And we all know the first thing writers are taught is "bore the audience to death in the beginning of your story because they'll stick around for the possibility of things finally picking up".
No, wait.
They're taught the exact opposite. They're taught to hook the audience early to induce the interest that keeps people going over the slow parts because they're already invested.
A TV show has 3, sometimes 4, episodes to hook me. If I'm not hooked, I'm out. A book has 50 pages to hook me. If I'm not hooked, I'm out. Life's too short to slog through boring crap on the off chance it gets better. Because it rarely does.
I don't mind people going on and on and on. (I mean I loved Mervyn Peake!) What I hate about Stephenson is how he:
Can't write people. At all. His "characters" are "concepts with a name attached". Ugh.
He often goes on and on and on about stuff he's absolutely wrong about at a fundamental level. (Like his bizarre take on Chinese culture in that one with the nanotech; I've forgotten the title. The Diamond Age?)
One or the other above I can cope with. Both together made me cringe every time I set eye on a page.
Are you seriously suggesting that the victims of the aggression need to mollify the perpetrators by loudly shouting how they're a) not in China, and thus b) not in the CPC? Fucking HELL that's next-level white privilege in action! What's next? "She should probably have worn longer skirts"? "Maybe if she wasn't out so late at night..."?
The Expanse did it for me. I couldn't read the books. I couldn't watch the show past two episodes.
The oft-praised Honor Harrington books also fall into this camp. It seems I'm completely allergic to David Weber's writing, because I can't read any of his other series either.
Anything billed as "Young Adult". I just find them off-putting in their formulaic structures and find the way they talk down to their readers a bit insulting. I read a lot of adult books as a child (pre-teen, not even "young adult"), though, so perhaps I'm not the target market.
edited to add
Neal Stephenson. I hatehatehate his writing. I think if he wrote essays I might find them readable, but his fiction is atrociously bad. (It doesn't help that he spouts gibberish on topics he knows little to nothing about—e.g. Chinese culture—with dogmatic authority.)
P.S. I can understand completely why you didn't like The Three Body Problem. It is, especially at the beginning, very Chinese and incorporates outlooks and ideas that are utterly alien to the western mindset.
That's true. Cross pre-#MeToo Weinstein (and "crossing" could be as simple as "not fucking him") and you didn't wind up in a work camp. You wound up in the exact opposite, in fact: completely and utterly unable to find work in your field.
It's very different. No equivalency whatsoever. You're absolutely right.
Again, the US government leaves censorship to the industry, which censors both inconsistently and stupidly because it's so paranoid about possible government censorship. You probably should look a little bit deeper into film (and music) censorship in the USA sometime. It's actually kind of amazing what people are getting away with imposing on others in the "Land of the Free".
I was fortunate enough to be brought up on stories from all over. LOADS of people have folk stories that are "grotesque" to those not brought up with them, and once you get over that, you begin to look at your own folk tales and seeing how foolish and/or grotesque and/or problematical they are. I mean talking snakes with legs? Daughters getting their own father to impregnate them? Fathers offering their own daughters for rape to protect guests? Yeah, Christian-sphere mythology has a lot of grotesque bits as well and there it's considered holy writ!
You mean like how the US military has a stated policy of wanting final approval on any film that uses their equipment? And of later blacklisting film-makers who make movies critical of the US military?
Or like how very few films (like 'zero') called out, say, the abuses of Harvey Weinstein before he got jailed, despite them being open knowledge for decades? (Yeah, I guess it's completely different when a government does it instead of a single very wealthy individual...)
You are the exception, however, not the norm. Look at the huge kerfuffle that brewed up over The Battle at Lake Changjin, for example. It's been derided as pure propaganda (unlike, say, almost any American war film!) that is full of historical inaccuracies (unlike, say, almost any American war film!) and that shows Chinese soldiers as unequivocally good (unlike what, say, almost any American war film does for American soldiers!) and that shows American soldiers as incompetent and/or evil (unlike what, say, almost any American war film does for whoever the enemy is!).
Basically it's the same old "othering" that dominates all public discourse anywhere. And it amuses the everloving fuck out of me.
Again, you are calling for the victims to change their behaviour, not the perpetrators.
Fucking Hell is white privilege embedded deep within you!