People talk different from each other sometimes. There is literally, absolutely, nothing wrong with it.

No one said that difference as such was bad. You need to rid yourself of the habit of jumping on your high horse in response to your delusional conjectures.

Honestly, you do too.

Okay, quote a passage in which I expressed a delusional conjecture, treating it as fact.

We've already been over this once,

What we went over was your objections to two things that I said that you regarded as insulting. In the interest of peace, I didn't offer a defense. Now I was blocked for responding to a personal insult (which had stood for more than a day) with an insult, while that prior insult seems to get a pass. A pirate ship cannot be sustained with capricious rules nor with capricious enforcement.

so - you've been banned for day.

Yeah, after an admin silently slapped a one-day ban, you did, apparently without checking, so it became a ban of nearly two days.

Please stop italicizing so many things in your posts, too. It makes them kind of hard to read, and I don't think it adds much to the meaning.

My sad experience, over decades, is that some important things just get ignored or glossed-over if not italicized. So, I can use them less, but the result will be more verbal churning.

Linguistic prescriptivism is for losers.

No, prescriptivism is for people who know that language is a tool for communication and who want the most effective tool practically possible. It's pretty stupid not to see that and agree. (Don't level unwarranted insults if you don't want to be met with warranted insults.)

Ok loser

In the end, when anti-prescriptivism doesn't get to filter or to misrepresent the argument, it collapses.

For those still following, a few points:
- Though it is almost always misrepresented as descriptive, anti-prescriptivism is virulently normative.
- Indeed, languages evolve, in the sense that they change, but “evolution” is a loaded word; languages don't always progess. (For example, the English language used to form compound words, then abandoned the practice, then reimported it. These contradictory changes weren't both progress.)
- Prescriptivism isn't outside the evolutionary dynamic; it is part of the evolutionary dynamic. Attempting to contrast prescriptivism with evolution is absurd.

I remember when ending a sentence with a superfluous “with” was something only some Midwestern hicks did. But Hollywood adopted it and decided to push it, and then a share of the audience thoughtlessly began doing it.

Linguistic prescriptivism is for losers.

No, prescriptivism is for people who know that language is a tool for communication and who want the most effective tool practically possible. It's pretty stupid not to see that and agree. (Don't level unwarranted insults if you don't want to be met with warranted insults.)

Language is fluid and always has been — otherwise we'd all still be living in caves, grunting at each other.

And I don't know a single real-world prescriptivist who doesn't accept change, so long as that change doesn't directly or indirectly undermine the efficacy of language.

You calling out people for talking wrong has exactly as much merit here as it did when Japan erased a large part of the Ryukyu Islands' cultural legacy through imposing standard Japanese on their populace.

Your bald claim is based on your not recognizing when and how a word is made useless.

People talk different from each other sometimes. There is literally, absolutely, nothing wrong with it.

No one said that difference as such was bad. You need to rid yourself of the habit of jumping on your high horse in response to your delusional conjectures.

I remember when ending a sentence with a superfluous “with” was something only some Midwestern hicks did. But Hollywood adopted it and decided to push it, and then a share of the audience thoughtlessly began doing it.

Why doesn't Adachi invite Shima over to her home?

Adachi wants Shimamura to express love. The ideal would be for Shimamura to initiate the expressions; second best is for Shimamura to agree to expressing them.

Adachi's wanting Shimamura to agree to a visit by Adachi is part-and-parcel with Adachi wanting Shimamura to agree to pat her on the head.

“lil' ” → “li'l”

An apostrophe stands where a letter or letters that might otherwise be sounded has or have been silenced.

And so we get to love Miko.

I will, however, ask for specific examples and details as to how exactly are either Octave or Liberty "normalising" or "advancing" a "perverse morality". You seem to have great in-depth knowledge about the personal driving forces of individual writers and what they are trying to accomplish with their works, up to and including labelling a carefree author who is clearly just having fun as either being a victim of abuse or abuser herself, because clearly only such people would write a story about infidelity.

