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Strom Cuzewon posted:"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!"
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Sep 28, 2016 04:58
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Nakar posted:If I had superwizard powers and was a little unhinged I would definitely play Minecraft with the terrain and make everything nice and tidy. Setting things on fire and killing people just doesn't have the same engrossing appeal. This is canon. A guy loses his mind because of the taint in a late middle book and he sits down to play with building blocks if I recall correctly. It might just have been regular children's toys, but the point stands. The madness doesn't necessarily mean murder spree. A lot of the reshaping of the world and killing was likely incidental.
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Sep 28, 2016 06:16
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Strom Cuzewon posted:"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!" There's a distinct subset of Paradox games players that suffers from Pretty Borders Syndrome. Some of the male Aes Sedai might have been afflicted with a similar mental illness, only in a stronger form when they went mad.
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Sep 28, 2016 06:15
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LET’S READ THE KINGKILLER CHRONICLE CRITICALLY Summing up, part 3 – Why does anyone like this garbage? They like it because it’s bad.  Too simplistic? Hardly. All the broad faults I illustrated in the last entry are exactly what attracts people to the series. There are readers who have seen nothing wrong with the disastrously poor editing, the very bad prose, the boring fantasy, or the sheer juvenility of it all. In fact, they parse them as strengths because they like bad writing. There are readers who even defend these books as progressive. There are the reviewers, too, who declared The Name of the Wind a significant genre novel. But one does not need to read reviews of The Name of the Wind for long to notice how callow their criticism is, with professional reviewers barely able to state what the book is about. The most ambitious review must be Hannah Strom-Martin’s Quixotic assay: quote:When Tad Williams concluded his Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn series back in the '90s, one intrepid reviewer dubbed it "The War and Peace of fantasy novels." With the advent of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, this ceased to feel like an entirely honest statement. The hard-edged realism and psychological density of Martin's series has usurped the Tolstoy comparison and made Martin the man to beat for sprawling epic fantasy. Indeed, it has become necessary to mentally separate Martin from his contemporaries, lest the enjoyment of new epics begin to pale in comparison. Or, perhaps less melodramatically, it has become necessary for audiences to recognize that there are various modes of epic storytelling, some thriving on minutia and realism and some harkening back to a time of more lyrical prose and mythological abstraction. Williams's work falls into the second category, more wondrous than gritty, as does The Lord of the Rings and now, quite strikingly, a new epic by first time novelist Patrick Rothfuss called The Name of the Wind. It is a book that, while posing no serious threat to Martin's reign, still carries a certain weight. I defy anyone who has read it to contradict me when I state that it is the David Copperfield of fantasy. quote:Once Kvothe manages to get off the streets, he makes his way to The University, where he hopes to become a student and gain access to the Archives, one of the few resources that might lead him to clues about the Chandrian. Here the novel really hits its stride, infusing what could have been a simple "Harry Potter for Adults" shtick with a subtle satire of academia that anyone who pines for their college days will relate to. One can only marvel as Kvothe holds his own against professors hostile, brilliant, and insane, befriends comically stressed out co-eds, and struggles mightily against outrageous tuition prices and a brilliantly irritating student nemesis. Kvothe's fight against classism and poverty (those classic Dickensian trappings) provides as much drama as anything else in The Name of the Wind (even Rothfuss's unique take on the fire-breathing dragon). Similar to the way we are moved by Adrian Brody's character in The Pianist, a penniless man forced to live without food, shelter, or warmth for long periods of time, we rejoice each time Kvothe manages to secure enough wealth for shoes, and plummet when he goes hungry. Luckily, Rothfuss possesses a ribald sense of humor and has a gift for wringing poignancy and laughs from his audience, often simultaneously. In this sense, it is as if Kvothe's story is one of the plays he has performed for his father's troupe, asking the audience to applaud the triumphs of a larger than life character. Take a moment to appreciate how laboriously Strom-Martin explains the concept of a destitute person (“a penniless man forced to live without food, shelter, or warmth for long periods of time”), or weaves in clichés like how the book is both poignant and hilarious. Yet this