Everyone will dismiss it with the "Paradox of Tolerance".

Did you actually read his interview though? If you’re going to mock your entire genre, you should at least be accurate. Otherwise, critics will rightly point out that you’re writing a genre you don’t know. When you add in that second quote, it’s even more obvious that he doesn’t know his genre.

The dude wrote some books at a team with YA was all the rage and got a film deal out of it. He made some godawful marketing and communications decisions and faced predictable consequences. I don’t feel bad for writers who can’t communicate. Nor do I feel bad for writers who aren’t capable of thinking through how their work fits within a genre they’re trying to capitalize on. Businesses that make bad marketing decisions cancel themselves and in this case, the writer made a myriad of awful business decisions. That’s capitalism.

And seriously, who would outright mock the Hunger Games without expecting some sort of disproportionate backlash? YA works in disproportionates - it’s the entire beast, right down to the growth strategy. If you’re not wise enough to understand your genre, you lose. The thought that you could dismiss that entire genre with garbage critiques and not face bizarre retribution is so insane that I can’t take it seriously.

And if you’re going to do that after you’ve signed a film deal?? I’m sorry but you deserve to be cancelled.

It's beyond my comprehension that anyone can believe that it was a reasonable response to some anodyne literary criticism. Hunger Games is rubbish. It's OK to say so. It's not OK to behave like a vicious lunatic because someone said the books and genre you like are rubbish. If you do lose your shit over it, then you are at best infantile and at worst mentally ill. The reaction might be predictable, but it's not defensible.

>If you do lose your shit over it, then you are at best infantile and at worst mentally ill.

The very sad, unfortunate thing is that a lot of these authors are indeed mentally ill. A lot of the ring-leaders of these mobs openly embrace their mental illness as a personality trait (ie: listing it in their Twitter bios).

It leads to this bizarre environment where their reactions are, medically speaking, insane (ie: the reaction of someone in bipolar mania, the reaction of someone suffering from paranoia or extreme anxiety.) But there are so many insane reactions, that it becomes normalized.

And then people who don't struggle with mental illness start to mimic the insane behavior, because hey, everyone else is doing it! And it's now the best way to get internet points, collect followers, and get some profitable attention to your own books.

>And seriously, who would outright mock the Hunger Games without expecting some sort of disproportionate backlash?

I believe you're having some selective memory issues. This was back in 2015, when "Hunger Games" was starting to lose steam. And many feminists on twitter were lampooning it for focusing on romance, and having a flimsy love triangle, when the life-or-death situation of the book wouldn't realistically allow for that.

Mocking the "Hunger Games" and any book with a love triangle was totally in vogue.

>He made some godawful marketing and communications decisions and faced predictable consequences.

It's funny, because I've seen dozens of YA authors sneer at "Fifty Shades of Grey." Call it toxic, poorly written, laugh at it, mock it, insist it was dangerous to even publish it.

Yet I've never seen the Fifty Shades of Grey fanbase, or any Romance genre authors, talk about threatening, stalking, and publicly heckling those authors who criticize the work.

You call it "predictable consequences." I call it "hateful, disturbing, potentially dangerous behavior that reeks of censorship."

What could possibly be wrong with mocking the Hunger Games?