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Gorn Myson posted:"World Building" is not only deprived of its rightful place at #1 but also not even mentioned, a shameful article it's in there, under 'immersion"
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Mar 19, 2018 00:12
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Where are the likeable characters and the subversion of tropes? #3 under character depth and plot intricacy.
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Mar 21, 2018 18:34
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The Kayvian Formulaquote:Gibbon observes that in the Arab book par excellence, the Koran, there are no camels; I believe that if that there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this lack of camels would suffice to prove that it is Arab. It was written by Mohammad, and Mohammed, as an Arab, had no reason to know that camels were particularly Arab; they were, for him, a part of reality, and he had no reason the single them out, while the first thing a forger, a tourist, or an Arab nationalist would do is bring on the camels, whole caravans of camels on every page... ─ Jorge Luis Borges, “The Argentine Writer and Tradition” quote:Amid the ten thousand noises and the jade-and-gold and the whirling dust of Xinan, he had often stayed awake all night among friends, drinking spiced wine in the North District with the courtesans. ─ Guy Gavriel Kay, Under Heaven Well-used formula in fiction serves as reference points within which anything can happen. The inverse of this can be found in the works of Guy Gavriel Kay, who works with infinite variety at his fingertips to repeat exactly the same pattern to exactly the same effect as before. In addition to a number of fantasy novels, Kay has written a series of historically inspired works – The Lions of Al-Rassan, the duology of Sailing to Sarantium and Lord of Emperors (together The Sarantine Mosaic), The Last Light of the Sun, Under Heaven, and River of Stars, which are the subject of this overview. Common to all these stories is that they all feature historical milieus (the Spain of El Cid, the Byzantium of Justinian, Scandinavia and Britain during the reign of Alfred the Great, and the Tang and Song Dynasties of China) disguised only by names being changed to protect the innocent. Many of these new names are terrible – “Jad” instead of “God,” “Bassanids” instead of Sassanids, for example. This is apparently a device of artistic licence, through which Kay can rigorously recreate and evoke the past without being constrained by historical record. But perhaps more importantly, it is an excellent device for Kay to reheat history and present at his own cooking. These stories are fundamentally repetition of form and content. The problem with Kay’s “historical” works is that reading one of them is very much reading all of them. Kay has not developed as a writer in the twenty years after The Lions of Al-Rassan. In each of these books one finds the same prose, the same syntax, the same narrative tricks, the same characters, and the same sentiments. Kay almost never uses one device in these books that he does not use another. Each even has the same style of exposition about the historical milieu du jour. Kay’s work is akin to cudgel that, before each beating, is bedecked with a new colourful piece of cloth to soften the blows. But nothing can make the sheer bluntness of his writing gentler. And Kay is an exceedingly blunt writer. He has no capacity or use for subtlety, nuance, or for gently persuading the reader. There is nothing veiled in his milieus, for even the presence of mystery is made too obvious. Everything exists in terms of unmistakable, shining Significance. If a character, an event, or anything serves to evoke some meaning or sentiment, Kay will explain it with great certainty of purpose. The whole grand scheme of his “historical fantasies” are nothing but an elaboration of this: counterfactual parts – rulers, countries, peoples, events – always refer to factual counterparts. Everything is a symbol as it would be in computer language: a binary value. The Lions of Al-Rassan posted:“We will not see the glory of the Khalifate again,” Husari ibn Musa said softly, a shadow against the sky. “The days of Rahman the Golden and his sons or even ibn Zair amid the fountains of the Al-Fontina are gone.” Lord of Emperors posted:Bonosus had a theory about the attraction of the racing, actually. He was prepared to bore people with it if asked, or even if not. In essence, he’d argue, the Hippodrome stood in perfectly balanced counterpoint to the rituals of the Imperial Precinct. Courtly life was entirely structured around ritual, predictable as anything on earth could be. An ordained practice for everything from the Emperor’s first greeting when awakened (and by whom and in what order), to the sequence of lighting the lamps in the Audience Chamber, to the procession for presenting gifts to him on the first of the New Year. Words and gestures, set and recorded, known and rehearsed, never varying. Under Heaven posted:A wind is blowing. It is cold. She is aware of the hard brilliance of the stars, the band of the Sky River arcing across heaven, eternal symbol of one thing divided from another: the Weaver Maid from her mortal love, the living from the dead, the exile from home. Nothing evidences this better than how ambiguity itself is too obvious in these stories. Kay is simply not content to foreground and explain the meaning of some development, he goes as far as to foreground and explain lack of clear meaning. This is why the supernatural elements, that seem to