|
I got an autographed copy for Christmas. I didn't start it because I'm tired of fantasy series not being finished but hearing this I might not start at all
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 19:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 09:46 |
|
|
Ambitious Spider posted:I got an autographed copy for Christmas. I didn't start it because I'm tired of fantasy series not being finished but hearing this I might not start at all I am having the alternate experience and want to crack open my copy just to see how long I can stand it.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 20:22
|
|
|
When I was a kid one of my uncles got me a couple of books from the Barf-O-Rama series. The books are so loving file but when I was in 3rd grade they were super edgy and gross.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 20:51
|
|
|
The Vosgian Beast posted:I am having the alternate experience and want to crack open my copy just to see how long I can stand it. Did I also mention that this book is 994 pages and a whole lot of that is Kvothe worrying about his finances? I swear the whole first 1/3 of the book is him schlepping around campus and thinking about the money he doesn't have. He moons over this one girl he can't have, while every other woman in the book is secretly into him but he just doesn't realise it. If Rothfuss spins around with book 3 and says "surprise, Kvothe is totally full of poo poo and is just kind of a loser blowhard" then I will do a total 180 on these books. The whole gimmick is that he's like 30 and telling his story back to a random bard-scribe-dude, so it's possible but I don't think it's very likely. There are actually pretty good aspects of it; Rothfuss writes very nice prose, and the world and the magic are pretty interesting. In the first book, the good things overpower the bad. In the second book, they take a backseat to terrible sex scenes and author wish fulfillment. Rothfuss kinda galls me, because he's clearly talented, but he really needs a loving editor to slap him around and say "this does not belong in the book." Cut 80% of the campus poo poo and 100% of the weird sex, then cut the Nice Guy bullshit. It's 994 pages, so it's not like it was gonna be too short. Actually do something with the cool plot arcs with the Chandrian and the weird present-day horror movie poo poo that's going on while Kvothe narrates. It's frustrating that so much good poo poo gets set up, then totally ignored for more Kvothe being sad that girls don't like him.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 20:54
|
|
|
U.T. Raptor posted:Crichton's books are mostly pretty terrible aside from Jurassic Park and maybe Congo (all of them are basically "Michael Crichton learned about a thing, here's a novel about his opinion on it"), and got worse over time. And then you get weirdly petty things like him depicting a real-life critic as a small-dicked pedophile in one of his last books. was it crichton who made one of his critics a pedohile in his novel
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 20:57
|
|
|
U.T. Raptor posted:Michael Crichton...depicting a real-life critic as a small-dicked pedophile in one of his last books. Hogge Wild posted:was it crichton who made one of his critics a pedohile in his novel Did you even read the post you were replying to. When it comes to popular authors Crichton may have been a nutjob and King may have ended a book dedicated to his son with a preteen sewer gangbang, but nobody can touch Dean Koontz's creepy love affair with golden retrievers.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 21:18
|
|
|
Sleeveless posted:Did you even read the post you were replying to. lol sorry, i've been 24 hours awake
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 21:24
|
|
|
Sleeveless posted:Did you even read the post you were replying to. At one point they're driving along in a huge gas-guzzling SUV, and they manage to escape some bad poo poo. The narrator then goes "man, imagine if we'd been in a prius lol liberals are terrible."
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 21:24
|
|
|
Sleeveless posted:Did you even read the post you were replying to. Now that's just an outright lie. The preteen sewer gangbang was halfway through the book, get it right.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 21:27
|
|
|
Hogge Wild posted:lol sorry, i've been 24 hours awake It's OK, it's so ridiculous that it's worth pointing out twice. SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Ahaha Koontz is great. I reread The Taking recently, and there's a huge amount of far-right subtext in there that I missed the first time. Characters are constantly going "it's the end of the world and it's not global warming at all! Bet those atheist scientists are feeling silly right about now." Pretty much every Dean Koontz novel is about a stoic manly-man solving problems with guns. Time-traveling Nazis? Genetically-engineered bioweapons? Satanists committing mass murder with the help of the spirit world? Just shoot them a whole bunch!