A snide, straw-man remark of that sort, on top of how you've argued in discussion about the significance of incentives to what Kitta Izumi writes, makes me disbelieve that I would want to attempt a second discussion with you, and especially that I would want a second discussion on a deeper topic. Perhaps I could imagine doing it after the earlier discussion comes to a close, and after you've apologized for the straw man; but, really, how likely is that?

Also, don't misquote me. I don't use “normalising”.

I will not address your tone, as that is for the staff to handle.

Pay attention to your own tone.

About your actual points, though.

Most people do relatively well in their debut work. I'm not referring to attempted debuts, but to work that finds a publisher.

Implying only "quality" works get published.

No. Implying that debut work will typically be of about the same quality as non-debut work.

Because that was the crux of your whole argument up until this post, the lack of quality of writing here, and why such a work is not getting better ("lack of competence or lack of incentive to do better").

Nope. You've imputed a belief that buyers want better work to me, but where did I say that? It flies in the face of what I've actually said. Indeed, as will be seen below, while you never identify an instance of my claiming that typical buyers much want better work, you observe me saying quite the contrary.

Let us forget for a moment that cancellations and axing would not be a thing if every work that got published was automatically a "quality" work

No, let's not forget that, nor let anyone imagine that it would be a point in your favor. If the author of Liberty was concerned that continuing as she has would get her cancelled, then she wouldn't continue as she has, unless she were unable to do better. So: “lack of incentive or lack of competence”.

(and let us also forget that it is popularity that actually dictates this, not quality),

If bad work as such is popular, an incentive exists to continue doing bad work. If work is popular for reasons other than being better or worse, then less incentive exists than otherwise to better work.

but the very fact this series was published undermines your entire point.

No, you simply guessed that I meant something other than what I actually said.

Garbage debuts get published all the time, and they get axed all the time, so why would you treat "finding a publisher" as an actual argument is somewhat baffling.

You're baffled because you imputed a presumption to my claim that is neither there nor consonant with what I said.

Experience is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain ability, so lack of ability cannot be explained by lack of experience.

Writing is in part both a gift and a product of experience, and how much the two are relevant to a particular writer varies greatly.

And thus some writers do not merely debut well, but offer brilliant work with a first submission.

An "able" writer without any experience would still produce mostly garbage,

You have to put “able” in quotation marks here because otherwise you offer a self-contradiction. And the more literal truth isn't helpful to you. That more literal truth is that raw talent varies greatly across people, and that some people who become quite skilled with experience are poor without it. That truth doesn't contradict what I said.

and an ungifted writer with lots of experience can produce good results.

Yet some would-be writers work feverishly for decades and remain poor writers.

Both the language skills and the adeptness at using the writing tropes come largely from experience,

For most writers, indeed. But raw talent varies considerably across writers.

arguing that they are not connected is just nonsensical.

I didn't say that they were unconnected.

My point was and is that this work being debut work does not explain why it is poor work because publishers are not compelled to turn poor writers into better writers by publishing poor work. [1] Writers get experience without being published, and [2] some writers don't even need the experience of multiple attempts.

Publishers can find sufficiently able writers without debuting bad writers who don't illustrate.

So why have they done so here?

There are multiple possibilities, but the unifying theme is that the readers care more about something else and so they don't incentivize better work, so the publisher doesn't incentivize better work. So the only incentive would come from the writer's desire to do good work for some other reason. She might have such incentive but, if she does, she lacks the competence to do better work.

Now, let's look back at those words of mine that you quoted: “lack of competence or lack of incentive to do better”.

I mean, I know why, even you know why,

Do you really think, at this point, that you should have been writing as if I were obtuse?

so the better question is, what is the point of this argument?

Well, I raised the question of whether the writer were not doing better work because she lacked ability or because she lacked incentive, and reiterated it when someone said that the writer likes stories full of drama. Then you wrote that debuting (being commercially published for the first time) and a love of drama explained the poor quality of her work, and I tersely explained why her debuting was not an explanation and again noted that the explanation was in lack of competence or lack of incentive. Since them, it's been a series of objections from you and responses from me noting why those objections are unreasonable.

