Bowling For Soup were right
"High School Never Ends," writer edition
Just me being rad in high school. Nana and Mamaw rolled up for it too.
For the three people in the world who haven’t heard the song, Bowling For Soup’s “High School Never Ends” is about how people are just as petty and childish in their 40s as they were in their teens. The scenery changes yet it’s all the same underneath. Put a pin in that.
We’re doing this again. Apparently.
Last fall I made my opinions pretty broadly known about the current state of the culture war, the left/right divide, and the loudest personalities on both sides. It’s not like I expected my small little Substack to change the world or anything, but I did kind of hope that if I had caught on to the state of things, it meant the general population had as well.
I’m a good trucker and a great writer; I share a birthday with Hemingway, so maybe there’s something to this whole astrology thing. (I’m not an alcoholic and I’m allergic to cats, but I am abrasive and combative, so hey.) I’ll be the first to admit I’m not the most original thinker. “Does it work?” is my motto. A conservative in the truest sense. I don’t know what my IQ is, it’s probably not all that exceptional. Maybe 130? All that means for our purposes today is that I expect that if I have figured something out, so has everybody else, but the older I get, the more I realize that isn’t the case.
“Graham, what are you talking about?”
People are being stupid on the Internet again. This time they’re doing it in an extremely predictable and childish way. And they’re doing it in the cultural sandbox—specifically the sci-fi writers. It’s high school all over again.
Drinker, Dinniman, and Weir
In 2023 I had my Epic Anti-LitRPG rant. As a result, a lot of my viewers hopped into the comments on that video to make what they thought were good LitRPG suggestions (including, comically, the unnamed book that spawned the whole bit of drama.) I tried a few of them and actually liked Dungeon Crawler Carl, which I had heard of but never tried. This is a series that was really written for the audio format, and thrives with its cast of narrators and immersive sound effects. The characters are fun, the world is exciting, and it somehow managed to make one of the dogturdiest genres into something readable.
I can see how it vaulted author Matt Dinniman to fame and popularity. Those are the hardest things to achieve as an author. Not sales: genuine fandom. If you have fans and readers, the sales are easy. Everyone wants it, everyone thinks they deserve it, and few can actually pull it off. Those who do will inevitably attract clingers, and whenever some new series, be it book or movie, gains popularity, the Left/Right chimera will rear its ugly heads to claim it for their own.
At some point in Dinniman’s journey (if I heard right, he put DCC out into the world during Covid and it took off) he gave Will Jordan (Critical Drinker) a cameo in one of his audiobooks. He’s even listed as one of the narrators. I haven’t read that book yet, just the first two, but it’s in my library. I don’t know how much Drinker features in the story, but he’s got billing.
Sometime in the last five years, Dinniman soured on Drinker, and has recently made remarks to put distance between himself and the inebriated Scot who has been caught faking movie reviews. (That link goes to a Comics Matter video—Zack got his out before I had time to write this, he hits the story from a few other angles. Language warning.—GB)
Dinniman even went so far as to say he regrets having Drinker in his books and wants to replace his part at some point. Drinker fired back that Dinniman was just trying to fellate Hollywood, where Drinker is not popular. The spat went viral in its respective circles.
This matters because Drinker’s audience is largely right-wing types, and Dinniman’s audience is much more Reddit-tier and thus left-wing. Two guys who, to whatever degree, had a working relationship in the past (it may have been extremely minor) are now having public breakups in the quad because one guy wants the jocks to like him and the other guy is hoping to have the theater kids do a stage adaptation of his book.
A book which, as far as I have seen, has been pretty popular among every reader who’s taken it up. I enjoyed the first one, thought the second one ran a little long, and had no haste to get into the third, but they were fun. A lot of MHI readers also share DCC memes. There’s audience crossover—I think Correia may have been an early booster of the series. Whatever Dinniman’s reasons for trying to excise Drinker from his oeuvre, it’s hard to argue that he isn’t being high school about it.
Drinker may even have a point about Dinniman’s Hollywood ambitions. I don’t know. I don’t care. What I do know is they’re both throwing red meat to their audiences based on culture war divisions, and this obnoxious trend is still moving well beyond its expiration date.
Right before this all kicked off, Drinker hosted Andy Weir on his channel and they talked about Project Hail Mary, which I read five years ago and reviewed favorably at Upstream. I’m not surprised that the movie is doing well. I’m seeing it soon. I hear that pretty much everyone has enjoyed it and it’s having great success, which I’m glad to hear, because I like it when good things succeed.