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 21:34
|
|
|
Sleeveless posted:It's OK, it's so ridiculous that it's worth pointing out twice. I fail to see how guns aren't the solutions to those problems.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 21:37
|
|
|
maybe the worst book i've ever read was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_the_Sea every woman with lines gets raped, the protagonist is a mary sue, when the protagonist sees some medieval thing the author drop a wikipedia article about it and the book is full of historical inaccuracies it's not so bad that's it's good, it's just very bad i have no idea why italians and spaniards have given it some awards, maybe they are just so corrupted
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 21:38
|
|
|
A friend of mine who has recommended multiple nerdbooks to me that I enjoyed very much has also talked about the Kingkiller series; I've stayed away from it because the summary on the back cover made the protagonist seem like a huge cringeworthy Mary Sue. Glad to know my Sue senses are still sharp 
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 21:48
|
|
|
Sleeveless posted:It's OK, it's so ridiculous that it's worth pointing out twice. It's the biblical apocalypse, except demons are actually aliens. The book ends because the Good Christians kept their faith and resisted the devil, and after all the heathens and liberals have been abducted/dragged to hell, our protagonists are left to recreate the world the right way. They never actually really fight back, they just kinda survive thanks to their faith. And yes, there is a gratuitous golden labrador.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 22:13
|
|
|
Ambitious Spider posted:I got an autographed copy for Christmas. I didn't start it because I'm tired of fantasy series not being finished but hearing this I might not start at all The funniest part of the whole thing is that before the first book came out the author was stating that he had all three books already written. Shockingly enough the series isn't done. First book was 07, second book was 11 and the third book hasn't actually come out yet. There was also a whole thing about how the main character's story involved him going to a university, getting kicked out and then doing a whole bunch of other stuff. Except he only got kicked out of the university at the very end of the second book. Which means its going to run longer than three books or a whole bunch of stuff is getting crammed into the third one.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 22:58
|
|
|
The Vosgian Beast posted:Now that's just an outright lie. It is the next to last major event in the book, but it's at the end of the kid part of the story.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 23:05
|
|
|
everyone posted:RAPE Can anyone explain why rape pops up to often in bad genre fiction to a clueless idiot? 
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 23:41
|
|
|
Klaus88 posted:Can anyone explain why rape pops up to often in bad genre fiction to a clueless idiot? It's a cheap and easy way to motivate a male character, establish a villain, and/or give the female character depth.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 23:45
|
|
|
Klaus88 posted:Can anyone explain why rape pops up to often in bad genre fiction to a clueless idiot? It's a cheap shock. You don't have to be good at writing to make people think that a rape is evil or scary so hack writers use it the way hack horror uses jump scares.
|
|
#
?
Jul 19, 2015 23:51
|
|
|
SurreptitiousMuffin posted:There's a 70 page sex scene in the second book. Kvothe (the protagonist, and really obviously an idealised version of the author) stumbles into the realm of the queen of the sex faeries, who is so good at sex that it drives men insane. At one point, in a reflecting pool, Kvothe sees a vision of the girl he likes. She's being beaten by her boyfriend, who is a MEAN JOCK. Kvothe basically goes "bitch deserved it for not dating me I'm such a nice guy" then goes back to sticking it in the queen of the sex fairies. He spends 1000 years in her sexy realm having awesome sex with her, then she says "oh my god you're so good! You're the best at sex ever, Kvothe!" and while she's passed out from gettin' hosed good, he escapes the fae realm. What really drives me crazy about the sex fairy is that she is in fact a monster who rapes people braindead. Everybody (except Kvothe, because he's special) who goes off with her comes back a drooling mess forever, and when she uses her sex magic on him, it's explicitly compared to a time when he was living on the streets and some older kids tried to assault him. Then he does some kind of magic thing and she becomes a harmless pixie dream girl. He doesn't do anything to stop her from preying on anybody else because if there wasn't a fairy around to magically sexually assault and mentally break people, the world would be less special.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 02:53
|
|
|
mycot posted:How does that even work? What's the special Warrior Culture that's so much better than the good guys? Ninjas?