The commercial publication of writing exhibiting lack of quality cannot be explained in terms of the lack of experience of the writer.

Now, this is something you did not argue before.

Wrong. You simply failed to consider what a debut were, and I finally spelled it out for you.

Your whole point was the lack of quality and whether or not it was caused by a "lack of competence" or a "lack of incentive to do better". At no point prior did you argue about the commercial aspect.

Wrong. Your initial response to me was about debuting, so you put commercial publication on the table, though evidently without recognizing what you were talking-about. Further, you simply failed to ponder what incentives a writer may have, and I finally spelled it out for you.

"Why is this so bad and why is it not getting better" (what you argued) is not the same as "why is this being published despite being bad" (what you brought up out of nowhere here).

Nope. It isn't a story mysteriously existing by itself; it is a commercial product. My spelling things out didn't introduce a new argument.

Putting that aside,

It's not yours to put aside.

yes, a work with subpar writing being published can not be explained in terms of the lack of experience of the writer. It can, however, be explained by something I wrote in my response to Altair.

Soap opera sells. Like, when you think about it, most soap opera features contrived plots, badly done and inconsistent characterisations, and plenty of morally reprehensible characters, so this fits perfectly. And as I said, this stuff sells well.

To make things really funny, you brought this up yourself, but failed to grasp the implications.

Nope. You really shouldn't write as if I am obtuse.

I'm reminded... of some of what I've heard and read about willful inconsistency in soap operas.

I made that comparison, in the same comment in which I first raised the issue of competence and incentives. In spite of my having made the comparison and having made it there, you added a presupposition that conflicted with the comparison and even with my remarks in the absence of such a comparison.

Apparently, either you have not read enough, or alternatively, you never saw a single soap opera in your life. Put it bluntly, garbage sells, and almost no genre is as full of garbage as soap opera. It sells exceedingly well, actually. The commercial success was never surprising here, nor was it even a point of argument in the previous discussion, including your own posts in this thread. And this will now be a recurring theme in the rest of your comment.

Again: That is an issue of incentives.

You linked the writing problems to either a lack of competence or a lack of incentive in terms of readers demanding better storytelling.

To keep doing this, she needs a publisher.

You are confusing writing quality with popularity.

Nope. Review what I actually wrote: “lack of competence or lack of incentive to do better”.

Yes, she needs a publisher. If her not-exactly-stellar writing is popular, why in the world would she not get a publisher?

She cannot avoid radical change if she no longer has a publisher. Cessation would be radical change; self-publication would compel radical change. Your claim that she would not make a radical change in the face of a reader rebellion cannot withstand scrutiny.

Lack of competence is certainly a factor, it can not not be with someone who is not a professional writer and is basically doing this for the first time.

Not unless a publisher publishes it. And a publisher won't keep publishing it if the number of people buying the contents discernibly declines.

Again, what we discussed before your baffling doubling down is the quality of writing.

What we discussed was “lack of competence or lack of incentive to do better”.

Lack of competence, largely stemming from a lack of experience, is a factor. I already covered how your argument of experience somehow being irrelevant in this case is nonsensical.

Except that that wasn't my argument, nor your original argument. You confused debuting with lacking experience. I noted both the difference, and that some writers do well without experience.

As for the publishing aspect, again, you seem oblivious to the fact that utter garbage can and does sell exceptionally well, and is published all the time.

No, the obliviousness was yours to the incentives faced by writers.

Why is the publishing aspect even being brought up here?

Because [1] work that debuts is by definition published and [2] writers who care about publication are incentivized by it. (They may not be incentivized to do better.)

But the lack of incentive, in the way you presented it, is simply not a factor at all, in my opinion.

Your opinion absurdly imagines commercial publication as something else.

Again, we have been debating the author's writing and her motivations behind it.

You brought up the subject of her debuting, and you did so in your first move. Further, in pondering the incentives of a writer who is being published, we shoulf consider the desire to be published, however slight that desire may be.

I know very well what "commercial publication" is and how it operates.

