SF & F Mega-thread: I had to google 'spock pirate depilatory'

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General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

People can express ideas normative to their culture without knowing they�re expressing anything.

e: nice

# ? Dec 12, 2021 04:25

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# ? Jun 1, 2024 00:35

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

I think it's a stretch to say that optimization is a specifically capitalist idea or that people are reading this stuff because they subconsciously want to justify living in an industrial society instead of having subconsciously trained themselves with video games to salivate over numbers directly.

Edit: Like, leaving aside capitalism or communism or anything in the real world, optimization is also something that people do when playing a game.

Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 04:39 on Dec 12, 2021

# ? Dec 12, 2021 04:35

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

The idea that it's all secretly capitalism and also somehow condoning or glorifying capitalism is pretty funny to me, since one of the more common tropes in progression fantasy is portraying the current 'system' as being really poo poo in one way or another. That's not always one of the themes, but it comes up all the time: Cradle, Mage Errant, Dungeon Crawler Carl, Weirkey Chronicles, Bastion, Wraith's Haunt, Tower of Somnus, Street Cultivation, Thousand Li...honestly it might be easier to list ones where the system isn't poo poo.

Like, the way things work usually isn't actually very good. Not necessarily the exact mechanics of gaining power, but how they're used, especially by the Powers That Be. The power fantasy at play is usually having some plucky hero accumulate enough strength through hard work to then triumph over the system, or at least reform it or something. So you can argue that the magical mechanics end up working for them in particular -- it wouldn't be much of a story if they just sucked rear end and then died in the mud with the other peasants -- but it rarely appears to be working for society in general.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 04:43

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

High modernism isn't the same thing as capitalism but even leaving that aside, it doesn't matter if the books depict it all as amazing or terrible; the books are still about the effectiveness of high modernism as a means of effecting personal agency and social power. The core logic is still the logic of Brasilia or standardized farming.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 04:50

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Everyone likes to believe that their fate is under their control and that if they really dug deep and worked hard they could become someone amazing, even in the face of giant hosed up systems of power, or their own illnesses and foibles, or the circumstances of their birth. That's what progression fantasy is about.

Of course real life ain't like that. But it's very very useful to believe it's like that.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 04:53

Larry Parrish: Jul 9, 2012; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

mrs. nicholas sarkozy posted:

Has any grad student written their thesis yet about lit rpg progression/"rational fantasy" magic systems re: our capitalist hellscape and prosperity gospel movement because i'd read it

i don't remember the name but there was some KU special I dropped on the second page because it was going into detail how our protagonist is a virtuous christian Air Force Academy cadet who will not be even sharing a motel room with his fiance, due to his Virtue and Conviction. which if you've ever met your average air force officer is both an over the top parody and somehow also exactly what a lot of them are like. it had me howling, but you could tell the author took it seriously and i'd rather read about actual space aliens than humans I have nothing in common with besides a language.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 04:55

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

That would be Azyl Academy (written by a Mormon, which explains the bit that weirded you out), and it�s easily the worst progression fantasy book I�ve ever read. Holy poo poo it was baaaaad.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 04:59

Horizon Burning: Oct 23, 2019

edit: gently caress it, this whole stupid discussion will start up in six weeks again anyway

Horizon Burning fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Dec 12, 2021

# ? Dec 12, 2021 05:01

Larry Parrish: Jul 9, 2012; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Horizon Burning posted:

edit: gently caress it, this whole stupid discussion will start up in six weeks again anyway

I saw your old post coward

# ? Dec 12, 2021 05:23

Sham bam bamina!: Nov 6, 2012; ƨtupid cat

I also saw the post.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 05:27

Cardiac: Aug 28, 2012

General Battuta posted:

Everyone likes to believe that their fate is under their control and that if they really dug deep and worked hard they could become someone amazing, even in the face of giant hosed up systems of power, or their own illnesses and foibles, or the circumstances of their birth. That's what progression fantasy is about.

Of course real life ain't like that. But it's very very useful to believe it's like that.

The attempted execution of Zaphod Bebblrebrox comes to mind.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 06:07

Grumblesnakes: Aug 25, 2015

Progression fantasy is about becoming stronger than Goku and everyone thinking you're cool after you've become stronger than Goku.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 06:21

withak: Jan 15, 2003; Fun Shoe

Video game fans ruin everything they touch.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 06:35

Telsa Cola: Aug 19, 2011; No... this is all wrong... this whole operation has just gone completely sidewaysface

General Battuta posted:

Everyone likes to believe that their fate is under their control and that if they really dug deep and worked hard they could become someone amazing, even in the face of giant hosed up systems of power, or their own illnesses and foibles, or the circumstances of their birth. That's what progression fantasy is about.