is one of the better reviews of The Name of the Wind. There’s really nothing ultimately remarkable over a bad or mediocre work in any medium being subject to critical (or fan) adulation. The Name of the Wind presents a veneer of boldness but beneath hide only the same clichés. This is the appeal. When a damsel in distress is saved, she is told by her rescuer (a man) how she was not a damsel in distress but a strong woman perfectly capable of handling herself. That she afterwards wants to gently caress him is simply natural. Rothfuss’s trafficking in clichés is always transparent because there is nothing genuine behind them. Reviewers might admit to some banalities, but generally pass over them in silence. As always, what one does not say is just as important as what one does say. So-called fans (in truth I am one of the few Rothfuss fans) are obviously no better, but the fannish enthusiasm is remarkably indistinguishable from supposedly professional work: jivjov posted:I enjoy the fictional history Rothfuss created; he commits fully to the concept of a living world; mundane things like currency conversions, folktales, or the difference of customs from one kingdom to the next are brought up. This makes the world feel less sterile and artificial than some fantasy I've read. I enjoy learning about various corners of the world. This recalls Strom-Martin’s disaster of a review: Hannah Strom-Martin posted:What sets all this apart from your typical coming of age narrative is Rothfuss's refusal to trade in throwaway details. Each skill Kvothe learns becomes a vital part of who he is. Where some authors would simply give us a few rough chisel blows, Rothfuss creates a meticulous carving. Kvothe doesn't just play music, he breathes it, one of the most poignant relationships in the novel being between him and a series of ill-fated lutes. Likewise, every lesson concerning sympathy, medicine, or arcane knowledge goes into Kvothe's arsenal and is whipped out at exactly the right time. Convenient? Yes, but Rothfuss also makes it plausible. Often in fantasy we get the obligatory montage of characters learning sword and sorcery skills, and are then asked to believe that a few brief lessons have turned them into a bad-rear end. Rothfuss, however, by long since revealing Kvothe's insatiable appetite for knowledge and by placing him in a position (a traveling performer) where the acquisition of knowledge would be the ultimate distraction from the monotony of constant travel, manages to sell us on the idea. Notice how both find the banal utterly important: it is pleasing for both the critic and the reader that the fantasy be “plausible”, in that that magic and legend are suitable restrained and properly explained. This is not a contradiction, but a vital aesthetic-ideological concern for fantasy readers. They demand that the fantastical be banalized to a degree. Psychological realism, plausibility, the minutiae of “world-building”, pulp shock, and modernist cynicism thus have primacy. This is why Rothfuss’s strives for such “objective” realistic detail. George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is the pinnacle of this development (incidentally, it does not resemble Tolstoy’s War and Peace very much). Even beyond the Rothfussian Attribute, the book’s dull faux-realism is undoubtedly its greatest stylistic asset. Fandom wants to consume, and Rothfuss’s unceasing pedantry is perfect for that. The fans and amateurish critics cannot recognize or understand good prose, let alone how that prose communicates the book’s story or aesthetic goals (all the praise the fan can muster for the prose is that it’s readable and communicates meaning!). Certainly none can recognize the driving psychological or ideological force of the The Name of the Wind. This force is tentatively illustrated by one blogger: ’Magpiewhotypes’ posted:What makes Kvothe’s story unique is that it is designed, point-by-point, to reflect back the experiences and desires of a young-ish male reader. Every point in Kvothe’s life is designed to appeal to a reader’s direct experience (going to university, dealing with the opposite sex) or appeal to the broadest spectrum of cool fantasies possible (living on the road, being super-smart, becoming a ninja in a society of super-ninjas, proving your cockmastery on a hot older lady). Kvothe’s hard-knock life on the streets? An American high school full of bullies. Kvothe’s money troubles? Envy of the guy down the street with a bitchin’ Camaro. While not everything above is accurate, it is based on an astute observation that makes all the pieces of the puzzle come together: The Name of the Wind is a fantasy of the white liberal middle-class American experience. This explains many baffling elements. The contradictory portrait of Roma, as both highly-educated liberals and as a marginalized minority, exemplifies many white progressives’ simultaneous anti-racism and discomfort with anything outside of their liberal bubble. The anti-religious bigotry is the province of liberal atheism. That the hero cannot escape financial insecurity in spite of his genius exemplifies the uncertain future and economy that defies the middle class's perceived self-importance. The absence of real communities and their actions reflects suburban atomism. The