But you failed to bring that knowledge to bear when I wrote of incentives and when you wrote of debuting. So I had to spell it out.

What I am saying here is that commercial publication in all likelihood does not matter to this particular writer.

In which case, what you are saying is that an incentive to be published does not motivate her. That cannot be literally true (otherwise, she would not submit work), but it might be that her incentive is minimal.

I do not think she would radically alter her course if some of the readers did rebel.

She'd have no choice but radical change of some sort. She'd have to abandon the work, or write better, or fund its publication herself. With money or sweet-talk, she'd have to persuade Momono Moto to keep drawing it, or find another artist, or draw it herself.

Read the bolded part.

Read my response, which shows that the possibilities are exhausted by radical change. If the readers rebel, then she does different work (a radical change) or she stops (a radical change) or she self-publishes (a radical change).

She is not a professional writer, she has a solid career as a voice actress that does not involve writing at all, this is basically a vanity project for her.

Stopping or self-publishing is a radical change.

I stand by what I said, I do not see her compromising on what she wants to do with this series because of reader rebellion or publication issues.

Stopping or self-publishing is a radical change.

Which is, again, why the "commercial publication" is not any kind of argument here, why it is irrelevant, and why your sudden need to hang every single argument you have onto it is, well, baffling.

Baffling because you ignored what was entailed by “lack of competence or lack of incentive to do better”.

So, given that her publisher puts-up with it because, for some reason, the readers put up with it, she doesn't have an incentive to do better. Get that all in your head at once.

Yes, the publisher "puts up with it" because the readers "put up with it". I will even be magnanimous and once again reveal to you why the readers "put up with it". Soap opera garbage sells well.

So: “ lack of incentive to do better ” from that potential source. Yes, very plausibly.

Your next point about the incentive is the same one I already addressed.

So far, you haven't addressed it.

She indeed probably lacks this particular incentive, however, my point was not that she does not lack it, she obviously does,

Indeed.

my point was that she lacks it for reasons different than what you were going for.

I was not going for one and only one incentive. More to the point, in noting that she would have to make a radical change if the readers rebelled, I was rebutting a false claim that you'd made and have reiterated.

You are arguing she lacks the incentive because the publisher "puts up with her",

No, I'm arguing that of all the things that might have incentivized her to do better, most have been eliminated; but that, if some were there, then her poor writing would have in part to be attributable to imcompetence (the suggestion of an earlier commentator).

One of the potential sources of incentives are the readers and thence the publishers. But they put up with her. Even if she cared a lot about being published, the readers and publishers do not provide incentive to do better.

I am arguing she lacks it because it is simply not a factor for her at all, whatever the publisher does or does not put up with. She is doing this for fun and apparently, this is what fun looks like for her.

My claim that she had “lack of competence or lack of incentive to do better” is not somehow a refutation when you now insist that she has a lack of incentive to do better. Rather, you have made an unacknowledged concession.

Of course, it is not really surprising you glossed over this,

An obvious, point is not glossed-over for being left unstated, especially when the point is moot (because the publisher puts up with her).

since your interpretation of the writer's motivations was literally as follows:

I think that people who write stuff of this sort are themselves either unfaithful people trying further to normalize infidelity, or victims of infidelity trying to rationalize their continued attachments to their abusers.

That previous assertion of mine, behind which I continue to stand, says nothing about the general sloppiness of this work. When I first raised the issues of competence and incentives, it was in response to the apparently rhetorical question of “Would the writer be so incompetent as to introduce some random person just to manufacture fake drama?”.

Once again, you have set-up straw men.

Well, then, since I’m obviously unable to grasp what you mean by “normalize,” further discussion on this topic is useless, so please let’s leave it there.

I imagine that you have a reasonably good idea of what “normalize” means, but you mischaracterized by what devices these stories are held to work to normalize inhumane behavior. I would quite agree that a constructive discussion is too unlikely to attempt.

