https://archive.ph/tnpzh
>A Los Angeles father, once an aspiring screenwriter and now a professional ticket-scalper, spends his spare hours calculating the extent to which younger straight white male novelists have been frozen out of the literary world. He pens a jeremiad against both publishers and critics who, he avers, no longer value great writing and a cadre of writers who are no longer interested in telling the truth about society.
>It sounds like the premise for, well, a literary novel. Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog, who wrote defiant letters to personages living and dead, meets the 21st century. Watch the advance money, sales and recognition roll in.
>Or not. It is the contention of a polemic published in March in the online magazine Compact by the writer Jacob Savage — dad, ticket-scalper, former screenwriter — that today, such a novel would not receive acclaim commensurate with its quality, a claim he backed up by showing a dearth of such authors from lists of prominent literary honors. Moreover, Savage argued that what he saw as these novelists’ self-censorship, whether provoked by timidity or rational self-interest, meant that such a novel would not even be written.
>“Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them,” Savage, who is 41, wrote. What they do write, he added, avoids “grappling directly with the complicated nature of their own experience in contemporary America.”
>Savage’s essay has attracted both derision and amens in newspapers and journals, on social media and Substacks, over drinks and in group chats.
>“I think the nerve I hit is fairly obvious,” Savage said in an interview, adding, “being able to put numbers behind it was cathartic to some people and triggering to others.”
>Humming underneath the disputation is a less tangible but more significant question. Let us say the perspective of the straight white man is being dampened in the world of literary fiction. Should we care?
>For some observers, the complaint is roughly translatable as, “Won’t somebody please think of the straight white men?” “If a very small number of people who are not white, male, heterosexual gained a (likely temporary) foothold in a fringe cultural practice — which is what literary fiction is — there has to be a raging sense of privilege, neo-Trumpist or outright Trumpist, to claim that that constitutes a crisis,” the Bosnia-born novelist and screenwriter Aleksandar Hemon said in an email.
>Francine Prose, a novelist and critic, was similarly skeptical: “You’ve run the world for thousands of years, and now you’re feeling disenfranchised?”

We've already done this thread mate.

>But to others, the straight white man’s persistent “raging sense of privilege,” however destructive or just plain annoying, is exactly why this trend cannot be ignored. At this moment, straight white men and their interiority — the great preserve of the literary novel, which for centuries has claimed an unparalleled ability to spelunk into the depths of human motivation — seem as important as ever.
>A backlash against the advancements achieved in recent decades by women, racial minorities and L.G.B.T.Q. people reigns in politics and culture. The collection of podcasters and YouTube personalities known as the “manosphere” has responded with its own coarse, often right-leaning and, to many, compelling set of answers for how straight white men ought to adapt to changing times. The Democratic Party has strapped on its pith helmet and sought to understand young men.
>The feeling of alienation among those with historically advantaged identities actually seems like exactly the sort of thing best tackled by the novel, which from “Don Quixote” to “Anna Karenina” to “Herzog” has brokered the soul-aching discrepancy between subjective experience and objective reality.
>“A lot of the frustration being expressed in the manosphere is the external form of quiet frustration male authors haven’t expressed,” Sam Kahn, a novelist and the editor of Republic of Letters, a literary journal on Substack, said in an interview.
>“The rise of Donald Trump or Andrew Tate is not because of hordes of male novelists who didn’t get published,” he added, referring to the online influencer who, along with his brother, Tristan, is facing criminal charges of rape and human trafficking in Britain. “But the two aren’t totally unrelated.”
>Yet it remains that the literary novel — “a fringe cultural practice” according to Hemon, one of its foremost practitioners — has perhaps not been so peripheral to the culture’s white-hot center in 150 years. It may no longer be up to its historic task.

>>24558436
Not this exact article

I’ve read three variations of this article this past month.
I shan’t be reading this.