hypocritical feminist sentiments are just that. The world entirely revolving around the protagonist is the narcissistic legacy of the “Me” Generation. And so and so on. The Name of the Wind is true hipster fantasy. If the dull faux-realism is the form that attracts readers, the liberal middle-class fantasy is the substance. Reviewers and self-proclaimed fans are blind to this as they are to the book’s editing goof-ups, because fannish enthusiasm inhibits insight and understanding (some are politically partisan or merely uncritical, and thus unable to see or question Rothfuss’s shallow liberal sentiments). One finds many fanboys with theories about the secret identities of characters and foreshadowed plot points, but who are unable to describe the prose or themes (in fairness’s sake, I have proven the latter to be an impossible task). Amateur critics similarly compensate in enthusiasm what they lack in discernment. But in the indomitable phalanx of genre enthusiasts, one stalwart warrior will always slip up and admit that they think their genre of choice is inferior, limited, or juvenile. In this instance it’s that phrase from Hannah Strom-Martin: that The Name of the Wind is “the David Copperfield of fantasy”. Not the David Copperfield of literature, but the David Copperfield of just genre fantasy novels! Why is there need for such a distinction, if not to avoid genuine and honest comparison? To truly compare David Copperfield to The Name of the Wind is to admit that the latter is unquestionably worse. Thus, there is need to categorize and divide so that true comparison does not happen, leading to the implicit admission that to be genre is to be deficient and that it is not "real" literature (How many genre critics even dare to use the word “literature” without a backhanded qualifier like “fantasy”?). The Name of the Wind is recognized merely as king among genre works. The punchline, of course, is that The Name of the Wind is not even good compared to other genre works. It’s poo poo. But that’s what we love about it, even the ones in denial. Next: Slouching towards Wise Man’s Fearr BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Apr 1, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2016 13:17
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Who in the gently caress compares Ice and Fire to War and Peace? Do they do anything even remotely similar?
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Sep 28, 2016 14:23
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Shrugging towards Wise Man's Fear.
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Sep 28, 2016 14:27
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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. Plate tectonics wasn't an accepted theory thing when Tolkien wrote LotR so he gets a bit of a pass.
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Sep 28, 2016 14:38
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Who in the gently caress compares Ice and Fire to War and Peace? Do they do anything even remotely similar? Ornamented Death posted:Plate tectonics wasn't an accepted theory thing when Tolkien wrote LotR so he gets a bit of a pass.
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Sep 28, 2016 15:21
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According to this Reddit thread I just saw (aka the source of all real and true information), Rothfuss thinks Harry Potter is dumb and bad. After reading both his book and the criticisms of his book, I find this really really funny. He brings up a couple of good points, sure, but he's the absolute last person who has the right to be making them. It's especially funny that he bitches at her not doing a good job on the last book, because gently caress, at least she wrote the thing. https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/54w4uq/pat_rothfuss_on_jk_rolwing/?st=itn0vvu4&sh=617c105c If you're desperately curious to leave SA.
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Sep 28, 2016 15:48
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Who in the gently caress compares Ice and Fire to War and Peace? Do they do anything even remotely similar? "War and Peace is the very famous and super-long novel. A Song of Ice and Fire is a series of long fantasy novels I like. Therefore A Song of Ice and Fire must be like War and Peace." Obviously reading War and Peace is vestigial to this. So is claiming that A Song of Ice and Fire is actually as good. Like I said, it's an implicit admission of inferiority. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 17:49 on Sep 28, 2016 |
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Sep 28, 2016 17:39
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Naerasa posted:According to this Reddit thread I just saw (aka the source of all real and true information), Rothfuss thinks Harry Potter is dumb and bad. After reading both his book and the criticisms of his book, I find this really really funny. He brings up a couple of good points, sure, but he's the absolute last person who has the right to be making them. It's especially funny that he bitches at her not doing a good job on the last book, because gently caress, at least she wrote the thing. I'm actually impressed how critical of Rothfuss the comments here are.