That's a pity, because the peculiar challenges of writing about romantic or sexual pathology and maintaining one's moral bearings with neither a happy ending nor a smiting of villains are certainly interesting.

the depiction of "bad" behavior (as defined by individual readers) even without dire consequences for the offending character does not necessarily amount to the author's endorsement of or advocacy for that particular behavior,

No one said that it did.

nor does a reader's appreciating the execution of such a story constitute the perpetuation of that behavior in real life.

No one said that a reader's appreciation (in and of itself) of a story in which there are no dire consequences for badly behaving characters constituted any manner of endorsement of such behavior.

Once again, you have set-up straw men.

I'm just surprised at how many 21st century readers seem to agree with the mid-1950s censors who crippled US comics for a generation by a literal rule that "good must always triumph over evil."

Well, it might seem that way to a person who didn't recognize the difference between wanting only stories in which good triumphed and wanting only stories in which evil were never treated as something other than evil.

LoL. Your craft skills fabricating with straw are truly outstanding.

Ah, no. Using the word “seem”, you set-up a straw-man. I noted the least implausible way for things to seem as you proposed them to seem. Of course, I didn't assert that you were sincere in your claim of how things seemed; an announcement that you were just taking a cheap shot wouldn't contradict me at all.

We do seem to agree that in this series the author seems to want us to admire a character who acts like a piece of shit,

No, I don't go that far. The writer seems to want to lead the audience to sympathy. Whether she'll want us to admire that character is unclear to me.

and that’s bad writing, however.

Indeed, wanting us to admire such a character would be bad writing, because prescribing with a broken moral compass is bad writing. And, for the same reason, wanting us to sympathize with a character who behaves as she does is bad writing. And wanting to normalize some of the behavior in the other series was bad writing.

Nearly any reader will accept a story in which what he or she regards as goodness does not triumph, and instead what the reader regards as evil is successful, if the reader is still somehow led to believe that a perverse morality is not being advanced. (In the simplest such cases, the message is that goodness faces a very great challenge.)

last edited at Dec 1, 2021 9:07AM

I'm just surprised at how many 21st century readers seem to agree with the mid-1950s censors who crippled US comics for a generation by a literal rule that "good must always triumph over evil."

Well, it might seem that way to a person who didn't recognize the difference between wanting only stories in which good triumphed and wanting only stories in which evil were never treated as something other than evil.

Also Kimi Koi Limit from the same author.

https://dynasty-scans.com/series/kimi_koi_limit

Far better in every single way and shorter so the angst can't make a dent in your heart.

I hated and hate that vicious story more than any other so far mentioned in comments to Liberty.

“woah” → “whoa”

And... the gender of the spouse? Was it mentioned?

Does it matter?

At the least, it would effect a generalized-Bayesian updating of probabilities associated with propositions relevant to understanding why she writes as she does.

I think that people who write stuff of this sort are themselves either unfaithful people trying further to normalize infidelity, or victims of infidelity trying to rationalize their continued attachments to their abusers.

I think that’s pretty much unknowable unless you were somehow able to do a full psychological workup on the writers themselves. Which you can’t do.

All knowledge at this level is a matter of whatever body of observations one has. For example, two of the various relevant questions are of how many confirming cases one encounters and of whether a counter-example is observed if at all.

I suspect it’s more like those many writers attracted to “edgy” themes and characters who believe they’ve written an antihero character when they’ve just created an asshole,

It's extremely plausible that the author doesn't recognize that Liz's behavior is literally inexcusable, but the question is of how the author could fail to see as much. Issues of romance and of sexuality are the most psychologically pressing in our relationships with others (for obvious evolutionary reasons). One doesn't not see Liz for what she is without either being like Liz or being a person of the sort who are victimized by such people.

I feel like this series is one of those strange cases where the author somehow doesn't realize Liz is a self serving narcissistic asshole, even though it's incredibly obvious. Maybe I'm wrong, but it feels like her personality is going to be glossed over while she for some reason gets a supposed "happy ending" with Maki that she doesn't deserve.

