January 31st, 2022 - Long Distance

Dear TNY,

Holy fucking shit did you do it again with “Long Distance”. Well, not as bad as before, but still.

And what did you do? Well, to me, and I know I don’t mean shit to you, these stories are toxic.  This story doesn’t go as far as “Cat Person” or “The Resident Poet”, but it’s in the same vein of displaying abhorrent behavior for mostly unjustified reasons (in this story they are totally unjustified reasons).  Now, with “The Resident Poet”, the male’s behavior wasn’t great, I’ll give you that.  And with “Cat Person”, the dude’s behavior, at the very end of a long string of shitty behavior on the MC’s part, turned bad (I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again:  That shit was a self-fulfilling prophesy on her behalf; he was a reasonably nice guy who didn’t even know the extent of the fucking degradation that girl was subjecting him to and he only acted poorly after being abused by her; she deserved that shit).  But in this story, the dude doesn’t do a goddamn thing wrong.  He’s fucking nice.  She even says it.  He’s nice to everyone AND he’s nice to her.  And she shits all over him. 

Why is that toxic?  It isn’t, on its own.  It’s currently just boring-ass, chittery, weak, pointless bumf.  But, to the people out there that read this and use it to validate their poor behavior, it will then become toxic, further establishing a very TNY standard of shittiness in humanity.

I’ve said all this before in another letter.  I don’t need to rehash.

Also, while we are on the subject of justifying bad behavior, can we focus on this idea for a minute:  two wrongs don’t make a right.

Even I, up above, was trying to justify the choices made by the authors about when it’s okay to act badly; I was trying to find a way to say that it might be okay, at least in some way, for someone to act badly as a reaction to bad behavior.  But it’s not. That’s not okay in real life and it’s not okay in literature.  Just because someone is a douche, doesn’t mean you get a free pass to be a douche back. Because then there will be two douches instead of one (to be clear, that’s not what happened in any of those three stories; that was just douching for douche sake).  So then, that begs the question about the state of the readership in the world now, in which we have verifiable evidence (via social media) that the previous two toxic stories did validate real life bad behavior in people, which means that at least some of the readership (a good portion of it, from recollection) is acting fucking badly and instead of doing that self-work that we all should be doing, they are just looking for external data points to bolster their current position, eschewing personal growth and betterment.  So, is it your fault because you are polluting the waters with your bad fiction?  Or are you just making money off of supporting a readership which is poisonous to begin with?

Definitely both, you dumb twats. 

The whole lot of you, bad publishers and bad people, can fuck right the fuck off.

Oh, naming the two main characters Lea and Leo is fucking stupid.  Calling attention to it in the story is even more stupid.  Because the author was aware this was happening and then decided to keep it, and let us know they decided to keep it.  That’s a willful act of defecation on the reader.  That is the writer saying, “Nah son, I don’t give a fuck about keeping these characters apart in your mind.”  Or, it’s a writer who is too dense to understand that they can change the names to whatever they want.  But based on Lea & Leo and Riccardo & Rebecca, it seems that the level of creativity here is as much as a single melted crayon on the sidewalk (not a cool color like mac & cheese or vivid tangerine either; just shit brown).

Wow.  I’m really ripping the shit a new one.  In saying that, it’s important to remember that the fault of this is solely on you, TNY.  This story isn’t well written, isn’t interesting, supports shitty behavior (likely validating it in the already shitty readership), isn’t creative, and isn’t worth publication. Yet you put it out in the world!

Cool cool cool cool cool cool.

You’re the authority on fiction and people look up to you and all that.  Makes total sense. Well deserved.

Anyway, to the author, let’s get beers, human to human.  We can talk about character names.  I’ll hear you out. Then likely say you are wrong.

Nick