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 12:59
|
|
|
Thinky Whale posted:What really drives me crazy about the sex fairy is that she is in fact a monster who rapes people braindead. Everybody (except Kvothe, because he's special) who goes off with her comes back a drooling mess forever, and when she uses her sex magic on him, it's explicitly compared to a time when he was living on the streets and some older kids tried to assault him. Then he does some kind of magic thing and she becomes a harmless pixie dream girl. He doesn't do anything to stop her from preying on anybody else because if there wasn't a fairy around to magically sexually assault and mentally break people, the world would be less special. I mean, the most terrible thing about the series is that people defend it but that Rothfuss is now churning out side-novels about his stapled-on non-characters whilst saying "who knows when I'll publish the third one" is so gross. He never had this loving series finished, he has no idea what he's doing and I honestly think I know how the Bad Thread got started about GRRM now I've jumped on a series that spiralled into poo poo at the ground floor.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 15:09
|
|
|
Funny thing is for me the best part of that book was the scrounging for money. It's the most believable part that a nobody from nowhere would have to constantly bust his rear end to make rent/pay tuition. It was far more interesting then the sex fairy or the dragon slaying. Yet everyone else I know hates those parts of the book. Of course he then gets a king to pay his tuition and invents a machine that everyone in the world wants so he'll always have a huge income.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 15:26
|
|
|
The Vosgian Beast posted:It's a cheap shock. You don't have to be good at writing to make people think that a rape is evil or scary so hack writers use it the way hack horror uses jump scares. A lot of these writers also have issues with women and sex in general, as can be seen by how graphic a lot of the depictions are and how they often use it to 'punish' a woman for doing something wrong. There's a lot of reprehensible actions to establish a villain and make people feel for protagonists, but the constant jump to rape and then writing it in a sexually titillating manner speaks to how hosed up some writers are. Speaking of, Lost Boys by Orson Scott Card is the biggest garbage fire I've ever read by a writer who is basically a walking garbage fire himself. You can kind of overlook how many naked young boys are in Ender's Game because it's very tangential and the book is at least pretty competent. This poo poo, though, is wall to wall boy abductions, pedophiles, pedophile red herrings, and fake out pedophile rape/murder twists that will make you question what the gently caress is up with Card. He mentions in the forward that this started as a Halloween horror story he came up with after having his son. Card's issues become real clear when you read the adaptation of Hamlet he did a few years ago, which makes Hamlet's father a pedophile that turned his son gay by raping him and has come back as a ghost to drag his son to gay hell. Yep.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 16:31
|
|
|
Anne McCaffrey who wrote The Dragoriders of Pern also supported the notion that men turn gay if you rape them.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 16:46
|
|
|
Hogge Wild posted:Anne McCaffrey who wrote The Dragoriders of Pern also supported the notion that men turn gay if you rape them. also that being a bottom inherently makes you flamboyant, in a clear cause-and-effect relationship
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 16:53
|
|
|
Practical Demon posted:Orson Scott Card my fav thing is OSC being accused of writing Ender's Game as  Hitler apologia http://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 17:20
|
|
|
The Saddest Rhino posted:my fav thing is OSC being accused of writing Ender's Game as I never took it that seriously, but it's fun to spread around given what an absolute cock OSC is. Sort of like how that essay about Harry Potter being Calvinist is going to get a lot more play if JK Rowling suddenly joins one of Britain's white supremacist fascist parties.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 17:58
|
|
|
John Kessel has a much more magnificent and relevant takedown of Ender's Game that I've already linked: Creating the Innocent Killer. If you ever liked the book, reading this will make you a better person (I'm speaking from experience). John Kessel posted:The abused child, when grown and given the power to act out his own suppressed rage, is unable to identify with the objects of his rage. In extreme cases, as Miller says about convicted child abusers,“Compulsively and without qualms, they inflicted the same suffering on [others] as they had been subjected to themselves.” (21) Yet to the abuser it still feels as if he is being abused, as if the sacrifice is his, and the effects of his actions on others take a secondary place to the emotions he feels himself.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 18:26
|
|
|
Do any of these "Ender = Hitler  " criticism account for the fact that Ender doesn't in fact feel like the buggers deserved what they got, suffers intense guilt, and makes sure that he is vilified by everyone else for what he's done? As someone who has read several Card books I'm 100% able to cope with the idea that he is a terrible person (he is), I'm just curious.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 19:04
|
|
|
I only read Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow back in school. The former was required reading, and I liked it at the time. Because of that, I hunted down a copy of the latter, and holy poo poo, even back then I thought it was bad. The whole thing read like wierd Mary Sue fanfic. It brought up every thing Ender did, and then had Bean do it better. Ender breaks the game? Bean is smart enough not to play it. Bean discovers the simulation at the end isn't actually a simulation and doesn't tell anyone because he knows what will happen. The only way he is supposed to be worse is that he isn't as good with people, I guess?
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 19:35
|
|
|
loquacius posted:Do any of these "Ender = Hitler Ender is Hitler-as-Christ. John Kessel posted:Thus, Ender’s taking on guilt for the extermination of the buggers at the end of Ender’s Game, and in Speaker for the Dead, is in no way a repudiation of his earlier violence, which is still viewed as justified, but rather a demonstration of the “magnitude of spirit” Graff praised him for earlier. Ender exterminates an alien race, gets credit for saving the human race, gets credit for feeling bad about it, and gets credit for expiating sins which he did not commit. First he sacrifices himself emotionally in order to save the human race physically, and then after the buggers are dead he sacrifices himself morally so that others may feel themselves innocent. History records him as a monster. In reality, the monster is a savior.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 19:42
|
|
|
At the end of the day Ender's Game is a book about how in the future being good at video games and laser tag make you important and cool and better than everybody else and also all the people who make fun of you for doing those things are actually just jealous of how awesome you are. It's no surprise that it was so acclaimed by children and manchildren regardless of the novel's actual quality.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 19:43
|
|
|
Man, I forgot to bring my lotion, don't hold a circlejerk without me!