Of course real life ain't like that. But it's very very useful to believe it's like that.

This has been a thing since, well, a long long long time. Way before modern ideas of capitalism have come about at the very least.

Like to illustrate my point we are talking about prehunting rituals, harvest festivals and the like here. This is bare bones "If I do X then I surely must get Y because I have appeased the spirits/put the work in/XYZ"

Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Dec 12, 2021

# ? Dec 12, 2021 07:39

Copernic: Sep 16, 2006; ...A Champion, who by mettle of his glowing personal charm alone, saved the universe...

General Battuta posted:

High modernism isn't the same thing as capitalism but even leaving that aside, it doesn't matter if the books depict it all as amazing or terrible; the books are still about the effectiveness of high modernism as a means of effecting personal agency and social power. The core logic is still the logic of Brasilia or standardized farming.

I think you should read something about Xianxia and Wuxia in China before just assuming its just another expression of a western concept you're already familiar with. Do you really think that progression fantasy is cultural borrowing from white people?

E: its called journey to the west because the monkey king picked up taylorism there

Copernic fucked around with this message at 07:50 on Dec 12, 2021

# ? Dec 12, 2021 07:42

Telsa Cola: Aug 19, 2011; No... this is all wrong... this whole operation has just gone completely sidewaysface

I mean at the bare bones prosperity gospel (and luck) are just discussions about magic.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 07:47

navyjack: Jul 15, 2006

Anne Rice just died.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 08:14

TOOT BOOT: May 25, 2010

Anne Rice was a a bit of an odd duck but The Vampire Chronicles were my comfort food 20 years ago.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 08:26

Stupid_Sexy_Flander: Mar 14, 2007; Is a man not entitled to the haw of his maw?; Grimey Drawer

I think I became a fan, regardless of how much I hated most of the novels she wrote, when she got into almost a blood feud with a Popeye's owner in nawlins.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 08:39

NikkolasKing: Apr 3, 2010

navyjack posted:

Anne Rice just died.

Aw gently caress, I was just starting a reread of Interview and the Chronicles...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lo6T0J1wxFA

Rest in peace. However much I think she became too much of a Lestat fangirl, she changed vampire fiction forever, and mostly for the good, IMO. I still love Interview.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 09:10

PupsOfWar: Dec 6, 2013

pour one out, folks

# ? Dec 12, 2021 09:31

HopperUK: Apr 29, 2007; Why would an ambulance be leaving the hospital?

Interview is legitimately great. She was very strange but very talented.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 13:50

DreamingofRoses: Jun 27, 2013; Nap Ghost

That sucks. RIP Anne Rice. Even though the Lestat stuff isn�t the first thing that comes up o mind when I think of her books, they�re still a staple in my bookshelf.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 14:59

Hieronymous Alloy: Jan 30, 2009; Why! Why!! Why must you refuse to accept that Dr. Hieronymous Alloy's Genetically Enhanced Cream Corn Is Superior to the Leading Brand on the Market!?!; Morbid Hound

Cicero posted:

I guess I should clarify, there are definitely some surface similarities as you say, but I don't see anything really all that deep. It's like someone watching DBZ or Naruto and deciding those, too, must be connected to capitalism, because in both shonen anime and capitalism you have people accumulating extreme amounts of power. Or people liking Starcraft is because of capitalism because in both cases you command and exploit those under you; I think there's a certain goon tendency to see connections to capitalism in basically anything that's similar on some dimension.

It's the problem of allegory vs analogy again, the tolkien / lewis debate. It's very easy to say "thing x is similar to thing y in such and such a way", and if you can do that you can also go "thing x IS thing y" but doing so is hacky and reductionist and lazy thinking / bad writing.

edit: not intending to imply that any specific person in the above discussion is being reductionist or simplistic etc. FWIW the general connection between litrpg, cultivation fantasies, "number go up" optimization, optimizing for moloch, etc, all seem like connections worth talking about, sure, just not 1:1 direct correspondences.

Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Dec 12, 2021

# ? Dec 12, 2021 16:01

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Copernic posted:

I think you should read something about Xianxia and Wuxia in China before just assuming its just another expression of a western concept you're already familiar with. Do you really think that progression fantasy is cultural borrowing from white people?

E: its called journey to the west because the monkey king picked up taylorism there

Cultivation is not the same thing as progression fantasy because the things people do to become super amazing are different (and reflect the different cultural backdrops they're drawing on).

e: I mean maybe I'm wrong and the cultivators get ahead on their spiritual development through CEO mindset sigma grindset

General Battuta fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Dec 12, 2021

# ? Dec 12, 2021 17:51

Copernic: Sep 16, 2006; ...A Champion, who by mettle of his glowing personal charm alone, saved the universe...

i'm just saying, in this thread LitRPG has been serially challenged by progressively stronger opponents and has gone from a weak-kneed "well *I* like this garbage" to a discussion of allegory vs analogy distinction and the historical development of qigong.

WHO IS THE NEXT CHALLENGER? WHO IS THE NEXT MOUNTAIN TO CLIMB?

# ? Dec 12, 2021 18:15

Larry Parrish: Jul 9, 2012; by Jeffrey of YOSPOS

Come to think of it, there is a bit of a trope of the semi-mysterious and omnipresent trading company which is somehow both not an immortal power in their own right and also treated with kid gloves by everyone. Maybe the people with the capitalism Dao run the auction house.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 18:16

AARD VARKMAN: May 17, 1993

I'd just like to apologize to myself, Graydon Saunders, because I gave up on Commonweal about halfway through book 3.

Just started The 7 and a half deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle instead :q:

# ? Dec 12, 2021 18:17

Quorum: Sep 24, 2014; REMIND ME AGAIN HOW THE LITTLE HORSE-SHAPED ONES MOVE?

Larry Parrish posted:

Come to think of it, there is a bit of a trope of the semi-mysterious and omnipresent trading company which is somehow both not an immortal power in their own right and also treated with kid gloves by everyone. Maybe the people with the capitalism Dao run the auction house.

The best way to make money in the ~~California gold rush~~ Isekai progression fantasy is to be the person selling the ~~shovels~~ vorpal swords.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 19:33

FPyat: Jan 17, 2020

All this talk of the implications of LitRPGs reminds me of the infamous post made by the author of Viriconium and Light.

M John Harrison posted:

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader�s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done.

Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn�t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn�t possible, & if it was the results wouldn�t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder�s victim, & makes us very afraid.

These observations will be of interest only to generic fantasy readers & writers. They do not form an integrated piece. They were written as notes, or emails to other writers, in separate attempts to clarify my position. They contain repetitions & restatements, & while there is some steady movement towards a set of conclusions, I�ve made no attempt to turn them into an article. The element of provocation has been left in.

Responses to the original posts, mostly negative & some more anxious than others, are numerous & can be found by Googling �M John Harrison +Worldbuilding� or anything similar.

When I use the term �writing�, here or in the original posts, I am not referring to prose, but to every aspect of the process.

When I make a distinction between writers & worldbuilders I am making a distinction not just between uses of a technique, but between suites of assumptions about language, representation & the construction of �the� world as well as �a� world.

When I use the term �worldbuilding fiction� I refer to immersive fiction, in any medium, in which an attempt is made to rationalise the fiction by exhaustive grounding, or by making it �logical in its own terms�, so that it becomes less an act of imagination than the literalisation of one. Representational techniques are used to validate the invention, with the idea of providing a secondary creation for the reader to �inhabit�; but also, in a sense, as an excuse or alibi for the act of making things up, as if to legitimise an otherwise questionable activity. This kind of worldbuilding actually undercuts the best and most exciting aspects of fantastic fiction, subordinating the uncontrolled, the intuitive & the authentically imaginative to the explicable; and replacing psychological, poetic & emotional logic with the rationality of the fake.

I am aware that something describable as worldbuilding goes on in the representational genres, and in even the most minimal of �mundane� fictions; the strength of my position depends on that awareness. I see no technical distinction between the worldbuilding of the representational writer�the travel writer or memoirist�& the worldbuilding of the fantasist. I have a certain amount of experience with both; & a fair amount of experience of sailing back & forth across the line between them. I agree to some extent with Aldous Huxley�s description of fantasy as �foreign travel of the imagination�. The distinction I would make between the two kinds of worldbuilding is in a sense Baudrillardian. But though I see fantasy worldbuilding as parasitic on its quotidian cousin, I also see it as not much more than a matter of the kidnapping & abuse of some techniques which don�t, recently, have much dignity even in their proper place. It�s no big deal until you get behind it to the ideology. After that it becomes important but not in the context of writing fantasy fiction, see below, Notes 3.

