This Unhinged Attack Piece By a Bitter Media Loser on a Science Fiction Writer For Being a Mormon Illustrates Why People Hate the Filthy Degenerates of "Journalism"

Do you know who Brandon Sanderson is?

He is currently the best-selling fantasy author on the face of the earth. He's alarmingly prolific; he writes like three novels per year, all over 130,000 words. I think I read that during the pandemic, when people really needed stuff to read, he made $55 million in one year, as far as gross revenues. (Which is not the same as personal income to himself.)

I'm neither a fan nor a critic; I've never read him. My only encounter with Sanderson is that this past week, while out for a run/walk, I listened to him give a class about worldbuilding in fantasy/sci-fi fiction.

I guess listening to that prompted YouTube to think I was a super-fan, because it then recommended a video about an absolutely toxic, hateful hit-piece that Wired just ran on Sanderson.

The hit-piece attacks him over the pettiest of things: He's boring when he speaks, and doesn't leave the nasty article-scribbler any good quotes. He doesn't dress well. His wife is boring. He's an observant Mormon, which is something the hateful pillowbiter keeps coming back to

And he complains bitterly that Sanderson is making so, so much money.

A friend of mine is very #Based, but he frequently hangs out with old friend I've lost touch with. They're neoliberals -- shitlibs. And my friend complains to me: "They all say they're good little socialists and want to do nothing but to improve the lot of the Poor Black Man in America, but all they ever talk about is money, unceasingly, and how it's a cosmic injustice they're not making more of it and how it's even worse that everyone who is stupider than they are -- and according to them, everyone in the world is stupider than they are -- is making more money than them.

Keep my friend's observation about shitlibs in mind if you read this hit-piece. The writer claims to be a "poet" of some low stature; I can only imagine how little money he makes, and how much it burns his soul that this boring, unfashionable God-fearing Mormon is making so much of it.

All shitlibs do, as Ethan Van Sciver termed it, is to "count other people's money."

Here's the headline and subhed:

Brandon Sanderson Is Your God

He's the biggest fantasy writer in the world. He's also very Mormon. These things are profoundly related.

What?

Most years, Brandon Sanderson makes about $10 million. Last year, he made $55 million. This is obviously a lot of money for anyone. For a writer of young-adult-ish, never-ending, speed-written fantasy books, it's huge. By Sanderson's estimation, he's the highest-selling author of epic fantasy in the world. On the day of his record-breaking Kickstarter campaign--$42 million of that $55 million--I came to the WIRED offices ready to gossip. How'd he do it? Why now? Is Brandon Sanderson even a good writer?

Nobody had the first clue who or what I was talking about.

On the one hand, who cares. Sanderson has millions upon millions of fans all over the planet; it doesn't matter that some losers at a single magazine (even if it is one of the nerdier ones) had never heard of him. On the other, the ignorance goes far beyond WIRED. As far as I can tell, Sanderson, who has been topping bestseller lists for the better part of the 21st century, has not been written about in any depth by any major publication ever. I called his publicist to confirm this. "Well, we have a piece coming up in LDS Living," he told me. That's LDS as in Latter-day Saints. It's a magazine for Mormons.

Which makes sense: Sanderson is extremely Mormon. What makes less sense is why there's a hole the size of Utah where the man's literary reputation should be. Is it because he mostly writes fantasy, a -- so the snobs sneer -- "subliterary" genre? But then, so do J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, and George R. R. Martin, and they're household names. Is it because none of Sanderson's work has been adapted for the screen? Well, he wrote three of the Wheel of Time books, and an adaptation of that series came out on Amazon Prime in 2021. Could it be, finally, because he's a weirdo Mormon? But so are Orson Scott Card (Ender's Game), Glen A. Larson (the original Battlestar Galactica), and Stephenie Meyer (Twilight). Mormon, I mean. Only Orson Scott Card is also a weirdo.

I don't know about you guys, but I'm learning so much about tolerance for diversity from embittered hate-filled loser shitlibs!

Sanderson, when I eventually meet him in person, makes versions of these excuses, plus others, for his writerly obscurity. It's kind of fun to talk about, until it isn't, and that's when I realize, in a panic, that I now have a problem. Sanderson is excited to talk about his reputation. He's excited, really, to talk about anything. But none of his self-analysis is, for my purposes, exciting. In fact, at that first dinner, over flopsy Utah Chinese--this being days before I'd meet his extended family, and attend his fan convention, and take his son to a theme park, and cry in his basement -- I find Sanderson depressingly, story-killingly lame.

I only have one question: What are your pronouns?!?!

Here's another cringily self-revealing passage:

He sits across from me in an empty restaurant, kind of lordly and sure of his insights, in a graphic T-shirt and ill-fitting blazer, which he says he wears because it makes him look professorial. It doesn't. He isn't. Unless the word means only: believing everything you say is worth saying. Sanderson talks a lot, but almost none of it is usable, quotable. I begin to think, This is what I drove all the way from San Francisco to the suburbs of Salt Lake City in the freezing-cold dead of winter for? For previously frozen dim sum and freeze-dried conversation? This must be why nobody writes about Brandon Sanderson.

So, recklessly, I say what's on my mind. I have to. His wife is there, his biggest fan, always his first reader, making polite comments. I don't care. Maybe nobody writes about you, I say to Sanderson, because you don't write very well.

I think this passage explain the hatred:

It's not that Brandon Sanderson can't write. It's more that he can't not write. Graphomania is the name of the condition: the constant compulsion to get words out, down, as much and as quickly as possible. The concept of a vacation confuses Sanderson, he once said, because for him the perfect vacation is more time to write -- vocation as vacation. His schedule is budgeted down to the minute, months out, to maximize the time he spends, rather counter-ergonomically, on the couch, typing away. Most days, he wakes up at 1 pm, exercises, and writes for four hours. Break for the wife and kids. Then he writes for four more. After that he plays video games or whatever until 5 am. A powerful sleeping pill is all that works, finally, to get him, and the voices in his head, to shut up.