As I wrote earlier:

I think that people who write stuff of this sort are themselves either unfaithful people trying further to normalize infidelity, or victims of infidelity trying to rationalize their continued attachments to their abusers.

five years from now I'll still get to visit this thread and read Blastaar's exquisitely written messages—explaining with subtle irony why Liberty is so terribly bad and how, after perusing chapter one hundred, they have confirmed once again that this manga is a torturous read and nobody should be subjected to it.

Chapter 100 is not scheduled to appear until 2048.

It is slapped together because she is an inexperienced writer, this being literally her debut.

While she may get better with experience, other writers do well in their debut work. The question of talent versus incentive remains.

Not everyone does well in their debut works, so it is hardly an actual argument.

Nonsense. Most people do relatively well in their debut work. I'm not referring to attempted debuts, but to work that finds a publisher. Experience is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain ability, so lack of ability cannot be explained by lack of experience. Publishers can find sufficiently able writers without debuting bad writers who don't illustrate. The commercial publication of writing exhibiting lack of quality cannot be explained in terms of the lack of experience of the writer.

Plus, there is a facet of the incentive premise that you are not even considering.

Nope. But, before you get to the heart of your screw-up, we get some blah-blah-blah:

From what I remember from her interview (and it has been a long time since I read it, so I could be slightly off), she is basically having fun with this, mashing all her favourite yuri tropes. If her incentive for writing this is to simply have fun doing something she always wanted to do, she is pretty much fulfilling it. She is a voice actress, her career is not really hanging on this manga performing well, so the "incentive to get better" at writing might not even be there at all, or at least it might not be prevalent.

So far, that theory (which could have been expressed in one brief sentence) falls well within the scope of what I'd said.

You linked the writing problems to either a lack of competence or a lack of incentive in terms of readers demanding better storytelling.

To keep doing this, she needs a publisher.

Lack of competence is certainly a factor, it can not not be with someone who is not a professional writer and is basically doing this for the first time.

Not unless a publisher publishes it. And a publisher won't keep publishing it if the number of people buying the contents discernibly declines.

But the lack of incentive, in the way you presented it, is simply not a factor at all, in my opinion.

Your opinion absurdly imagines commercial publication as something else.

I do not think she would radically alter her course if some of the readers did rebel.

She'd have no choice but radical change of some sort. She'd have to abandon the work, or write better, or fund its publication herself. With money or sweet-talk, she'd have to persuade Momono Moto to keep drawing it, or find another artist, or draw it herself.

She is doing this for fun ​and is clearly not planning and mapping it out in excruciating detail beforehand.

So, given that her publisher puts-up with it because, for some reason, the readers put up with it, she doesn't have an incentive to do better. Get that all in your head at once.

last edited at Nov 27, 2021 7:29PM

It is slapped together because she is an inexperienced writer, this being literally her debut.

While she may get better with experience, other writers do well in their debut work. The question of talent versus incentive remains.

(Liz turns away, Maki spots her and chases after her to explain It's Not What It Looks Like, and then probably apologizes to Liz. Bonus points if Liz then slaps Maki.)

Probably too quick. More likely Liz slips away, we learn that Ms Whoever is just a friend, Liz does something self-destructive, and then G_d-knows-what because the mangaka want to keep this fire burning.

she likes stories full of drama.

That's orthogonal to the question. A story could be carefully and realistically plotted to have lots of drama; it could be slapped together and have no drama. Here it is slapped together with lots of drama; maybe it's slapped together because she couldn't do any better, but maybe it's slapped together because she doesn't feel any need to do better.

last edited at Nov 27, 2021 10:55AM

Would the writer be so incompetent as to introduce some random person just to manufacture fake drama?

Apparently the people buying the manga have not rebelled. So is the issue competence? or a simple lack of incentive to do better?

I'm reminded on the one hand of the revival of Jason Todd, after readers very literally paid to have him killed; and, on the other hand, of some of what I've heard and read about willful inconsistency in soap operas.

That's not Tsucchi at the end. Tsucchi has longer hair, is chubby and doesn't work with Maki. She's probably just a colleague of Maki.

Nope. It's Tsucchi. She's much changed from her original form; but it's Tsucchi.