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 19:58
|
|
|
Hogge Wild posted:Anne McCaffrey who wrote The Dragoriders of Pern also supported the notion that men turn gay if you rape them.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 20:20
|
|
|
Ender's Game is kind of weird morally when you scratch the surface, and it is wish fulfillment for nerds, but almost every genre novel ever fits those criteria. It's not the worst thing though, especially compared to literally everything else Card has ever written. Another great example is Wyrms, which is primarily about a fifteen year old girl's desire to gently caress a giant worm creature. At the very least, it breaks the tradition of Card's young boy obsession.
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 20:54
|
|
|
Practical Demon posted:It's not the worst thing though, especially compared to literally everything else Card has ever written. Like, for example The Tales of Alvin Maker! I read Seventh Son, the first book in this series, when I was in college. I enjoyed the poo poo out of it and attempted to read the rest of it, only to find that each book was an order of magnitude worse than the one before and by book 3 or 4 they were complete unreadable trash. As an added bonus, the covers of each book got more and more homoerotic for no particular reason, making me feel extra awkward carrying them up to the register at the bookstore   book 1, looks pretty good   book 2, uh okay that little boy should be wearing some more clothes but I guess it's supposed to be a Native American thing or whatever  Book 3. Uh, no, bookstore cashier girl, this is not porn. That glistening hairless guy is probably wearing pants and the thing in front of him is just glowing flying metal. He's a magic blacksmith, you see. Stop judging me and just take my $7.99. I don't remember the books clearly enough for a true effortpost, but basically the premise of the series is an alternate-reality early-19th-century America in a world where folktales and folk magic are real, which was a cool idea, but as the series went on the protagonist Alvin became a clearer and clearer Jesus analogy and hugely blatant Mary Sue, and the nebulous group of antagonists (led explicitly by Satan) got more and more cartoon-villain evil until I pretty much didn't care what happened to anyone in the storyline anymore. For example, the main antagonist in book 1 is a local town preacher who is convinced he's receiving messages from God when really they're from Satan; he is a complex and interesting villain who is clearly motivated to do good but misguided by outside forces. In book 3 or 4 (can't recall which exactly) this character meets a slaveowner and rapes some slaves with him as they high-five and agree that being evil is the loving poo poo. Yeah. Suffice to say, I was not able to finish reading this series. loquacius has a new favorite as of 22:05 on Jul 20, 2015 |
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 22:02
|
|
|
it's called Red Prophet and it has stereotype Native Americans on it wow
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 22:54
|
|
|
Practical Demon posted:Speaking of, Lost Boys by Orson Scott Card is the biggest garbage fire I've ever read by a writer who is basically a walking garbage fire himself. You can kind of overlook how many naked young boys are in Ender's Game because it's very tangential and the book is at least pretty competent. This poo poo, though, is wall to wall boy abductions, pedophiles, pedophile red herrings, and fake out pedophile rape/murder twists that will make you question what the gently caress is up with Card. He mentions in the forward that this started as a Halloween horror story he came up with after having his son. I tried to read this one in high school and got 40, maybe 50, pages in before I decided it was a stinking tire fire. I only remember three things about it: * The oh-so-perfect protagonist family is Mormon, because of course they are * The eldest son of the protagonist, who I suspect is the one who eventually gets PEDOPHILE'D!, has his amazing wunderkind genius demonstrated by correcting an uppity teacher about the plural of "octopus" * The potential babysitter who immediately sets off red flags to the dad is a dude who plays D&D with a character named "Saladin Gallowglass," who is apparently Chaotic Good, because the Mormon dad gets a line about "how could you be chaotic and also good?" I never even got to the gay rape pedostravaganza or whatever and this book still irritated the poo poo out of me. How did anybody finish it?
|
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 23:10
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 09:46 |
|
|
Antivehicular posted:I never even got to the gay rape pedostravaganza or whatever and this book still irritated the poo poo out of me. How did anybody finish it? I can't tell you how I finished it, but... The main kid is killed toward the last third of the book, but you don't know till the very end because he comes back as a GHOST to help solve his murder and the rape and murders of all the other boys in town. I guess it had to be a Halloween story some how, and not just an excuse for Card to write pedophile hysteria for an entire novel. The weirdo babysitter is the red herring who is ALSO a pedophile, but only gets as far as taking the family's infant girl to change her diaper and talking about smooth skin that smells like honey. He apologizes by saying he only wanted to look, and would never touch 'cause he's not some pervert or anything.' There's also a character really interested in Mormonism because he's nuts and really fixates on the whole "you get to be best friends with Jesus and create your own planet in Heaven" thing.He ends up naked on the family's lawn yelling about being God incarnate. Poor Miserable Gurgi has a new favorite as of 23:30 on Jul 20, 2015 |
|
#
?
Jul 20, 2015 23:27
|
|