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docbeard posted:Fool Moon is the weakest book in the series but Murphy Did Nothing Wrong (aside from being on the business end of the worst kind of sitcom "a five minute conversation would have cleared all this up" plotting). The first time I read Fool Moon, I thought Murphy was grating and illogical and she should just let Harry do stuff and get out of his way and then I came back on a re-read like a year later and went oh the narrative tricked me, the wizard's an rear end in a top hat. It has plenty of dumb poo poo and mishandled/missed opportunities/gross stuff. On the other hand, it also has: The police station attack. Some fun with Marcone "... then I blew the tires off his loving truck." It's funny how the truck thing strikes me as a more fist-pump worthy moment than a lot of the more spectacular stuff he does later in the series.
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Aug 6, 2019 14:14
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:The first time I read Fool Moon, I thought Murphy was grating and illogical and she should just let Harry do stuff and get out of his way and then I came back on a re-read like a year later and went Yeah, the action set pieces in Fool Moon are genuinely good. It's just that the worst excesses of the series are present in full force without as many of its later redeeming features. I do enjoy the (comparatively) subtle narrative that Harry is Harry's biggest problem in the book though; his overconfidence drat near gets him killed and leaves him mostly powerless for the final confrontation with the hexenwolves, and his general belief that he knows best and the people around him can't be trusted with dangerous information does get his friend killed and convinces his other friend (with some justification) that he is dangerous and untrustworthy.
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Aug 6, 2019 14:27
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Kea posted:Just finished my reread of the second book. Arguably worse than the first to be honest. MUCH more awful Dresden perving, specifically the female hexenwolf he CONSTANTLY mentions her boobs, often times 2 or 3 times in the space of a page or two. Also Murphy is loving horrible in this book too. My favorite part of his obsession with the female hexenwolf is he always has to find some excuse to call her a 'bitch' over and over, like that's some clever joke Jim Butcher was in love with.
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Aug 6, 2019 17:11
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Reading the first Sandman Slim. It owns: "I'm the Joesph Stalin of laundry." "I found a BMW SUV a block a way, which is way too many letters together and made me feel better about stealing it." I just finished binging Alex Verus and Slim takes itself waaaaay less seriously and is better off for it.
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Aug 6, 2019 21:52
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Keep reading, let us know how that goes for you
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Aug 6, 2019 23:17
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tokenbrownguy posted:Reading the first Sandman Slim. It owns: Yeah, I found it a pretty fun series. The Everything Box is another one by him I really enjoyed.
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Aug 6, 2019 23:49
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tokenbrownguy posted:Reading the first Sandman Slim. It owns: Sandman slim is the top tier urban fantasy. Everything else should be compared to it.
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Aug 6, 2019 23:55
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Sandman Slim is always a hoot.
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Aug 7, 2019 06:32
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I've been rereading Stormfront for a lark and holy poo poo I forgot what a smug shithead Dresden is. Like, the entire start of the book has him whining that people keep asking him what a wizard does right after he acknowledges that normal people don't know about wizards and yet he still hates people who asks just what does he do. He also refuses to actually show or tell them. Yadda yadda masquerade but he openly advertises himself to be a drat wizard. Also the whole thing where this guy hires him to see if this place is haunted and he just goes there, tells the dude he's on drugs, gets paid and leave just... Well, that ages poorly after him blowing people off for almost identical stuff gets them killed later on.
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Aug 9, 2019 15:23
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Proteus Jones posted:Yeah, I found it a pretty fun series. The Everything box is infinitely better than Sandman Slim.
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Aug 9, 2019 17:51
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Kchama posted:I've been rereading Stormfront for a lark and holy poo poo I forgot what a smug shithead Dresden is. Like, the entire start of the book has him whining that people keep asking him what a wizard does right after he acknowledges that normal people don't know about wizards and yet he still hates people who asks just what does he do. He also refuses to actually show or tell them. Yadda yadda masquerade but he openly advertises himself to be a drat wizard. A lot of that's down to Butcher clearly not having a handle on his worldbuilding yet; I would say that all the way through Stormfront and most of the way through Full Moon, Dresden never explains himself because the author doesn't know what a wizard does. Dresden in Stormfront displays a level of magical talent barely greater than Garrett, P.I. He's a dude with a gun and some location spells and potions. That's why the only good part of Full Moon is when he cuts loose and blasts a werewolf through a building. It's a serious tonal shift that carries through to the rest of the series.
