No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

Anonymous asked:

I would love your thoughts on something. When I was younger, I greatly preferred Tales from the Crypt over Goosebumps (books and shows). But as I get older, I feel as though I like Goosebumps way more. I feel like Tales from the Crypt had a cutting-edge significance but it feels dated and formulaic now whereas Goosebumps had an element of unpredictability and the kid-friendly restrictions made extra creativity absolutely necessary. Your thoughts?

One of the most extraordinary developments in Geek Culture specifically, but also the culture more generally…is that we’ve become more okay with realizing that our guilty pleasures and ironic pleasures are our actual pleasures, and not to maintain a level of distance or disdain from something that has value not everyone sees.

It felt like this happened in only the past 3 years, and is especially noticeable in the music world. I think people are starting to find that the boy bands that the edgy music scene folk got mad about in 2001 were extremely inoffensive and actually had many talented members. Likewise, every few months like clockwork, every music journal has a few “hot-take” articles about how saying that you hate Insane Clown Posse, Phish, and Nickelback is classist. I don’t care for Insane Clown Posse’s horror-core rap, but the idea that class plays a role in the fact their fans are looked down on? Well, it’s absolutely, inarguably true, and how we talk about them is extremely bound up in that, which partially explains the deeply raw and visceral reaction to them.

If there’s been a positive development of the past few years, it’s that fandom has learned to condemn a lot less, learned to be a lot less mean, and is unlearning the instinct to look down on things, and are more aware of how our reactions to things are centered on very unpleasant currents in society. If your reaction to something is intense, raw, and visceral, it’s good to look under the surface and see what’s driving it because it’s probably due to a current in society. For instance, one of the perennial punching bags of the past few years was Twilight, a harmless bunch of romance novels written by a goofball Mormon aimed at teenage girls that I can’t imagine getting anyone’s dander up. Now, obviously, I am as far from the target audience for a teen girl romance novel as one can get, but as a grown-ass man with a job, even in the early 2010s, the notion of getting raw and mad about them is just…absurd to me, and I am delighted more people are coming around to that way of thinking. Worst of all, I think a lot of people who hate Twilight get mad at it because they think young girls are silly and subhuman and their culture is the same way, the same reason they didn’t like the boy bands in the early 2000s.

Saying you hate Twilight is the adult version of singing songs about how you want to kill Barney (…and by the way, what did Barney ever do?)

I think we’re seeing that quality is something that can be achieved regardless of form and audience, which is brings us to Goosebumps, which, within the limits of their audience and form, I remember them as being actually tight, effective little chillers. It’s harder to write a good short novel than a long one, and harder to write for kids than adults. R.L. Stine is a real person, and yes, he wrote nearly all of the books attached to his name with a productivity that is almost inhuman.

R.L. Stine was always this way. He was an on-call series writer, and in that world, it’s more important to be a consummate professional who meets deadlines than to be a genius. It reminds me a lot of the pulps, actually…you’re more likely to see guys who can meet deadlines. He wrote GI Joe tie in novels and knockoff choose your own adventures, and was a published author on call for a full decade before Goosebumps became a hit. These are series where you sometimes need to turn in a 25k kids’ novel in a single sleepless weekend in a hotel room.

I hate to “armchair quarterback,” but if I had to identify what kept Goosebumps from being a regular part of our lives and only linked to a specific moment in childhood (and a childhood at a specific time in the 90s, at that), where you put them down, never picked them up again, and 20 years later you rediscover them as “nostalgia,” it’s that Goosebumps never really “grew up with you.” The Harry Potter novels were smart in that they started light and funny, with the characters the same age as the (assumed) reader, only to have a book come out every few years where the heroes were the same age as the characters, where the stakes got higher and the heroes grew up. A more “teen oriented” Goosebumps line might have kept that audience.

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.