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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Mary Sue could be her own thread, but generally my understanding is that if they have a character flaw of any kind, they're not a Mary Sue. Honor Harrington is a Mary Sue because she's perfect at everything, including morality, and anyone who disagrees with her about anything is actually evil. To add to this, the term "Mary Sue" originated as short hand for "hyper-competent obvious author self-insert." The "author stand-in" is the key thing. Rey is probably not the insert of the various authors who wrote Star Wars. Kvothe is probably not Rothfuss's person self-insert either.
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Feb 4, 2016 03:04
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Uranium Phoenix posted:Rey is probably not the insert of the various authors who wrote Star Wars. Agreed. Uranium Phoenix posted:Kvothe is probably not Rothfuss's person self-insert either. Disagreed. Rothfuss' blog entries related to music in particular line up with Kvothe's opinions.
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Feb 4, 2016 03:26
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Rey is an audience insert.
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Feb 4, 2016 03:28
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ulmont posted:Rothfuss' blog entries related to music in particular line up with Kvothe's opinions. I think there's a little more to being an author "stand in" than simply having the same opinions about music.
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Feb 4, 2016 07:14
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BananaNutkins posted:Well, I believe in the original Doyle, the cocaine use was seen more as Sherlock being a forward thinking man of science rather than a flaw. I just read Hound of The Baskervilles and Holmes most definitely had no flaws in that book. He also occassionally fucks up - most notable case being A Scandal In Bohemia.
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Feb 4, 2016 08:40
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Kvothe's character arc revolves pretty majorly around "goes to university, has no money" so it's pretty obvious he's Rothfuss's author stand-in
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Feb 4, 2016 09:23
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anilEhilated posted:A Study In Scarlet makes it pretty explicit he doesn't care about anything that's not useful for investigation which leaves Watson quite bewildered. IIRC the example he used was astronomy. This is actually a very interesting point, because it doesn't take Conan Doyle very long to almost completely drop that idea. He freely makes allusions in speech to the Bible and a number of writers; he knows immediately who the Count von Kramm really is in A Scandal in Bohemia; in The Bruce Partington-Plans he's writing a monograph about Orlande de Lassus and he says that for Mycroft to leave his usual routine would be "like a planet leaving its orbit"; in The Hound of the Baskervilles he admires some paintings and then says "Watson won't allow that I know anything of art, but that is mere jealousy, since our views upon the subject differ." I've got half a memory of a passage where it outright says "oh, that was just Holmes's little joke when they first met", but that could just be transposition from having read third-party stuff about the change since reading the stories. Once I read something (can't find that, either) which explained the change by suggesting that Conan Doyle originally created Holmes as the ultimate lower-middle-class professional, with a background, family, and occupation similar to his own (he was a consulting doctor); and then only after Holmes became popular do we find him demonstrating wider knowledge, and there comes the line in The Greek Interpreter where he says he's from a family of country squires.
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Feb 4, 2016 14:35
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Earwicker posted:I think there's a little more to being an author "stand in" than simply having the same opinions about music. There's more - that sentence was edited clumsily apparently - but I didn't feel like doing a detailed parallel reread of the books and the blog to reference other topics like travel, education, etc.
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Feb 4, 2016 14:40
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Trin Tragula posted:Once I read something (can't find that, either) which explained the change by suggesting that Conan Doyle originally created Holmes as the ultimate lower-middle-class professional, with a background, family, and occupation similar to his own (he was a consulting doctor); and then only after Holmes became popular do we find him demonstrating wider knowledge, and there comes the line in The Greek Interpreter where he says he's from a family of country squires. I'm thinking of it as a concession to the public: they wanted the genius who knows and solves everything, not a character. Then again, Doyle's other works don't exactly emphasise this part of writing either. I'd like to think that Holmes at least didn't start off as a Mary Sue; why he turned into one we can only wonder.
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Feb 4, 2016 15:06
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There are a number of cases where Holmes is either wrong or suffers a major setback. He fails to recover the treasure in The Sign of Four, he allows Henry Baskerville to be injured by the dog, he is flat out wrong in The Yellow Face, his client dies in The Dancing Men after he explicitly promises to keep them safe, etc. He's also a giant rear end in a number of stories (seducing the maid in Charles Augustus Milverton, etc.). Have we had a Sherlock Holmes thread at any point? I highly recommend the modern annotated Holmes edited by Leslie Klinger.