Andy Weir’s books—and there are few of them—are very Reddit-coded, especially with his dialogue, which often comes off as childish. He writes like he’s planning a Marvel movie. Remember in 2013 when Tumblr posts started leaking all over the rest of the Internet and everything was about how people &^%#ing Wuv Science? That’s the dialogue of Andy Weir’s space novels.
Still, THE MARTIAN was an extremely cool idea wrapped in what I assume was hard science, but probably had flaws that could be picked apart by people smarter than me. (This dude drove a rover across Mars with a nuclear rock under his seat?) The same can be said of ARTEMIS (whose main character was obnoxious) and PROJECT HAIL MARY which was, generally, more wholesome. The books sell because they’re good reading.
Weir is an idea guy and a science guy. His storytelling takes a back seat to that but is still readable. The ease of access is part of what makes him broadly popular, and once again, that popularity breeds envy and attracts clingers. If you make something that people like, the Left and the Right will make efforts to claim you for their own causes.
So when Andy Weir, who had another successful movie based off another successful book, went onto Drinker’s show to geek out over all of it, the Left had a meltdown because That’s Not Allowed.
(As I said on Twitter: if Andy Weir is your favorite author, you don’t read.)
The nerd from the science lab did something cool, so the class clown who’s trying to make inroads with the jocks is also farming clout off the science nerd, and the theater kids are not okay with it.
Clout-chasing ideologues. That’s all this is. Back in 2022, Drinker did a review of a Daily Wire movie called Run, Hide, Fight. He explicitly said in his review that he wasn’t going to glaze the movie just because it came from His Side of the Aisle. Five minutes later he had Ben Shapiro beating down his door with a charm offensive to explain why Daily Wire’s Super Cool Right Wing Streaming Service was going to make the best movies ever (and idk, maybe make one of yours, tee hee?)
Suddenly Drinker had great things to say about Daily Wire’s next offering, Terror on the Prairie, featuring Cowboy Cerrone and Gina Carano. This is right around the time he cruised past a million subs and was on his way to two million. The debate team realized the class clown had power, and they were trying to jumpstart their own theater projects, and they had money, so they bought him. Drinker was for sale and they bought his clout.
High school. This is stupid high school antics. And we used to have a way of shaking people out of the hypnosis that ensnares them to this behavior, a powerful word of sorts from the legendary era of the 1990s, which has since fallen out of popular favor, but maybe it’s time to bring it back. Maybe it’s time to reintroduce this word of power and remind people what this behavior really is.
“But Graham, you can’t say that! It’s a mean word! We vanquished it! High school is over!”
Is it? And if it isn’t, why not bring it all the way back?"
Honestly, what are doing? Why is this still going on? “Waaaaa somebody I don’t like made art that I do like, waaaaaa!” The entire world is full of things you won’t like. The people you do like have things about them that you’d hate if you knew what they were. Whatever this perpetual ideological purity test is trying to accomplish, it’s failing—unless the goal is to divide and destroy and spread misery, at which it is most likely succeeding.
But I don’t think the goal of this behavior is to destroy. I think it’s WAY more pathetic than that. The world’s cup runneth over with artists and creators who have never had an easier time putting their work out into the world. When those works are successful, money and cultural power come with them. Those are two things that just about everyone wants. They see someone else lay hold on them, and envy kicks in, followed by a sinister campaign to wrangle them to one side or the other.
“Say ‘MAGA’! Say ‘Black Lives Matter’! Say ‘The Message’! Say ‘Free Palestine’!”
“Eww, you can’t be friends with him! Eww, you talked to her? Eww!”
Both sides are doing this, but I’m gonna close by echoing Rambo Van Halen because he was dead-on: we expect these childish antics from the Left because that’s who they are. You’d think that means the Right doesn’t act that way.
But they do. Moreover, they hate success in the arts because they largely don’t know how to accomplish it. (That’s a subject for another day—there are plenty of us out here, but we lack patrons). The Right Wing doesn’t like art, they like to complain about art. That’s where their bread is buttered.
That’s why Drinker is so popular, and that’s where he’s found his audience. I got over a hundred comments on my November article and in the five months since that happened, ONE DUDE showed up to say he actually had read and enjoyed Will Jordan’s novels. Maybe he was telling the truth. The percentage amuses me.
Dinniman wrote books people enjoy. Weir wrote books people enjoy. Will Jordan doesn’t. Maybe he can’t. So he does this instead, and I blame him for that. Then the Internet responds with its stupid bullying tactics and night letters and pressure campaigns, and guys like Dinniman and Weir have to dance around it to keep everyone happy, and this is where we are.
I blame everyone involved. This is stupid. Make better art. High school is over.