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The novels based on the game Doom are so bad they're good.
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# ? Jul 14, 2015 00:41 |
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# ? May 19, 2024 15:08 |
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theflyingorc posted:All the Sword of Truth I read was at a young enough age that I did not note the libertarian subtext at all. I read the first one as a teenager and wouldn't have known what libertarianism was to be able to spot it, but there was enough else to put me off the rest of the series. Another one I read about the same time was Lord Foul's Bane by Stephen R. Donaldson, the first book of the Thomas Covenant series. The main gimmick of the series is that the protagonist is transported from the real world to a magical world, and doesn't believe any of it is actually really happening. He goes along with it anyway though because reasons. Also he has leprosy in the real world but not in magic-land and not having leprosy somehow makes him rape a woman he meets there. For some reason, both those books were in my highschool's library. I doubt whoever decided which books the library would buy ever read them.
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# ? Jul 14, 2015 07:38 |
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Tiggum posted:I read the first one as a teenager and wouldn't have known what libertarianism was to be able to spot it, but there was enough else to put me off the rest of the series. I had it described to me as Thomas arrives in a magical new world, doesn't think its real so he rapes a woman, then later realizes the world is real and spends the series mourning his actions. quote:He is also unprepared for the sudden restoration of his health, which cures the impotence brought on by his leprosy. This, and his mental turmoil over the reality he feels but does not believe, drives him into a frenzy, causing him to rape Lena, an act which will be pivotal to all that follows. When Lena's friends and family learn of what happened to her, they are barely able to comprehend the enormity of or reasons behind this crime, but the Oath of Peace to which they are sworn forbids them from taking vengeance.
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# ? Jul 14, 2015 07:48 |
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Citrus Sky posted:Daughter of the Blood, the first book in Anne Bishop's Black Jewels Trilogy. The protagonist is a preteen girl whose love interest is a thousand year old demon named The Sadist. Her destiny is to topple the Evil Queen, who spends most of the book torturing and raping The Sadist, and install herself queen of a realm where powerful women have harems of sexy men who serve them. This is from like a week ago but I came to post the Black Jewels Trilogy. I read it as a teen on a friend's recommendation and it's one of those books you get kind of swept up in, but then when I went to reread it about four months later, I couldn't make it through the first chapter. It was so indescribably awful. It's terrible Mary Sue fiction about this little girl absolutely everyone falls in love with, including the aforementioned Sadist, who is supposed to be supremely beautiful and all that good stuff. What makes it even better is that Anne Bishop hates fanfiction so nothing really even exists to propagate the popularity of this tome of poo poo. Well done.
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# ? Jul 14, 2015 09:34 |
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Sherrilyn Kenyon She vomits out novels at an obscene rate, and once you read one you can immediately see how. I found this review on goodreads that sums it up better then I could. quote:First off, the “Born of Shadows” is the fourth book in the “League” series. I can accept that without reading the first 3 I am lacking some context, but from reading just this book I have no idea what the League is or does. They apparently keep the 9 systems (not sure if this was a metaphor or actual number) from constantly fighting, dispatch assassins that the Systems aren’t allowed to prosecute, and are so corrupt they can be bought by anyone. However, a minor plot of the novel is one system/kingdom (ruled by a Queen) is lying to give pretense to invade another system, for resources maybe, and nothing is said of the fabled “League”. The shadowy background government isn’t an effective plot device when their only reason for existing doesn’t matter for the sake of the current plot.
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# ? Jul 14, 2015 09:59 |
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pentyne posted:Sherrilyn Kenyon That bitch is the reason why Paul Kearney's W40K book Dark Hunters: Umbra Sumnus had to be pulped just before it could hit shelves, because "Dark Hunters" is such a distinct name that no two books could share the same two words in the title. Paul Kearney is one of my favourite authors for writing The Monarchies of God and The Macht but he just can't catch a break
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# ? Jul 14, 2015 10:23 |
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# ? Jul 14, 2015 10:39 |
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Inspector Gesicht posted:That bitch is the reason why Paul Kearney's W40K book Dark Hunters: Umbra Sumnus had to be pulped just before it could hit shelves, because "Dark Hunters" is such a distinct name that no two books could share the same two words in the title. Paul Kearney is one of my favourite authors for writing The Monarchies of God and The Macht but he just can't catch a break Holy poo poo you horrible nerd.
