/lit/ - Literature

>>9029887
>I guess I just don't see as being quite as destructive as the European or American forms.
I feel that's precisely the reason why it could be even more dangerous. China and America have had decades of criticism on their forms of government, but India? Nobody believes it even has government. Imagine if one of the centers of civilization turned itself on its head seemingly over-night, a sort of Trump situation on a whole nother scale. Imagine the world going out with whimper, but a Bollywood dance.

>Did you watch the Harris/Peterson podcast?
I sadly haven't found the time nor the will.

>I was actually just wondering why Japanese cyberpunk is weirdly more optimistic
Japan has no imperative to update (i.e. still using fax) and has a different relation to the Other vis-a-vis Shinto, so questions of humanity becoming outdated or subjugated simply aren't there. Compare Cthulhu to Godzilla. On that vein, compare the pairs Superman/Batman to Ultraman/Kamen Rider; the one side of the pair are "savior" types, the other are more tragic "hero" types, society is intrinsically good vs. intrisically bad; but while Superman isn't popular nowadays, Ultraman remains respected. Note that the second element in both cases has an aspect of horror: you actually find strands of a type of "romanticism" everywhere in Japanese media, but they're very often modern and Western influenced (the opposite to Western romanticism). I could go on about this, but it's also interesting to note the villain in Rider is pretty much a cosmic horror, while in Ultraman the *hero* is a cosmic horror. It seems distrust for technology and the state stopped on the 70s in Japan. It's funny the examples of technophobia and horror in Japanese vidya all seem Western influenced (MGS, Silent Hill, Resident Evil all influenced by cinema). I wonder how the Japanese have reacted to I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream.

On the point of media and Japan, and to come back to my body point: It's interesting that the most radical genre for the West is nothing but the SoL. Mundanity is aesthetically pleasing nowadays; will high brow literature shift to more speculative fiction? I think nostalgia is very related here: The reason Stranger Things became popular didn't have anything to do with its speculative aspects, which were tried and true but not fresh, but because it was the experience of "being a kid in the 80s". Its appeal is very SoL.

>>9029737
The past is retroactive. There is no past, and since there isn't a past, the past is also present. The past is in a state of constant birth: about looking for what was, is, and will be born. Likewise, the future is a state of constant death: about looking what did, does and will die.