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Tehlu, we have a problem: https://twitter.com/PatrickRothfuss/status/776763484923199488 https://twitter.com/PatrickRothfuss/status/776772209507459072 https://twitter.com/PatrickRothfuss/status/776774870273290240
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Sep 16, 2016 21:42
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Thoren posted:https://twitter.com/PatrickRothfuss/status/776763484923199488 I am dismayed by a person being self-critical on Twitter.
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Sep 16, 2016 21:56
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Self-critical, but still self-aggrandizing.
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Sep 18, 2016 21:34
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He's such a piece of poo poo. He's gonna leave a bruise smacking himself on the back so hard for not considering himself a "success." I hope that single mother of 3 he knows and totally didn't make up gets the recognition she deserves.
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Sep 19, 2016 02:12
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It sounds like he needs to visit a therapist to be honest. Imposter's syndrome is a heck of a drug.
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Sep 19, 2016 02:36
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Solice Kirsk posted:He's such a piece of poo poo. He's gonna leave a bruise smacking himself on the back so hard for not considering himself a "success." I hope that single mother of 3 he knows and totally didn't make up gets the recognition she deserves. She's as real as the pizza guy who showed up on his doorstep and said "Hey man, are you playing TAK?"
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Sep 19, 2016 02:54
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I think he just confirmed a character will be a single mom with three kids in his next book. But that single mom will be a complete monster who Kvothe will kill to save the kids from. Then an older woman will say he did the right thing and she deserved it and how he's the greatest hero to ever hero. Rothfuss is an enigma to me, to be honest. He goes out of his way to show off how progressive he is, to point how sexist fantasy can be and all that but then his actual writing in the books falls somewhere deep within the "problematic" category. I mean, raising awareness of the problem and showing that you're not OK with it is one thing but when it comes to actually changing your writing to reflect those views is completely different. You have to follow through on that stuff or you just end up looking like someone trying to score brownie points as "being one of the good ones" without actually, you know, changing or doing anything.
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Sep 19, 2016 03:00
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I'm shocked and horrified and sick at being given an award for having a huge and amazing penis, because I assure you my huge amazing penis is already recognized well enough. It should go to this person with a much smaller penis than me, or perhaps even a woman
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Sep 19, 2016 03:11
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Jimbot posted:I think he just confirmed a character will be a single mom with three kids in his next book. But that single mom will be a complete monster who Kvothe will kill to save the kids from. Then an older woman will say he did the right thing and she deserved it and how he's the greatest hero to ever hero. One of the most glaring examples of this is in the first book, when Kvothe saves Fela from the exploding magic fire. quote:"No. I was just standing there. Like one of those silly girls in those stories my mother used to read me. I always hated them. I used to ask, 'Why doesn't she push the witch out the window? Why doesn't she poison the ogre's food?' " Fela was looking down at her feet now, her hair falling to hide her face. Her voice grew softer and softer until it was barely louder than a sigh. " 'Why does she just sit there waiting to be saved? Why doesn't she save herself?' " quote:I flushed with embarrassment as I realized what I'd said, but pushed ahead. "This isn't the hand of some swooning princess who sits tatting lace and waiting for some prince to save her. This is the hand of a woman who would climb a rope of her own hair to freedom, or kill a captor ogre in his sleep." I looked into her eyes. "And this is the hand of a woman who would have made it through the fire on her own if I hadn't been there. Singed perhaps, but safe." Rothfuss doesn't want to write a damsel in distress. And yet he uses Fela as one anyhow. He thinks he can make up for it afterward by paying lip service to what a strong and powerful and independent woman she is, but that's not enough. We don't see her save herself from the fire, we see her freeze up and we see Kvothe save her. We see Kvothe save her from Ambrose by joking about raping her in an alleyway, we see Kvothe come to her bedroom while she's half-naked, we see her use her feminine wiles to distract Ambrose with her breasts whose size that the narrator can't seem to stop mentioning. We're told she learned the name of stone, offscreen, which she never uses, and the story of how she learned it doesn't seem to be interesting enough to tell. If you don't want to write a damsel in distress, you can't just slap on a "BTW I DON'T WRITE DAMSELS IN DISTRESS AND ALSO SHE'S NOT A DAMSEL OK" tag after the fact. If I were being particularly charitable about that scene, the best I could do is say that Fela's lack of agency is just one instance of the lack of agency of everyone in the world except Kvothe. But answering "this scene is poo poo" with "actually, all the scenes are poo poo" is hardly an improvement, and Rothfuss's preemptive defensiveness against justified complaints of Fela's damselhood is still no less pathetic. Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Sep 20, 2016 |
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Sep 20, 2016 20:19
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I honestly think that's the worst piece of writing in The Name of the Wind.
