I just got linked to an article about why gatekeeping is necessary for subcultures

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Pervocracy has written about guys who think women don’t want sex, and who talk about all the ways to get sex out of women, and who have no idea about all of the women who’re openly seeking sex. The article’s author is like the folks strategizing how to get sex without being shackled to women’s will. Archive of Our Own is like the folks actually having mutually enjoyable sex. (No Mutants Allowed are the incels here.)

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Okay, so there’s this old video called Nerf Gun Control:

Watch on YouTube

The joke is that all of the bad arguments for not taking away the nerf gun are also bad arguments for not taking away real guns, because arguments against gun control are all bad, hardy har har. But one of the arguments is that the problem isn’t the nerf gun, the problem is that this one employee is an obnoxious twit. Without the gun, he’ll just find some other way to be annoying. And I’m like, “Hold up! You can’t just skip past that like it’s not a valid argument!”

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I didn't much like A Prayer for Owen Meany, but I just realized something that makes me respect it a bit more,

There's a kind of fantasy story where there's a hero figure who does all the things a hero does, except they're not automatically presented as good things. The hero kills monsters, so this hero figure kills anything monstrous, even if it's not actually evil. The hero marries the princess, so this hero claims the princess for himself, even if she wants nothing to do with him. The Brightest Shadow, The Long Look, and Beast: The Primordial all fit into this in one way or another.

There was a post recently about a woman who burned to death. The post was about the miraculous survival of the woman's Bible. The woman's death was treated as irrelevant by comparison--it was simply God's will. When you take that kind of story, where God's arbitrary will brings salvation or suffering, and you strip out the assumption that this is good and not horrifying, that's how you write A Prayer for Owen Meany.