Notes 1: Being & Simulating

Some of it is a matter of aesthetics. I think Katherine Mansfield could �build a world� in thirty words & a couple of viewpoint changes, & that Chekhov could cram more into four thousand words than Dickens got into three hundred thousand.

But much of it is a matter of ideology. The whole idea of worldbuilding is a bad idea about the world as much as it is a bad idea about fiction. It�s a secularised, narcissised version of the fundamentalist Christian view that the world�s a watch & God�s the watchmaker. It reveals the bad old underpinnings of the humanist stance. It centralises the author, who hands down her mechanical toy to a complaisant audience (which rarely thinks to ask itself if language can deliver on any of the representational promises it is assumed to make), as a little god. And it flatters everyone further into the illusions of anthropocentric demiurgy which have already brought the real world to the edge of ecological disaster.

My feeling is that the reader performs most of the act of writing. A book spends a very short time being written into existence; it spends the rest of its life being read into existence. That�s why I find in many current uses of the term �active reading� such a deeply ironic tautology. Reading was always �active�; the text itself always demanded the reader�s interaction if the fiction was to be brought forth. There was always a game being played, between writers and readers (for that matter between oral storytellers & listeners), who knew they were gaming a system, & who were delighted to engage each other on those terms.

Worldbuilding is the province of people who, like Tolkien, actually resist the idea it�s a game, and have installed their �secondary creation� concept as an aggressive defense of that position.

The worst mistake a contemporary f/sf writer can make is to withold or disrupt suspension of disbelief. The reader, it�s assumed, wants to receive the events in the text as seamless & the text as unperformed. The claim is that nobody is being �told a story� here, let alone being sold a pup. Instead, an impeccably immersive experience is playing in the cinema of the head. This experience is somehow unmediated, or needs to present itself as such: any vestige of performativeness in the text dilutes the experience by reminding the reader that the �world� on offer is a rhetorical construct. All writing is a shell game, a sham: but genre writing mustn�t ever look as if it is. This seems to me to ignore the genuine sleight-of-hand pleasures of conjuring in favour of a belief in magic, a kind of non-writing which claims to be rather than to simulate.

Notes 2: Bandwidth

I�m interested in how worldbuilders construct the real world. How do they describe the process of writing & reading about it, for instance ? Do they envisage writing as a kind of camera, which allows them to photograph London�or cheese�or a giraffe�& pass the picture to the reader, who then sees exactly what they saw ? For that matter, would they describe photography itself as an objectively representational process ? Perhaps they would, and perhaps that�s one of the main reasons why worldbuilding fantasy strikes one as so amazingly Victorian a form.

You cannot replicate the world in some symbols, only imply it or allude to it. Even if you could encode the world into language, the reader would not be able to decode with enough precision for the result to be anything but luck. (& think how long it would take!) Writing isn�t that kind of transaction. Communication isn�t that kind of transaction. It�s meant to go along with pointing and works best in such forms as, �Pass me that chair. No, the green one.�

Writing does something else. It not only invites but relies upon reader-participation. Writing and reading are complementary aspects of the same process; much of what appears to be the work of writing is in fact done by the reader in the act of reading. While the writer takes advantage of this, making implications & inviting the reader to do the rest, the worldbuilder�lonely & godlike & in control of (or attempting to be in control of) every piece of footage retrieved from her obsessive creation�induces dependency in the audience, then discovers in the subsequent delirious spiral of self-fulfilling prophecy an excuse to take even more responsibility out of their hands. God�s in her Heaven & all�s right with the �world�.

It�s control-freakery on a scale that reminds you instantly of the other kind of worldbuilding�the political kind. That�s why I am �very afraid� of worldbuilders. They tend to be quite managing, even in real life.

Notes 3: It�s All Down Here in Black & White

The transaction we talk about when we talk about reading goes on not between the writer & the reader but between the reader & the text. The writer (as opposed to the worldbuilder) plans for this inevitability, presenting a spread of more or less �possible� interpretations tied to the themes & meanings of the story, and allowing�or perhaps impishly not quite allowing�for the cultural library & types of interpretative tool any given reader might bring to the text. In this view, any reading, of any kind of fiction, is emergent from the interaction of more variables than can be defined or consciously managed by either writer or reader. There seems to me little point trying to deny that this happens whether, as the writer, you encourage it or not. Any other view of the writing/reading process is at best idealistic & at worst contains an appeal to telepathy (the idea that I can somehow pass my vision to you without mediation, the ultimate paradoxical utopia of the representational).

