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And Kamen Rider.
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Aug 8, 2017 16:03
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grittyreboot posted:RPO also has a part where the MC gives a Japanese character his Ultraman powerup because he thinks it's something sacred to Japanese culture or some poo poo. I think he even calls it Ultaru-manu or some poo poo. quote:“You two should keep the Beta Capsule,” I said. “Urutoraman is Japan’s greatest superhero. His powers belong in Japanese hands.”
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Aug 8, 2017 16:48
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The Vosgian Beast posted:Well probably NES games 
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Aug 8, 2017 16:59
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ThePlague-Daemon posted:What's terrible nerd 80s nostalgia like in Japan? I only know about the ones who like anime. A functional economy. 
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Aug 8, 2017 17:57
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I bet their media nostalgia isn't as big because most properties from the 80s are still ongoing and will continue until the artist/writer dies
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Aug 8, 2017 18:07
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Youth biker gangs and pompadour haircuts? They seem to be popping up in modern comics more these days.
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Aug 8, 2017 21:30
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outlier posted:That article captures Matthew Reilly perfectly: it's utter trash, but the guy is so gleeful and enthralled with his own stories that are nothing but action-action-action ("Quick as a flash, he unslung his sniper rifle, aimed and fired it at the first oncoming RPG!"), that it all kinda works. So it's like the Doom comic in prose form.
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Aug 8, 2017 23:45
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Deadspin actually has some moderately interesting things to ssy about RPO.
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Aug 8, 2017 23:47
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Thank God that Helldump Superstar Boniface is here to tell us the same things everyone else has already said about that stupid book.
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Aug 9, 2017 00:08
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:Thank God that Helldump Superstar Boniface is here to tell us the same things everyone else has already said about that stupid book. Jeb Lund is the guy who blogged as Mbutu Sese Seko for awhile, I didn't think he joined until after helldump shut down? And I liked the article,I thought it was surprisingly sympathetic 
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Aug 9, 2017 03:38
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A Pinball Wizard posted:Jeb Lund is the guy who blogged as Mbutu Sese Seko for awhile, I didn't think he joined until after helldump shut down?
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Aug 9, 2017 03:47
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je me j'appelle je blund
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Aug 9, 2017 04:33
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ThePlague-Daemon posted:Why does it sound like the Japanese nerds are obsessed with poo poo from before the 80s? Other than I guess it's the stuff Ernest Cline knows about from American nerd culture. As others have said, Famikon and then the manga/anime staple you probably already know. I think tinkering with electronics was a popular pastime for nerds in Japan as well, so 80's nerd culture probably also involved putting together radios, old stereos and second-hand computers in your friend's garage with spare parts you scrounged on a flea market and poo poo like that. I assume this was also a thing in the USA and Western Europe. Japanese nerd culture is a bit more varied than what we think of as "nerds" though, so any sort of audiophiles or train enthusiasts would share the label and their experiences could wildly differ from the anime or gamer crowd.
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Aug 9, 2017 10:24
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Sham bam bamina! posted:He's both. Lol didn't he write a long whiny blog post about how he got doxxed on some baseball forum and had to go undercover as a brutal Congolese dictator for a decade? hosed up if true.
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Aug 9, 2017 12:03
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If this is a fulltime RPO SUCKS thread now (and it does, to be sure) can someone at least drop me off some links to other forums' Lets Reads like the "Victoria" one from earlier on?
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Aug 10, 2017 06:55
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To get off the RPO hate-wagon, a series that I read most of and enjoyed was The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson, which is a weird series. It's about a leper who falls unconscious one day after years of becoming used to being an outcast and having most of his body mostly numb from his illness, and in his mind ends up in a fantasy world that has innate healing powers and a Big Bad Evil Man to fight. Of course, it heals his leprosy and through his visits he becomes a legendary hero, as a few hours for him in the real world makes decades pass in the dream world. There is one part at the beginning that gets weird though. When he first arrives in the world, he gets shown around a particularly powerful area of background healing that completely cures his leprosy (but only while he's in the dreamworld, in reality his body is deteriorating as badly as ever) by a young priestess, and he ends up with feeling coming to parts of his body that he thought long dead, which drives him to temporary euphoria-based madness and he ends up raping her after losing control of himself. Because the whole series takes place over a few hours in his time, he spends the rest of the series feeling like absolute poo poo about himself as the world of his dream heaps endless praises on him for defeating many evils over the course of the story. The key there, is that the girl never told anyone, and by his second trip there I think she is long dead of old age, so it stays an awful secret buried by history. It does have some interesting characterisation though, like Thomas befriending a creature that should be chaotic evil due to being one of the evil lord dudes main minion army, but turns out that they are not evil by nature and he becomes kind of the team pet. There was some interesting word-building too, although I never finished the fourth book in the series. Fatal Revenant: The last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. What is everyone else's opinions on those books? I kind of liked them despite their flaws. BioEnchanted has a new favorite as of 08:33 on Aug 10, 2017 |
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Aug 10, 2017 08:28
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The first trilogy was solid, but it quickly went downhill from there. I didn't get past the book where Tom is missing and it just follows some chick around looking at stuff through the Fog.
