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Strom Cuzewon posted:The bit where Kvothe almost freezes all his blood to light a candle is pretty cool. Mostly for the idea of wizards literally drawing off the energy in their bodies to drive their magic. Rothfuss had definitely given the system limitations, and I think it works great because it allows Kvothe to find clever solutions. The only thing that doesn't seem to is the true name of things but they seem to be unreliable up until the latter part of the series.
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Aug 23, 2017 15:58
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Confer posted:Rothfuss had definitely given the system limitations, and I think it works great because it allows Kvothe to find clever solutions. The only thing that doesn't seem to is the true name of things but they seem to be unreliable up until the latter part of the series. I would say that the system SEEMS like it has limits, I don't think they have really shown up except when Rothfuss wants a plot thing to happen. Pretty much any of the limits he has shown so far could be overcome with Kvothe having a big rear end fire next to him to draw power from.
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Aug 23, 2017 16:02
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:A: Yeah, this book is really fun! A: I really enjoyed these books. B: Why? A: I found them entertaining. B: Please point to a passage of the book that was enjoyable or entertaining. A: *points to a part* B: No, see, that part is objectively bad writing and you couldn't possibly enjoy that. A: I never said they were good or well written, just that I found them entertaining. B: Incorrect. Here are some parts of the book that I thought were entertaining: 1) Kvothe travelling with his minstrel family and his sympathy teacher was fun and lighthearted up until everyone was murdered for singing a silly song. 2) The first few, increasingly informative parts about how sympathy works, as I personally enjoy having world mechanisms explained if they are well understood in-universe. 3) Kvothe gets pranked super-easy by a rich idiot into losing his library privileges, and vows revenge forever like a child. 4) A teacher basically tells Kvothe to set him on fire, and then complains to other teachers when he actually does. 5) The "Bloodless" moniker is explained as incorrect, and is ostensibly the only legend to be described as such. 6) Kvothe jumps out of a window and gets badly hurt because an eccentric old man tells him to. 7) Kvothe, in a blind rage, tries to boil a woman alive with her own blood. She owns him super hard, though, and tells him to gently caress off forever -This is somewhat undercut but a later, too-easy forgiveness, but it's pretty neat in the moment. 8) Kvothe manages to slay a dragon that's high out of its mind. Am I going to argue their literary merit or quality? Of course not. But I enjoyed them personally. The book is for-sure twice as long as it needs to be, but I found enough of it entertaining that I'll still defend parts occasionally.
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Aug 23, 2017 16:06
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I only got to the bit with Kvothe's Obi Wan before I gave up but I actually liked the prologue. The description of the rock monster they found was good and I liked how they handled cutting it open. Those interactions flowed very naturally to me, including the parts where the villagers grumbled because the traders didn't have poo poo. I also liked the implications that Kvothe used to be big poo poo but he got tired of it all and turned away because he caused more harm than good. Then I got to the sctual story and I went uuuuuuuugh I don't wanna re read Harry Potter but worse so I gave up
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Aug 23, 2017 16:14
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SpacePig posted:A: I really enjoyed these books. I do like how all those parts are from the first book. (I find the books entertaining although an attempted reread got really hard at a few points...)
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Aug 23, 2017 16:17
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Pash posted:I do like how all those parts are from the first book. (I find the books entertaining although an attempted reread got really hard at a few points...) I generally could not tell you almost anything that happened in the second outside of Felurian and Tempi's City of Sexhavers. I think maybe Kvothe finds a sponsor whose wife is racist against the Ruh? And he only went out to find a sponsor in the first palce because Kilvin told him to take a break from school? And also, there was the famous "molesting a rape victim" scene that I think I genuinely just blocked from my mind, and didn't remember until Lamps brought it up in this thread.
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Aug 23, 2017 16:28
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SpacePig posted:Here are some parts of the book that I thought were entertaining It's telling that every claim that the books are entertaining is accompanied by a warning not to take such claims at a face value. They're just opinions. Even the people who like books don't quite believe themselves when they say that they're entertaining. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Aug 23, 2017 |
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Aug 23, 2017 16:29
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:It's telling that every claim that the books are entertaining is accompanied by a warning not to take such claims at a face value. They're just opinions. Correct, they are only opinions. I have never stated otherwise. I don't think anybody has ever argued that they are objectively good or entertaining. You seem to be the only one looking for an objective qualifier to "entertaining", which is fairly, if not entirely, subjective.
