The Kind of Short Stories People Really Want to Read

moral judgment on Reddit.com

The prestigious short story—the sort of thing published in Ploughshares or The New Yorker—is not particularly popular these days. But this doesn’t mean that short fiction itself is not a major source of pleasure for many millions of people. “Short stories” is a much broader category than “literary fiction short stories,” so we must look outside of the relatively marginal high-literary world if we want to know how large audiences—audiences much larger than the readership of every existing literary magazine put together, as far as I can tell—want to be pleased by the written word.

The literary genres that maintain their popularity now are not the sort of thing that most literature professors would want to spend much time on: science fiction stories, fanfiction, and litRPGs, for example. But if I had to choose the most popular kind of short story today, I would choose that old Reddit chestnut, the “am I the asshole?” (AITA) post. For the uninitiated, the genre works like this: the original poster (OP) describes a scenario in their life where they have been accused of treating someone else poorly. They appeal to their audience of readers, who render a verdict on whether this person is the “asshole” in the situation.

Reading AITA posts is something like reading the penny-dreadfuls of the nineteenth century. It is a mass-market product that reveals the preferences of large reading audiences. There are multiple AITA-style subreddits (/r/AmITheAsshole, /r/AITAH, /r/AmITheJerk, and more) that have millions of weekly visitors, it seems clear to me that AITA posts are at least a significant representation of the kind of stories that people want to read.

You may object to my designating AITA posts as “short stories.” Aren’t some of these stories true? Almost certainly, yes, although it’s just as obvious that many are false. If these stories were avowedly fictive, they wouldn’t be nearly as popular. They get a special zing from the fact that they might be true, and the attempt on the part of commenters to identify and condemn fiction is one of the key pleasures of consuming this sort of fiction. For any reasonably skeptical reader, the AITA story exists in a limbo between fact and fiction.

But I still think it makes sense to consider them short stories. They are avowedly not journalistic, and they’re all about middle-class manners, one of prose fiction’s most enduring themes. And anyway, the line between fiction (invented, not-true) and nonfiction (discovered, true) has never been that solid. In the early nineteenth century, the word “novel” was quite capacious; the Irish priest Edward Mangin, writing in 1808, said, “The word novel is a generical term; of which romances, histories, memoirs, letters, tales, lives [biographies], and adventures, are the species.” Readers often believed that the novels they read were literally true. From nineteenth-century novels to reality television to autofiction to films that claim to be “Based on a True Story,” imaginative works have long given themselves a little extra juice by being, or pretending to be, at least partially real. AITA posts are a part of this long, sometimes-august tradition of chicanery, hoaxing, foolery, and lies (and, every once in a while, truths). Regardless of their truth-value, they are stories, and they can be analyzed like stories. So that’s what I’ve done.

Reading Reddit posts as literature is convenient because the site is so dominated by quantitative measures. You can very easily see which posts were the most popular (or most controversial), and it’s easy to see which posts were most popular at any given time. This, coupled with the short length of most AITA posts, makes it relatively easy to identify the trends that distinguish successful AITA stories from unsuccessful ones. It also provides a window into what kinds of writing Reddit users actually want to read.

People often insist that “good writing” has psychological complexity, moral nuance, lush visual detail, or beautiful prose. I think all of these things are lovely and good. But, to the degree that AITA posts are representative of what people actually want to read, it is fairly clear that people do not want to read “good writing,” largely because “good writing” feels like fiction, and the realism of the AITA post depends on its style. The more ornate and specific, the more fake the story seems. Ironically, the trappings of literary realism—for example, what James Wood calls the “Flaubertian detail,” or the visual descriptions of unimportant objects that give the sense of reality to the reader, making them feel as if they are really watching the characters—would ring unimaginably false in AITA-land. To preserve a sense of reality, the prose remains pared-back, ungrammatical, casual, and sloppy—not dissimilar to how the shaky camera adds verisimilitude to a film like The Blair Witch Project. To preserve the sense that they might have actually happened, AITA stories must resist the prose conventions of literary fiction.

Oddly enough, however, the most successful AITA posts tend to adhere to a pretty rigid formula, a feature that does not seem to signify fakery to readers. First, the narrator of the story almost certainly must not be judged to be an “asshole” by the users. Normally, the narrator has been wronged, most frequently by a woman, in some spectacular or unusual way. Then, the narrator responds forcefully to correct this injustice, and is criticized by either a neutral party or by the person who wronged the narrator; this provides the occasion for the narrator to ask the Internet whether their response to the initial injustice was reasonable.

There might be something distinctive, charming, and even obscure about the way the narrator is wronged; “AITA for breaking up with my girlfriend after she cheated on me?” would never work, but “AITA for sending my little sister a vet bill after she tried to get my horses to breed?” did spectacularly well. Coming up with a funny, memorable, and creative way to be wronged (by a woman) is the first task of the aspiring AITA writer.

