Ruby Granger #26 Ruby Granger is a bad writer

[opal73]

So Ruby doesn't like reading and won't sit to watch a series, what does she legitimately like doing? Playing pretend and making busywork for herself to make others think she's studious?

Wonder if any content will come out of her experiences. It might at least be more interesting than another dissertation/planning vlog or pointless routine.

 

[gossip_guy]

Not quite sure how Ruby is able to declare if the show is "honestly groundbreaking" or not when she's watched like 3 TV shows in her life and won't have any knowledge or point of comparison.

"A PR rep told me this was JANUINELY SYO SYO GROUNDBREAKING!"

 

[xoxoxo13]

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Not quite sure how Ruby is able to declare if the show is "honestly groundbreaking" or not when she's watched like 3 TV shows in her life and won't have any knowledge or point of comparison.

"A PR rep told me this was JANUINELY SYO SYO GROUNDBREAKING!"

isn't this a YA romance book about a gay couple? reviewes by the same roobs who skips romance books with straight couples and any mention of YA?

 

[oliviasday]

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Not quite sure how Ruby is able to declare if the show is "honestly groundbreaking" or not when she's watched like 3 TV shows in her life and won't have any knowledge or point of comparison.

"A PR rep told me this was JANUINELY SYO SYO GROUNDBREAKING!"

A mlm romance about two teenage boys? Wow, SOO groundbreaking… I‘m sure it‘s good, but it doesn‘t sound that special to me, an LGBT person who actually watches LGBT content.

 

[bratzsmack]

I can't get over how in her Deadline Season video, at the end she says "...and to subsidise that, I'm going to set some timers on my phone..."

The word subsidise makes absolutely no sense in this context, what the actual duck goes through her head when she throws these words out

 

[Ilaariaa]

I can't get over how in her Deadline Season video, at the end she says "...and to subsidise that, I'm going to set some timers on my phone..."

The word subsidise makes absolutely no sense in this context, what the actual duck goes through her head when she throws these words out

I'm dying omg
In a corporate environment or any kind of adult workplace she'd be the entire company's laughing stock

 

[Just here to say]

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"such an honest, authentic..." I guess Ruby just doesn't know the meaning of those words so uses them in a strange context???

 

[Magpie02]

She sounds like she's throwing darts at a thesaurus.

 

[figgypud]

Don't get me wrong, I think Heartstopper is a great series for LGBT+ teens. If I'd had that series when I was younger, I would have felt very happy to see myself represented. But it's not groundbreaking.

I do find it interesting how Ruby only seems to engage with queer romance - specifically gay male romance, thinking of how much she raved about Call Me By Your Name. But is that performative because she feels like she can't criticise queer romance in the same way she can heterosexual romances?

 

[gisellejoly]

Don't get me wrong, I think Heartstopper is a great series for LGBT+ teens. If I'd had that series when I was younger, I would have felt very happy to see myself represented. But it's not groundbreaking.

I do find it interesting how Ruby only seems to engage with queer romance - specifically gay male romance, thinking of how much she raved about Call Me By Your Name. But is that performative because she feels like she can't criticise queer romance in the same way she can heterosexual romances?

It’s probably not performative. I am making assumptions here but I think she’s uncomfortable around the idea of dating and romance. I also went to a girls school like Ruby and if you’re not sociable outside of school it can lead to you growing up unable to relate to or befriend men, perhaps even a little threatened by them. (Not saying Ruby’s attracted to men though, she could not be!) Romance novels about women or straight relationships might make Ruby uncomfortable and make her question her own feelings and aware of her own inexperience.

As she’s not a man, gay romance novels are unrelatable to her life, it’s basically like a fantasy. She can allow herself to talk about it without any of these expectations or attracting any questions about her own love life. Gay romance is really popular among a lot of teenage girls for this reason.

 

[gossip_guy]

Don't get me wrong, I think Heartstopper is a great series for LGBT+ teens. If I'd had that series when I was younger, I would have felt very happy to see myself represented. But it's not groundbreaking.

I do find it interesting how Ruby only seems to engage with queer romance - specifically gay male romance, thinking of how much she raved about Call Me By Your Name. But is that performative because she feels like she can't criticise queer romance in the same way she can heterosexual romances?

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to checking out the series, and I'm always glad to see more books and TV shows for diverse audiences being released. But...Love Victor had gay romance front and centre in a teen coming-of-age series for a streaming series two years ago. Queer as Folk was doing this stuff decades ago. Everything it's doing has been done before. I'm sure it's good, but it's by no means groundbreaking.

Of course, Ruby wouldn't know that because she never watches TV. I'm also not quite sure how she’d know what an authentic portrayal of a diverse group of LGBT+ people is, having never socialised with anyone who's not a straight white cis woman from a privileged background.

I think Call Me By Your Name was Ruby transparently trying to chase the popular opinion. She never read it, as evidenced by her hilariously vague word soup review. She just pretended to read it at a time when CMBYN was being discussed all over the place and Timothee Chalamet stanning was at an all-time high (she also mentioned him quite a lot around that time, too). The content was irrelevant to her. She just saw a book being talked about by everyone and as a supposed bookworm, wanted to be part of the crowd.

She did similar things with Song of Achilles and historical fiction, and kept featuring it in stories and posts all over because she realised that featuring an at-the-time very popular book/genre was getting her a tonne of likes. Of course, there was nowhere to go with that because she couldn't discuss a book she'd never read and never intended to.

And I think the only reason she's talking about Heartstopper is because she got an ad deal for it as part of Sixteenth's Netflix deal. If there were a big show about lesbian teens being released on Friday that she got invited to a screening for, she's be raving about that, too. If it was a show about talking animals, robot vampires, or teens with superpowers that allow them to turn into household appliances, she'd be screaming about how great that is. Any show they ask her to, she'll advertise and rave about.