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Aug 23, 2017 16:33
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:lol I don't know if you think you're owning me or whatever but I'm fully aware of how bad my own fantasy writing is and that was kinda the whole point, so  Also lol D&D novel, I don't even like playing D&D, why would I ever write or read anything even remotely similar
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Aug 23, 2017 16:39
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The confusion of "parts" with "sequences" is also important. Instead of things like plotting and dialogue (all parts of a story) being entertaining, it's just some random sequences, like islands in a sea of dreck. Anybody can point to a sequence that fulfills the minimum requirements to not be unreadable, so it's hardly impressive. It's basically an admission that the books are not entertaining, just that there are sequences in them that someone may find entertaining. Also lol at saying that the novels have no literary merit while claiming that they possess the merit of being entertaining literature. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Aug 23, 2017 |
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Aug 23, 2017 16:39
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:It's telling that every claim that the books are entertaining is accompanied by a warning not to take such claims at a face value. They're just opinions. You never answered my question from a couple pages back. That said, I'm not surprised that people are couching their opinion in qualifiers in this thread considering how out of the way people will go to prove the book is objectively one way or another.
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Aug 23, 2017 16:44
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Statistically a number of fans will die before the next book comes out. How many nerds will literally die before book 3 is done?
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Aug 23, 2017 22:17
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The books were good and entertaining, and have gotten better with a second and third reading. All-in-all, better than A Polyphonic Killing Spree.
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Aug 23, 2017 23:33
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Confer posted:I personally love the way sympathy is explained. Maybe I'm slow and enjoy "terrible" literature but having a 'magic' system explained so thoroughly was nice You'll Brandon Sanderson's books then.
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Aug 23, 2017 23:39
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:It's basically an admission that the books are not entertaining, just that there are sequences in them that someone may find entertaining. That's a really good way to describe the two books.
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Aug 23, 2017 23:43
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Evil Fluffy posted:You'll Brandon Sanderson's books then. Hate? Love? I've read a few of his but not any of the storm light archives (totally guessing here, not sure if that's actually what it's called)
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Aug 24, 2017 00:10
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Confer posted:Hate? Love? I've read a few of his but not any of the storm light archives (totally guessing here, not sure if that's actually what it's called) Cosmere/Stormlight Archive/Cycle 1/The Way of Kings.txt But seriously they're just the Stormlight Archives. Looking at that list of events, I can say that those are concepts that I might find amusing in a book. The problem is that actually trying to read them is loving miserable because Rothfuss is really bad at putting words together. When you cut something down to, "An eccentric old man tricks Kvothe into jumping off a roof," it's mildly amusing. When you have to read through the series of events to get there, you don't. You put the book down and do something more productive with your life. Or at least that's what I did. The problem is that basically anything that happens in the book happens in other books but in more interesting ways. The relationship between Kvothe and Not-Snape is one dimensional. They don't get along because the professor wants respect and Kvothe doesn't feel like giving him any. It lacks all the nuance and subtlety of loving Harry Potter. SKULL.GIF posted:I always read these as indicators of how a Namer thinks about things. Elodin's whole spiel is that to be able to truly name things you need to understand it thoroughly and completely, which requires a mindset that doesn't think conventionally. So you get these strange, broad attributions like "heavy as a smooth river-stone" and "a hint of red sunset against the slate-grey clouds" attached to seemingly mundane things. If you want a better example of the relationship between the imprecision of language and the confounding bits of matter that make up any given object, I'd check out Nausea.
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Aug 24, 2017 00:54
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Atlas Hugged posted:The problem is that basically anything that happens in the book happens in other books but in more interesting ways. The relationship between Kvothe and Not-Snape is one dimensional. They don't get along because the professor wants respect and Kvothe doesn't feel like giving him any. It lacks all the nuance and subtlety of loving Harry Potter. I remember having deep multidimensional relationships with all of my teachers.
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Aug 24, 2017 01:35
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Rowling has a good idea of how to structure a narrative and a grasp of theme and character, which puts her leagues ahead of Rothfuss.
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Aug 24, 2017 01:37
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Corky Romanovsky posted:I remember having deep multidimensional relationships with all of my teachers. Imagine a world in which every relationship in a book was between a two dimensional protagonist and all of the meaningless, surface deep relationships that pass through his life. That would be incredibly satisfying to read and would definitely have something important to say about the human condition. The problem is that this professor takes up more than a page of the book and is set up as one of the primary antagonists. I just don't care about him and I'm not given any reason to cheer against him and for Kvothe besides, "They just don't get along." And not getting along could be a valid, interesting relationship if the professor had anything else to his character, which he doesn't. Mr. Hand and Jeff Spicoli don't get along at all and their relationship isn't particularly deep. But you are invested in their interactions even though they're short and don't have much impact on the overall plot because both characters are well developed.
