEAUTIFUL AND YOU ARE WORTHY OF LOVE JUST AS YOU ARE ‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️

content creators, much like the elder gods, must not be given requests that can be left to interpretation, for the results bring madness upon the unwary

Time to take this post entirely too seriously:

1. I often wonder if this is why you so commonly see the sentiment that we are in an era of uniquely bad literature, or at least that the fact that most books don't have artistic aspirations and are not aiming to be anything other than mindless entertainment is new. In fact what's new is the idea that everything is worth preserving (and also the internet making it easier to preserve it). The dumb artistically unambitious trash books of the past have survived only sporadically, because people thought of them as literally disposable.
2. When I was in college I had a professor who was an expert on detective fiction. He had a longstanding beef with the idea that "Murders in the Rue Morgue" was the first detective story. He thought that it seemed way too polished to be inventing a new genre, and also that the whole orangutan business had the vibe of someone subverting preexisting audience expectations and maybe engaging in a bit of stealth parody. With the help of some student volunteers, he went trawling through old magazines and newspapers and found hundreds of detective stories from the early 1800s that just hadn't garnered enough individual attention to be remembered. This was because most of them sucked balls. He created an online archive of them, so you too can read these mostly terrible stories.

I've spent a ridiculous amount of time on Project Gutenberg sifting through forgotten old fiction and lemme tell ya. a lot of that stuff sucks ass.

Tremendously comforting, really.