I've been a passive lurker on here for a long time and I feel like the quality of posts on this subreddit have gone downhill.
Half of anything that trends are people piling on popular series and denigrating their audience. Why yes, you're so enlightened, you're the only one who thinks Dungeon Crawler Crawl is overrated. Romantasy is "junk," I've never heard that one before. DAE think Ready Player One sucks? Wow, we have to get the New York Times on this, they'll never believe it. Imagine having so much misplaced pride in your own intellectualism and taste in books and being utterly unable to use Google Search. It ain't hard my brothers and sisters.
Reading Discworld instead of whatever popular trending piece of "#BookTok" doesn't make you a smarter or better person. Reading good books doesn't make you a more worthy person, and reading "bad" books doesn't decrease your value as a person either.
I think it's just sad to see people denigrating people who are into books they deem unworthy. So few read these days, any books that get people into the ecosystem are objectively a good thing. I'm a lifelong reader but I know so many people who got back into reading because of something they saw in the romantasy section of B&N, or because of books like Project Hail Mary or DCC. Not all of those people will "graduate" into reading more heady material, but some surely will. And even for those who don't, reading is good for you no matter what you're reading. That is an objective truth.
I imagine it's upsetting being one of these new fans going on here and seeing people call them idiots, imply that they can't read, or that they're troglodytes just for liking something low brow. I can see this push new readers away, after all why would you want to join a community that calls you a moron just for liking something? At best it will push people away from book-reading communities, at worst it may push them away from continuing to read altogether. And that's a very bad thing.
I just think this is an incredibly toxic way to approach discussion, and I've seen it become more and more prevalent recently. It doesn't do you or new readers any favors. Sometimes books are not for you, that is OK. Sometimes those books are not very well written by your standards, that is also OK. Saying that no one above a 6th grade reading level is into those books is not OK.
Edit: Predictably many of you are missing the forest for the trees and implying that my point was that these books are somehow above criticism. Let me put it in bold. There is nothing wrong with criticism. There is something wrong when that criticism becomes a statement on the fanbase and not the work itself. Have fun with the strawman arguments, folks. I won't be responding to them.
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