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GOTTA STAY FAI posted:Frank's are good. It's all (sort of) one story that spans a huge amount of time, and each novel ties in with the others well.
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# ? Apr 25, 2016 23:23 |
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# ? May 9, 2024 20:35 |
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Is there a Dune book that Duncan Idaho isn't in?
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 00:02 |
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Heath posted:Is there a Dune book that Duncan Idaho isn't in? I'm not sure I understand the question. Why would you even want that?
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 01:31 |
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Whenever Duncan Idaho appeared in the movie version of Dune, I just imagined a studio audience reacting like they'd just seen Onion Bubs
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 01:38 |
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So, here's the thing with the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson prequels: they are bad. Thing is, that as time goes by, they get consistently worse. You read the first one, which is very bad, and then they keep piling on nonsensical bullshit that clearly demonstrates they didn't get what was cool about the original Dune books. I present an example: So, in the first 'Dune', we are told that Leto's father, the elder Duke Atreides, was killed in a bullfight. This is something that says a tremendous deal about the society in which the story takes place, where not only would a major figure take place in such an event, but that there isn't any kind of advanced medical technology that could heal the wounds inflicted in such a fight. The first three Brian/Kevin prequel novels go through the backstory immediately leading up to the events of Dune, including that aforementioned bullfight, in which they reveal that it's a space bull with tentacles and acid for blood, which is loving stupid and overindulgent and completely misses the point of the original bit in the story. The Baron Harkonnen is a loving fat gross weirdo because he's a pinnacle of hedonism. He's fat because he loving loves eating food, he's a futuristic Caligula, at the pinnacle of excess. In the Brian/Herbert prequels, it's revealed that Lady Jessica implanted a gene modification virus thing in him to make him fat. That's it! Again, it's loving stupid bullshit technobabbly sci-fi that completely misses the point of the original novels. Then, in the double-prequels, we get to hear the story of the Butlerian Jihad, the vaguely-referenced event in the original books that led to the outlawing of all thinking machines. These are such a blur that it's hard for me to even remember. The way the story gets told here is basically 'evil robots took over the world, so now we're not going to let there be robots anymore'. There's an evil robot-overmind called Omnius that's taken over all of humanity, and there are a privileged few humans who got to stick their brains in robotic bodies and become 'Cymeks'. Everybody else is downtrodden peasants. Much like the Star Wars prequels, loving everything that happened in the original books gets some nod in the Butlerian Jihad novels. The story of the swordmaster school in which Duncan Idaho was trained gets told (electro-swords for fighting robots, see above for 'loving stupid, completely misses the point'). The invention of the space-folding technology that allows rapid interstellar travel gets described, and it turns out the guy who 'invented' it just took credit for his assistant's work. This assistant later gets vaporized by a cymek, but Doctor Manhattans herself back into reality. Then she founds the Bene Gesserit order. Then she founds the Guild Navigators. Then she fucks off to nobody cares where (this will be important in a bit, unfortunately enough). Also, Omnius puts on gladitorial fights with the cymeks. I don't loving know why, other than to have descriptions of 'cool' robot battles with lasers and explosions. Also, in maybe my favorite part of the whole story, there's a whole drawn-out conversation where somebody asks the robot overmind why the robots don't just live on moons and planets with atmospheres that aren't habitable by humans, and the overmind doesn't have any good answer, basically going 'well, it's the principle of the thing!'. Poking holes in your own dumb-rear end plot doesn't make you look clever, book! Also the Harkonnens are there, and there's one of them who's a total dick for no reason, and he founds the dynasty of dickish-Harkonnens. Also, some Fremen are there, and they have a SANDWORM BATTLE, where they bonk their sandworms into each other until one of them dies. At the end, the robots all get destroyed, but manage to send a signal out into deep space, setting up the inevitable sequel. gently caress those books. Double-gently caress the sequel. So, allegedly, according to Brian Herbert, his dad left a lock-box full of notes on what he wanted to do with Dune 7. Heretics and Chapterhouse allude to some force on the edges of the Galaxy that was driving the Honoured Matres back into the old empire, so there was a lot of speculation as to what it might be. Fuckin', it's the robots. It's the loving robots. So there. Now, at the end of Chapterhouse, the uber-Duncan Idaho who remembers all of his past clone-lives, and some other people, escape on a big ol' spaceship. In 'Hunters of Dune', it turns out that somebody has a null-capsule full of DNA samples from all the major characters of the original Dune novels! So we loving clone everybody. Paul Atreides is there, both Letos are there, the whole