upset and unsettle order and reason, are without mystery or enchantment. And if a character acts in a surprising manner or revealing some hidden depth, the unexpectedness is always heavily underlined. Under Heaven posted:Without pattern, absent that sense of order, a feeling of randomness, of being lost in a world without purpose or direction can undermine even the strongest man or woman. And most ridiculous of all must be the self-praise to be found in the text, where Kay points out that stories are, in fact, fiction (yet full of significance!), and commends the labours of the storyteller: The Last Light of the Sun posted:Often, however, this emerges only in looking back, an awareness long after the fact (sometimes accompanied by belated fear) as to how many strands and lives had been coming together—or breaking apart—at the same time. Men and women will wonder at how they did not perceive these things, and be left with a sense that chance, accident, or miraculous intervention (for good or ill) lay at the heart of the time. Under Heaven posted:Conjunctions of this sort—events occurring at the same time, far apart—are seldom perceived by those living (or dying) through the moments and days involved. Only the patient historian with access to records is likely to discover such links, reading diligently through texts preserved from an earlier time and dynasty. He might take a scholar’s pleasure, or be moved to reflection, considering them. River of Stars posted:We are not gods. We make mistakes. We do not live very long. These are not books that a reader interprets. Interpretation implies ambiguity, a gap between what is said and what is understood, but the meaning of each novel is too well outlined. This is not so much a question of obviousness, for that in itself is hardly a literary evil, but of mentally debilitating pedantry. Kay does not write stories as much as he writes data. All symbolic value is clear cut, as already explored. Anything that holds significance within the historical milieu is foregrounded. All dialogues have an expository quality to them. The stories at times resemble lectures. They are self-referential, underlining their own significance. The ideal reader of Kay is not an interpreter but a passive receiver. No wonder his books bear glowing quotes from review hacks. All of these books displays “Kayisms,” the devices that the author repeats throughout this series. These can be a type of character, a style of setting a scene, or a manner of introducing a character, and so on. Perhaps the easiest way to understand this is to outline the standard plot of these “historical fantasies”. Each of them follow different men and women being drawn into events surrounding the decline of a civilization or of an epoch: the destruction of Al-Andalus in The Lions of Al-Rassan, Byzantium at the end of its zenith in The Sarantine Mosaic, the extinction of legends and liminal places in The Last Light of the Sun, the downfall of the Tang Dynasty in Under Heaven, and the failed restoration of the Song in River of Stars. The principal characters are on a quest or journey that leads them out of civilization and between cultures. There is an impending crisis looming over things, and the lives and adventures of the characters becomes intertwined with it. There are a variety of figures from Great Men to seemingly irrelevant figures who nevertheless may with one act change the course of history. The events involved, we are told, will inspire many songs and stories. The Lions of Al-Rassan posted:In Al-Rassan, in Esperaña, Ferrieres, Karch, Batiara—even, in time, in the far-off eastern homelands of the Asharites—what happened that night in a burning hamlet near Fezana became legend, told so often among physicians, courts, military companies, in universities, taverns, places of worship, that it became imbued with the aura of magic and the supernatural. Kay employs several point-of-view characters, and gives minor figures briefly sketched but vivid internal live informed by stereotyping (like George R.R. Martin and other genre authors, Kay is preoccupied with using interiority of characters to ‘immerse’ readers in another world). Whatever the trials they face, each story ends with the surviving protagonists being rewarded with happy family life, to ease the pain of the greater tragedy. All along one is accompanied cultural commentary which explains the meaning, significance, and attraction of institutions and events of the historical milieu in question. Great Men and Women, as mentioned, are always involved. They are all cut from the same cloth: charismatic figures, often approachable yet hardened and seasoned in intrigues, who accomplish their deeds through near-inhuman will, keen intelligence, and exceptional self-control. Mention is always made of the stories (borrowed from history) that surround them. They are ruthless, but seem to be above good and evil by the dint of their mythic qualities. Kay’s digressions into illustrations of paganist power seem connected; these texts are at heart idolatrous. What drives thems the fantasy of foreign, exotic vitality. Kay’s texts transport to another land, the vibrant cultures that are home to Great Men and Women, where everything appears more alive, and where even the most humdrum sides of life convey some wisdom and truth. But this vitality and exoticism are always domesticated, and to explore this in full we must examine the three distinct registers or modes between which Kay shifts through in prose. The first register is identified as the “dramatic” mode for sake of convenience, and as the most common mode inevitably deserves the