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Sep 20, 2016 20:22
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I love this thread so much.
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Sep 20, 2016 20:34
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Jimbot posted:I think he just confirmed a character will be a single mom with three kids in his next book. But that single mom will be a complete monster who Kvothe will kill to save the kids from. Then an older woman will say he did the right thing and she deserved it and how he's the greatest hero to ever hero. In defense of Rothfuss, he can't exactly show us how he's changed or improved when he hasn't actually written anything new. If he writes a third book and it's still a dumpster-fire of faux-progressiveness, then yes, he hasn't learned anything, but right now we're all still criticizing him for stuff he's said he'd like to improve. He just has to, you know, actually write something to prove it. TheIncredulousHulk posted:I'm shocked and horrified and sick at being given an award for having a huge and amazing penis, because I assure you my huge amazing penis is already recognized well enough. It should go to this person with a much smaller penis than me, or perhaps even a woman also this
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Sep 20, 2016 21:06
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Naerasa posted:In defense of Rothfuss, he can't exactly show us how he's changed or improved when he hasn't actually written anything new. If he writes a third book and it's still a dumpster-fire of faux-progressiveness, then yes, he hasn't learned anything, but right now we're all still criticizing him for stuff he's said he'd like to improve. He just has to, you know, actually write something to prove it. The first book, in which he complains about distressed damsels, features a distressed damsel. The second book, in which he says rape is as unthinkable as eating a stone, features kvothe feeling up a rape victim who tries to resist but is too weak. The novella, which came out last year, somehow manages to include rape despite having only one character. The pages in which he insists how feminist and cliche-breaking he is are the same as the pages in which he reveals how very much he's not.
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Sep 21, 2016 00:51
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But the Bast story was OK. I think there's a good writer in him, but maybe not a good novelist. Maybe, if he actually wrote stories, he would be more like King who I always thought excelled at short stories, but was hit or miss on longer works.
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Sep 21, 2016 12:58
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https://twitter.com/nerdconstories/status/778332287020576768
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Sep 21, 2016 16:03
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The gently caress is Modeg?
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Sep 22, 2016 02:59
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Solice Kirsk posted:The gently caress is Modeg? It's the place with the sexiest women, the most skillful courtesans, and the most casual sex. Take a guess why Rothfuss's attentions have been diverted there. Was there really not enough sex in the rest of Rothfuss's universe? The entire second half of Wise Man's Fear consists of a sex goddess-fairy; a barmaid with a virgindar; a city of sex ninjas; some kidnapped sex slaves; and Kvothe loving the entire town of Imre. Lottery of Babylon fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Sep 22, 2016 |
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Sep 22, 2016 03:07
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Unless you have been to Modeg, as I have, you cannot possibly understand what it is to be truly horny.
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Sep 22, 2016 03:18
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Rothfuss has a lot of weird fetishes. The worst part is how scifi/fantasy lit culture encourages creators to overshare this poo poo.
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Sep 22, 2016 03:54
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After he sleeps with a starry-eyed maiden, he makes sure to tell the Chronicler that he did not take advantage of her, that she had a deep fire within her that no man could tame, and that the sex was entirely of her consent and volition.
