Idea Ripper // ArchiveCards: 1555 [Live] | Updated: 2026-10-14
Card #c733IR // #c733Synthesis

Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than those of any other literary corporation in the world, no species of composition has been so much decried. From pride, ignorance, or fashion, our foes are almost as many as our readers.

— In our words · Source: Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen)

[Use when]

Use when a whole medium is dismissed as mind-rot by people who have not read it. The panic is older than the medium.

[Why it matters]

Austen breaks the fourth wall in Chapter 5 to defend the novel itself: the most-read form in the world takes the most contempt, and the attackers are driven by pride, ignorance, or fashion, not by judgment. Every despised medium gets this same treatment on its way to respectability.

More from Northanger Abbey

#c734"And what are you reading, Miss——?" "Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected…Use when you catch yourself, or anyone, apologizing for what they consume. The apology is the tell. #c735I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel-writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very…Use when tempted to punch down at your own form to look serious. Defend the thing you make. #c736Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.Use when your field is under attack from outside. Close ranks; the reviewers will not save you.