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Sep 28, 2016 17:46
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Atlas Hugged posted:I'm actually impressed how critical of Rothfuss the comments here are. The dedicated Kingkiller subreddit is about 80% sycophantic Rothfuss nuthuggers, but the post above is in the fantasy subreddit. Many of those Redditors have actually read other fantasy books and by comparison, Rothfuss doesn't come off so well.
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Sep 28, 2016 19:44
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Rothfuss wrote two books and a novella, of steadily-decreasing quality, refuses to get off his rear end and write anything now, and he thinks he can step to Rowling? I mean, he can think whatever he wants, but I'd hope some part of his brain would engage and go "Alert, alert, saying this poo poo in public is a bad idea and it's gonna make me look like an rear end."
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Sep 28, 2016 19:48
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At the risk of fueling the Rothfuss hate cult even more, isn't he still an educator? Why the hell is he acting like that in public?
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Sep 28, 2016 20:04
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:At the risk of fueling the Rothfuss hate cult even more, isn't he still an educator? Why the hell is he acting like that in public? If those tweets posted in the thread are any indication, he's prone to self sabotage.
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Sep 28, 2016 20:10
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:At the risk of fueling the Rothfuss hate cult even more, isn't he still an educator? Why the hell is he acting like that in public? His self insert is hemme
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Sep 29, 2016 00:53
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anilEhilated posted:Contrast-using name?
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Sep 29, 2016 03:56
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Without getting too deep into it (because god knows half of us are superfans anyway), the LOTR elf wars began before the world was completely finished and radically reshaped the planet's topography several times. Also, it's not trying to explain to you why the story should be acceptable to science, because that's not at all the point.
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Oct 1, 2016 08:05
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Things in Middle Earth can also actually fade into obscurity as they figuratively fade into obscurity. Europe did not physically diminish as the Roman Empire declined (well kinda). It's a literary thing. It's like being critical of the genesis of Narnia, which was called into existence by a Jesus Lion, because a lamppost grew from an iron bar that got planted in the ground and that's not how real lamps are made.
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Oct 3, 2016 09:03
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Going over old entries, I don't think people have hated this sentence enough:quote:I moved a finger and the chord went minor in a way that always sounded to me as if the lute were saying sad. This is worse than silly geography.
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Oct 3, 2016 09:49
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Going over old entries, I don't think people have hated this sentence enough:
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Oct 3, 2016 10:06
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For the webcomic crowd:
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Oct 3, 2016 10:14
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I still think the sword that's as lethal as a pebble in a riverbed is better.
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Oct 3, 2016 10:42
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Going over old entries, I don't think people have hated this sentence enough: Didn't I write like a paragraph or something about how ridiculous it was and that literally no musician would ever describe a minor chord in such a symplistic stupid way? Then someone else described the way Kvothe talked about losing music as the same way someone would describe losing an iPod because Rothfuss doesn't know what goes through a musician's mind any better than he knows what goes through a woman's mind. All of his writing involving music is absolutely terrible. It's so much worse than flowery purple nonsense prose about swords or virgins or clouds. He treats music as something that can physically be lost and it's not at all. Everyone hums to themselves and it's even more common for musicians to drum or whistle or hum to themselves when ever they're alone. Sure not playing your instrument for a long time and getting it back in your hands is a really good feeling, but it's not like music just ceases to exist because you lost your power cable to your synthesizer. Kvothe is the worst type of musician as well. No one likes to be around a smug lead guitarist. No one. Not even other smug lead guitarists.
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Oct 3, 2016 19:58
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Reminder that Peter S. Beagle wrote A Fine And Private Place when he was 19 years old, just for comparison.
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Oct 4, 2016 04:02
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Solice Kirsk posted:Didn't I write like a paragraph or something about how ridiculous it was and that literally no musician would ever describe a minor chord in such a symplistic stupid way? Then someone else described the way Kvothe talked about losing music as the same way someone would describe losing an iPod because Rothfuss doesn't know what goes through a musician's mind any better than he knows what goes through a woman's mind. All of his writing involving music is absolutely terrible. It's so much worse than flowery purple nonsense prose about swords or virgins or clouds. He treats music as something that can physically be lost and it's not at all. Everyone hums to themselves and it's even more common for musicians to drum or whistle or hum to themselves when ever they're alone. Sure not playing your instrument for a long time and getting it back in your hands is a really good feeling, but it's not like music just ceases to exist because you lost your power cable to your synthesizer. Food for thought, lesson #1, paragraph 1, sentence 1 in creative writing is to write what you know. Because everyone will be able to tell when you don't know.