The writer�as opposed to the worldbuilder�must therefore rely on an audience which begins with the idea that reading is a game in itself. I don�t see this happening in worldbuilding fiction. When you read such obsessively-rationalised fiction you are not being invited to interpret, but to �see� and �share� a single world. As well as being based on a failure to understand the limitations of language as a communications tool (or indeed the limitations of a traditional idea of what communication can achieve), I think that kind of writing is patronising to the reader; and I�m surprised to find people talking about �actively reading� these texts when they seem to mean the very opposite of it. The issue is: do you receive�is it possible to receive�a fictional text as an operating manual ? Or do you understand instead that your relationship with the very idea of text is already fraught with the most gameable difficulties & undependabilities ? The latter seems to me to be the ludic point of reading: anything else rather resembles the�purely functional�act of following instructions on how to operate a vacuum cleaner.

Since a novel is not an object of the same order as a vacuum cleaner, and since the �world� a worldbuilder claims to build does not in fact exist in the way a vacuum cleaner exists, why would you want to try & operate it as if it was one ?

In fact you wouldn�t, unless you were already experiencing confusion about what is functional & what isn�t.

This aspect of the contemporary relationship between readers & fiction is complicated further by the fact that, prior to any act of reading, we already live in a fantasy world constructed by advertising, branding, news media, politics and the built or prosthetic environment (in EO Wilson�s sense). The act of narcissistic fantasy represented by the wor(l)d �L�Oreal� already exists well upstream of any written or performed act of fantasy. JK Rowling & JRR Tolkien have done well for themselves, but�be honest!�neither of them is anywhere near as successful at worldbuilding as the geniuses who devised �Coke�, or �The Catholic Church�. Along with the prosthetic environment itself, corporate ads & branding exercises are the truly great, truly successful fantasies of our day. As a result the world we live in is already a �secondary creation�. It is already invented. Epic fantasies, gaming & second lives don�t seem to me to be an alternative to this, much less an antidote: they seem to me to be a smallish contributory subset of it.

The piece that began all this, �What It Might Be Like To Live In Viriconium�, has been up at Fantastic Metropolis for at least five years, maybe longer. It was written in 1996, and originally published in a British print fanzine in 1997. The notes on which it was based were made as early as 1992. Since 1992, the feeling I had that this was an essentially political issue, & not really much to do with epic fantasy or Tolkien movies or gaming in themselves, has only grown. That�s what I meant when I said at the end of my �licensed settings� post that I wouldn�t write Viriconium again, or write an article like �What It Might Be Like To Live In Viriconium�.

As we emerge from the trailing edge of postmodernism we begin to see how many of its by-now-naturalised assumptions need challenging if it isn�t to become as much of a dead hand as the modernism it revised into existence to be its opposite. The originally vertiginous and politically exciting notion of relativism that underlies the idea of �worlds� is now only one of the day-to-day huckstering mechanisms of neoliberalism. My argument isn�t really with writers, readers or gamers, (or even with franchisers in either the new or old media); it is a political argument, made even more urgent as a heavily-mediatised world moves from the prosthetic to the virtual, allowing the massively managed and flattered contemporary self to ignore the steady destruction of the actual world on which it depends. This situation needs to change, and it will. At the moment, the fossilised remains of the postmodern paradigm (which encourages us to believe three stupid things before breakfast: firstly that we can change the real world into a fully prosthetic environment without loss or effort; secondly that there are no facts, only competing stories about the world; & thirdly that it�s possible to meaningfully write the words �a world� outside the domains of imagination or metaphor, a solecism which allows us to feel safely distant from the consequences of our actions) are in the way of that.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 20:06

mrs. nicholas sarkozy: Jan 1, 2006; ~let me see ya bounce that bounce that~

e: ^^ this owns

Telsa Cola posted:

This has been a thing since, well, a long long long time. Way before modern ideas of capitalism have come about at the very least.