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# ? Jul 14, 2015 10:52 |
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Inspector Gesicht posted:That bitch tragic story of a nerd babbyboy loving destroyed by the feminist agenda, tears fall down now
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# ? Jul 14, 2015 10:59 |
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# ? Jul 14, 2015 12:28 |
This is probably cheating, my favorite bad book is one that was intentionally bad. It's called Atlanta Nights, and it was written round-robin style by a bunch of genre authors trying to see if they could write a novel so bad that a notorious vanity publisher wouldn't accept it. (Answer: No, they couldn't.) Excerpts include:quote:"All dead guys are irregardless of how they lived their rotten, two-timing sadistic, pathetic, discombobulatedly senseless, irreligious, unthinking, flakes, debauched, foulmouthed, obnoxious, deviant, gross, adulterous, murderous, gluttonous, alcoholic, lazy, indolent, filthy, grotesquely indecent, lunatic, lives", "She preened. He turned away with me! Quickly! Inside!" quote:"It's full of sick, people!" quote:"The waitress jotted down Isadore's order, then looked at Isaac with the patience of a saint who has to work tables in order to support a family and possibly just a writing habits, not to mention, pay bills and federal taxes." quote:"[He] splattered it with his blood and ichor, all kinds of body fluids, all more or less foul and sticky." One of the chapters was written by a text generator. I can't make that up.
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# ? Jul 14, 2015 14:52 |
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After Maddy's parents divorce, she's stuck starting over at a new high school. Friendless and nicknamed Freak Girl, Manga-loving artist Maddy finds refuge in the interactive online game Fields of Fantasy. In that virtual world, she reinvents herself as Allora, a gorgeous elfin alter ego, and meets a true friend in Sir Leo. Maddy can?t hide behind Allora forever, especially as a real-life crush begins edging in on her budding virtual romance. But would anyone pick the real Maddy, gamer girl and Manga freak, over the fantasy? This fresh, geeky/cool novel includes online chats and exciting gaming, and features Maddy?s Mangastyle artwork. quote:“Whatcha doin', Freak Girl?"
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# ? Jul 14, 2015 18:24 |
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Nanomashoes posted:
Gender flipped Ready Player One or a sincere text version of The Guild?
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# ? Jul 14, 2015 19:48 |
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The most infuriating series of books I read were about a Sexy Badass Future Cop. She had a sexy badass super-hacker boyfriend with unlimited wealth and vague and convenient connections to the criminal underworld that would move the plot along as needed (why can't I ever date a hunky deus ex machina?) Only one scene has stayed with me over the years--Future Cop got the flu or something, but she was just too drat badass to admit it. Cue all these people being like, "Go home and get well, Future Cop" but NO she couldn't do that because she's too BADASS. She goes to boyfriend's hacking lair and badasses collided as he physically fought with her and forced her into bed and poured nyquil down her throat and it dragged on and on and on because at every turn she tried to get away from him because I'M NOT SICK I'M A BADASS and he's all BUT I'M PHYSICALLY OVERPOWERING YOU BECAUSE I'M THE PERFECT MAN Does that ring any bells for anyone? Around this time I also read a few awful historical romances. I really enjoyed how no sex would take place without the main characters coincidentally bathing beforehand.
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# ? Jul 14, 2015 20:57 |
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Philip Jose Farmer's science fiction novel Dark is the Sun was excruciating. Please enjoy this exhaustive and frightening excerpt describing one of the characters... THE SHEMIBOB!quote:She seemed at first view to be half-snake, half-human. Her body was that of a python's and at least forty feet long. Her skin, however, was scaleless, smooth as Deyv's. It had a silvery quality, as if impregnated with metal, with dark spindle-shaped markings on the back and sides. The body was raised from the floor in a most unsnakelike manner by twenty pairs of short thick humanoid legs. These were black up to the thighs and silvery to the body. The feet were also human, though they were very broad and threetoed.