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Oct 4, 2016 21:37
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Rothfuss update! He bought a Flow Hive! It didn't come pre-assembled! Because he's too lazy to put the Flow Hive together, he posted an anti-Flow Hive/Save the Bees article on his blog!
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Oct 10, 2016 04:55
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Kvothe gazed longingly at his Flow Hive. It was a hive that was not entirely a hive, not entirely honey, not entirely bees, but a combination of these things, more and yet...yet somehow less. Less in the tapping of the hive, less in the pour of the honey, less in the spring-evening buzzing that rose to his ears like a mandolin submerged under running stream water, struggling to play out a single heartfelt note. A note that said sad.
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Oct 10, 2016 14:26
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Nothing would make me laugh harder now, than Rothfuss inserting a digression on bees into Book 3. One that that smacks down some type of arrogant strawman who assumes he understands bees when in reality, he can never understand what it truly means to own bees.
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Oct 10, 2016 15:28
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I for one am glad Rothfuss is reinventing himself. Side-note, I saw someone reading Wise Man's Fear at the bus stop the other day and felt like warning them that there's never gonna be a third book. 
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Oct 10, 2016 15:59
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He was on imaginary worlds podcast last week as well. Talking about how much more clever he is than JK Rawlings...
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Oct 10, 2016 20:03
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nikitakhrushchev posted:I for one am glad Rothfuss is reinventing himself. Side-note, I saw someone reading Wise Man's Fear at the bus stop the other day and felt like warning them that there's never gonna be a third book. Anyone who continues into book two deserves what they get.
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Oct 11, 2016 05:05
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Hughlander posted:He was on imaginary worlds podcast last week as well. Talking about how much more clever he is than JK Rawlings... o. oooooo. J.K. Rowlings He has a weird hate boner for her. I assume it's just jealousy.
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Oct 11, 2016 22:19
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Benson Cunningham posted:o. oooooo. It should be admiration since he basically stole his book from her.
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Oct 12, 2016 04:45
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Solice Kirsk posted:It should be admiration since he basically stole his book from her. Yeah, you'd think he would want to avoid that comparison as much as possible. Ambrose is as basic a clone of Draco Malfoy as you can get, although somehow even less interesting.
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Oct 12, 2016 05:32
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StonecutterJoe posted:Kvothe gazed longingly at his Flow Hive. It was a hive that was not entirely a hive, not entirely honey, not entirely bees, but a combination of these things, more and yet...yet somehow less. Less in the tapping of the hive, less in the pour of the honey, less in the spring-evening buzzing that rose to his ears like a mandolin submerged under running stream water, struggling to play out a single heartfelt note. A note that said sad. It was a buzzing of three parts.
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Oct 12, 2016 06:12
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Benson Cunningham posted:o. oooooo.
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Oct 12, 2016 18:38
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Has anyone written a series about biker wizards? Because now I want to read that poo poo. I don't care who writes it, as long as it isn't Rothfuhahahhaahhah he doesn't write anything.
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Oct 12, 2016 20:21
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StonecutterJoe posted:Has anyone written a series about biker wizards? Because now I want to read that poo poo. I don't care who writes it, as long as it isn't Rothfuhahahhaahhah he doesn't write anything. Sounds like something Pratchett would have written.
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Oct 13, 2016 03:54
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Solice Kirsk posted:It should be admiration since he basically stole his book from her. I've always imagined the reason rothfuss's books are popular is that they're a Wizard College series that came along just as Harry Potter, (a Wizard High School series) was winding down, and were able to catch some of those readers as they floated, lonely and adrift, through the literary void Just a timing thing. Not all big Harry Potter fans I know have latched onto Rothfuss, but all three of the Rothfuss fans I know were big Harry Potter fans.
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Oct 13, 2016 04:05
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