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Aug 10, 2017 08:51
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Uh, I hate to break it to you but in a later book he goes back there like twenty years later and rapes his daughter (who was born out of the original rape). and the books could be so good but their use of rape is notably awful even for 70s fantasy
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Aug 10, 2017 09:03
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BioEnchanted posted:To get off the RPO hate-wagon, a series that I read most of and enjoyed was The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson, which is a weird series. Have you tried clench racing? quote:This is a social and competitive sport, that can be played over and over with renewed pleasure. Playing equipment currently on the market restricts the number of players to six, but the manufacturers may yet issue the series of proposed supplements to raise the maximum eventually to nine.
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Aug 10, 2017 09:14
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Uh, I hate to break it to you but in a later book he goes back there like twenty years later and rapes his daughter (who was born out of the original rape). Holy poo poo, seriously? The initial rape put me off ever reading those books as a teen, but somehow I never heard about there being a second rape, complete with (accidental?) incest. The level of wretchedness people put up with in nerdlit is still astounding to me, even now. Clench racing is loving hilarious, though. It makes me miss the Eye of Argon sessions of my youth, although we always deployed lovely fanfic instead of the classic Theis.
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Aug 10, 2017 09:23
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Uh, I hate to break it to you but in a later book he goes back there like twenty years later and rapes his daughter (who was born out of the original rape). Jesus Christ, what is it with fantasy authors and rape? 
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Aug 10, 2017 09:24
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Antivehicular posted:Holy poo poo, seriously? The initial rape put me off ever reading those books as a teen, but somehow I never heard about there being a second rape, complete with (accidental?) incest. The level of wretchedness people put up with in nerdlit is still astounding to me, even now.
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Aug 10, 2017 09:27
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That series has one of the most unsympathetic protagonists of all time. I read the first three books, and I wanted my money back even though I checked them out of the library.
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Aug 10, 2017 09:53
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Something about 'standard' fantasy lit has the protagonist tend to be the least likeable and sympathetic character in it besides maybe Lord Evil McRapeocaust and also lots of jarring sexual content. It's basically a long-form version of fanfiction in that way. Is anyone else really sick of 'seemingly standard fantasy setting is actually the FUTURE after nuclear war!' even though it isn't used that much? I mean, Middle Earth is at least kinda interesting given the implication/statement it's the distant past. (I might give Adventure Time a pass because it doesn't try to pretend it's a surprise)
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Aug 10, 2017 10:31
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Agents are GO! posted:That series has one of the most unsympathetic protagonists of all time. I read the first three books, and I wanted my money back even though I checked them out of the library. The problem is how quickly authors go to sexual assault and how it's always like, a one-and-done thing to show how BAD the guy is -- the women are never more than props used to prove a point. Thomas Covenant isn't as bad as Prince of Thorns in that regard (worst fantasy series I've ever read and it came heavily goon-recommend what the gently caress guys) but it ain't good. Actually can we talk about Prince of Thorns again because it's really hard to explain how bad those books are. The protagonist is: 1) Fifteen years old 2) impossibly handsome, with flowing anime hair 3) the best tactician in all the realm 4) the best soldier in all the realm 5) so scary and cool that a ghost jumps him, then goes "oh no it's that guy k bye" CW: sexual assault In the opening chapter, he rapes two women, then locks them in a barn and sets it on fire. While it burns down, he laughs to his fellow soldiers about the smell of bacon. At one point in the book, he rips out a necromancer's heart and eats it. There's no particular plot reason for this, and he gets nothing out of it. It's just there so he can shove his hand into a guy's chest and rip out his heart, then eat it and monologue about how cool he is because he loves the taste of blood. And like, at some point fairly quickly it stops being shocking, and just starts being dumb. Like that game Hatred, it wants so bad to be edgy and cool and dark but the harder it tries the stupider it comes off. It reads like the author has watched a fuckload of anime but never reads books. oh and TWIST at the end a wizard did it. No really, he's so evil because a wizard did it.