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Aug 10, 2019 03:50
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:A lot of that's down to Butcher clearly not having a handle on his worldbuilding yet; I would say that all the way through Stormfront and most of the way through Full Moon, Dresden never explains himself because the author doesn't know what a wizard does. Dresden in Stormfront displays a level of magical talent barely greater than Garrett, P.I. He's a dude with a gun and some location spells and potions. Sometimes, I like to look at amazing author's first books and compare them to the rest of their books. And just kind of smile because this is where you started and look at how far you've come. Look at how far you have left to go. and one day if I work hard enough, maybe someone will do that to my books, too.
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Aug 10, 2019 04:24
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:A lot of that's down to Butcher clearly not having a handle on his worldbuilding yet; I would say that all the way through Stormfront and most of the way through Full Moon, Dresden never explains himself because the author doesn't know what a wizard does. Dresden in Stormfront displays a level of magical talent barely greater than Garrett, P.I. He's a dude with a gun and some location spells and potions. How does this even work though? How do you not have any understanding of the entire premise of the story, and yet write the entire start of the story to be revolving around that question you can't answer? That's the rankest incompetence you can get. And Dresden comes off as a complete shitheel due to it, even as he tries to make it sound like he's principled as a result. And the worst thing is he doesn't even seem to LIKE being a wizard. He gets upset when Murphy calls him about his only steady job, and also gets upset at the lady who hired him privately for more or less hiring him. Fluffy Bunnies posted:Sometimes, I like to look at amazing author's first books and compare them to the rest of their books. And just kind of smile because this is where you started and look at how far you've come. Look at how far you have left to go. Too bad we're not talking about an amazing author.
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Aug 10, 2019 04:39
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It would be kinda neat if we got a short story from another character's perspective of the early books, where Harry just looks like an rear end in a top hat the entire time.
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Aug 10, 2019 04:57
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Kchama posted:How does this even work though? How do you not have any understanding of the entire premise of the story, and yet write the entire start of the story to be revolving around that question you can't answer? Storm Front was originally a way to get past Butcher's writer's block - essentially a literary laxative that was accidentally good enough to publish. Fool Moon was written while he tried to get the first book published. It wasn't until book 3 that it was a deliberately crafted series. Coincidentally, this is widely considered to coincide with a significant increase in quality.
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Aug 10, 2019 16:58
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 Widely
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Aug 10, 2019 17:33
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Gnoman posted:Storm Front was originally a way to get past Butcher's writer's block - essentially a literary laxative that was accidentally good enough to publish. Fool Moon was written while he tried to get the first book published. It wasn't until book 3 that it was a deliberately crafted series. Coincidentally, this is widely considered to coincide with a significant increase in quality. I didn't feel book three was all that much better, if at all. It has a lot of the same issues with Harry's personality that the first two books do. And indeed, I'm pretty sure that gets people killed yet again and he doesn't act like he ever gives a gently caress. And 'deliberately crafted' the book is almost entirely new characters coming out of nowhere and reassuring the reader that they've been there the entire time, and just were never mentioned.
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Aug 10, 2019 18:46
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Love the point in the thread cycle where we all decide suddenly that Dresden sucks and was never good.
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Aug 10, 2019 20:54
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The third book is basically a refined version of the first one.jivjov posted:Love the point in the thread cycle where we all decide suddenly that Dresden sucks and was never good. Yes, it's pretty ironic. At first we were like men who were starving and anything we could eat was delicious, but now we have been living in abundance and luxury, and anything less than the most delicate and exquisite food is ofensive.
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Aug 10, 2019 21:06
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I picked up Storm Front on a lark on a camping trip, and promptly fell in love with the series. I really enjoy the Dresden Files, and it got me back into reading. The novels have some problems, it isn't for everyone, but I do enjoy reading the Dresden Files.
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Aug 10, 2019 21:41
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So the first two Craft Sequence books were neat, but I'm disappointed that it changes protagonists each book. I was totally on board to read a whole series about an rear end in a top hat wizard lawyer and all of her adventures, but it seems like the author is more enamored with his worldbuilding, which is serviceable but not really amazing- it basically strikes me as discount Shadowrun.