loving gang. Remember what I said about having to shoehorn in everything that was in the originals? Meanwhile, the villains of the story (who at the get-go seem to be the face-morphing people that the Tleilaxu keep cloning) have their own one of these null-capsules, so they clone their own Baron Harkonnen, and make themselves an Evil Paul Atreides, that the Baron will raise up to be super evil. Meanwhile, you know how the Tleilaxu have been trying to make synthetic spice for 5000 years, and never succeeded? Somebody gets the idea to, instead of cloning the spice, clone the sandworms. Apparently, nobody ever ever thought of this. And it works! They genetically engineer sandworms that actually like water, call them seaworms, and set them to work on some planet. There they make [b]ultra-spice[/i], which is like regular spice but a billion times more potent! gently caress you Kevin Anderson and/or Brian Herbert. So, the face-dancers spring their plan, but the plan fails because actually they've been played by the actual villains, the robots! The stupid robots are back from the edges of the galaxy with a gigantic fleet. How did they manage to turn a radio signal into an actual physical robotic device? Who the gently caress cares! Then the lady from the prequels who invented the warp drive and the Bene Gesserit and the guild navigators shows up and blips all the robots out of existence. That's it. I cannot think of another example in all of fiction of a better example of a Deus Ex Machina. Oh, then to wrap everything up in a nice bow, the evil Paul Atreides eats some of the ultra-spice, so he can become God or whatever, and he gets trapped in a vision of the universe, starting at the big bang, evolving to the present second, and then starting over. So he takes a bunch of drugs and goes catatonic, basically. That's it. That's your story. Night night. I understand there are actually a couple more BH/KJA books, but I just can't. I can't. Wikipedia posted:
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 02:29 |
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Lamprey Cannon posted:loving Christ... I knew they were bad, but I didn't know they were that bad. I've only ever read Dune, but I've read it a million times and I love it. I never read any of the sequels because I didn't want my love of the original ruined.
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 02:52 |
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why did you read all those Bad Dune Books you could have... not read them
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 02:57 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:why did you read all those Bad Dune Books I don't think this thread would work if people did something sensible like stop reading a book when it turned out to be terrible.
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 03:21 |
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I don't think this thread would work if people did something sensible like stop reading a book when it turned out to be terrible.
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 03:55 |
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Kind of stupid how Brian Herbert and KJA don't seem to care that Frank Herbert had a reason that he skipped those chunks of the Dune story originally.
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 04:06 |
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I haven't read any of his Dune books, but I have read a couple of Kevin J Anderson's original works. Alternitech was inoffensive - a somewhat neat idea that never really goes anywhere - but Hopscotch was definitely bad. Not as bad as those Dune books sound, but still, I never finished it. It's been a while so I may have some details wrong, but here goes. The premise is that at some point in the future, people just spontaneously develop the ability to switch bodies with each other (which they call "hopscotching" for some reason). Rather than coming up with some technobabble explanation or leaving it as some unexplained future technology, Anderson explicitly states that it's a thing that just happened out of nowhere. You'd think that would be the sort of mystery the book might focus on, but it doesn't. In fact, the book doesn't really focus on anything. One character joins a cult where they just switch bodies with each other all the time. The cult leader gets really obsessed with her for some reason and she eventually runs away, but can't get her original body back because someone else ran away with it, so she's stuck in someone else's body permanently. Another character takes a job where he switches into his boss's body and exercises for him so the guy can basically get the benefits of that without spending the time. But on top of that, and unknown to him, the boss is also using his body to take a bunch of drugs and has already basically killed several people who had the job before. It takes a stupidly long time for him to catch on to this. There's also a character who can't body swap, which basically makes him a bitter social outcast (even though there are other people who also can't or won't do it), and there's no real plot progression at all. Also they're all orphans, but that's not really relevant to anything as far as I could tell. There's enough there to make an interesting setup for at least three different books, but it just meanders along with nothing really happening at all. This was also an issue with Alternitech, in which the story never really goes much beyond establishing the premise, but at least Alternitech was short. It left you with the feeling that, had it been longer, it would have done more (although the truth is that it probably wouldn't). This book is much, much longer.