A Real Decline, an Open Question
>The dynamic Savage and others have outlined — that male, white male, straight white male and young straight white male novelists’ work is of diminishing interest in the literary world — is broadly if not unanimously accepted. The haggling is more over the cause: self-censorship, industry disinclination, elite approbation.
>Savage found increasingly few young white men on The New York Times’s year-end notable fiction lists as well as equivalents at Vulture, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic and Esquire. No white men are among the 25 most recent nominees for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions prize for debut fiction, the 14 latest millennial finalists for the National Book Award or the 20 current fiction and poetry fellows at Stanford’s eminent Wallace Stegner Fellowship.
>The numbers only constitute circumstantial evidence. The sample size is small, some argue cherry-picked (regarding the Young Lions prize, the writer Jay Caspian Kang said on his podcast, “Time To Say Goodbye,” “I don’t even know what that is”).
>The novelist Rebecca Makkai said none of the several prize juries she has sat on — including for the National Book and PEN/Faulkner awards — made decisions with the intention of excluding white men. “It was just that it was, book by book, the very best books we saw,” she said.
>But if the figures are less than comprehensive, they are also real and, say many, troubling enough.
>One literary agent, who represents several prominent novelists and who requested anonymity to discuss the industry candidly, believed the numbers were accurate and called it a form of overcorrection. “It is no more the case that, all of a sudden, in the last 10 years all of the best writers in America became writers of color or women or other marginalized identities, than it is that prior to 10 or 15 years ago, all of the great writers were straight white men,” the agent said.
>A second agent, who also represents prominent novelists and also requested anonymity, added that the trend will most likely continue because it is driven by the industry’s desire for marginalized voices as well as female writers, as women are the primary buyers of fiction.
>It is not exactly news that, as Mark McGurl, a professor of English at Stanford University, said in an interview “in aggregate white men are much less interested in literary fiction.” As creators and consumers, plenty of young men are moving away from reading toward the multibillion-dollar video game industry or outrageously popular podcasts.
>The decline in male novelists, Sarah Brouillette, a professor of English at Carleton University in Canada, recently argued in Defector, might track the decline in the novel’s cultural and financial capital.

>>24558440
Yeah it was I think the one before the last one

>And it is not clear exactly what might fix the problem, if there is one. “Writers (including male writers) should just write, try to put out the best work they can, and let the chips fall where they may,” said Andrew Boryga, a novelist who has weighed in on the debate on his Substack and the “Time to Say Goodbye” podcast, in an email. “The market’s always shifting.”
The ‘Great Male Narcissists’
>If you read only the beginning of Savage’s polemic, you might come away believing that his primary antagonists are industry gatekeepers: agents, editors, publishers, awards juries, booksellers. But he reserves the majority of his opprobrium for young straight white male novelists themselves.
>“Diversity preferences may explain their absence from prize lists,” Savage wrote, “but they can’t account for why they’ve so completely failed to capture the zeitgeist.”
>The contrast hardly needed to be stated: The American novel was in recent eras defined by straight white male novelists’ ambitious, grandiose and not infrequently successful attempts to do exactly that.
>Well into the 1990s, it was rare for the National Book Award for fiction not to go to a white man. Norman Mailer won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction and another for nonfiction; Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1969, America’s top-selling fiction book, according to Publishers Weekly, was not a genre potboiler, but a novel about a young man from Newark named Alexander Portnoy. (The Jewishness of many of these novelists did give them a more angled perspective on some questions of identity.)
>A new generation of novelist responded with a more apologetic brand of manhood. In a New York Observer essay published in 1997, David Foster Wallace deflated the “Great Male Narcissists,” or “G.M.N.s” (he cited Mailer, John Updike and Philip Roth), with their “radical self-absorption, and with their uncritical celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters.” Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers and others seemed to write with more explicit self-awareness about the fact that they were writing as straight white men.
>Yet into the ’90s and 2000s it was still widely accepted, by both the novelists themselves and the industry and critical apparatus, that exploring the lives of hyperbolically male characters — a deeply troubled tennis prodigy, say — was the valid way to explore the American psyche.
>“These writers, our boys not overseas, are friendly. And ambitious and ashamed of ambition,” Choire Sicha wrote in a 2008 essay about a yet newer generation of novelist headlined, “Papa Hemingway! Where Are the Men?”