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Feb 4, 2016 15:39
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anilEhilated posted:I'd like to think that Holmes at least didn't start off as a Mary Sue; why he turned into one we can only wonder. Well, I think Holmes fails the purpose of a Mary Sue - Doyle likely wasn't engaging in a power fantasy of being Holmes, given that he doesn't bang a bunch of hot heiresses or win the (desired) adulation of a fawning public. Unless Doyle had a secret crush on one of his doctor friends that he always felt should have looked up to him, preferably from a kneeling position.
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Feb 4, 2016 15:43
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The Slithery D posted:Well, I think Holmes fails the purpose of a Mary Sue - Doyle likely wasn't engaging in a power fantasy of being Holmes, given that he doesn't bang a bunch of hot heiresses or win the (desired) adulation of a fawning public. Unless Doyle had a secret crush on one of his doctor friends that he always felt should have looked up to him, preferably from a kneeling position. Of course, a lot of it could be attributed to Doyle straight up writing adventure novels (or rather those being what he's remembered for - IIRC he also wrote historical novels but I've honestly never actually seen those except for Micah Clarke) that ended up propagating some of Doyle's views - most famously in spiritism. A certain amount of Mary Sue-ism could be viewed as dictated by genre convention.
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Feb 4, 2016 16:06
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anilEhilated posted:It's interesting that there's so few stories where Holmes "loses": A Scandal In Bohemia is obviously based around that, but the only other occassion I can think of is Valley Of Fear, and that feels like an attempt to retroactively give more credibility to Moriarty as a villain. You want to go read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes again. (They're better than Rothfuss!) There are twelve stories, and Holmes is on the losing end in five of them (A Scandal in Bohemia, A Case of Identity, The Five Orange Pips, The Engineer's Thumb, and The Beryl Coronet). Later collections see him succeed more often, but for my money the Adventures are easily the best.
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Feb 4, 2016 16:23
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Anyone read the semi-official erotic short story with Bast and Kvothe written by Mary Robinette Kowel (who is a better writer, btw)? What's not better than Rothfuss (feel free to add): Terry Goodkind Peter V Brett, post the Warded Man Adrian Tchaikovsky Matthew Reilly's Ice Station
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Feb 4, 2016 18:32
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Trin Tragula posted:You want to go read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes again. (They're better than Rothfuss!) There are twelve stories, and Holmes is on the losing end in five of them (A Scandal in Bohemia, A Case of Identity, The Five Orange Pips, The Engineer's Thumb, and The Beryl Coronet). Later collections see him succeed more often, but for my money the Adventures are easily the best. BananaNutkins posted:Terry Goodkind
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Feb 4, 2016 19:22
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BananaNutkins posted:What's not better than Rothfuss (feel free to add): What?
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Feb 4, 2016 19:43
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Can we get a thread title change from all this new attention? Maybe something like Patrick Rothfuss: From Talents to Trash or, you know, something actually funny?
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Feb 4, 2016 20:19
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Trying Our Hardest Not To Discuss Patrick Rothfuss?
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Feb 4, 2016 20:21
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Patrick Rothfuss: All Of You Shut Up
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Feb 4, 2016 20:27
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Kingkiller Chronicles: Number of Kings Killed: 0 Patrick Rothfuss: Silence Like a Cut Flower, Prose Like Your Posting HIJK posted:Patrick Rothfuss: All Of You Shut Up
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Feb 4, 2016 20:30
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anilEhilated posted:Well he definitely failed at the point Doyle started plotting to kill him off. The concept of Mary Sue is iffy at best; I honestly doubt there's an official definition Pretty sure the term was originally meant to describe a specific type of character that would appear frequently in Star Trek fanfiction wherein the author has a idealized version of themselves appear on the Enterprise and save the day out of nowhere. I don't see how there could be an "official definition" of what is essentially usenet slang and IMO trying to retroactively apply it to any story in which any character is simply "unrealistically good at things" is kind of missing the whole point anyway - just because a character seems flawless or "unrealistically skilled/good" doesn't make them an author stand-in or author wish fulfillment, in a lot of cases it's a deliberate audience power fantasy rather than one for the author. Earwicker fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Feb 4, 2016 |
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Feb 4, 2016 20:39
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I was thinking more along the lines of "we don't necessarily all agree on what constitutes a Mary Sue". As you said, there's always a risk of author stand-in or wish fulfillment, especially in genre fiction, but that doesn't always mean flawless power fantasies. In, say, Malazan, characters are often literally what the author played in an RPG campaign - but there's plenty of flaws and complexity (for the genre, anyway). It's too vague to be an useful term, is what I was saying. On the other hand, it does convey the information, it's just blurry around the edges. Patric Rothfuss: Anatomy Of Mary Sue anilEhilated fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Feb 4, 2016 |