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 05:29 |
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I understand reading one Dune prequel, maybe two if you can't take a hint (I gave up 20-30 pages into The Butlerian Jihad and never gave the rest a second thought). Lamprey Cannon's depth of investment in this crap just baffles me, even as "hate-reading". Well, you have to understand, I read 'Dune' when I was in elementary school, so by the time I started picking up the prequel novels, I was in middle school. Most of the things that I mentioned, like acid-blood tentacle-bulls and robot gladiator fights, are really cool to a typical middle-schooler. I remember actually pre-ordering the last of the prequels, 'The Battle of Corrin', the year before I entered highschool, but even by that point, some of the dumber things in those books were starting to stand out to me. It wasn't until years later, I think I was home from college, that I decided to check out the sequel books, and after I started reading those, and it was *so clear* how awful they were, I had this flood of memories, and all of the embarrassing bullshit that I'd overlooked or enjoyed in the earlier books when I was 13 came back to me. I did feel it necessary finish 'Hunters' and 'Sandworms', just because it was such a hilarious MST3K-level trainwreck (and partly just to see how it ended).
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 06:23 |
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D'oh, of course.
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 06:58 |
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Lamprey Cannon posted:So, here's the thing with the Brian Herbert/Kevin Anderson prequels: they are bad. Thing is, that as time goes by, they get consistently worse. You read the first one, which is very bad, and then they keep piling on nonsensical bullshit that clearly demonstrates they didn't get what was cool about the original Dune books. I present an example: Also a scene with Tleilaxu entertaining clone-Baron by loudly farting.
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 08:10 |
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Uncyclopedia: Kevin J. Anderson That's an older slightly less sucky version.
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 08:27 |
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I finished Homeland by Cory Doctorow. It's exactly what I expected, it's just like the previous episode, Little Brother, where main character Marcus is an author self-insert and the story is Doctorow's nightmare/wet dream. It's actually a story that teaches the reader stuff, and the part where it teaches things is pretty good. The story, not so much. It has themes that Doctorow likes to write about : government spying, government corruption, hacking, counterculture, nerd culture, oppression, police brutality, intimidation & torture. The book feels dated because it's pre-Snowden. It recommends TrueCrypt. The ending was the worst part of it all, Marcus breaks up with his girlfriend, and a few pages later, the story fast-forwards a few months and they get back together, just so there can be somewhat of a happy ending.
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 11:13 |
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When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, also by Doctorow, is so bad. I forgot the catalyst exactly, but there's a virus or something that kills the majority of people, but a bunch of computer janitors maintain order by sitting in their server rooms and emailing each other.
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 11:20 |
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Lamprey Cannon posted:Well, you have to understand, I read 'Dune' when I was in elementary school, so by the time I started picking up the prequel novels, I was in middle school. Most of the things that I mentioned, like acid-blood tentacle-bulls and robot gladiator fights, are really cool to a typical middle-schooler. I remember actually pre-ordering the last of the prequels, 'The Battle of Corrin', the year before I entered highschool, but even by that point, some of the dumber things in those books were starting to stand out to me. It wasn't until years later, I think I was home from college, that I decided to check out the sequel books, and after I started reading those, and it was *so clear* how awful they were, I had this flood of memories, and all of the embarrassing bullshit that I'd overlooked or enjoyed in the earlier books when I was 13 came back to me. I did feel it necessary finish 'Hunters' and 'Sandworms', just because it was such a hilarious MST3K-level trainwreck (and partly just to see how it ended). Mammals that can suppress the force A literal clone of Luke Skywalker A Jedi that got so good at the force that she was able to extract poisonous nanites from Mon Mothma A warrior-assassin race that served Darth Vader out of gratitude for keeping their planet barely alive, except the robots that were "fertilizing" the soil were actually keeping it deader than it should have been A new superweapon that could destroy entire star systems by detonating stars, hidden inside a secret base in the middle of a cluster of black holes All very cool to younger me, until I got older and got to the Yuuzhan Vong and went "hey, they're not even really fighting the Empire anymore, what gives?"
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 11:42 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:A literal clone of Luke Skywalker Named Luuke. There was a third clone named Luuuke.
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 13:42 |
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Tiggum posted:
This was actually the plot of an episode of Red Dwarf
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 13:56 |
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Named Luuke. With some of these things I just imagine the writer got drunk with some friends and they just used whatever they suggested to see how much they could get away with, Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks style. edit: I looked up Luuuke and it was a parody or something apparently Mind you, what I said goes for the non Frank Dune books I guess. NLJP has a new favorite as of 15:28 on Apr 26, 2016 |
# ? Apr 26, 2016 15:25 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:This was me, except with the Star Wars EU. Worth noting: this is from a Star Wars EU novel by Kevin J. Anderson! Also worth noting: Kevin J. Anderson looks exactly the way you'd expect he would!
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 17:48 |
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gradenko_2000 posted:
That's the stupidest poo poo I've ever heard of.....