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# ? Jul 15, 2015 07:12 |
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The Papal Decree by Luis Miguel Rocha is the worst book I've ever read. I found it in an airport and thought, "oh, it's a daft Da Vinci Code knock-off, this should be a bit of light relief". The book's about a priest/spy dude called Rafael who's an author self-insert. He's mates with a high-powered journalist/secret agent called Sarah, who's friendly with the Vatican and knows all the freaky secrets that they apparently have. She only just considers the possibility that she might be pregnant when her boyfriend says, "Well, we have not been taking the appropriate precautions, dear" (actual quote), despite having missed periods and morning sickness. The story is that the Vatican has a secret, and only 5 guys know about it and 4 of them have been found dead. It's a scroll they found years ago that appears to be the Gospel of Jesus. And they keep finding more and more of Jesus's stuff, they must've found his shed or something. For some reason, the Vatican doesn't want to show the world irrefutable historical evidence that their founder was real, so it's a secret. Also, there's a bad guy murdering all the guys who know about it, and all they know about him is that he's a Jesuit (not Opus Dei because he's nothing like Silas from The Da Vinci Code). They work this out after Rafael and his atheist mate Jacopo shoe-horn a painfully long geek-out about church history in front of a bunch of the filth, who are in the middle of a murder investigation and only trying to find out what they know. There are huge chunks of these conversations that look like they were copied off Wikipedia pages about church history. Other highlights include several characters whose names are ethnic variations on "John Smith", and the fact that no one ever "says" anything - the author was probably telt in school by some well-meaning teacher to stop using "said" and so he makes everyone "exclaim", "affirm", "respond", "cry", etc. even when it makes no sense. In the end it turns out Sarah isn't pregnant after all; she has ovarian cancer that gave a false positive on the pregnancy test. The priest dude shows up to console her and she's thinking, "oh, I'm kind of relieved I'm not pregnant with that guy's kid when I still have feelings for the sexy priest", not "how will I deal with this cancer". Then it cuts to five years later... and we hear nothing about Sarah and her cancer. Instead we just have some conversation with the Pope and some guy talking about the Bible and how they reckon it's true... which we could probably guess from the fact that HE'S THE HEAD OF THE BIGGEST CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN THE WORLD. It's just bad.
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# ? Jul 15, 2015 08:31 |
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artsy fartsy posted:The most infuriating series of books I read were about a Sexy Badass Future Cop. She had a sexy badass super-hacker boyfriend with unlimited wealth and vague and convenient connections to the criminal underworld that would move the plot along as needed (why can't I ever date a hunky deus ex machina?) Oh, man, was this one of J.D. Robb's In Death books? I kind of love those trashy pieces of poo poo, but the main characters are the worst loving things about them, especially Omnicompetent Billionaire Hacker Boyfriend/Husband. Some fictional characters just need to be taken out behind the back of the barn and put out of everyone's misery. EDIT: Also, the main couple both have Extremely Sad Backstories that we go over in every. loving. Book. Like loving clockwork. (Sexy Badass Future Cop in particular has terrible nightmares related to her murder cases and her Extremely Sad Backstory, which kind of makes me wonder if murder investigation is really an ideal career for her?) These backstories are hilariously overwrought, and we get to hear about them constantly. I swear to God, these books are about 60% moderately fun trash featuring characters who aren't completely wretched to follow around, and the other 40% is all the loving protagonists. Antivehicular has a new favorite as of 09:49 on Jul 15, 2015 |
# ? Jul 15, 2015 09:44 |
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Antivehicular posted:Oh, man, was this one of J.D. Robb's In Death books? I kind of love those trashy pieces of poo poo, but the main characters are the worst loving things about them, especially Omnicompetent Billionaire Hacker Boyfriend/Husband. Some fictional characters just need to be taken out behind the back of the barn and put out of everyone's misery. That's what I was thinking of from atrsy fartsy's description but couldn't place the name. I *knew* this trash rang a bell. I remember my mom lending me one of them years ago and I couldn't even finish it. Just to make sure my memory wasn't playing tricks I looked it up and J.D. Robb is the pseudonym of Nora Roberts of the trashy romance novel fame. Not surprised.
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# ? Jul 15, 2015 13:44 |
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Part of Everything posted:Philip Jose Farmer's science fiction novel Dark is the Sun was excruciating. Please enjoy this exhaustive and frightening excerpt describing one of the characters... THE SHEMIBOB! I remember liking that book just because it has a bonkers setting.
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# ? Jul 15, 2015 14:23 |
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Oh , I almost forgot about The Black Gryphon by Mercedes Lackey. I read that in 1996. When it got to the part where the gryphons had graphic gryphon sex I took the book out to the backyard and burned it.
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 00:17 |
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I can't stop listening to that Modelland podcast help
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 02:57 |
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Part of Everything posted:Oh , I almost forgot about The Black Gryphon by Mercedes Lackey. I read that in 1996. When it got to the part where the gryphons had graphic gryphon sex I took the book out to the backyard and burned it. Oh my god, I read that when I was twelve or so, and I will never forget the lady gryphon (who couldn't get a man gryphon for some reason) trying to have sex with a human dude who was some sort of magickal sex healer or something. Mercedes Lackey wrote weird poo poo. Better than Marion Zimmer Bradley, though, who ended up being a pedophile.
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 03:39 |
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Pinball posted:Better than Marion Zimmer Bradley, though, who ended up being a pedophile. I don't know *how* I missed that news last year, but welp. And holy poo poo.
