Are there examples of “viral fiction” besides that one cat-person short story?
Does virality meaningfully apply to fiction, as in rapid contagion (seems to me in general, fiction gets popular in a more slow-burn way based on people actually thinking before sharing/talking)
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On supply side, there’s a certain “feel” to the writing when you sense viral potential developing. You get a bit high on cooking fumes while writing, so to speak. It feels like getting up to mischief rather than solemnly practicing a craft. Never felt this while trying fiction.
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Fiction or nonfiction, you can always tell when the writer got high on the cooking fumes while writing. The text becomes visibly unbridled in its flow. Viral inside precedes viral outside. With fiction you see the signs sometimes with high-output genre writers.
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Hmm. Now that I think about it, Cat Person was not so much viral as click-baity. It seemed to cynically push buttons of the sort that go into r/relationships or r/amitheasshole or letter-to-penthouse in another era. 🤔 twitter.com/Brett_Fujioka/
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I did not think it was a great story, either in form or context, but the brilliant innovation was to present a story that many women could share real-life versions of. It was more a really long Twitter prompt tapping into me-too than a story. “I’ll go first...” implied.
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I’m wary of conflating traditional popularity with virality. Viral things have an aspect of thoughtless transmission because people want to talk about it based on minimal viable engagement more than they actually want to read it.
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Replying to @vgr
would harry potter &/ hunger games count? game of thrones perhaps (tv shows are much more likely to go viral than books, which was my first interpretation of your tweet)
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I enjoyed Harry Potter enough to reread the whole series a couple of times and rewatched the movies too. That’s intrinsic popularity. Cat Person... I barely fast-read once and only to join the take party. Not for the intrinsic pleasure of it. Zero desire to reread.
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Notably I’ve never wanted to join Harry-Potter-social-media or write fanfic. Reading it was enough. I drop references to it only because it’s a convenient source of shared references.
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I hadn’t read this. If 2 stories make a genre, I guess we have one now. This and Cat Person are both the same kind of story, where the focal figure is a collage of MRAish tropes. It’s a bit like serial killer fiction.
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Replying to @vgr
I got a similar vibe from The Feminist. Though I’m not sure how popular it was relative to Cat Person. nplusonemag.com/issue-35/ficti
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The MRAish characters in the 2 stories are different flavors (PUA-ish vs woke-guy-incel-ish) but similar in having the same apparent life mission of “solving” women, being humorless about it, and having no other discernible life interests. Caricatures but close to real types.
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Hmm. Wonder if the formula generalizes: take a one-dimensional collage of online tropes and view their outer or inner lives from a sort of ordinary and mediocre unsympathetic perspective that doesn’t attempt explanation or theory. Could you do this to say a qanon character?
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Something unsatisfying about fiction based on basically unflattening what seem like flattened online personas. Both male characters in the 2 stories are recognizable from their online behaviors. The meatspace part is the fictional invention.
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This feels at least partly like “meatspace fiction” by very online people.
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🤔 Hmm the original short story in this case topped paid ebook charts, which seems more like a traditional success. I’m not sure virality can be judged for paywalled things.