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 20:13 |
You should all be aware that Chuck Tingle is now an official Hugo Award Finalist for Best Short Story, "Space Raptor Butt Invasion." http://midamericon2.org/home/hugo-awards-and-wsfs/2016-hugo-finalists/
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 20:28 |
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Max posted:You should all be aware that Chuck Tingle is now an official Hugo Award Finalist for Best Short Story, "Space Raptor Butt Invasion." I sincerely hope he beats Vox Day. Especially if he then writes a story of a reactionary blogger taken in the butt by an awards ballot, which is of course also a billionaire from space.
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 20:36 |
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Lamprey Cannon posted:Worth noting: this is from a Star Wars EU novel by Kevin J. Anderson! I'm loving stunned he doesn't have the stereotypical black hat that all sci-fi/fantasy authors have.
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 20:56 |
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Sanguinary Novel posted:I'm loving stunned he doesn't have the stereotypical black hat that all sci-fi/fantasy authors have. The scraggly bloatee kinda makes up for it
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 21:00 |
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Max posted:You should all be aware that Chuck Tingle is now an official Hugo Award Finalist for Best Short Story, "Space Raptor Butt Invasion." I am 100% this is part of the prolonged temper tantrum against this story winning a Hugo.
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# ? Apr 26, 2016 22:21 |
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The Vosgian Beast posted:I am 100% this is part of the prolonged temper tantrum against this story winning a Hugo. Winning a Nebula. Nominated for Hugo. E: This year they've also nominated things like SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police and an episode of MLP. Jerome Agricola has a new favorite as of 22:50 on Apr 26, 2016 |
# ? Apr 26, 2016 22:46 |
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Jerome Agricola posted:Winning a Nebula. Nominated for Hugo. Also “If You Were an Award, My Love” lol
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 00:58 |
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Cumslut1895 posted:Also “If You Were an Award, My Love” lol Toldya. Insane amounts of anger about a pretty good story, basically just because one of the many far-right nutjobs weaponizing nerd culture told them to be angry.
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 00:59 |
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Toldya. Insane amounts of anger about a pretty good story, basically just because one of the many far-right nutjobs weaponizing nerd culture told them to be angry. This is such a good term, I am stealing it.
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 01:34 |
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I like the idea of living forever in a computer cloud instead of perception ending when I die but the fact that Cory Doctorow et al are going to be on their deathbeds faced with the existential horror that they wasted their life on The Rapture For Atheists and are still going to die like everyone else with nothing to show for it almost makes up for it.
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 03:19 |
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Lamprey Cannon posted:Also worth noting: Kevin J. Anderson looks exactly the way you'd expect he would!
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 03:29 |
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Antivehicular posted:I sincerely hope he beats Vox Day. https://twitter.com/ChuckTingle/status/725150580709142528 Jerome Agricola posted:Winning a Nebula. Nominated for Hugo.
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 06:48 |
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I think the thing we're all really overlooking is that Grimm got nominated. You know, the show where X-Files meets Supernatural in the budget aisle and they get married in Vegas three hours later.
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 08:25 |
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I have no idea how the guy behind Chuck Tingle manages to stay interested enough to keep going with it, but then I also feel that if there were no Chuck Tingle it would be necessary to invent him.
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 08:46 |
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Toldya. Insane amounts of anger about a pretty good story, basically just because one of the many far-right nutjobs weaponizing nerd culture told them to be angry. I just read this story, and oh my God, how are people this angry about this? It's just tribalism, right? Nobody is legitimately arguing in good faith that this story is bad enough to destroy fantasy fiction, right?
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 08:51 |
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Antivehicular posted:I just read this story, and oh my God, how are people this angry about this? It's just tribalism, right? Nobody is legitimately arguing in good faith that this story is bad enough to destroy fantasy fiction, right? the argument is that this sentence quote:They’d grasp each other for comfort instead of seizing the pool cues with which they beat you, calling you a fag, a towel-head, a shemale, a sissy, a spic, every epithet they could think of, regardless of whether it had anything to do with you or not, shouting and shouting as you slid to the floor in the slick of your own blood. which suggests the story features a trans & muslim character is the only reason it won, therefore far-left liberal under-representation inclusion has gone wrong etc, so all fantasy fiction will die
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 09:19 |
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# ? May 9, 2024 20:35 |
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Antivehicular posted:I just read this story, and oh my God, how are people this angry about this? It's just tribalism, right? Nobody is legitimately arguing in good faith that this story is bad enough to destroy fantasy fiction, right? Let's look at the comments for the story, shall we? Some angry dudes posted:The funny thing is that if you change those five blustering gin-soaked pool players into demographic profiles more reflective of who is relatively most likely to beat someone senseless….
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# ? Apr 27, 2016 11:23 |