In the five months or so it has taken me to sit down and write this magazine story, which is 4,000 words long, Sanderson has published two books. During the Covid lockdowns, he wrote and/or edited seven: two for his regular publisher, a graphic novel, and four more in secret, telling no one but his wife until he surprise-announced a Kickstarter in March 2022 to crowdfund their publication. (Hence the $42 mil, raised in a month, by far the most successful Kickstarter ever.) Since his debut, Elantris, in 2005, Sanderson has published 30-plus books, the biggest ones in excess of 400,000 words; there are far more if you count the novellas and graphic novels and stuff for kids.

This jerkoff complains that it took him five months to write this high-school-girl slambook of an article, and complains that while he was procrastinating and not working for five months, Sanderson published not one but two new novels.

So I think you can see the reason for the unjustified hatred. You probably won't be surprised to hear that Jason Kehe has no works listed on Amazon.

Below, a video from what I imagine is a nonpolitical normie who is probably "liberal" in the normal unexamined-life sort of way, reacting to this "unhinged" hit-piece.

I say he must be a "nonopolitical normie" because he's shocked to see this level of unreasoning hatred issuing from a "real media" outlet like Wired.

LOL.

So I don't think he knows that this is all the shitlib media does -- attack people, throw around slanders, and bitterly count other people's money.

He keeps saying "this article can't be real" and "when I read this article, I was sure it was some kind of joke."

Welcome to the real world, buddy.

This is all the media is. It's all it ever has been. Like the Democrat Party itself, the media is just cheap vengeance for measly souls. The media is just a weapon of revenge of the weak upon the strong, the stupid upon the wise, the ugly upon the beautiful, the bitter upon the contented, and the deservedly-poor upon the deservedly-well-off.

Here's another reaction, this one by someone who is hipper to what the "mainstream media" really is. He thinks the hatred is about Kickstarter -- Sanderson made a mint by pre-selling his books on Kickstarter -- and how talented people are now able to re-route around the traditional cultural gatekeepers and make tons of money even if the untalented shitlibs occupying positions of power in legacy cultural institutions would prefer to reject you.

Try writing more than one article in five months, "poet." Perhaps you'll give yourself something to do besides bitterly counting other people's money.

Sanderson responded... graciously.

But then again, the victor can afford to treat the bitter losers with grace.

Not sure how, or if, I should respond to the Wired article. I get that Jason, in writing it, felt incredibly conflicted about the fact that he finds me lame and boring. I'm baffled how he seemed to find every single person on his trip -- my friends, my family, my fans -- to be worthy of derision.

Bear in mind, Sanderson welcome this dickhole into his home and his life for an extended period of time. He introduced him to his family, took him to a convention with him, etc.

But he also feels sincere in his attempt to try to understand. While he legitimately seems to dislike me and my writing, I don't think that's why he came to see me. He wasn't looking for a hit piece -- he was looking to explore the world through his writing. In that, he and I are the same, and I respect him for it, even if much of his tone seems quite dismissive of many people and ideas I care deeply about.

He came to write a hit-piece. Stop being such a pussy.

The strangest part for me is how Jason says he had trouble finding the real me. He says he wants something true or genuine. But he had the genuine me all that time. He really did. What I said, apparently, wasn't anything he found useful for writing an article. That doesn't make it not genuine or true.

Because he wanted to write a hit-piece and you didn't give him something juicy to attack you with, so he had to just keep calling you boring and your life unfashionable and attack your religion.

I am not offended that the true me bores him. Honestly, I'm a guy who enjoys his job, loves his family, and is a little obsessive about his stories.

The majority of writers are boring, relatively. They're not musicians. They're not even painters. It's the most stolidly middle-class of all the arts.

This "Jason" must not know many actual writers. Probably just a lot of very dramatic antifa couch-surfers who talk about writing.

There's no hidden trauma. No skeletons in my closet. Just a guy trying to understand the world through story. That IS kind of boring, from an outsider's perspective. I can see how it is difficult to write an article about me for that reason.

But at the same time, I'm worried about the way he treats our entire community. I understand that he didn't just talk about me, but about you. As has been happening to fantasy fans for years, the general attitude of anyone writing about us is that we should be ashamed for enjoying what we enjoy. In that, the tone feels like it was written during the 80s. "Look at these silly nerds, liking things! How dare they like things! Don't they know the thing they like is dumb?"

As a community, let's take a deep breath. It's all right. I appreciate you standing up for me, but please leave Jason alone. This might feel like an attack on us, on you, but it's not. Jason wrote what he felt he needed -- and as a writer, he is my colleague. Please show him respect. He should not be attacked for sharing his feelings. If we attack people for doing so, we make the world a worse place, because fewer people will be willing to be their authentic selves.

So Sanderson sounds a little thrown, but all in all, he's taking things in stride, which is on brand. He assures his fans that, to him, none of them are "boring or lame" and ends with one last plea for civility:

I do want to make it clear, again that I bear Jason no ill will. I like him. Please leave him alone. He seems to be a sincere man who tried very hard to find a story, discovered that there wasn't one that interested him, then floundered in trying to figure out what he could say to make deadline.

Uh, he said it took him five months to write this. I don't think he made his deadline.

I respect him for trying his best to write what he obviously found a difficult article.

He's a person, remember, just like each of us.

Not like me.

posted by Ace at 04:10 PM

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