>>24558448
That was this

>In the early 2010s, the ground again shifted, in a quietly drastic manner. The culture industry was reckoning with the legacy of the “G.M.N.s” in ways that anticipated the #MeToo movement with novels like Adelle Waldman’s “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.,” about a straight white male novelist making his way through Brooklyn’s dating scene; movies like Alex Ross Perry’s “Listen Up Philip,” about an older, Roth-like writer’s mentorship of an anachronistically toxic younger novelist; and television shows like Lena Dunham’s “Girls,” in which Dunham’s heroine visits a charming straight white male novelist to discuss accusations of sexually predatory behavior.
>“I envisioned he was a person with status in part because he is male,” Waldman said in an interview about her nuanced hero, Nathaniel. She imagined that “a bookish male who’d graduated from Harvard and had a certain self-presentation would strike people as an up-and-coming intellectual before he even had to do anything, in a way that just isn’t the case for women,” she said.
>There was a broader point being made. The earlier model had it that the interiority of men, white men (with allowances for some Black men) or straight white men could stand in for everyone. A new model, by contrast, could not abide the earnest universalizing of that identity.
The End of ‘Assertive Gusto’
>In recent years, novelists could be seen embracing the straight white man’s (slightly) less central status.
>Savage praised Tony Tulathimutte’s 2024 story collection “Rejection” for capturing “millennial rage and anomie,” but noted ruefully that Tulathimutte had “felt the need to publicly distance himself” from the central story’s badly behaving protagonist. Savage read the ending of 2019’s “The Topeka School,” the third novel by Ben Lerner, as the straight white male narrator’s allocution about “how he’s unlearned his white maleness.”
>But others suggest such choices do not represent a cowed holding back. What if instead they are deliberate self-effacement intended to offer a glimpse at these groups’ vexing situations today?
>“Right now one of the most important things being written about in America is identity,” said Makkai, the novelist. “If you’re talking about a young, straight, white, able-bodied man with English as his first language, I can understand it would be hard to write about identity with anything other than guilt or anger. Neither of those necessarily makes for the greatest subject matter.”
>Few are saying there ought to be no more male main characters. What they are suggesting is that such figures ought no longer have main character syndrome if they are to be responsive to this era’s gender relations.

NOT THIS FUCKING THREAD AGAIN

>During the imperial heights of the “G.M.N.s,” Bellow’s Augie March could begin the novel that bears his name with the announcement, “I am an American, Chicago born” — a thrilling act of “assertive gusto,” in the words of a besotted Roth. Contemporary novels, on the other hand, might find insight by depicting straight white men as more ancillary in the broader sweep of the culture.
>An example I have noticed, as a straight white man who reads novels, is the use of the N.B.A. (the National Basketball Association, not the National Book Award) to ingeniously explore contemporary masculinity. Four recent books, not all by straight white men — Andrew Martin’s “Early Work,” Jackie Ess’s “Darryl,” Vinson Cunningham’s “Great Expectations” and Leo Robson’s “The Boys” — show male characters’ discursive encounters with that arena of transparently sublimated male (often Black male) ambition to suggest the characters’ status as spectators.
>Others have dramatized privilege and its discontents through plot. Writing in The Point, the critic Martin Dolan praised Andrew Lipstein’s recent novel “Something Rotten” — about a young, moderately canceled stay-at-home dad’s cosplaying embrace of a more retrograde idea of manhood — as signaling a way “that contemporary novels can think about masculinity: letting it be ugly without reducing that ugliness to the book’s entire point.”
>Novels that honestly explore young straight white men, and their inner and outer conflicts with our era’s changing ideas about masculinity, gender, sex and power, will endure.
>And when they do, it will not be simply because they offer an alternative to the manosphere. “Is the idea that literary novels will save white men from the Tate brothers?” the novelist Sam Lipsyte said in an email. “I’m not sure I see that. Goebbels wrote a novel, you know.”
Marc Tracy is a Times reporter covering arts and culture. He is based in New York.