 

[Fastgirl154]

And Ruby's dad couldn't pass up an opportunity to mingle with some like-minded Tory parents and talk about some very legitimate tax-free investment deals.

Ive been catching up reading a bunch of threads and this made me legitimately snort can you imagine Daddy bones and Jade’s dad talking together!!

 

[alligatorshades]

The thing that most irritated me about the Heartstopper stories was that she just said how 'important' it was, without saying why or what it was even about. Just like when she said in one of her videos that she had been told to read Loveless by Alice Oseman. She said she was really looking forward to reading it, had wanted to for a while, even read some of it in the video, but didn't discuss the main topic of the book - asexuality. Just more tea and adverts. From a literature student.

 

[figgypud]

It’s probably not performative. I am making assumptions here but I think she’s uncomfortable around the idea of dating and romance. I also went to a girls school like Ruby and if you’re not sociable outside of school it can lead to you growing up unable to relate to or befriend men, perhaps even a little threatened by them. (Not saying Ruby’s attracted to men though, she could not be!) Romance novels about women or straight relationships might make Ruby uncomfortable and make her question her own feelings and aware of her own inexperience.

As she’s not a man, gay romance novels are unrelatable to her life, it’s basically like a fantasy. She can allow herself to talk about it without any of these expectations or attracting any questions about her own love life. Gay romance is really popular among a lot of teenage girls for this reason.

I completely agree, but I do think the way that Ruby makes an exception for gay male (correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think she's ever discussed reading sapphic books) plays into an othering of gay men. Maybe it's a fantasy for her, but gay men are....real people, with a long history of persecution and not a tool to make Ruby (or anyone else) more comfortable with their own feelings or lack of around romance.

I understand, and I'm by no means trying to say "women shouldn't engage with mlm relationships/stories" but if that is the way she engages with them (which is what I was suspecting, but couldn't word as eloquently) then she's coming at it from a very privileged and fetishising position.

 

[Ilaariaa]

It’s probably not performative. I am making assumptions here but I think she’s uncomfortable around the idea of dating and romance. I also went to a girls school like Ruby and if you’re not sociable outside of school it can lead to you growing up unable to relate to or befriend men, perhaps even a little threatened by them. (Not saying Ruby’s attracted to men though, she could not be!) Romance novels about women or straight relationships might make Ruby uncomfortable and make her question her own feelings and aware of her own inexperience.

As she’s not a man, gay romance novels are unrelatable to her life, it’s basically like a fantasy. She can allow herself to talk about it without any of these expectations or attracting any questions about her own love life. Gay romance is really popular among a lot of teenage girls for this reason.

That's what I think, romance involving women probably feels way too close to home for her and she can't handle it. With male-only romance she can simply pretend that romance is something that doesn't concern her.

 

[gisellejoly]

I completely agree, but I do think the way that Ruby makes an exception for gay male (correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think she's ever discussed reading sapphic books) plays into an othering of gay men. Maybe it's a fantasy for her, but gay men are....real people, with a long history of persecution and not a tool to make Ruby (or anyone else) more comfortable with their own feelings or lack of around romance.

I understand, and I'm by no means trying to say "women shouldn't engage with mlm relationships/stories" but if that is the way she engages with them (which is what I was suspecting, but couldn't word as eloquently) then she's coming at it from a very privileged and fetishising position.

I don't disagree but more often than not these sorts of books arent gay mens stories at all. They're usually written by females for females (or for teens), as a female fantasy of a 'cute' innocent gay relationship is like. Heartstopper is an example, as are the Love, Simon books or those Rainbow Rowell books. They all centre on mlm relationships, but have barely any gay or male readers but they do heaps of teen girl superfans. The entire genre of book is sort of fetishising and positions mlm relationships as cute and non threatening for girls to consume.

 

[Idkwhy123]

I don't disagree but more often than not these sorts of books arent gay mens stories at all. They're usually written by females for females (or for teens), as a female fantasy of a 'cute' innocent gay relationship is like. Heartstopper is an example, as are the Love, Simon books or those Rainbow Rowell books. They all centre on mlm relationships, but have barely any gay or male readers but they do heaps of teen girl superfans. The entire genre of book is sort of fetishising and positions mlm relationships as cute and non threatening for girls to consume.

This is actually really interesting! Someone from my uni actually wrote a paper about straight women consuming mlm fiction and they argued that a lot of women consume this type of media because no woman can get hurt. There is no place for the submission of a woman and thus it’s weirdly freeing. (Obv it is problematic, but I found that really interesting)

 

[gossip_guy]

I can't get over how in her Deadline Season video, at the end she says "...and to subsidise that, I'm going to set some timers on my phone..."

The word subsidise makes absolutely no sense in this context, what the actual duck goes through her head when she throws these words out

I also love when she changes her mind about the layout of her Notion page an instant after adding something, then says, "Retrospectively, I'm going to change this."

I'd give anything to have been a fly on the wall during her seminars, when she was trying to impress her lecturers by vomiting misused intelligent-sounding words all over the place.

It reminds me of the scene in Good Will Hunting, when Ben Affleck is misusing a tonne of words trying to sound smart while posing as his genius friend Will:



I'm pretty sure Ruby has misused some of those exact same words, too.

 

[StatusWoe]

She sounds like she's throwing darts at a thesaurus.

This line's so good I wish we could work it into a thread title somehow.

Ruby the economist is keen on subsidies.

 

[bluemoondreams]

Seems a bit random but this outfit looks okay. I wonder if her management sorted out a stylist for the night or something?
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I was really shocked to see this. Definitely seems like something Ruby wouldn't wear. This is an adult dress, how is our Victorian child dressing like an actual woman?