most attention. This covers the dramatic action to be found in fiction, and the principal type of action in Kay’s stories is, distressingly, extended introduction of characters and of milieus. Kay cannot present almost anything in his pseudo-historical setting as a given. If Greek Fire, the substance used as a weapon by the Byzantines, is involved, it must be explained. A passage must be devoted to rhapsodizing about the Chinese scholar examinations, and blood-eagles must figure heavily into a story of the Viking Age. Kay evidently never considered Borges’s lesson about gibbons and camels. Kay’s prose is clumsy and stuttering, with wearisome, repetitive syntax. A chapter in his novels is usually guaranteed to begin with some teasing or abrupt introduction of a new situation, which describes action in medias res. An explanation for this observation or circumstances will soon follow, and biography and cultural commentary are always involved. Such an introduction is often punctuated with observations or declarations, and expressions of a character’s frustration, and after this there may be more a strenuous dialogue. This is always obvious when a new chapter begins in the book. Sailing to Sarantium posted:‘Jad boil the bastard in his own fish sauce!’ Rasic snarled under his breath as he scrubbed at a stained pot. ‘We might as well have joined the Sleepless Ones and gotten some holy credit for being up all loving night!’ River of Stars posted:Some things were kept simple on the steppe, had been for hundreds of years, all tribes. While there are variations, this does describe the basic principles of Kay’s “dramatic” register and the general course of his prose: observation, unfolding, and then a closing. Whether in the short or the long-term, Kay is always oddly conclusive. Despite Kay’s variety of characters and viewpoints, there is absolutely no sense of polyphony in the text. Dialogues, especially, function as some form of exposition, as characters inform each other of serious matters. There is a power dynamic which governs these dialogues, informed by the knowledge characters hold and the confidence that stems from that knowledge. The result is that hardly anyone speaks for the sake of achieving something in these novels, but to reveal or to confirm something. The world of Kay’s novels seems to be populated by people who always know better than others. Much of the action likewise is compressed or accomplished off-page. The Lions of Al-Rassan posted:“I can do both those things, but your company, clever as its men may be, is not the wider world.” There was no amusement in her eyes any more. “Do you remember what your Queen Vasca said of us, when Esperaña was the whole peninsula, before the Asharites came and penned you in the north? […]” Sailing to Sarantium posted:It was remarkable, really, how a silence and a silence could be so different. The woman—and he knew this was Alixana and that this voice would be in his head now, forever—went on, after a gauged pause, ‘You would rather be named Caius Crispus, I take it? The artisan young enough to travel when your summoned colleague deemed himself too frail to make the journey to us?’ Under Heaven posted:From within the carriage he heard, “Son of Shen Gao, [...] if you enter my carriage, if you… honour me by doing so… I will begin by telling you what happened to a man you will be looking for, and show you a letter. Moreover, as is common in genre fiction, Kay’s dialogues are in style an attempt at a pseudo-realistic approximation of how the people of the past might have spoken. No one is particularly eloquent, and characters generally speak in either in curt declarations and commands, smug formalities and witticisms, or in commonalities that are never convincingly vulgar. The Lions of Al-Rassan posted:The cleric said, “Think you the so-called Star-born of the desert are the only infidels we must face? Do you not know the rites the Kindath practice on the nights of two full moons?” The Last Light of the Sun posted:“Two ships!” The Erling’s voice was incredulous. “We never leave hostages, you poo poo-smeared fool! We never leave our ships!” The second mode is the ironic mode, although Kay is too unsubtle to not undermine any ironies in his stories by his fervent pedantry. This is a register where Kay collapses time and space for pithy effect, and it is especiailly evident whenever Kay describes the course of an entire life, official procedure, or politics, or when he introduces a point-of-view character. Sailing to Sarantium posted:The judge had some latitude under Marcellinus’s new Code of Laws. The death penalty had been largely eliminated as contrary to the spirit of Jad’s creation and as a benign Imperial gesture in the aftermath of the Victory Riots, but the possible fines, dismemberments, mutilations, and terms of exile or incarceration were wide-ranging. The Last Light of the Sun posted:The six women were stoned to death, the members of the two feuding families invited to throw—standing together—the first volleys of stone and rock, as the most immediately aggrieved. The wives and maidens joined the men, one of the times they were permitted to do that. It took some time to kill six women (stoning always did). River of Stars posted:Prince Zhizeng, ninth son of the father-emperor, brother to the reigning one, accompanied the treasure. He rode a good horse, though not one of the best—why give it to the barbarians yet? The irony comes from the detached, sarcastic tone of the prose, which is used to mock pretences and fictions of civilization. The formal problem comes in Kay’s dependence on flat sentences without wit. This