>>24558430 (OP)
Hmm, seems like the author basically summarizes the debate, then arrives at some inoffensive centrist conclusion:

>In a recent article by Marc Tracy, the literary world is grappling with the perceived decline of the straight white male novelist. This debate was ignited by a polemic from writer Jacob Savage, who argues that these authors are increasingly absent from literary awards and are self-censoring, thus failing to honestly portray their own complex experiences in modern America.
>While some, like novelist Aleksandar Hemon, dismiss these concerns as a product of privilege, others in the literary community acknowledge a real shift. Literary agents suggest this is an overcorrection in the industry, now driven by a demand for marginalized voices and the fact that women are the primary buyers of fiction. The article explores the historical dominance of authors like Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, whose "Great Male Narcissist" personas once defined the American novel, and contrasts them with a more recent, self-aware generation of male writers.
>The discussion also considers whether the novel is the appropriate medium to address the alienation felt by some straight white men, a sentiment that has fueled the rise of the "manosphere." Ultimately, the piece suggests that while the role of the straight white male narrator has become less central, novels that honestly explore contemporary masculinity, power, and gender dynamics will continue to find their place, not necessarily as a corrective to online discourse, but as a nuanced reflection of the times.

>>24558471
it's a chuddy chud world out there

>>24558430 (OP)
Look man we all agree, it’s damn near impossible for a straight white make to be published these days.

What the fuck more can be said about it? Why make this thread over and over? Go write an essay or novel about it.

>>24558471
>>24558444
>>24558436
Those were different articles

>>24558484
>>24558471
>>24558444
>>24558436
new article, new thread

>>24558475
This doesn't seem to adress the claim that not a single white man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker. The notion of the "Great Male Narcissist" becoming less relevant does not explain this. In general, it's funny how these texts pretend to explain a phenomenon while being a performative exemplification of the phenomenon.

>>24558484
>it’s damn near impossible for a straight white make to be published these days
>Go write an essay or novel about it.
But who's gonna publish it?

>>24558499
Figure it out and include it in the essay or novel

>>24558475
Oh man, who could have seen that coming?

>>24558430 (OP)
I don't care about this and I don't know why you faggots care so much. I'm going to read whatever I want to read regardless of what's in the zeitgeist at the moment. I'm going to write whatever I want to see in the world. Your retarded bitching about all this bullshit is pathetic and unseemly. Maybe 10 people in America read, maybe 3 of them read literary fiction, none of this matters

>>24558735
>I don't care about this
>[proceeds to write paragraph long self-righteous sperg about it]
Lol

>needing a literal literary agent
always cracks me up
what a system you guys got

>>24558430 (OP)
>Saul Bellow
>white

>>24558472
>>Novels that honestly explore young straight white men, and their inner and outer conflicts with our era’s changing ideas about masculinity, gender, sex and power, will endure
I would argue these are then not about straight while males but about guys who are questioning their straightness lol

>>24558499
Imperium Press?

>>24558495
>This doesn't seem to adress the claim that not a single white man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker

Is the solution to just straight-up attack the New Yorker on this? If you ginned up an outrage campaign against them, online and offline, they'd at least have to respond, to this very specific fact related to their magazine.

Even if they didn't commit to publishing white men going forward, they'd have to do so in a way that tarred them with insult and notoriety going forward, which would diminish them in the eyes of at least a few of their readers.

Sometimes the solution to a problem is to punch it in the face.

>>24560079
>Is the solution to just straight-up attack the New Yorker on this? If you ginned up an outrage campaign against them, online and offline, they'd at least have to respond, to this very specific fact related to their magazine.
Word for word the response would be “mediocre white men are big mad about (apparently) not being able to write books about themselves. Here’s why that’s okay…”

>>24560054
lmao

Anyone complaining about this thread is a ((())), but at the same time the article is clearly written by a ((())).

Wouldn't stronk black womxn and the like need at least some straight white male authors to rail against? Like even from their perspective it doesn't make sense to just ban the straight white male author from the literary world altogether. The way things are makes stronk black womxn seem like they are shadowboxing with ghosts rather than actually fighting with something that has a real, tangible presence.

