idk i do think people are kind of unimaginative when it comes to talking about tmuir’s more fanfictionesque tendencies / i do think this drive to write off the idea that her engagement with fanfiction as a form could be taken as seriously as her engagement with, say, lolita or the iliad or don quixote (or even that her engagement w/ fanfiction cancels out the intellectual seriousness of the latter three) is, like. i mean you do you but that seems boring to me.
like idk it seems very clear to me that she’s a heavily referential writer & how she wields that in tlt specifically allows her to crack open questions about cultural preservation; what lasts for ten thousand years, to what does the work of preservation lend legitimacy and what does it elide, what do we give legitimacy to; these are questions that hang over the whole series and i think exist as much in her “lowbrow” references as in her “highbrow” ones. i find the prose of gideon a little grating at points but it seems pretty clearly deliberate in what it’s doing, so it stands to reason to then ask why that tone is being employed at all. and i’m kind of interested in why a “fanfiction voice” can only ever be a limitation and an indication of a writer’s infantile/shallow/unskilled engagement where eg. a mimicry of nabokov’s voice (harrow, the john chapters in nona) can have intellectual heft behind it. i don’t even 100% agree with what tlt posits around fanfiction, but like, i think it demands and therefore merits engagement lol
it’s less a question of whether tmuir at her most fanfictiony is doing “good” or “bad” prose (sometimes it is kind of bad lol) and more like, the discourse of the text makes it v clear that this style is present for a reason other than her being a writer who cannot write outside of this v limiting voice & is shilling republished fanfic with poor-quality prose in order to make a profit, so we might as well start talking about what that reason is and responding accordingly