Because the purpose of horror fiction is to entertain.
And it is more entertaining if the reader is sold on the worldbuilding instead of thinking to themselves ‘decades? has this guy ever done his own grocery shopping? does he realize how little food a standard PriceCo warehouse contains?’, and buy into the high-concept SF before the twist reveal ending that it was horror all along and the world-building and Robinson Crusoe stuff was a trap that the reader fell into just like the characters in every loop do.
And it is more entertaining to be wrong in an interesting way than it is to be right.
Arguably true of Mouse Utopia (I’m not saying it’s not interesting or entertaining, I’m saying that it is false and I think you are doing a minorly bad thing by endorsing it), but not the others, which are neither interesting nor right.
I do not consider this story scifi, nor PriceCo to be particularly high tech.
You don’t consider a story of mad science societal engineering across millennia of underground generation-ship-style arcologies, with implied brainwashing or cloning tech of some sort, and literal invisibility cloaks, to be ‘high tech’?
The fixes were not easy in my estimation. I am thinking now this story was a poor fit for this platform however.
That is one way you could react to criticism, sure: not make a single fix and leave. If you only want adulatory feedback, then yes, I do not think the LW platform is for you.
And it is more entertaining if the reader is sold on the worldbuilding instead of thinking to themselves ‘decades? has this guy ever done his own grocery shopping? does he realize how little food a standard PriceCo warehouse contains?’, and buy into the high-concept SF before the twist reveal ending that it was horror all along and the world-building and Robinson Crusoe stuff was a trap that the reader fell into just like the characters in every loop do.
Arguably true of Mouse Utopia (I’m not saying it’s not interesting or entertaining, I’m saying that it is false and I think you are doing a minorly bad thing by endorsing it), but not the others, which are neither interesting nor right.
You don’t consider a story of mad science societal engineering across millennia of underground generation-ship-style arcologies, with implied brainwashing or cloning tech of some sort, and literal invisibility cloaks, to be ‘high tech’?
That is one way you could react to criticism, sure: not make a single fix and leave. If you only want adulatory feedback, then yes, I do not think the LW platform is for you.