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Aug 24, 2017 02:05
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Confer posted:Hate? Love? I've read a few of his but not any of the storm light archives (totally guessing here, not sure if that's actually what it's called) You'd enjoy them. The Stormlight books are decent and the third one comes out in a couple months. A lot of people really enjoy Emperor's Soul and the recent set of short stories he released are all good. Though Secret History is something to avoid reading until after the Mistborn trilogy and probably the 3 Wax and Wayne books since it has spoilers for them (especially Mistborn).
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Aug 24, 2017 02:37
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Evil Fluffy posted:You'd enjoy them. The Stormlight books are decent and the third one comes out in a couple months. A lot of people really enjoy Emperor's Soul and the recent set of short stories he released are all good. Though Secret History is something to avoid reading until after the Mistborn trilogy and probably the 3 Wax and Wayne books since it has spoilers for them (especially Mistborn). I enjoyed Mistborn well enough, but I couldn't get into Wax and Wayne. I'm not sure I can ever read another description of a person burning metals and the list has grown too large for me to keep track of mentally.
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Aug 24, 2017 02:39
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:They're very much not. Notice that despite having so much time, no fan of the books has managed to state why the books are entertaining. Were you at no point entertained when you wrote up your chapter by chapter criticism of why the books were bad?
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Aug 24, 2017 02:48
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Harry Potter didn't really have character development. His main beef was revenge against voldemort/draco. Harry had opportunities to be compassionate to Draco later on, and possibly pull him over to Harry's side, but he decided to keep up the childish feud. The last book or four only kept me turning pages out of some desire to "achievement unlocked" and move on with my life. Kvothe is a dumbass who gets himself owned by Elodin, drops the ball with Denna, etc. He is acknowledging his past mistakes in this narrative to Chronicler. The narrative within the narrative is definitely a crutch, but whatever: I enjoyed the stories and await the next. I'm glad Rothfuss provided this material for y'all to go all Plinkett on. You seem to invest a lot into it.
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Aug 24, 2017 04:05
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How dare we have discussions about things on a forum dedicated to talking about those things.
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Aug 24, 2017 04:23
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I liked these books my wife and cousin did as well. I tried to explain why so many people think they are terrible. They both thought it was odd people would spend time discussing books they don't like. This is a good thread to read if you want to try to understand why something you enjoyed isn't good.
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Aug 24, 2017 06:51
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:It's telling that every claim that the books are entertaining is accompanied by a warning not to take such claims at a face value. They're just opinions. I hate these books so loving much, like I'm physically affected by how much I despise them and I wish Rothfuss would be legally barred from writing. Like I feel like I'm Cato the Elder and Rothfuss is Carthage. Even I think you're stretching and being weirdly obstinate in insisting that people don't really like them or they're not finding them entertaining whatever. Yeah, they're bad, and I wish they wouldn't like them but sometimes people like things I think are bad and worthless. It's not really challenging people to claim that no, your enjoyment of the books was fake, and all the times you said you liked them weren't real. That's different from saying "Your enjoyment was bad because the books are bad". Just shift to that. Everyone who likes these books, they're garbage and you should stop reading them.
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Aug 24, 2017 13:38
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Individually, like half of the scenes are okay. I liked a good chunk of Kvothe getting owned by Devi and Elodin, and even the Cthae was cool. Anything involving Denna should probably be burned. But the narrative framework where it constantly winks at the reader about "this isn't a fairy story!" and then REALLY OBVIOUSLY shows the dramatization of his life with the dumb townsfolk that smugly correct him on the story of his own life just sucks. Rothfart is trying to sell us the "untold" story of a story we've never heard and it's insufferably up its own rear end about it. Fighting a dragon that's tripping balls is fun, exciting, and hilarious, but the incessant reminding us "it's not a dragon, it's a drakkis" or whatever just reminds me more of the obnoxious frame story. There's long periods of the story where either the only thing happening is Kvothe whining about student loans or ninja sex school, objectively the worst subplot. Kvothe feels like someone's (read: Rothfart) extra special original character that's in the process of being backpedaled to show no, really guys, his tragic backstory isn't that big a deal. I'll admit I enjoyed bits of both books, but not nearly enough to outweigh the insufferable parts.