tone is too even and too strenuous, and cannot sustain the narrative for long. Wit is half insight and half eloquence, and Kay has little of the former and none of the latter. These self-contented commentaries are not enlightening, but merely attack imagined, stereotyped civilizations: Kay provides satire free of real cultural context or relevance. As as a general critic of pretence and civilization he is just smug rather than incisive. This, together with the dialogues and endless exposition, renders Kay’s novels oddly paternalistic. Finally we acknowledge the third mode in Kay’s prose, which is what we might call the Sublime mode, for it is apparent whenever the text reaches for an approximation of Sublime feeling. We see it when the narrative deals with supernatural events, liminal experiences, the great sweep of history, and poetic beauty. And just as the irony is undermined by its strenuousness, Kay pursues the Sublime effect with such vigour (and rigour) that he is doomed to never achieve it. The Sublime is perhaps something that, like peace of mind, is more difficult to achieve the more one strives for it. Here Kay’s monstrous bluntness and anti-ambiguity is crippling. The effect is not unlike that of George R.R. Martin, whose stubby prose will, in climactic moments, burst forth after remaining inert for hundreds of pages. The Sublime feeling is illusionary, only appearing as a contrast against the general stodginess of the prose. And as it does with Martin, Kay’s alternation between sarcastic irony and approximation of the Sublime inevitably gives the impression of wanting to eat one’s cake and have it too. The ironic mode mocks civilization, while the Sublime tends mode exalts the passing of ages or the power of a liminal, pagan world. The mode has also a third purpose in the novels: to hint and tease at a grand design at work, a tapestry being woven by act of men, women, and something more. But one quickly realizes that it is the author praising the intricacy of his own design. It is nothing but self-adulation. Lord of Emperors posted:What man dared try to reconcile so many things in the span of a single life, he thought. East and west brought together again, north coming down to south, a faction dancer becoming an Empress. The daughter of one’s enemy and... victim, married to one’s own friend and Strategos. The zubir of the Aldwood, huge and wild—the essence of the wild—on a dome consecrated to Jad in the heart of the triple-walled City. These three modes interweave, and common to all of them is a sense of over-definition. That Kay is incapable of subtlety or ambiguity has been established, and when we observe his registers of writing it is clear that Kay is a reductionist writer. While it is easy to accuse of Kay of formulaic writing, we must understand the full nuance of the complaint: a formula is a scheme for repetition, but it is also a scheme for simplification, which is perhaps the greater failing. More than formulaic, Kay’s writing is mechanical, where characters, events, and milieus are merely interchangeable parts. Whenever Kay’s novels exhaustively outline an entire human life, community, or civilization, they close out potential in his universe by establishing limits. Whenever they summarily describe the meaning and importance of some figure, or some cultural tradition, or some historical development, they eliminate a chance for reinterpretation or reanalysis. Thus Kay’s works will not improve with time and perspective. While the content of the books seems to possess universal scope, its form does not, with its pedantic explanations, lack of polyphony, and repetitive syntax. This grand project serves to categorize history and delineate its scope. Its total effect is to domesticate the complexities of humanity, to present it in an easily consumable form. Kay is a commodifier of human experience, an apostle of false universalism. Once observed, this commodifying aspect now colours all of Kay’s writing. It is in the content, rational smugness of the prose, or in Kay’s reliance on stereotyping. Something may be said of how Kay’s comprehensiveness in portraying a milieu is part of this project of limitation. The Nika riots in Constantinople feature in a flashback sequence in Sailing to Sarantium, ast is an unavoidable part off the reign of Justinian that illustrates many peculiarities of the Byzantine world. In Kay’s version, the Nika riots necessitated the exile of John the Cappadocian, Justinian’s infamous tax collector, and John in response is drawn into a plot against Justinian which of course is executed during a chariot race. Artistic license allows for Byzantine iconoclasm to be introduced centuries in advance, as conflict over religious images would be of utmost relevance to a story centred on mosaics. Greek Fire was a substance developed after the reign of Justinian the Great, but it nevertheless has a minor but crucial role in The Sarantine Mosaic. This need to tie together all elements of the milieu is a further example of Kay’s commodification. It is contrived, which is likely why one finds implicit and explicit justifications for such in the text. One might assume that the first of these novels precedes Kay’s dulling repetition and stand on its own merit. But The Lions of Al-Rassan novel is an extended Cordoba Foundation pamphlet: the former Caliphate of Cordoba serves as the focus for a potential utopia, where East and West could meet in peace, where the three Abrahamic faiths could live in harmony, and which is lost to barbarism of both uncivilized Christians and Muslims. Jews, Christians, and Muslims are represented by worshippers of