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Feb 4, 2016 21:19
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anilEhilated posted:In, say, Malazan, characters are often literally what the author played in an RPG campaign lol that explains a lot anilEhilated posted:but there's plenty of flaws and complexity (for the genre, anyway) I read about 1.5 books of that guys stuff and couldn't take it. it read like the fantasy equivalent of an Avengers movie combined with the confusing nomenclature of a Hindu epic
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Feb 4, 2016 22:14
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BananaNutkins posted:The fake Muslim culture with the ceramic dildo magic rites [wish I was joking], along with wheel-spinning for three books with new PoVs. yeah it got really bad real fast. I thought the first was enjoyable enough trash with some interesting potential, second was not-so-enjoyable trash that got progressively more magicalmuslim dildo rape rape hosed up hot garbage that by the 3rd I couldn't even finish it
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Feb 4, 2016 23:52
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Xaris posted:yeah it got really bad real fast. I thought the first was enjoyable enough trash with some interesting potential, second was not-so-enjoyable trash that got progressively more magicalmuslim dildo rape rape hosed up hot garbage that by the 3rd I couldn't even finish it I liked the first one, but then I remember it ends with the female lead getting gang raped, meeting the male lead, who proceeds to unrape her with good sex as the cure
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Feb 5, 2016 03:40
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Solice Kirsk posted:Can we get a thread title change from all this new attention? Maybe something like Patrick Rothfuss: From Talents to Trash or, you know, something actually funny? Patrick Rothfuss: A Bad Author in Three Parts
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Feb 5, 2016 05:23
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Evil Fluffy posted:Patrick Rothfuss: A Bad Author in I believe this to be more accurate.
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Feb 5, 2016 05:35
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Odette posted:I believe this to be more accurate. Oh snap
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Feb 5, 2016 05:41
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Who here has read anything by Guy Gavriel Kay? I read Tigana a few years back and really enjoyed it--it's definitely miles above Rothfuss' works in every respect--but haven't checked out anything else by him yet.
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Feb 5, 2016 06:54
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Not A Hydroxyl Ion posted:Who here has read anything by Guy Gavriel Kay? I read Tigana a few years back and really enjoyed it--it's definitely miles above Rothfuss' works in every respect--but haven't checked out anything else by him yet. His other works are all solid to awesome. My favorite is The Lions of Al-Rassan which is one of the books I continually reread when I'm at home for the holidays. He's also really well know for the Fionavar Tapestry which is a 'people from our world transported to fantasy world' story which are not my favorite but this is still pretty good too. It's basically like a darker Chronicles of Narnia and it definitely has its moments. He has a lot of stand alone novels which is great, the only series of his that I haven't read is the Sarantine Mosaic but I've heard good things about that too. I've read most of the individual books and while Tigana and Lions are my two favorite the rest are all definitely decent to good.
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Feb 5, 2016 09:07
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Guy Gavriel Kay breaks my heart - he chooses wonderful settings, can write memorable and believable characters (granted most of them are from history), and he always has some memorable insight into life, culture, history, whatever. His work has a deeply humanist bent to it, and he can explore mankind in its best, its worst, and in its most middling. But he's lousy in the actual act of putting one word after another. And he's obsessed with underlining the significance of his own writing, about how impressive something is or how legendary something will be. This also leaves out any room for subtlety or ambiguity: if Kay wants you to feel or think something, he tells so very bluntly. Out of the books I've read, I can recommend Sarantine Mosaic because i have a soft spot for the setting, and Last Light of the Sun, which was actually really decent. Tigana is a weird transitional work, the book blew my mind out when I was young, but now reads extremely clumsy. I just read David Malouf's Ransom. I don't know about the author's other works, but he manages to do in 200 pages what Kay has struggled to do for decades. It seems like Kay's weakness is that he tries to be too realistic with his prose, whereas Malouf is poetic. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 09:40
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Agree. Kay's prose is not great. He's basically at Sanderson's level there. His stories have a much more emotional angle than Sanderson, and the world building is less fantastic and more colored by earth cultures. I think Tigana is a bore, but it has some cool characters and ideas.
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Feb 5, 2016 11:08
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I've read Tigana and the two Sarantium books and was honestly bored. He can do interesting ripoffworldbuilding but can't set an interesting story there.
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Feb 5, 2016 12:02
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Gavriel's best book is Lions of Al-Rassan. At his best he can do really excellent characterization.