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Sep 22, 2016 05:18
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LET’S READ THE KINGKILLER CHRONICLE CRITICALLY Summing up, part 2 – How (badly) The Name of the Wind reads This has been unquestionably the hardest part of this read-through to write, hence the delay. It’s just hard to sum up all the tangents I’ve gone onto in a satisfactory manner. And sometimes it feels like they're a way of coping: the reader is compelled to see more than there is rather than face how boring this stupid book is. So I’ll try to be straight-forward. Here are the principal issues with the writing of The Name of the Wind. It reads almost like an overwritten first draft In spite of all the time Rothfuss purportedly spent on The Name of the Wind, it’s remarkably unpolished and poorly edited. And despite its length, the book is quite thin in content. There’s a lot of pointless faffing about to it, including most of its story. The book is longer than Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, but there’s nothing challenging or ambitious to it, not even a proper story arc. A legendary hero living in obscurity explains how his family was murdered, and how it took him months to discover that a library was badly organized. Early on our hero explains how his childhood training gave him prodigiously accurate memory, which is presumably the reason why his life story is ground down with pointless detail. Rothfuss insists on describing the story's happenstance in all of its extended, utterly boring, and completely unnecessary particularity . The poor editing and thin content come together iin this, as evidenced in the inseparable pair of the book’s most aggravating structural elements: the frequent and dull long dialogues, and the over-described and ridiculous emotions that always accompanies said dialogues. Rothfuss’s characters speak long and often, yet end up saying very little. And they cannot speak without nodding, shaking their heads, sighing, giving meaningful looks, smiling, or some other complicated series of gestures and expressions. Often these are repeated as to make them more ridiculous. When describing a maiden on the verge of crying, Rothfuss gives her eyes that are "luminous with the beginning of tears” twice, mere paragraphs apart. But even if the book were competently edited, only so much can be done to fix the poor writing... The prose is just bad No way around it. For all the praise given to Rothfuss’s prose by critics and some readers, actually producing any good prose for examination has proven to be an impossible task. Rothfuss’s is a very consistently bad writer, and in purely stylistic terms, his principal weaknesses form a triumvirate: there’s the arduous detail, the limp flatness of the prose, and the Rothfussian Attribute. The first has already been discussed, and the second deserves demonstration. Here is one illustrative excerpt, from the beginning of Chapter 61: quote:With admissions behind me I had no responsibilities until fall term began. I spent the intervening days catching up on my sleep, working in Kilvin’s shop, and enjoying my new, luxurious accommodations at the Horse and Four. Every sentence has a stretched out limp rhythm, and each segues smoothly into the next. This makes the prose easy to read but without any force or substance save for facile self-contentment. When a chapter opens with a long prose segment, it’s almost a rule that it ends on a pointedly flat note such as above. The dreary “Again” is as indicative as anything of the book’s plodding imagination. For poor rhythm, one needs only to observe the third sentence of the final paragraph: quote:After my fourteenth trip, I came to the deep realization that I woudn’t find her. Why “came to the deep realization” when it spreads the sentence too thin? What makes this realization so “deep”? Not only is the pacing off, but it presages the last of the triumvirate, the Rothfussian Attribute. The Attribute (or Conceit) is an instance of Rothfuss employing a metaphor, simile, or some other descriptor so broad and fanciful that it distracts from how absolutely nonsensical it is. A silence is as deep and wide as autumn’s ending. A sword is like an alchemist had distilled a dozen swords into one. A character sings powerful lines like the branches of a tree. Emotion touches the edges of a voice like a hint of sunset against slate-grey clouds. In the face of such sheer clunkers, the reader mistakes their incomprehension for fascination. And fascination is fleeting in this book... The fantasy is dull As is common with genre authors, Rothfuss thinks that the trappings of the fantastical are fantastical in themselves. There’s nothing enchanting about magic in itself, even less so when it’s reduced to comic book/RPG superpowers. The book is named after a secret of magic, yet that secret is nothing more than Summon Wind (costs X Magic Power). And “fantasy” is not limited here to the strictly supernatural elements, but to the whole imagined world of The Name of the Wind. The Four Corners of Civilization are without any character to them. The world is simply there, bare and static. Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than Rothfuss’s choices in the central setting of the book: the great academy known simply as the University, which Rothfuss has seems to have based on his own college years in the Midwest US, with only the garnish of vague ancient mysteries and corporal punishments to flavour it. It’s hard to overstate how safe and staid the University is: Rothfuss’s meek and colourless student body wouldn’t last a minute in an old Sorbonne brawl. Even the Hogwarts kids would eat them alive. Like the University, Rothfuss’s world does not feel like anything, not even barren. There are things in it, like aristocracy and religious dogmatism, but they have only the weight of stage props.  The problems with Kvothe’s character, explored in the last entry, also apply to the world of Kingkiller. Rothfuss describes many things in it, but never decides what the world is like. And when creatures of myth stroll the scene in all their glory, they’re quickly and decisively deflated, such as a petulant fairy prince threatening to string a fiddle with a man’s guts. The monsters are treated as if they were from a RPG supplement, and the demonic villains speak in comic book clichés. Rothfuss suggests that his principal villain wants to destroy the world, and perhaps only suggests it so that he can backpedal smoothly away from such a supremely hackish and juvenile device. And speaking of juvenile... It’s all-around embarrassing The Name of the Wind is shameful. The book is an extended paean to its main character, and despite fleeting hints at satire, never escapes its hero’s teenage mindset. Practically nothing significant happens in the world of the story without Kvothe being involved. He is of course a master of music, learning, magic, wit, thievery, and so on, and whenever he fails Rothfuss is very keen to underline how despondent and pained he is. Everything’s about Kvothe. He’s exceptional because he’s exceptional, not because he embodies any virtue or values. Men envy him, women want him. Women deserve a section of their own, but in interests of brevity let’s simply note that in a cast of hundreds, female characters with names and voices are outnumbered about 7-to-1 by their male counterparts. While lopsided enough, all the significant female characters are young and in some way striking (the exception is the hero's mother, who is presumably slighty matronly and beautiful instead of young and beautiful), with painstaking detail reserved for illustrating the delicate mannerisms of the child-like Ophelia of the novel. The men receive no favours either. Rothfuss has a whole platoon of aging mentors, with a meaningful glint in their eyes and a mischievous smile on their lips, paraded on the page to share their practical wisdom. The antagonists with most page-time are Severus Snape and Draco Malfoy from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, and remarkably none of their nuance survived the transition from mediocre children’s adventure to mature fantasy epic. The counterpart to Draco is involved in one of the clumsiest duels of wits that have ever escaped a writer’s trash bin. And yet there’s still so much reason to shake’s one head at in the book, such as the idiotic anachronisms sprinkled throughout or Rothfuss’s typical liberal elitism. But as conclusion, it must be noted that book’s stated philosophy of stories is embarrassingly wrong. The Name of the Wind is a story about stories, but does not understand them: characters often tell stories or recount songs, and they’re false save for the occasional nugget of truth hiding in them. That the truth of stories is in the narratives and aesthetic instead of hidden trivia goes almost completely unrecognized. Similarly, fans of the Kingkiller series comb the narrative for clues and theorize what the truth of it is, and are thus too distracted to recognize the mediocrity staring them in the face. And with that, one question remains... Next: Why does anyone like this garbage? BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Jun 1, 2017 |
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Sep 24, 2016 12:42
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That map looks almost exactly like a map of Europe.
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Sep 25, 2016 11:45
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a trolley posted:That map looks almost exactly like a map of Europe.  Also:   (from Drakengard the video game. Yes, it's an upside down Europe.) e: also also: 
BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 13:01 on Sep 25, 2016 |
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Sep 25, 2016 11:52
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I wish this story was as entertaining as Drakengard.
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Sep 25, 2016 14:20
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Is there are terrible fantasy maps thread? I like the way the mountains make a perfect border along the right hand side.
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Sep 25, 2016 17:11
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Is there are terrible fantasy maps thread? It's fantasy so mountains aren't formed by geological fault lines. That's why there's circles of them all over that map. Reminds me of the Mist continent in Final Fantasy 9.
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Sep 26, 2016 03:46
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The mountains on the right hand side is a trope from Tolkien isn't it? Wheel of Time does it as well.
