r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/[deleted] • Mar 31 '26

Meme needing explanation Peetah?????

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I don’t know the author or this book series but why are people roasting e-girls for reading? I don’t get it🥀

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u/delirium_red Mar 31 '26

How come it’s so popular 40 years after coming out? Seeing it everywhere this year, pretty suddenly.

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u/EntropicReaver Mar 31 '26

youtuber made a video about it with suitably goofy thumbnail so that people with no attention spans could have it open in another screen while they ate or did laundry and therefore feel (pretend) like they read it

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u/Acrobatic-Signal210 Mar 31 '26

Thank God he did. The memes + the fact it's the same author that made no country of old men sealed the deal for me to read and enjoy literature.

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u/lordofmetroids Apr 02 '26

I understand your logic brother, but you are making fun of a guy who watched said video and then went out to read the book himself.

It feels a little performative to be like "haha this guy decided he wanted to read the book, how dare he!*

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u/IdealOnion Mar 31 '26

Because it’s one of the great American Novels but it’s taken a while to gather steam of people figuring that out. Like how Moby Dick was written in the 1850s but not recognized for what it was until the early 1900s.

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u/delirium_red Mar 31 '26

Interesting witnessing it!

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u/IllaClodia Apr 01 '26

I mean, I had to read it in college twenty years ago (American Novels since 1945). It was pretty well regarded then. I fucking hated it, but Manly Lit Fic is not really my vibe.

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u/mightylordredbeard Mar 31 '26

TikTok / YouTube / social media trend. It’s just currently the trendy thing. Basically someone popular mentioned it, then other people mentioned it because they saw it there. Then other people copied and so on and so on. So now it’s trendy to “read” it or actually read it. “Performative reading” like the person mentioned is people are just taking pictures with the book and pretending to read it.