Time & Perspective Quote by Poppy Z. Brite

Brite’s line reads like a darkly amused autopsy of internet outrage: not content with disapproval, the critic wants total social quarantine. The sentence sprawls on purpose, piling clause on clause the way a comment thread piles grievance. “Must spend huge amounts of time” isn’t just a jab at obsession; it frames the hate as labor, an unpaid second job undertaken for moral theater. That’s the subtext: the attack isn’t only about Brite’s work or persona, it’s about the attacker’s need to perform righteousness in public.

The key turn is the escalation from “I’m disgusting” to “no one should ever read my books.” That shift exposes what online moral panic often targets: not merely the alleged offender, but the audience that grants them oxygen. “They can’t stand the fact that ANYONE likes me!” is doing double duty. It’s a defensive flex (I have fans, you can’t erase that) and a diagnosis of scarcity culture, where approval is treated as a finite resource that must be policed. The caps-lock “ANYONE” mimics the very medium she’s critiquing, borrowing the internet’s volume to parody its absolutism.

Context matters: Brite emerged from transgressive horror, queer goth aesthetics, and the 90s culture wars that prefigured today’s “discourse.” The quote anticipates cancel-culture dynamics before the label hardened: the demand isn’t critique, it’s banishment, and the real affront is that taste can’t be centrally managed.