moons, the sun, and the stars respectively, in a retelling of the story of the blind men and the elephant But as Rémi Brague so succinctly expressed it in his incisive The Legend of the Middle Ages, Cordoba was a city which exiled its most famous residents. Kay’s Andalusian fantasy peaks in his multicultural imagining of Hudid Zaragoza (“Ragosa”), where liberal openness and tolerance culminates in a festival of sexual freedom. This joyous festival is however interrupted by fanatical Muslim infiltrators, and Kay shows this utopia is unsustainable, as Rémi Brague claimed was the case with much more modest civilizations (the lesson, he tells us, that successful multiculturalism must be a thing of the present and the future, without real guidance from the past). The Lions of Al-Rassan shoulders evil onto the clergy, loathsome bigots, religious fundamentalists, and political opportunists. Kay presents modern, liberal, and Machiavellian views through characters who precede all of these positions. The Jewish physician Jehane bet Ishak is the heart of the novel and who illustrates these anachronisms, as her strength of character appears not as expression of Medieval personality but as modern sophistication and frustration. The Lions of Al-Rassan, furthermore, is not the beginning of the Kayvian formula, for it repeats Kay’s previous novel, Tigana. The connection is emphasized by allusions to The Fionavar Tapestry, Kay’s early drivel. Tigana anticipates Kay’s “historical” sequence in embryonic aspects but is more in the mould of a traditional genre fantasy novel. The setting is inspired by history, but thematically instead of specifically. A peninsula reminiscent of Italy has been divided by two foreign sorcerers and their armies, against whom the heroes plot rebellion. Kay’s prose is incredibly clumsy, even more than in his later works, and its only innovations are in content. The strength of Kay’s novels lie in introducing ideas that are bold in genre context, but nowhere else: adult sexuality and “realistic” political complexity instead of pulpy romance or comic book tyrants, for example. But for anyone experienced in reading, it becomes clear that Kay only writes with a veneer of originality. This is his real strength as an author: writing for audiences who do not seek out anything better. His eroticism in particular seems initially bold, because he seems to have a sense for genuine adult sexuality, but in his works it is really is only a type of exotic thrill. We can still go back further to A Song of Arbonne, which reimagines the Albigensian Crusade as a quasi-feminist tale about competing pagan cults, and where we find the same Kayvisms. A Song for Arbonne posted:The tale of an immortal goddess’s vengeance for her servants defiled and slain begins to sweep immediately across the valley. It will not stop there. The story has a long way to travel. Such tales, of the deaths of kings, always do. Regular readers of these reviews, tired of recommendations of Umberto Eco’s works, will be glad to hear of author David Malouf and his short novel Ransom. The book is a retelling of an episode in the Iliad, where Priam, King of Troy, chooses to personally venture into the Achaian camp to reclaim the body of his fallen son. What’s remarkable is that the book is all Kayisms – great men of human feeling, a civilization nearing its end, an inexplicable supernatural force, a common man who is witness to all this, and time and space collapsing to cover human life and history, etc. It is a brief but enjoyable novel, and shows that the problem of the Kayisms is not simply that Kay repeats himself, but that the repetition highlights his ineptitude as a writer. If one wants to match Kay’s pseudo-epics with real scope of vision, one needs to look no farther than the works of Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. His My Name is Red is a rollicking, tragicomic novel of the Ottoman Empire to match Kay’s ponderous self-praise. It too is set in a civilization facing decline, and like The Sarantine Mosaic takes on the topic of a lost art-form: miniature painting, under threat by the innovations of European masters. Pamuk has been accused of pandering to Western tastes, and one cannot deny that he to a degree exoticises Turkish culture. But he actively engages with modernity, sometimes directly, sometimes playfully, as opposed to Kay who only projects modernity onto the past. My Name Is Red posted:I crossed the wide hall diagonally, wondering if I should set water to boil on the downstairs brazier for the gray mullet soup. I entered the room with the blue door. Everything was in shambles. Without thinking, I was about to say, “What has my father done?” Pamuk’s choice of absurd narrators such as trees, dogs, or colours alongside conventional characters makes for an excellent blurb, but it is formidable in the author capable of polyphony, and who unlike Kay does not reduce the scope of infinity to bourgeois smugness. Even in his handling of a domestic ending he is superior to Kay: for Pamuk it is not merely something sweet to counteract any bitterness. It is a viewpoint from which to understand a greater tragedy, not an escape from it, and bears its own bitterness while retaining the novel’s playfulness. Pamuk provides the inverse of Kay’s limited, reduced world: within the confines of some days in old Istanbul, he shows true infinity. Kay’s “historical fantasies” are concerned with the collapse or ending of a civilization treated with awe and admiration that belies its brutalities, pretences, and drab realities, for those are part of its glorious, tragic story. What we must remember