The only question that matters is; is the culture producing quality work. Kikes, niggers, trannies and dikes can rule literary society with an iron fist for all I care, as long as good books are coming out.

The problem is not if white males are writing, the problem is, as the original article says and the author here doesn't acknowledge, that niggers, trannies and kikes have presided over the greatest decline in literary quality since the collapse of bronze age.

If you cared about literature you wouldn't be writing about whether your replacements like Donald Trump or Andrew Tate, none of it matters. You have neutered your own institutions in the name of gay American politics. And can barely deem to notice it because it's the politics you really cared about.

When the frat Bros rule the roost you will get to complain about them not having produced a great American novel. Right now it's your people who are in charge. And the rot is plain to see.

>>24560648
shut up you stupid cocksucker

>>24560648
A better question: why don't know the difference between the usage of a semicolon and colon? I assume you took an English class, so this is quite perplexing as to why you'd make such an entry-level mistake.

>>24559136
This

>>24560836
Yeah why do you think we are. This is 4 channel dot org. We uphold spelling standards here?
You made anon sad

>>24560836
>oh shit it looks like u made a typo pal, better luck next time

>>24559110
>long paragraph
>two lines long

>>24560079
That's a fucking cute cat

>>24560836
>>24560970
Even more embarassing for you, replacing the semincolon with a colon would also be an erroneous usage, you whose comment implies your brain is in full-on grammar mode and you're trying your darndest

>>24560381
Have you seen the stuff that the New Yorker publishes? I would guess that on average it's not exactly Shakespeare.

>>24561272
I’m well aware, and yet that’s still exactly the memespeak verbiage they’d dump on the world.

>>24560826
He’s right. Snark won’t get you anywhere in life
>>24560648
Well said

Is this just America or other places as well?

>>24560836
I'm sorry Anon. I will endeavor to reform. Please forgive me.

>>24561518
Thanks.

>>24560648
Sparta's abstention from literary production is a historical reminder that the arts rarely bloom where material surpluses are slim, where social life is drilled into a single utilitarian purpose, and where authorities treat private imagination as an incipient threat. Whenever we do find a burst of literary or artistic innovation, such as Periclean Athens, Abbasid Baghdad, Song-dynasty Kaifeng, Renaissance Florence, Edo-period Kyoto, Elizabethan London, the setting almost always combines a reservoir of disposable wealth, a class that is exempt from subsistence labour, and some degree of intellectual porosity.

Sparta's priorities lay in constant military readiness and the maintenance of a rigid caste hierarchy. That agenda consumed the adult male citizen’s time, restricted commerce, discouraged foreign travel, and treated verbal or visual exuberance as a potential fracture in the civic shield. As a result, literacy remained functional, emptied of the luxury of self-display or speculative thought. The pattern recurs elsewhere. Puritan New England before the eighteenth century, Franco’s Spain at its most insular, or certain twentieth-century revolutionary regimes all show that sustained suspicion of aesthetic excess curtails not only content but the skills, workshops, and audiences that make an artistic ecosystem viable.

Hence the historical lesson: the arts flower when a society can afford leisure and chooses to regard imaginative labor as socially valuable rather than distracting or dangerous. Economic surplus alone is insufficient; the surplus must filter into pockets of discretionary spending, whether through princely patronage, civic festivals, a paying public, or modern grant systems. Political stability must be broad enough to promise that an investment in creative skill will not be wiped out by the next harvest failure or coup. Remove any of those supports, as Sparta effectively did, and cultural production narrows to liturgy, propaganda, or private hobbyism. Provide them, and even a modest polis can leave behind a literary and artistic corpus that outlives its armies.

>>24558499
Ubisoft

>>24561869
Tldr

>>24561869
Dumb, bourgeois take. Tsarist Russia or baroque Spain mogged the Dutch in every conceivable way even though according to your logic the netherlands should have been far superior to both.

