Based on the title alone, what story would you want to read/watch first?

  • School of Lightning Mages: ECE Majors
  • Selling Blessed Children
  • Trapped With My OCs Trying To Kill Me
  • Corrupting Every Bloodline To Prevent A Prophecy
  • Timing Kills To Ensure Victims Go To A Certain Afterlife
  • The Marathon Runner And The Powerlifter Who Wished They Swapped Bodies
0 voters

None except maybe the first one because these are all power fantasy isekai titles

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The meanings of your message evade me

human trafficking isekai lets freaking go

1 and 3 sound kinda generic imo

2 sounds like a decently interesting title

4 and 5 could be interesting but i probably wouldnt have faith in it being executed well

6 depends if it got the romance tag :cat_with_wry_smile:

“Selling Blessed Children”

Short titles really get me

I wouldn’t read any tbh these all feel like titles for media made purely to contrast to other media with how fucked up they are rather than have an actual story

Yes, they’re all strictly “parodic” in the postmodern sense where nothing is critiqued and it all amounts to a more vulgar presentation of what is being satirized. The function of the vulgarity is to signal that a parody is going on because otherwise it would be identical to what is being parodied (this is why this activity always has a bit of paranoia attached to it). The most perfect expression of it is the alternating case meme which involves copying verbatim the parodied sentiment but adding an external marker of irony, effectively the same as saying /s except with a fantasy of the stupid Other baked into it (this also means that in the postmodern age nobody knows what distinguishes irony from “literal” treatment except intent. The problems with “intent” are not that hard to get at but for one thing this sort of “irony” is only maintained by an empty reference to the fantastical Other, who nobody is really interested in understanding besides the ironic reference. To understand the Other would require critique, and this is the fundamental impossibility that is motivating all of this behavior).

But, to be fair, a lot of modern cultural output is also just this. And I’m fairly certain that @Archenhailor was perfectly aware of all this when they made their post (well, the parts of it that are relevant, the point of this kind of irony is that it’s a self-awareness that the books we read are shit combined with an inability to critique them and our consumption habits beyond(?) pointing out “absurdities” as an act of solidarity with other readers about our alienation with our own thoughts). So the point is not to contrast other media by being fucked up but to point out more openly the fucked up aspects of already existing media in an irreverent but totally uncritical way that still protects our relationship to the works/genre, hence the post-irony and satire. Every title there is just an exaggerated expression of a trope that already exists (and #3 is the same thing but the relationship between reader and art).

I take back what I said because this persons reply makes me sound like a pretentious asshole