As good as it gets

When you work in a clerical field - a field where, at best, you do problem-solving in an office - you run into misfits. One such strain of misfit is the Gamma Male. He's the guy in the (sexual) hierarchy who finds his niche as the sensitive man who is some (stupid) woman's platonic BFF. His mating strategy is to wear her down.

If you own a Y chromosome, you don't want to drift into Gamma. Smart women see through the Gamma and hate him. The younger Gamma will graduate to a full-on bullshit artist, who gets fired a lot. Or he will wax embittered with women and give up: these are the Omegas to the extent they're still on the scale, or are just shut-ins like Jack Nicholson's author in As Good As It Gets. To the extent Gammas are prey, many younger Gammas are targets of male preeverts in their early teens - of these, many Come Out later in life, wherefrom is no going back in.

Anyway, Vox Day - who has done more than anyone to identify the Gamma pattern - has turned to the fiction enamoured by these pathetic creatures. VD quotes a correspondent calling out Ernest Cline's Ready Player One to which he calls out Patrick Rothfuss's Name of the Wind himself. I've not read the former but did see the movie; I tried to read Rothfuss but couldn't finish, since the protagonist disgusted me. Obviously I concur with the Vox Populi analysis.

As Good As It Gets had its author whose best sellers feature a female protagonist. The female fans of said books saw them as understanding the female psyche in a way most male authors (and many females) didn't. In the movie, one fan-ette confronted Nicholson and asked how he did this sorcery. Nicholson - having a bad day - angrily retorted that "I take a man and remove reason and responsibility". In an otherwise liberal movie NOT siding with Nicholson, this quote is the only quote its viewers remember today. On 4chan, a.k.a. Omegas Anonymous, the quote crops up almost daily.

I posit that that's because Nicholson was right - about flawed female protagonists. At least, flawed in those ways which damaged men can understand: weak, emotional, vengeful, all the other defects which women and men must overcome in life.

And I posit that Nicholson's author is Rothfuss and Cline after they'd turned their eye upon their own past behaviour and reskinned their characters as females. Which Rothfuss and Cline themselves have not done, to my knowledge. Hey, they got paid, right?

As for Rothfuss and Cline, a healthy fiction readership would never accept them. What sales they have rung up come at the expense of emotionally-stunted misfits in the fandom - seeking escape. The verbal-SAT set know this, and know how to twist the knife. This is how "toxic fandom" has become such a theme, when verbal-SAT sets out to manipulate the wider populace. If you meet a fan of Rothfuss and/or Cline, you know not to trust him, like you wouldn't trust a porn addict. And if there are many of these fans, they witness only to that much spread of their mental disease.

My advice to the Gamma seeking a writing career is to start by writing an Omega character, and move on to an unsympathetic female. Open that vein. Then work with humble characters in a sensawunda setting. In shâ'llâh you'll grow out of Gamma. My advice to publishers is to pass that advice on to their writers. Failing that, my advice to readers is to boycott Gamma-enabling publishers. We can start with Tor.