>>24561869
I don't think this is true for all writing, religious work for example comes out most prominently in the poverty stricken Middle East, so does political writing. But yes, advanced art requires civilization.
Not just literary. Phidias needed there to be a Parthenon for him to put his work on.

I will say some of the best work comes up when a previously decadent society starts to fall apart. The stranglers of Tarist Russia, Austria-Hungary before and just after the war, Britain after the restoration and then after the second world war , etc.

What you absolutely don't need is equality. You just need a class of people wealthy enough to pursue leisure. Even with the help of slaves.

However being wealthy is clearly not enough. Truth be told most western cultures have money coming out of their ears. There is a kind of Sweet spot between satiation and hunger where the creative drive is strongest.

it seems awfully melodramatic to be complaining about white man's novels while we are about to be replaced by ai, no wonder no ones paying attention to you retards because you still live in a world where antiquity has relevance, where heraclitus and socrates will help us navigate post job society

Isn't everybody abandoning literary fiction, though? Normal People got popular because it has YA tropes. Yellowface got popular because a previously established SFF writer wrote it. The Underground Railroad is an alt history and technically science fiction. When was the last time a literary book with no ties to genre fiction became a big hit that is still remembered 5-10 years later?

>>24563488
there are those gay books

How do you even make young men want to read when it's true, most of them are retards now? Moreover those that lean towards the humanities are either half-gay or some flavor of marxist spastic. I did theatre studies, literature, art in my pre-university years and I was always surrounded by women as a straight man. There was maybe one or two others, and this was ten years ago and I felt like I was of a dying breed. The goofy straight sperg who loves reading, like me, but isn't some effeminate woke retard or can be disconnected from their vidya seems increasingly like a pointless market to chase. If you do, you can bet some frumpy hoe is going to say your book is too male perspective and poison the well of criticism surrounding whatever you put out anyway. It shouldn't stop you but it sure feels like crawling uphill.

>>24563936
Marketing. Same way you get anybody to do anything. If THE BIG THING (TM) is a new series about a protagonist the people will read it. But THE THING (TM) also needs to not be gay, preachy or effeminate.

The problem is in every form of media nothing is uncompromising in targeting straight men (particularly straight white men in America). It always has to make concessions to appeal to women or gay people or blah blah blah. Women’s smut doesn’t do this, and so it does extremely well with it’s target demo - sex deprived single women and middle aged regret filled married women who dream of hopping back on the cock carousel.

If men’s products didn’t have to appeal to women or fags it would do much better. This obsession with men’s media needing to hit with other demographics has destroyed multiple industries.

>>24564323
*If THE BIG THING (TM) is a new series about a straight masculine protagonist the people will read it

>>24563936
Are they retards or do gatekeepers try to make books as unattractive for them as possible?

I remember some time ago looking at book prizes. I can't remember if the article was on the NYT or the Guardian.
The books were about "some transexual from Puerto Rican diaspora", "a gender queer Eritrean facing discrimination in New York" and the likes. As an old pro-wrestler used to say "this doesn't work for me, brother". Which make me decide to read old ass books by 19th century Russian men instead.

People criticize Brandon Sanderson but at least he doesn't set up to make his books as unattractive to normal men as possible.

And this kind of ideology is even affecting Western videogames today. Which is why Asian games like Genshin Impact have a revenue above 1 billion per year and 300mi individual players while Western games are struggling unless they come from a popular franchise.

>>24564406
>trans pipeline anime games are totally different from lgbt slop
i don't think so. the reason genshin impact makes so much money is because it's legalized gambling that targets underage gamers.

>The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took action against HoYoverse, alleging that the company's loot box system was deceptive, particularly to minors. The FTC claimed that Genshin Impact deceived children, teens, and other players into spending hundreds of dollars on prizes they stood little chance of winning. As a result, HoYoverse agreed to a $20 million settlement with the FTC, which includes a ban on selling loot boxes to teens under 16 without parental consent.

>>24564419
This decision was extremely stupid for anyone who has some knowledge of gacha gaming. And was mostly caused by the American-China trade war.
Regardless of that, there are other Asian games who had tons of success with the advanced strategy of not going out of their way to be hideous for straight male players.