that this is in itself a fantasy. Each novel is a eulogy to a lost, gleaming world. Thus the tragedy ultimately concerns the collapse of a fantasy. But as mentioned, Kay rather wants to have his cake and eat it too, which is why he usually rewards his surviving protagonists with domestic happiness as their world decays around them. This promise of happiness is also a fantasy, and it illustrates the basic dishonesty of Kay’s stories: even when fantasies collapse, they are unable to move past them. There is no core of truth to the fantasy, no revelation that is retained even after it is lost. With his historical glamourizing, symbolic pedantry, and obnoxious prose, Kay is an equal of Dan Brown. Truth be told, I initially intended to bring up Kay’s latest novel, Children of Earth and Sky, on the account of its first chapter available for preview on Amazon.com. This chapter is such a cavalcade of Kayvian clichés that one could reasonably try to predict the whole plot from it. But that would not have been accurate: one can make an educated guess before the first chapter, just by the dramatis personae provided at the very beginning. BravestOfTheLamps fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Oct 5, 2018 |
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Mar 22, 2018 09:15
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you're a beautiful man botl
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Mar 23, 2018 09:06
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So at one point you must have enjoyed these books, to go through reading them. What sharpened your views? Grad school? Age? Or are you just reading them now in order to write critiques? Because I gotta say, that's an ordeal.
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Mar 23, 2018 22:27
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Ccs posted:So at one point you must have enjoyed these books, to go through reading them. What sharpened your views? Grad school? Age? They killed my mother, they killed my father, they killed my people!
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Mar 23, 2018 22:31
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Ccs posted:So at one point you must have enjoyed these books, to go through reading them. What sharpened your views? Grad school? Age? one of the fallacies* that nerds commit when rushing to defend their chosen genre fic is not understanding that it's entirely possible to read and enjoy things that are not good, and which you know are not good i like Lovecraft. I derive genuine pleasure from reading Lovecraft. Lovecraft is not a good writer, and I can happily list and discuss the many ways in which he is in fact a bad writer. these are not mutually exclusive statements. *though not the greatest fallacy, which is making the media they consume part of their own personal identity, and reacting to any attack on it as though it were an attack on themselves
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Mar 24, 2018 02:11
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I've just read a couple of the reviews you linked in the OP and the first page so far, but I'm going to request an author I like to see what your take is: Ann Leckie and her Imperial Radch trilogy. Or, well, probably just Ancillary Justice, the first book.
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Mar 24, 2018 05:53
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There are thoughts bubbling in my head about how the genre fan's obsession with "officiality" and "canon" are based on an aversion to criticality but the argument is still in the infant stage
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Mar 26, 2018 17:01
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Mel Mudkiper posted:There are thoughts bubbling in my head about how the genre fan's obsession with "officiality" and "canon" are based on an aversion to criticality but the argument is still in the infant stage
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Mar 26, 2018 17:49
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When fans use the words "canon" or "canonical," you simply have to remember that they mean it in the full sense of the word. It is indistinguishable from the religious usage.
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Mar 26, 2018 17:51
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Yeah, I am reflecting on when Star Wars fans got upset that the books were no longer "canon" as if that distinction was in any way meaningful
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Mar 26, 2018 17:56
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chernobyl kinsman posted:one of the fallacies* that nerds commit when rushing to defend their chosen genre fic is not understanding that it's entirely possible to read and enjoy things that are not good, and which you know are not good I would go further and say "good writing" is a pretty irrelevant quality, at least this day and age, because I seriously doubt the vast majority of people who read regularly (let alone the vast majority who don't) would be able to describe, or even recognize, the qualities of "good writing." It would be like criticizing Warhammer 40,000 fiction for not having sufficient Buddhist morals or something--it's totally irrelevant to the intentions of the writer and desires of the reader.
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Mar 26, 2018 19:23
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How is that different from any other day and age? And remarkably, that defence is only ever applied to fiction that is bad, like Warhammer novels.