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Sep 26, 2016 06:28
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Off the top of my head, the Shannara novels featured some particularly ludicrous  geography, although I'm mobileposting so I don't have a picture handy
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Sep 26, 2016 08:44
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Atlas Hugged posted:The mountains on the right hand side is a trope from Tolkien isn't it? Wheel of Time does it as well. At least Wheel of Time had the excuse that they weren't naturally formed mountains, but instead were created when all male mages went insane simultaneously as part of the backstory.
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Sep 26, 2016 10:55
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Torrannor posted:At least Wheel of Time had the excuse that they weren't naturally formed mountains, but instead were created when all male mages went insane simultaneously as part of the backstory. "I have been driven mad by the corruptive taint of Shai'Tan and am laying waste to the world around me. I shall reshape the continent into.....perfectly neat rectangles!" Would totally read a book set during the Breaking of the World or whatever it was called.
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Sep 26, 2016 13:12
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Atlas Hugged posted:The mountains on the right hand side is a trope from Tolkien isn't it? Wheel of Time does it as well. More a repurposing of the common Ural Mountains as ending Europe on the right hand side of the map I suspect.
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Sep 26, 2016 13:21
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ulmont posted:More a repurposing of the common Ural Mountains as ending Europe on the right hand side of the map I suspect. I trust Tolkien to have done it for a reason and for Jordan to have come up with a reason to justify doing it, but all the others are just following along.
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Sep 26, 2016 18:43
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I thought Shannara series took place in the US. Like Prince of Thorns.
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Sep 27, 2016 00:38
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Solice Kirsk posted:I thought Shannara series took place in the US. Like Prince of Thorns. Prince of thorns is Europe plus some amount of rising seas. There's a bit where they hop a boat to Libya and another bit where Jorg is in Spain IIRC.
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Sep 27, 2016 00:46
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I would love to see someone shred Prince of Thorns the way Kingkiller has been in this thread, but I don't have the patience to plow through all the stupid bullshit in that book again.
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Sep 27, 2016 01:23
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I liked Prince of Thorns, but that's because it took a day to read and was basically a trash novel. It's seriously like a YA novel with poorly written graphic violence.
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Sep 27, 2016 02:43
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It's stupid, but not really worth the effort.
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Sep 27, 2016 04:39
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Kingkiller is set apart by the bizarre adulation it received. There's a lot of mediocre to bad fantasy out there, but KK was a commercial hit and acclaimed as a standout work of literary significance even by many SFF critics. And with the best will in the world it just isn't. So there's value in picking it apart that there isn't for Branderson's latest or whatever.
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Sep 27, 2016 22:53
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Torrannor posted:At least Wheel of Time had the excuse that they weren't naturally formed mountains, but instead were created when all male mages went insane simultaneously as part of the backstory. Tolkien also had godly beings directly causing massive upheavals and reshaping of Middle Earth so things like Mordor having a nice defensive box of mountains is a bit easier to forgive since, IIRC, the events of Allakabeth(?) happened it not only involved sinking an island (which killed Sauron's physical body) but the world had actually been flat and/or a square and was reshaped in to a circle with Valinor sealed off from normal/mortal means of entry. Since up until then you'd just sail west to hit Valinor but afterwards sailing west just wrapped around to the far eastern lands unless you had the magic means to reach Valinor. As stuffy as the Silmarilion is it is basically "world building, the novel (plus a few mentions of people like Hurin)" and I'd love to see some games made using its content. No, Angband doesn't count. Peel posted:Kingkiller is set apart by the bizarre adulation it received. There's a lot of mediocre to bad fantasy out there, but KK was a commercial hit and acclaimed as a standout work of literary significance even by many SFF critics. And with the best will in the world it just isn't. So there's value in picking it apart that there isn't for Branderson's latest or whatever. Sanderson also churns out books at a rate few people can come close to. It's really kinda bonkers just how fast he writes. Like how Alloy of Law is something he wrote during a long plane ride. 
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Sep 27, 2016 23:10
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Grenrow posted:I would love to see someone shred Prince of Thorns the way Kingkiller has been in this thread, but I don't have the patience to plow through all the stupid bullshit in that book again. The take home message from Prince of Thorns is that if you start your book by paraphrasing A Clockwork Orange then I'm just gonna go read that instead of your poo poo.
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Sep 27, 2016 23:17
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