Like to illustrate my point we are talking about prehunting rituals, harvest festivals and the like here. This is bare bones "If I do X then I surely must get Y because I have appeased the spirits/put the work in/XYZ"

obviously power fantasies are not a new thing, but the litrpg + systems fantasy trends seem of similar minds to me and I'd like to read some kind of analysis of the genre that goes deeper than It's Gamers. I do not think people on royal road are deliberately writing capitalist propaganda lmao. but maybe it was just goku all along. also I'd 100% read someone's essay about how naruto is about objectivism or whatever, tbh.

Anyway, RIP Anne Rice, queen of early fandom drama and bisexual vampires.

mrs. nicholas sarkozy fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Dec 12, 2021

# ? Dec 12, 2021 20:14

pradmer: Mar 31, 2009; Follow me for more books on special!

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# ? Dec 12, 2021 20:15

Famethrowa: Oct 5, 2012

FPyat posted:

All this talk of the implications of LitRPGs reminds me of the infamous post made by the author of Viriconium and Light.

Possibly the best I've ever read on the subject, thank you for sharing. I've always had Baudrillard on my mind when reading about litrpg.

Also this:

quote:

It’s control-freakery on a scale that reminds you instantly of the other kind of worldbuilding–the political kind. That’s why I am “very afraid” of worldbuilders. They tend to be quite managing, even in real life.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 20:34

anilEhilated: Feb 17, 2014; But I say fuck the rain.; Grimey Drawer

Aardvark! posted:

Just started The 7 and a half deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle instead

That's a really good one. His second book is pretty great as well, I wish the guy would write faster.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 20:51

unattended spaghetti: May 10, 2013

FPyat posted:

All this talk of the implications of LitRPGs reminds me of the infamous post made by the author of Viriconium and Light.

Thanks for reminding me why I love this thread. I don�t have a dog in the litRPG fight, ever. I don�t read it, but I�ve tried to articulate my discomfort both with it and with fantasy more interested in its mechanics than its innate existence as an object of narrative, and that pretty much hit the nail on the head for how I feel about it.

I wouldn�t ever suggest that people who prefer litRPG and fantasy written in the Sanderson mode are wrong but I will say I don�t understand their draw to that type of fiction, because I think it pokes the idea of a free-flowing work of art right in the eye. It seeks to make knowable all things, when fiction should always hold some mystery or loose end. That willingness to let fantasy be alien and ultimately incomprehensible in totality is imagination fuel and helps work stick, imho.

And I�ve always thought it�s what separates the merely decent from the timeless in genre fiction.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 21:25

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

General Battuta posted:

Cultivation is not the same thing as progression fantasy because the things people do to become super amazing are different (and reflect the different cultural backdrops they're drawing on).

I'm sorry dude, but this is basically like trying to assert that Portland isn't part of the Pacific Northwest.

Many of the most popular and recommended progression fantasy series are cultivation novels, including the #1 most popular progression fantasy series in the West, Cradle.

Have you actually read progression fantasy? Because that declaration right there just screams "little to no idea what I'm talking about."

# ? Dec 12, 2021 22:16

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

Cradle is written in English for an American audience.

Portland is really culturally distinct from its surroundings. Ever been to Beaverton?

# ? Dec 12, 2021 22:22

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

General Battuta posted:

Cradle is written in English for an American audience.

Yeah, and it's a cultivation series.

quote:

Portland is really culturally distinct from its surroundings. Ever been to Beaverton?

Really just wanna dig that hole deeper, huh?

# ? Dec 12, 2021 22:24

General Battuta: Feb 7, 2011; This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: you hurt it, you keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the posts from the screams.

I think that progression fantasy, like self-publishing, is hard to talk about because people make "consuming progression fantasy" part of their personal identity and feel personally attacked when people talk about it. When people start talking about 'holes' and making stacks of quotes I think they're well past wanting to actually have a conversation and well into "I need to win."

# ? Dec 12, 2021 22:28

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# ? Jun 1, 2024 00:35

Cicero: Dec 17, 2003; Jumpjet, melta, jumpjet. Repeat for ten minutes or until victory is assured.

I don't feel personally attacked, it's just obvious by your statements you're confidently asserting knowledge of something you don't know poo poo about, sorry.

This is getting tiresome, but I just wanna clarify for any future discussions that progression fantasy is an umbrella term that includes LitRPG's and cultivation series and other progression stuff that falls under neither of those labels.

# ? Dec 12, 2021 22:36

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > SF & F Mega-thread: I had to google 'spock pirate depilatory'

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