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Aug 24, 2017 17:38
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Malpais Legate posted:Individually, like half of the scenes are okay. I liked a good chunk of Kvothe getting owned by Devi and Elodin, and even the Cthae was cool. Anything involving Denna should probably be burned. I agree a lot with what's said here. I'm not a fan of Rothfuss, but I get the sense when people talk about the books, they mention specific scenes or events as why they like it. As a complete story, a great deal of it seems to have been bits and pieces, ideas or short stories, that were stapled together into one narrative. I think the tone varies wildly because of that, but I also think that's why the books have broad appeal--people can find one thing that might interest them slightly. But the pedantic explanatory nature of anything that advances the Kvothe myth is absolutely maddening. He is referred to as Kvothe the Bloodless because he was whipped without bleeding. Okay, cool. "Well, actually, it's because I took a bunch of Tylenol which caused me not to bleed and I learned how to channel my chakras to slow my heart rate and . . . " Okay . . . so what? How does that subvert the myth of Kvothe the Bloodless? It confirms it if anything as he did not bleed. No one really believed he didn't have blood, so the subversion of that myth would have to happen in some other way--even if it was a silly as "he doesn't like blood in his steak and eats everything well-done." Much like a subversion of Vlad the Impaler's myth could be "He actually really liked screwing whores", but not "Actually he impaled heads on spikes, not whole bodies.  " As to why discuss something you hate, you learn more from failures and recognizing how they failed then you do from success. Hell, I bet 90% of authors read something that made them think "I can write something better than that!"
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Aug 24, 2017 18:06
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I can see why people find his books enjoyable. They're wish-fulfillment in the trendy magic-school genre. They're an easy read, in that the structure and sentence construction is simple and straightforward. People enjoy them in the sense that I enjoyed Sword of Shanarra or other people enjoy Twilight. The difference is that these have been marketed as ground-breaking works by a master writer, and people have latched on to that as truth. But they can't withstand that level of scrutiny, because Rothfuss writes at the level of a precocious student who has heard about things like framing stories and unreliable narrators and tries really hard to use them. Which is worth an A from your English professor even if you botch the implementation, but doesn't get you enshrined in the canons of great literature.
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Aug 24, 2017 20:07
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AngusPodgorny posted:I can see why people find his books enjoyable. They're wish-fulfillment in the trendy magic-school genre. They're an easy read, in that the structure and sentence construction is simple and straightforward. People enjoy them in the sense that I enjoyed Sword of Shanarra or other people enjoy Twilight. Like plenty of other people have observed they're also popular because they're all about "deconstructing" something by adopting a cynical tone and being really pedantic which nerds love and think makes them smart.
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Aug 24, 2017 20:16
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Aug 24, 2017 20:22
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The subreddit for these books is a living document of Stockholm syndrome.
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Aug 24, 2017 20:23
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Lightning Lord posted:Like plenty of other people have observed they're also popular because they're all about "deconstructing" something by adopting a cynical tone and being really pedantic which nerds love and think makes them smart. I haven't really heard anyone say this is why they are good as much as why people defend that it's not bad.
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Aug 24, 2017 20:27
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I've checked it on occasion; it's amazing how horrifyingly and rigidly positive it is.
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Aug 24, 2017 20:27
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The joke here is that magic school has been beaten to death and continues to get beaten and has many books better (less bad???) than The Kingkiller Chronicles.
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Aug 24, 2017 20:28
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:I haven't really heard anyone say this is why they are good as much as why people defend that it's not bad. I've seen it and variations on "It's REAL"
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Aug 24, 2017 20:41
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Lightning Lord posted:Like plenty of other people have observed they're also popular because they're all about "deconstructing" something by adopting a cynical tone and being really pedantic which nerds love and think makes them smart.
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Aug 24, 2017 22:52
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AngusPodgorny posted:On the subject of feeling smart, they include a mystery to speculate about, the Chandrian, which appeals to some people. Like Lost, Twin Peaks, can't think of a book series offhand because it's not something I care about. It's a Sanderson trope. He establishes a mystery early on and resolves it by the end of the book or series, depending. Sometimes there are multiple mysteries at once. His writing is overly mechanical at times, but the mystery never strays far from the plot and remains an integral motivator for some or all of the characters.
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Aug 25, 2017 00:47
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Atlas Hugged posted:It's a Sanderson trope. He establishes a mystery early on and resolves it by the end of the book or series, depending. Sometimes there are multiple mysteries at once. His writing is overly mechanical at times, but the mystery never strays far from the plot and remains an integral motivator for some or all of the characters. I kinda like some of the stuff in Mistborn, such as how Ruin could read influence things that weren't recorded on metal, and how he used that and then a certain incident with it later on that gets some more insight in Secret History. I suspect that the upcoming 3rd book for the Stormlight Archives might reveal a bit more information about The Thrill and likely confirm/quash some fan theories about it too.
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Aug 25, 2017 05:23
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