[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Fiction about Introverts?
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Ask HN: Fiction about Introverts?
I recently read the (rather excellent) Murderbot Diaries series and
realized that it isn't just social interactions that tend to assume
that people are extroverts, but that most fiction does too. I
recall reading as a kid any number of mystery stories where the
protagonist was shut-in for some reason (agoraphobia, for example),
and misanthropes abound in anything with a hint of noir, but
introverts per-se seem to be rare (which strikes me as odd, since
authors are often introverts). So, any recommendations? I'm
personally interested in science fiction and fantasy, but mysteries
or (techno)thrillers will do as well. Not really into horror, but
don't let that stop you, I'm sure others here will be interested.
Author : webmaven
Score : 11 points
Date : 2021-11-21 21:31 UTC (1 hours ago)
| neoeno wrote:
| I'm Thinking Of Ending Things by Iain Reid.
|
| Without wanting to spoiler you -- it's about a few introverts,
| and it's narrated in a way that focuses heavily on the inner
| world, on their thoughts, the culture they enjoy, their
| deliberations, what they say and what they hold back.
|
| It is a horror too, sort of.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I enjoyed an anime called 'Im a spider, so what?' where the main
| character gets transferred to another dimension, except as a
| spider.
|
| She's a genki girl in the anime (hyperactive trope) but only when
| she is alone. When she talks to others, she's an introvert (very
| terse and soft spoken), which is an interesting version of the
| trope. The only name she goes by is Kumoko (rough translation:
| Miss Spider, or maybe Spider-cutie).
|
| In the original source material (the original Novels), she's
| fully an introvert. But I think the problem with anime is that
| acting in front of an audience is innately an extrovert activity.
|
| Introverts can be side characters in an anime (Rei from
| Evangeleon, Nagato from Haruhi), but since they sit around and
| think to themselves so much it's hard for them to be a main
| character. Kumoko is an interesting way of doing it, since she is
| only hyperactive when she is alone.
|
| ------
|
| Mild spoilers: but the people who got transferred over got forms
| that best represented their soul. Most became a human again, but
| a few swapped genders and another few became monsters.
|
| In the case of Kumoko, her introverted nature matched the spider
| the most. In contrast, teacher has the 'young at heart' trope and
| thus the teacher got the form of an elf, for example.
|
| As an Isekai novel / anime, it's fantasy + sci-fi. They are all
| clearly in some kind of techo-video game world, but magic seems
| to have been the cause for how they all got trapped in the first
| place.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| The first thing that comes to my mind is Naomi Novik's _A Deadly
| Education_. It 's something like _Harry Potter_ mixed with _Lord
| of the Flies_ ; imagine if Hogwarts had no teachers, and the
| building was self-aware and tried to kill its students.
|
| The protagonist is definitely an introvert, and her narration is
| basically what made the story work for me. The book is YA, but
| without too many tropes.
| tlb wrote:
| The main character of Machines Like Me
| [https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9781787331679/Machines-McEwan-Ian...]
| is, somewhat. (Also a decent sci-fi story)
|
| Haruki Murakami's narrators all seem like introverts to me. Try
| Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki or 1Q84.
|
| Many of Iain M. Banks' characters are. Try The Algebraist or The
| Player of Games.
|
| In Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, the main character
| keeps mostly to herself, but I'm not sure if that's due to her
| introversion or the broken world she lives in.
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