Also, would you disagree with the main point that in literature they try to make books as awful as possible for normal men?

>>24564454
>not going out of their way to be hideous for straight male players
by filling it with anime tits and ass? ok so how will u apply that strategy to your novel then?

>>24558430 (OP)
Straight white men are still being published beyond the borders of anglostan.

>>24563488
>Yellowface got popular
Its "popularity" only existed in advertisements, marketing, and award ceremonies. Notice how no one's talking about it now.

>>24564471
Genshin is usually tame in terms of fanservice and so is Wukong who was a fairly successful game.
I'm talking about not going out of your way to make the games extremely toxic to normal males.

What would interest a normal male reader better? A book about the life of a 12th century French Knight who goes to a Crusade or a misery drama about a genderfluid (XY chromosomes) Haitian immigrant who works as a prostitute and gets AIDS?

>>24564517
too be far i haven't played a triple a game in years i think fallout 3 or skyrim was the last one oh i guess borderlands 3, but the last time i played an anime game was like ff7 in 1998 or something.

>>24564534
The last few years, Western games are being made to be as repulsive to normal straight males as possible. Ugly female characters, "check your privilege", etc. Some people in the industry make sure to say how they loathe gamers and wish they died. As a result, Western AAA games (not from franchises that will sell well regardless of the crap they release) are failing and companies are doing mass layoffs.

The way I see it, the publishing industry is not very different in what they choose to publish and market.
Are the gatekeepers looking for authors who write books that are good and who will be interesting to normal men. Or are they trying to own the chuds?

>>24564406
The gatekeepers are there surely, but just like you did and I do, you can find avenues around it. Even just pulpy crime books or smaller authors. The hard horrible truth is that white straight men just aren't buying this anymore. If we did, it would change overnight. I've often thought about how a new upcoming white male author could help to flip that script without being dogpiled by frumpy female publishers.

>>24564588
>If we did, it would change overnight
Straight males play games and publishers try to make games unappealing for them, to own the chuds. I can't see things going differently here.

Also, Houellebecq is commercially successful as far as I know. Why aren't publishers trying to find the American Houellebecq?

>>24564596
straight males play madden, they don't play shit with wizards and ninjas and other dorkbait

>>24564635
The biggest market for console/PC "wizards, ninjas and other dork bait" games is "straight males". Women prefer other types of games.
Wukong last year sold 25 million copies. Elden Ring sold 30 million copies.

>>24564654
>furry game sold well
not sure that's helping ur argument tho

>>24558484
>>>24558430 (OP) (OP)
>Look man we all agree, it’s damn near impossible for a straight white make to be published these days.
>What the fuck more can be said about it? Why make this thread over and over? Go write an essay or novel about it.
>
Honestly, if the straight male writer trusts his editing and proofing and sequencing? There is just plopping it on KDP. Then, the book? Its at least published.
>
The issue then , is getting that... presence. Real publishers have some way of advertising and pushing a book. That, is what's key! And 4-chins should be smart enough to come up with a way. Its just information, it needs to get out.
>
getting self published is easy, its that web presence that you want the publishing company for,

>>24561869
>the arts rarely bloom where material surpluses are slim, where social life is drilled into a single utilitarian purpose, and where authorities treat private imagination as an incipient threat.
Nice description of the Soviet Union. Yet it gave us Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Gorky, Solzhenitsyn, Alexander Zinoviev, Yevtushenko in literature, Shostakovich and Prokofiev in music. One could go on. But just as no white man has published literary fiction in the New Yorker since 1984, no kulak published a work of literary fiction in the Soviet Union, period. Sometimes its not grand historical trends, its simple straight-up exclusion.

>>24560079
>Sometimes the solution to a problem is to punch it in the face.
Spoken like a real man! Go, bro!