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Mar 26, 2018 19:29
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:When fans use the words "canon" or "canonical," you simply have to remember that they mean it in the full sense of the word. It is indistinguishable from the religious usage. This may be true for many, but I believe the earliest use of the term was among Sherlock Holmes fans, to distinguish the Doyle stories from those by other authors, for the purpose of playing various intellectual games (such as arguing for various "real" locations for Baskerville Hall, etc.) As with so many other things, it's a usage that began as light irony and has since become a bit too real.
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Mar 26, 2018 19:41
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Yeah, I am reflecting on when Star Wars fans got upset that the books were no longer "canon" as if that distinction was in any way meaningful I think it's the same basic premise as to why people get upset that a movie or TV show is reset by a large sequence being a dream. If you've committed time and energy to the story, if you've had some sort of emotional response or connection to the characters, then that connection is now invalidated moving forward. Those characters might still exist but they'll be fundamentally different in all new works or they may no longer exist at all and will no longer be written professionally. So someone spent the last 20 years reading Star Wars EU and, while they can always read those books and enjoy them, there will never be a professional author writing new works about those characters that they loved. It has no bearing on the literary merit of the books (or whatever metric you're using to say the distinction has no merit) but there is still an emotional response. Only a small select few get truly upset but they're the only ones posting about it since no one else cares so they get attention. It's like when a college sports program is forced to vacate victories because of illegal recruiting that wasn't proven until years later. The games were still played and won and it has no real impact on anyone's day to day lives but fans will still get really upset (although there are potentially longer term implications for the program but let's keep this simple).
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Mar 26, 2018 19:52
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Lyon posted:I think it's the same basic premise as to why people get upset that a movie or TV show is reset by a large sequence being a dream. If you've committed time and energy to the story, if you've had some sort of emotional response or connection to the characters, then that connection is now invalidated moving forward. Those characters might still exist but they'll be fundamentally different in all new works or they may no longer exist at all and will no longer be written professionally. So someone spent the last 20 years reading Star Wars EU and, while they can always read those books and enjoy them, there will never be a professional author writing new works about those characters that they loved. It has no bearing on the literary merit of the books (or whatever metric you're using to say the distinction has no merit) but there is still an emotional response. Only a small select few get truly upset but they're the only ones posting about it since no one else cares so they get attention. My favourite example of this was when Cracked tried to argue that the Ghostbusters remake occurs in the same canonicity as the original, but in a parallel universe. It's action figures all over again - who cares about actually doing anything with the work, its important to categorise them and keep them in nice tidy little boxes.
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Mar 26, 2018 20:00
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Lyon posted:I think it's the same basic premise as to why people get upset that a movie or TV show is reset by a large sequence being a dream. If you've committed time and energy to the story, if you've had some sort of emotional response or connection to the characters, then that connection is now invalidated moving forward. Those characters might still exist but they'll be fundamentally different in all new works or they may no longer exist at all and will no longer be written professionally. I think there's another element to it. Retroactive dream sequences, story remakes, canon reclassifications and the like are almost always caused by the author or publisher responding to some pressure in real life. For example, an author's original idea for a storyline isn't liked by the audience, so they quickly reset things to how there were before, or a book series isn't selling well (by some measure) so the publisher stops hiring authors, or hires different authors to take the story in a different direction. In each case, it's the world of the story being tread upon by reality. It's not just that a story or a series was unsatisfying, but that the reasons behind it are unsatisfying. There's a sense that the story could have been good, if only the author didn't chicken out, or the publishers didn't lose faith, or whatever limitation didn't exist.
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Mar 26, 2018 20:18
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the problem with nerds arises from poor parenting and insufficient church
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Mar 26, 2018 20:38
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But, for example, Star Wars doesn't and never has had an authorial vision to speak of, even if you believe an authorial vision matters. The "EU" being officially canon or not is irrelevant because the stories themselves are the collaborative works of hacks to support a "brand"
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Mar 26, 2018 20:40
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chernobyl kinsman posted:the problem with nerds arises from poor parenting and insufficient church I read nothing but Christian texts from before the 20th Century, personally.
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Mar 26, 2018 20:42
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Mel Mudkiper posted:But, for example, Star Wars doesn't and never has had an authorial vision to speak of, even if you believe an authorial vision matters. The "EU" being officially canon or not is irrelevant because the stories themselves are the collaborative works of hacks to support a "brand" they're upset because all of the stories they liked aren't real anymore. of course they weren't real to begin with, but even in the not-real world they aren't real now, due to decree from on high. this matters, somehow
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Mar 26, 2018 20:44
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As far as I am concerned if your texts dont come from the original fathers of orthodoxy you are a heretic
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Mar 26, 2018 20:44
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Mel Mudkiper posted:As far as I am concerned if your texts dont come from the original fathers of orthodoxy you are a heretic You must be either a papist or a Greek.