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Aug 10, 2017 10:49
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Inescapable Duck posted:Is anyone else really sick of 'seemingly standard fantasy setting is actually the FUTURE after nuclear war!' even though it isn't used that much? I mean, Middle Earth is at least kinda interesting given the implication/statement it's the distant past. (I might give Adventure Time a pass because it doesn't try to pretend it's a surprise) I can't say I've encountered it too much. I used to read a lot more than I do these days and read a whole lot of fantasy in my teens and the only series I can recall that does it is The Death Gate Cycle. I liked that series as a kid and am kind of scared to revisit it in case it was actually not that good and I'm just being nostalgic. Anyway, is post-nuclear war a common trope in fantasy writing?
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Aug 10, 2017 11:11
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:CW: sexual assault Also good job not warning me about violence. I wasn't raped, but I did lose both of my sisters in a barn fire. rear end in a top hat. Sham bam bamina! has a new favorite as of 11:24 on Aug 10, 2017 |
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Aug 10, 2017 11:12
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Actually can we talk about Prince of Thorns again because it's really hard to explain how bad those books are. The protagonist is: Yeah, the final twist was about the last straw when I noped the hell out and threw the goddamn book into a corner. It was just so utterly half-assed, and only popped up like 30 pages out from the end. It actually could have made for something potentially interesting if it had come up somewhere about halfway through: Imagine a character who has been ludicrously, cartoonishly evil for most of his life and had built a reputation upon that, but then it turns out that whole thing was due to an outside influence. That gives you an interesting hook for having the character try to deal with their position in life now that they actually have a functioning conscience, and trying to deal with the trauma of actually having done all that hosed up poo poo. A certain conflict between just how much of everything was due to the compulsion and how much they did out of their own free will. But instead it comes in at the very last moment as basically a cheap "Welp, turns out he's not actually culpable for anything, so I get to have my cake and eat it, too". Perhaps that whole issue is brought up in the sequels, but gently caress reading anything more of that. Foxhound posted:I can't say I've encountered it too much. I used to read a lot more than I do these days and read a whole lot of fantasy in my teens and the only series I can recall that does it is The Death Gate Cycle. I liked that series as a kid and am kind of scared to revisit it in case it was actually not that good and I'm just being nostalgic. It's not super common or anything, but it does seem to pop up surprisingly regularly. There's no easy way to give examples without giving away the twists of some books, so read at your own risk: The aforementioned Prince of Thorns is one example, I think at one point you have the protagonist walk through an old bunker and interact with some remnant computer system, dumping a whole lot of exposition on his head and I think giving him some WMD or something. Another fairly recent example would be the Shattered Sea series by Joe Abercrombie, who embedded that whole thing a little more gracefully with only a few surviving artefacts that turned out to be modern firearms.
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Aug 10, 2017 11:59
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I mean, just have a drat fantasy setting where they also invented computers and guns if you want them that badly. Or just do Fallout. Though there's a fun loophole usually used in anime where it's set on another planet that happens to be in a Wild West stage of incomplete/aborted colonisation so you can have wildly varying culture and tech levels without having to have a contrived post-apocalypse scenario. (though it doesn't always stop them anyway)
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Aug 10, 2017 12:29
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Foxhound posted:I can't say I've encountered it too much. I used to read a lot more than I do these days and read a whole lot of fantasy in my teens and the only series I can recall that does it is The Death Gate Cycle. I liked that series as a kid and am kind of scared to revisit it in case it was actually not that good and I'm just being nostalgic. I really liked that series as a kid, too. Had some great monsters, cool world building and the magic system was pretty sweet. Plus the dog. But I also wanna say those books had a time-traveling wizard character who would occasionally drop George Lucas' name or something like that. At the time I loved it but I think it would just annoy me now.
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Aug 10, 2017 12:30
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Perestroika posted:Yeah, the final twist was about the last straw when I noped the hell out and threw the goddamn book into a corner. It was just so utterly half-assed, and only popped up like 30 pages out from the end. It actually could have made for something potentially interesting if it had come up somewhere about halfway through: Imagine a character who has been ludicrously, cartoonishly evil for most of his life and had built a reputation upon that, but then it turns out that whole thing was due to an outside influence. That gives you an interesting hook for having the character try to deal with their position in life now that they actually have a functioning conscience, and trying to deal with the trauma of actually having done all that hosed up poo poo. A certain conflict between just how much of everything was due to the compulsion and how much they did out of their own free will. But instead it comes in at the very last moment as basically a cheap "Welp, turns out he's not actually culpable for anything, so I get to have my cake and eat it, too". Perhaps that whole issue is brought up in the sequels, but gently caress reading anything more of that. It was not. The sequels just add even more convoluted ultra-violence.
