Short Story: "Strax"

[Alicorn]

Strax, < 5,000 words, I'm billing it as "science fiction" but the underlying mechanism for the speculative element is unspecified in the text.

[Bluelantern]

Strax, < 5,000 words, I'm billing it as "science fiction" but the underlying mechanism for the speculative element is unspecified in the text.

Loved it :D

(Why Strax?)

[Alicorn]

It says in the story, it's short for "soundtracks". (There have presumably been previous terms that have since succumbed to pejorative rollover; "strax" is accepted for casual use at the time of the story.)

[Anya]

-It's short for "soundtracks"!-

Edit: already answered. :3

[Lambda]

I found it very distressing. I guess that means it worked?

[Alicorn]

People keep finding my more relatively innocuous stories distressing and I don't know why.

[Lambda]

The distress I experienced from Strax was very similar to the distress I experienced from Me And The Abstracted Persona of the Anti-Ism Community At Large. It might have something to do with fear of ostracism and/or shaming becoming internalized shame. It might be relevant that I'm white and was raised liberal.

[jalapeno_dude]

People keep finding my more relatively innocuous stories distressing and I don't know why.

Really? I certainly wouldn't describe this story as "relatively innocuous" -- to me it seemed pretty clearly influenced by the sort of stuff that you tag with "don't bite me" on your tumblr...

EDIT: ^ What Lambda said.

[Alicorn]

Well, yes, but no one is being tortured or mind-controlled or murdered or anything. Relative to some other things I write, I mean.

[Kappa]

Maybe it's an Umbridge-Voldemort thing? Relatively few of your readers have direct experience with torture, murder, or mind-control, I'd imagine, but rather tautologically one hundred percent of your readers on this forum use the Internet.

Edit: Umbridge-Voldemort in the sense of "people hate and fear Voldemort less viscerally because far fewer of them have personally encountered someone like him, whereas lots and lots of people have personally encountered someone like Umbridge"