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Mar 26, 2018 20:46
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Schwarzwald posted:I think there's another element to it. Retroactive dream sequences, story remakes, canon reclassifications and the like are almost always caused by the author or publisher responding to some pressure in real life. For example, an author's original idea for a storyline isn't liked by the audience, so they quickly reset things to how there were before The royal family of Great Britain circa 1893, the O.G spergin' nerdos.
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Mar 26, 2018 20:47
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lol if you're not a sedevacantist in TYOOL 2018
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Mar 26, 2018 20:47
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:You must be either a papist or a Greek. Nah, I was just reflecting back to this crazy street preacher back in college who was, of all things, a loving Russian Orthodox and would yell at all other Christians for being wrong because Russian Orthodoxy was the one true religion
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Mar 26, 2018 20:58
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It's about identifying as a nerd, not enjoying the work.
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Mar 26, 2018 21:07
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Mel Mudkiper posted:But, for example, Star Wars doesn't and never has had an authorial vision to speak of, even if you believe an authorial vision matters. The "EU" being officially canon or not is irrelevant because the stories themselves are the collaborative works of hacks to support a "brand" But, but, my story group. I can totally get why someone would get mad at an awkward awful/authorial wipe, but it almost always occurs in multi-author universes where where there are giant gaps in logic and characterization that often get handwaved away anyways.
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Mar 26, 2018 21:24
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:It's about identifying as a nerd, not enjoying the work. yeah this is really most of the answer; it's a combination of a desperate need for escapism and a weak sense of self-identity, which the nerd shores up using mass-marketed consumer products
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Mar 26, 2018 21:30
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Yeah, I am reflecting on when Star Wars fans got upset that the books were no longer "canon" as if that distinction was in any way meaningful
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Mar 26, 2018 21:39
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:How is that different from any other day and age?
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Mar 26, 2018 21:53
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Lyon posted:I think it's the same basic premise as to why people get upset that a movie or TV show is reset by a large sequence being a dream. If you've committed time and energy to the story, if you've had some sort of emotional response or connection to the characters, then that connection is now invalidated moving forward. Those characters might still exist but they'll be fundamentally different in all new works or they may no longer exist at all and will no longer be written professionally. So someone spent the last 20 years reading Star Wars EU and, while they can always read those books and enjoy them, there will never be a professional author writing new works about those characters that they loved. It has no bearing on the literary merit of the books (or whatever metric you're using to say the distinction has no merit) but there is still an emotional response. Only a small select few get truly upset but they're the only ones posting about it since no one else cares so they get attention. Edit: Unless that's the whole point, like in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 22:02 on Mar 26, 2018 |
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Mar 26, 2018 21:56
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To avoid that, every story should be a play within a story.
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Mar 26, 2018 22:00
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:To avoid that, every story should be a play within a story. I disagree, one should go full Pirangello and have it be a play within a play in a story about a play
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Mar 26, 2018 22:06
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Each page isn't actually a page but the image of a page.
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Mar 26, 2018 22:10
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Mel Mudkiper posted:But, for example, Star Wars doesn't and never has had an authorial vision to speak of, even if you believe an authorial vision matters. George Lucas is an auteur actually
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Mar 26, 2018 23:17
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A human heart posted:George Lucas is an auteur actually Common mistake but it's actually said as "autist"
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Mar 26, 2018 23:22
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Sham bam bamina! posted:The reason that people hate when it was all a dream is that it's awful storytelling. Yeah it was an example, in the case of Star Wars the reason people hate the reset of the EU would be, "awful management of a brand" according to a small vocal minority of nerds. Honestly resetting the EU is probably the best thing that could happen to it. I read the Star Wars EU in elementary school through early high school and it was already garbage, I can't even imagine what it's like today.
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Mar 26, 2018 23:35
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Lyon posted:Yeah it was an example, in the case of Star Wars the reason people hate the reset of the EU would be, "awful management of a brand" according to a small vocal minority of nerds. Honestly resetting the EU is probably the best thing that could happen to it. I read the Star Wars EU in elementary school through early high school and it was already garbage, I can't even imagine what it's like today.
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Mar 26, 2018 23:49
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