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Feb 5, 2016 13:17
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Odette posted:I believe this to be more accurate. Unfortunately I'm not sure if it's possible to do strikethroughs in thread titles.
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Feb 5, 2016 13:17
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Sounds like I need to check out some of Kay's other works! I have fairly low standards when it comes to fantasy; passable prose is all I ask for. I think Rothfuss bothers me so much because of how full of himself he is, and how full deluded most of his fans are. Both Rothfuss and his fans seem to think the novels are groundbreaking in setting, plot, characterization, and actual writing, when of course none of that is true. I have no problem people enjoying crummy fantasy on its own terms*, I just hate it when they act like it's full-blown literature. It's been said a thousand times in this thread but his prose is *so* incredibly purple and pretentious, yet he gets heralded as some amazing wordcrafter. *I'm a huge Sanderson fan, for example. Not because I think his prose is great. It's not--it gets the job done, at best. Not because of his deep characterization--there isn't really any. Instead, I happen to enjoy the magic systems, the settings, and two-dimensional characters are enough for me. I wish more Rothfuss fans could acknowledge the same kind of stuff in his books
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Feb 5, 2016 17:40
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Not A Hydroxyl Ion posted:*I'm a huge Sanderson fan, for example. Not because I think his prose is great. It's not--it gets the job done, at best. Not because of his deep characterization--there isn't really any. Instead, I happen to enjoy the magic systems, the settings, and two-dimensional characters are enough for me. I wish more Rothfuss fans could acknowledge the same kind of stuff in his books Someone recommended Sanderson to me earlier in the thread, because I stated that I really enjoy the magic systems in Name of the Wind. I haven't checked it out yet, but the more I read about it, the more I'm convinced that it's absolutely a series for me. I agree on the point of Rothfuss thinking his books are "literature", and would rather he just release a pulpy little turd of a fantasy novel every so often that just deals with characters using sympathy cleverly, rather than whatever sprawling epic he ostensibly has planned for Doors of Stone.
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Feb 5, 2016 18:06
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SpacePig posted:Someone recommended Sanderson to me earlier in the thread, because I stated that I really enjoy the magic systems in Name of the Wind. I haven't checked it out yet, but the more I read about it, the more I'm convinced that it's absolutely a series for me. I agree on the point of Rothfuss thinking his books are "literature", and would rather he just release a pulpy little turd of a fantasy novel every so often that just deals with characters using sympathy cleverly, rather than whatever sprawling epic he ostensibly has planned for Doors of Stone. Well, I definitely recommend checking out Sanderson's stuff, then. People tend to disagree on where you should start. Elantris is his first published novel, and as such it's *much* rougher than his later works. The Mistborn trilogy is what put him on the map, so you could either start with the first book in that, or with Warbreaker since it's standalone. You could also dive into the Stormlight Archive series since it's awesome Just be warned that some of Sanderson's books have characters who are considered to be funny/clever/witty in-universe, but are in fact none of those things. Sanderson also tends to go into very specific detail about how the magic systems work, sometimes repeating details far too much. This is too much for some readers (and I don't fault them for it) but it doesn't bother me too much. He's also gotten better at not doing either of those things over the course of his writing career. That's another thing--I think Sanderson has actively developed as a writer over the years, unlike Rothfuss. Of course, when you've had 20 novels (holy poo poo I can't believe this number is accurate) + lots of novellas and short stories published in a 10 year period, versus two novels, an abortion of a novella, and some short stories, development is gonna be more likely to happen. Anyway, Sanderson is understandably not everyone's cup of tea, but as far as escapist fantasy goes I enjoy it for what it is and I hope you do too.
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Feb 5, 2016 19:51
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I feel like reading Elantris first would probably be a mistake. Start with Mistborn probably, otherwise the Stormlight 1: The Way of Kings is really good, but you have to make it through the first 3rd of the book before things really start happening...
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Feb 5, 2016 20:07
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Warbreaker is free on Sanderson's site and probably better written than Mistborn (and shorter), so I'd suggest starting with that. Afterwards either hit the Mistborn or Stormlight books. After you read the Mistborn trilogy if you're interested in more then there's Alloy of Law and its subsequent books, as well as the Secret History (do not read this before you finish Mistborn and maybe the Wax and Wayne books). Stormlight is good but it's a bit of a slow start. It's also his long, long term project so if you're expecting closure you're going to be waiting a good 15+ years even at Sanderson's inhumanly fast writing speed. I haven't read Elantris yet but it did, or is supposed to, get a rewrite to fix up some of its issues so that may make it better.
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Feb 5, 2016 20:50
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