If the inciting incident is not quirky or charming, it must be an intensification of more quotidian annoyances. Consider, for example, that many men feel frustrated that their girlfriends don’t respect their generically masculine hobbies (video games, sports, and so on). In one post, this quotidian annoyance is intensified, and the stakes are increased: the narrator’s girlfriend sends a car that the narrator has been working on to a junk-shop. This justifies an outsized response: the narrator breaks up with his girlfriend and sues her. A common annoyance is amplified imaginatively into an injustice; the injustice is eradicated in a spectacular way that could never be justified if the annoyance had not been amplified; hence, catharsis is achieved. Many of the most successful posts follow this formula. If a retail worker is annoyed and slighted by customers all day long, it is easy to see why they might enjoy reading about a really offensive and insulting customer who is denounced by a perfectly virtuous store employee, whose actions are praised and justified by a vast Greek chorus of readers. It’s a kind of participatory wish fulfillment on a gigantic scale.

If there is anything that particularly enrages (which is to say entertains) AITA readers, it is entitlement. Family members (most frequently in-laws) who expect money or special treatment from their more prosperous relatives are, apparently, great fun to denounce. I can only gather from this that AITA readers feel a simmering hatred of their in-laws and express this hatred by denouncing potentially-fictional in-laws on the Internet. Refreshed by this emission of bile, the AITA reader presumably grits their teeth and heads off to a long family dinner, where their career choices will be subtly mocked by their mother-in-law.

The exaggerated or intensified nature of successful AITA posts makes the moral universe of AITA mostly Manichean. Although the subreddit bills itself as “a catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us,” very few of the most successful posts have anything close to what I would call “moral ambiguity,” which is one traditional area of interest for moral philosophers. In these narratives, the primary categories of human personhood are “asshole” and “not asshole,” and the job of the moral observer is to sort moral agents into these slots (or, more rarely, to suggest either that “everyone sucks here” or that there is “no asshole here”). Because the characterization in these plots are so thin, all of the characters are typological and not individualized. A person’s actions are not judged on how they, a particular person, handled a particular situation. Instead, readers ask, “should a person in category A perform action X”? Should a sister-in-law expect brunch to be vegan? “No!” cries the chorus. “She sounds insane!”And while typology, moral clarity, and categorical thinking can be useful in moral philosophy and in life, it is also true that being a moral person means attending to human beings in their individuality—treating them, in other words, like people rather than instances of a category.

This is one reason why the forms of moral reasoning on AITA forums so frequently seem slightly deranged, as a literary critic with the handle “DarthCharizard” noted seven years ago. AITA’s hatred of entitlement, DarthCharizard suggested, led readers to encourage posters to refuse to do nice things for other people. They also led readers to recommend that OPs cut off all contact with parents and in-laws; file for divorce over minor grievances; and generally react to minor inconveniences with unusual vitriol and force. This is how one acts when one views interpersonal life as a set of clear-cut rules and obligations and not a messy exchange between human beings. When someone misbehaves, they are punished; when, in the mental ledger one keeps of a relationship, the “negatives” outweigh the “positives,” the relationship is ended.

In the end, then, the AITA post does what so many forms of mass social media seem to do. They create thin, typological characters, and the task of the viewer, it is posed, is to confidently make pronouncements about the conduct of these characters without any real knowledge of them. This, it is suggested, is moral judgment.

One of the things that great literary characterization can do is to set compassion and judgment side by side and to let the reader feel both. I’m working through Paradise Lost right now, and what is most powerful about it is how wretched and pained Satan is, and how emotions that I have recognized in myself (mortified pride, jealousy) drive him to further and further despair: “Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell;/And in the lowest deep a lower deep,/Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide,/To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.” He’s literally the worst—he’s Satan, he praises evil, he lies and destroys, and I don’t think the poem wants its reader to shy away from these judgments. But his pain and rage, and the way they drive him to deeper pain and rage, are rendered so articulately that it is impossible not to pity Satan in all of his wretchedness and despair and to wish that there was a way out for him, a way back to Heaven. But there isn’t, and he’s evil, and his evil must be acknowledged, just as we must acknowledge his suffering as well. It’s just this kind of tension that conventionally good literature induces in readers.

It might seem a little lopsided to compare a kind of contemporary, popular, anonymous folk-art to one of the acknowledged masterpieces of English poetry. Of course Paradise Lost is better than a random AITA post. But the particular failings of AITA as a genre are informative: they exchange tension and difficulty for an easy sense of moral superiority, and the fact that so many people find this so entertaining today says a lot about what people are really looking for when they read for pleasure. Like any form of outrage as entertainment, AITA posts call us to quick judgments, made without qualms, in reaction to low-resolution, categorical representations of human beings. But as far as I can tell, this sense of pleasurable and righteous denunciation is not always what it feels like to live in a world with other human beings who one looks at attentively, with real care and patience. The best representation of that, I think, is what we might (rather fustily) call “good writing.”