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 03:46 |
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Pinball posted:Oh my god, I read that when I was twelve or so, and I will never forget the lady gryphon (who couldn't get a man gryphon for some reason) trying to have sex with a human dude who was some sort of magickal sex healer or something. Mercedes Lackey wrote weird poo poo. Both her and her husband. Apparently they were a team-up who abused the poo poo out of dozens of young kids of either gender.
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 04:42 |
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If there is any sexual interaction between a human and a non human it is a bad book. Because the author did not really want to write a book they just wanted a way to publish their furry porn.
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 05:01 |
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Pinball posted:Better than Marion Zimmer Bradley, though, who ended up being a pedophile. Woah, what? Mists of Avalon was one of my favourite books, once upon a time.
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 10:39 |
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Sakurazuka posted:Woah, what? Mists of Avalon was one of my favourite books, once upon a time. It's pretty loving dark. The daughter is the one who outed her father as a rapist pedophile years ago ("They convicted him for what he did to me but he had done it to dozens") and she said her mother (Marion) was even worse, and only kept quiet because of all the positive feelings people got from her work.
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 11:06 |
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MZB was married to Walter Breen, who had a previous conviction for child molestation from 1954. Breen was banned from WorldCon in 1963 for being a pedophile, which caused an uproar in a science fiction fandom firmly in the grip of the Geek Social Fallacies, decades before they were formulated. This document(Edit: fixed link) is a contemporary account of the controversy. Breen continued to molest children up till 1990, when he received his final conviction for child molestation and died after serving one year. It emerged last year that not only was MZB completely aware of what Breen was doing, but that she also joined Breen in molesting their own kids Doc Quantum has a new favorite as of 14:07 on Jul 17, 2015 |
# ? Jul 17, 2015 13:16 |
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Can we go back to discussing nice pleasant non-horrifying things like Piers Anthony books please?
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 13:52 |
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quantumavenger posted:MZB was married to Walter Breen, who had a previous conviction for child molestation from 1954. Breen was banned from WorldCon in 1963 for being a pedophile, which caused an uproar in a science fiction fandom firmly in the grip of the Geek Social Fallacies, decades before they were formulated. This document is a contemporary account of the controversy. Holy poo poo. quote:Although Breen's behavior at conventions right around the time of Pacificon II seems to have been beyond reproach, Breen (who also wrote an authoritative book on man-boy love) was known by many fans, especially in the Bay Area, to have engaged in sex with boys. (Ultimately, he died in prison a multiply-convicted pederast.) quote:Q. Where did you have this discussion with David where he thought he was too old for Walter? Poems from her daughter attempting to express her suffering quote:And how to learn to cope And not give up all my hope MZB was a bigger monster then Sandusky, Jimmy Savile, and Warren Jeffs (had to look that one up) put together. Now most of the people who own/operate the licenses for her books donate 100% of the profits to NGO's that fight for child rights. That's the important point. You can still enjoy her written works because every single dollar her estate makes goes to help people who were victims of monsters like her.
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 13:55 |
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drat, that's awful To go back to a less depressing topic, a while back a well-meaning relatives got a bunch of family members Three Cups of Tea. It's about a guy setting up schools in Afghanistan, and supposedly it's a true story. I think it came out a while back that it was a bunch of crap, but what got me is the distinctive prose of somebody who is being a writer at you as hard as they possibly can. My breaking point was a line that went something like, "Mortenson sat down to take a drink of water, but he couldn't drink in enough of the scenery around him." Edit: And now, looking at the Wikipedia page a minute too late, I just picked on a guy who committed suicide. Thinky Whale has a new favorite as of 14:13 on Jul 17, 2015 |
# ? Jul 17, 2015 14:07 |
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Thinky Whale posted:I think it came out a while back that it was a bunch of crap, but what got me is the distinctive prose of somebody who is being a writer at you as hard as they possibly can. My breaking point was a line that went something like, "Mortenson sat down to take a drink of water, but he couldn't drink in enough of the scenery around him." Being a writer, but a very bad writer. That sentence doesn't even make sense. The first and second halves are completely divorced from each other except for that strained "drinking" metaphor. It's a complete non sequitur.
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 14:10 |
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It's been a while, and I can't remember the book, but it was the guy who was featured on Oprah's Book Club and was later found to have fabricated 95% of his life. The entire thing reeks of stdh.txt yet for some reason it was a big deal for a year or so. There was also some book written as a bio of some hardcore black female gangbanger with some excruciatingly bad lines. Think "So this ghetto ho tried to jack my rock, so I popped her in the head with a fo-fo and let the block know who ran the streets" but it turned out is was some middle-upper class white girl and when outed she tried to claim it was a true to life depiction of what the lower classes experience.