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Aug 10, 2017 12:31
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Inescapable Duck posted:I mean, just have a drat fantasy setting where they also invented computers and guns if you want them that badly. Or just do Fallout. Isn't that the Star Trek/Gate approach?
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Aug 10, 2017 12:38
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Inescapable Duck posted:Is anyone else really sick of 'seemingly standard fantasy setting is actually the FUTURE after nuclear war!' even though it isn't used that much? artsy fartsy posted:But I also wanna say those books had a time-traveling wizard character who would occasionally drop George Lucas' name or something like that. At the time I loved it but I think it would just annoy me now.
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Aug 10, 2017 12:39
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Inescapable Duck posted:I mean, just have a drat fantasy setting where they also invented computers and guns if you want them that badly. Or just do Fallout. May I introduce to a show called "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe"?
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Aug 10, 2017 13:20
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Tiggum posted:Kind of the opposite, really. Like, it's the most interesting thing about the Shannara Chronicles (TV show anyway, I haven't read the books) and I wish they'd get into it more because it's just kind of there in the background. And there are so many generic fantasy settings that having something like that just makes it slightly less repetitive. The Shannara books are also in a distant future setting. In less lovely territory, Riddley Walker seems at first to be a kind of Iron Age fantasy setting but quickly becomes apparent as an England nuked back to the Iron Age, and The Book of the New Sun also seems to be a fantasy story but slowly reveals itself to be very very far future. The origins of the idea are probably in Jack Vance's Dying Earth books, or even earlier than that in William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land, though again neither are specifically a nuclear future (in The Night Land's case that would have been quite a trick since it predates nuclear weapons by over thirty years).
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Aug 10, 2017 13:41
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artsy fartsy posted:I really liked that series as a kid, too. Had some great monsters, cool world building and the magic system was pretty sweet. Plus the dog. That's just Once and Future King's Merlin for the lazy.
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Aug 10, 2017 14:27
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Uh, I hate to break it to you but in a later book he goes back there like twenty years later and rapes his daughter (who was born out of the original rape). Wow, I didn't feel like responding since I'm sure someone else would point it out, but the sex was totally consensual, with Tom ignorant of her parentage (he's been gone for what they feel is 30 years), but Elena knowing fully who her dad was but didn't bring it up. Tom was horrified when he later finds out iirc. The 'rape-as-a-whole-concept' thing was put in very early in the first book, to show Tom as an anti-hero when everyone in the world assumes he's Jesus mkII, and his difficulty handling their expectations with his self-loathing. It's super-jarring, but sexuality is really not brought up ever again of a trilogy so Donaldson get a pass.
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Aug 10, 2017 14:28
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Tiggum posted:IIRC that character is actually originally from their Dragonlance novels and turns out to be a god? Fizban / Zifnab, yeah. In the Death Gate novels he specifically references characters and events from Dragonlance, as well as real life stuff. He's completely an author insert and injoke.
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Aug 10, 2017 14:46
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BioEnchanted posted:To get off the RPO hate-wagon, a series that I read most of and enjoyed was The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen Donaldson, which is a weird series. It's about a leper who falls unconscious one day after years of becoming used to being an outcast and having most of his body mostly numb from his illness, and in his mind ends up in a fantasy world that has innate healing powers and a Big Bad Evil Man to fight. Of course, it heals his leprosy and through his visits he becomes a legendary hero, as a few hours for him in the real world makes decades pass in the dream world. Thomas Covenant was huge in its day. I think a lot of it's allure was that the protagonist was so un-heroic (without being a an outright dick) and spent so much time trying to avoid his fate. I gave the rape in the opening chapter a pass because it was drawn as a horrible action done by a tormented man who was out of his mind who spent the rest of the series beating himself up for it. And you say there was a second rape. I may have been wrong. The second trilogy? Eh ... Then there was Donaldson's other series, The Gap into Power which I was utterly unable to get into because everyone was unpleasant and the whole thing was just grim and sordid. I think the big problem may be that Donaldson's shtick has just become the norm.
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Aug 10, 2017 14:58
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Davros1 posted:May I introduce to a show called "He-Man and the Masters of the Universe"? I never gave this a second thought but you're right, for all the magical transformations and talking skeletons and cute sidekicks you also have laser pistols and space travel. I think most folks forget that Queen Marlena, He-Man's mother, was an astronaut from Earth that crash-landed on Eternia. You get a little bit of that in Jack Kirby's work as well with the magic = science in Thor and later in his Fourth World stuff. Notably the He-Man live action director, Gary Goddard, wanted to hire Kirby as a concept artist (studio said no) and tried to dedicate the film to Kirby as his primary inspiration (studio took the credit out).
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Aug 10, 2017 15:03
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