>>24558430 (OP)
Let's look at this from another angle. When was the last time Straight White Males ruled in American Literature? I would argue, in the 30s and 40s, the age of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Chandler, Dos Passos. Not a Jew in the bunch. Then, in the 50s, there's an explosion of Jewish talent: Roth, Mailer, Bellow, Cozzens, etc--Updike is the one WASP outlier. After Jewish ascendance comes female domination and POC affirmative action. A paranoiac antisemite--not that we would ever see such a nasty type on 4chan--could argue that the need for Jewish writers/critics/publishers to prioritize Jews led to the slow and not-so-slow expulsion of straight white male Gentile writers. Since Jews couldn't fill up all the slots, places were set aside for other natural opponents of straight white males, ie feminists, gays, POC. What we have now is the consummation of that trend.
Plausible scenario?

>>24564596
>Houellebecq is commercially successful as far as I know. Why aren't publishers trying to find the American Houellebecq?
Why did Bud Light commit suicide, and why is Jaguar following suit? Because ideologues in power follow the ideology, even if it takes them over a cliff.

>>24566238
The USSR produced lots of great writers in spite of itself. Most of them struggled with the authorities constantly and lived miserable lives. Mayakovsky an heroed, Mandelstam died in a gulag, Bulgakov drank himself to death, etc because higher powers deemed their work dangerous to the progress of humanity.

>>24566289
>Pynchon
>Cheever
>Delillo
>McCarthy
>DFW
>Vonnegut
>Gaddis
>Keroauc
What about these fuckers?

>>24566422
>What about these fuckers?
Top-flight writers, but I wrote, "Since Jews couldn't fill up all the slots, places were set aside for other natural opponents of straight white males," and of the list, Kerouac and Cheever were bisexual, and none of the writers could be described as Christian the way an Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene could.
As with alll things Jewish, there is a certain ambiguity. I wouldn't argue that the door was slammed tight against straight white (Christian) males after Jewish ascendance in the Fifties. Some got through, though I can't think of even one major straight male Christian writer (for sure an anomaly in Western culture since Constantine). But fewer and fewer till now there are basically none.
You don't have to be Jewish to get published (though I expect it helps); but it also helps to be secular;/leftist in ways that provide no opposition to Jews and foster a multicultural stance in which Jews are welcome but don't stick out. I don't call this a conspiracy; it's a kind of 'feel' that some writers belong to 'our crowd' and others don't. Sontag and Bloon, absolutely. Pound? Into the lunatic asylum.

>>24566345
>The USSR produced lots of great writers in spite of itself. Most of them struggled with the authorities constantly and lived miserable lives. Mayakovsky an heroed, Mandelstam died in a gulag, Bulgakov drank himself to death, etc because higher powers deemed their work dangerous to the progress of humanity.
True, but it doesn't change the main point: "The USSR produced lots of great writers." You don't have to have ideal social conditions to produce enduring work. Hard times can help. Soft times, which is what we have now, boil the frog.

>>24566289
>the need for Jewish writers/critics/publishers to prioritize Jews led to the slow and not-so-slow expulsion of straight white male Gentile writers. Since Jews couldn't fill up all the slots, places were set aside for other3
This is the key point. Including more of some means excluding others, and when people of a certain category are in charge of publishing, or make up the bulk of agents, readers, reviewers, they select people like themselves. When 80% of literary agents are women, they publish women. It's not a conspiracy so much as natural predisposition. Unfortunately that means that Faulkner with his corncob or Hemingway with his toreador's cape don't get published, and we're the poorer for it.

>>24564534
Lmao you have no idea how bad it has gotten.

My ideal straight-white-guy game is thief gold btw, I don't care about Tits or ass. But other anon is right, everything except CoD (and desu even that has some signs of it) is packed with derivative inclusivity shit.

I don't even mind female leads or brown people or gays if a really compelling story is the focus. But it never is, it's all muh queer rights battle against oppressor or some super thinly-veiled version thereof. "Lets make all the male characters obviously flawed babies and all the [identity] characters fucking cool and awesome." It's a reflection of the writers' disdain for straight white guys, from years of media insisting we're the villains of history and the present day.

lol

>>24558430 (OP)
They just haven’t read Corndog zen yet