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 14:23 |
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pentyne posted:It's been a while, and I can't remember the book, but it was the guy who was featured on Oprah's Book Club and was later found to have fabricated 95% of his life. The entire thing reeks of stdh.txt yet for some reason it was a big deal for a year or so. James Frey and A Million Little Pieces? I remember that. Oprah was pissed.
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 14:32 |
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pentyne posted:It's been a while, and I can't remember the book, but it was the guy who was featured on Oprah's Book Club and was later found to have fabricated 95% of his life. The entire thing reeks of stdh.txt yet for some reason it was a big deal for a year or so
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 14:32 |
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I had very poor critical skills as a kid and read a bunch of really terrible sci-fi books, but the only one I was capable at the time of recognizing as bad was the Star Wars Jedi Prince series. Here's some stuff I remember off the top of my head: - A guy comes along claiming to be the son of Emperor Palpatine. He has three eyes. His name is "Trioculus"; this is a word meaning "three eyes." As proof of his ancestry, he produces a glove that he claims to be the glove of Darth Vader. He is able to use this glove to choke people at a distance, and, you see, the glove is what allowed Darth Vader to do that in the movies, and only a son of Emperor Palpatine could use it (I guess Darth Vader was also a son of Emperor Palpatine?). Trioculus wants to marry Princess Leia (as a Main Villain in an '80s kids book/cartoon he is contractually obligated to want this); when she proves less than amenable to this idea, he instead marries a robot replica of Princess Leia. It kills him. At the robot wedding. - At some point it is revealed that Trioculus isn't actually the son of Emperor Palpatine. Another guy is. This guy also has three eyes. His name is "Triclops"; this is a word meaning "three eyes." - The main character of the series is a kid named Ken. He is a kid Just Like You, who grows up in a room full of Star Wars memorabilia and like C3PO action figures or whatever, only his room is in an underground city on Yavin IV (the Lost City of the Jedi!!!!) where he was raised by robots and has no human contact before being discovered partway through book 2. The robots give him "lessons" that consist entirely of Star Wars trivia. - All the Grand Moffs fly around on a ship together. That ship is called the Moffship. On the Moffship they have conferences. Those conferences are called Mofferences. - There is a character named Zorba the Hutt; he looks like Jabba the Hutt except he has a full human-style beard - Han and Leia build their dream house (a Cloud House, on Bespin) and have a housewarming party. Later they attempt to elope to a theme park, called Hologram Fun World. In the end they decide not to elope and make a big production out of planning their REAL wedding. These are subplots in a Star Wars book. Basically I was convinced that the only good way to read the Star Wars EU books was to read them in chronological order , and this pile of poo poo took place two years after Jedi so even though I was fully aware that it was terrible I still had to suffer through it (and Splinter of the Mind's Eye, which was also terrible) if I wanted to read actual good books like Heir to the Empire or whatever. I guess I thought those books would like spoil things that happened in chronologically-earlier books, and this would be bad somehow??? Man I was a really stupid kid.
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 15:35 |
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loquacius posted:- All the Grand Moffs fly around on a ship together. That ship is called the Moffship. On the Moffship they have conferences. Those conferences are called Mofferences. quote:- There is a character named Zorba the Hutt; he looks like Jabba the Hutt except he has a full human-style beard Looking him up, he's Jabba's dad, and he won control of Cloud City from Lando. As I recall, he did this using a deck of cards with markings on them that only he could see. Why did I read this book
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 15:52 |
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loquacius posted:- A guy comes along claiming to be the son of Emperor Palpatine. He has three eyes. His name is "Trioculus"; this is a word meaning "three eyes." As proof of his ancestry, he produces a glove that he claims to be the glove of Darth Vader. He is able to use this glove to choke people at a distance, and, you see, the glove is what allowed Darth Vader to do that in the movies, and only a son of Emperor Palpatine could use it (I guess Darth Vader was also a son of Emperor Palpatine?). Trioculus wants to marry Princess Leia (as a Main Villain in an '80s kids book/cartoon he is contractually obligated to want this); when she proves less than amenable to this idea, he instead marries a robot replica of Princess Leia. It kills him. At the robot wedding.
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 16:19 |
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Tiggum posted:I think you're in the wrong thread, this one is for terrible books. I've read those books, they're not so bad they loop around to good, they're so bad they loop straight around to bad.
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 16:59 |
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# ? May 19, 2024 15:08 |
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FactsAreUseless posted:A Million Little Pieces, the story of a man who got drug high on crack weeds.
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# ? Jul 17, 2015 17:32 |