Offtopic post, but a discussion I wish to pursue nonetheless:

Regarding TVT: it used to be so. Nowadays school study media and the "literary canon" are beginning to find their way in... and all those tropes with silly names, built from mass media, are proving their usefulness as tools of analysis. Of course, getting a movie adaptation or a TV miniseries is one of the best ways to draw troper attention to a work, but classics always end up getting those with some regularity. So let's just say that the user base has widened. Oh, and many classics are as doorstoppery as modern fantasy sagas, especially stuff from the XIXth century, when novels where published as long-running serials in magazines and authors were paid by the word. When people call Eliezer Yudkowsky a terrible writer because of MoR's lack of tightness or his using it as a vehicle for ideas and lectures, I feel half-tempted to point at the likes of Victor Hugo or Alexandre Dumas or Dickens or Benito Pérez Galdós, just to name a few... surely if those are the traits of terrible writing, it means that those books have room for improvement, if only by way of abridging them?

Regarding LW: The filters the site imposes on its demographics (language and mode of interaction) worry me: what's the point of translating MoR to Spanish or French, if afterwards hispanophones and francophones don't get to read their sequences and have a site to be a community in? I'm trying to seed a rationalist community at my school, and the language barrier is proving to be troublesome; I often find myself not even knowing how a bias would be called in Spanish.