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Aug 10, 2019 23:19
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jivjov posted:Love the point in the thread cycle where we all decide suddenly that Dresden sucks and was never good. Don't drive-by white noise post, geez. Unless you're just trying to drum up people to run in and talk about how they love it. Sure, maybe it gets good. Maybe it doesn't. But I'm rereading it and drat I hate it. Of course I never did like it in the first place. I sure as heck didn't suddenly changed my mind about its goodness. Do you really have nothing to contribute? At least I'm reading and talking about the topic. Kchama fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Aug 10, 2019 |
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Aug 10, 2019 23:28
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Why are you reading a series you hate? Doubly so when it's a reread and you didnt like it the first time. I dont want to kink shame, but that seems masochistic.
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Aug 10, 2019 23:50
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Ornamented Death posted:Why are you reading a series you hate? Doubly so when it's a reread and you didnt like it the first time. I wanted to give it a second try to make sure I wasn't being unfair to it. And I thought it'd be good for discussion to see if I'm just misinterpreting things. Also I'm stupid. Peek into the Honor Harrington thread if you wanna see the depths of my stupidity. I don't mind getting told I'm wrong, but that kind of post really irks me.
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Aug 10, 2019 23:53
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jivjov posted:Love the point in the thread cycle where we all decide suddenly that Dresden sucks and was never good. After reading Rivers of London and, well, pretty much everything else, Dresden does suck.
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Aug 11, 2019 00:50
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As somebody who read Dresden this year there are tons of reasons to hate the series.
Hub Cat fucked around with this message at 00:57 on Aug 11, 2019 |
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Aug 11, 2019 00:53
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Kchama posted:I wanted to give it a second try to make sure I wasn't being unfair to it. And I thought it'd be good for discussion to see if I'm just misinterpreting things. Which things? That it gets better in book 3? That just because Harry is the first-person narrator it doesn't mean that Butcher thinks he's perfect or that we should? Dresden Files was one of the origin points for a particular kind of fiction. Of course some of the authors who followed it made improvements. They'd be poo poo authors if they didn't. Sometimes somebody has to screw something up for the first time before it becomes clear what constitutes screwing up. Jumping from that to "this author is loving horrible" is a big jump. Butcher is, for example, a much better writer in almost every way than Weber (though maybe not so much in those first two books). He can present human emotion, even when his narrator doesn't recognize it. He's synthesized a bunch of fantasy traditions into something that's somewhat coherent, though a bit of a mess. He's written several pretty strong characters, though it'd be nice if more of them were women. He's neither humorless nor is he presenting a psychopath as a hero. Let us know which of those claims I just made you disagree with and we'll see if the thread's willing to discuss.
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Aug 11, 2019 01:00
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Taking a look through the other thread I'm pretty sure Kchama doesn't like Weber at all.
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Aug 11, 2019 01:10
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Kchama posted:Don't drive-by white noise post, geez. Unless you're just trying to drum up people to run in and talk about how they love it. Sure, maybe it gets good. Maybe it doesn't. But I'm rereading it and drat I hate it. Sorry I hit a nerve. But hey, read what you want, even if you don't like it. That's cool with me
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Aug 11, 2019 01:43
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Omi no Kami posted:So the first two Craft Sequence books were neat, but I'm disappointed that it changes protagonists each book. I was totally on board to read a whole series about an rear end in a top hat wizard lawyer and all of her adventures, but it seems like the author is more enamored with his worldbuilding, which is serviceable but not really amazing- it basically strikes me as discount Shadowrun. Cool, so i'm not the only one who thought this.
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Aug 11, 2019 02:11
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Hub Cat posted:Cool, so i'm not the only one who thought this. Yeah... I'm nitpicking a bit, because in all fairness the first book had a perfectly satisfying conclusion to that character's arc, but wizards doing contract law felt like it had a lot of unused potential. In comparison, book 2's thing of midlife crisis corporate drone loves dad, even if he does occasionally cut someone's heart out still worked perfectly well, but it didn't get me nearly as excited.
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Aug 11, 2019 02:34
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Narsham posted:Which things? That it gets better in book 3? That just because Harry is the first-person narrator it doesn't mean that Butcher thinks he's perfect or that we should? So here's the thing. The fact that he was an early urban fantasy author really has nothing to do with the things that I dislike about Dresden Files. He writes Stormfront as if he's aiming for a noir mystery. He's completely incompetent at it, but it's what he's attempting. The magic and stuff is all just a skin for it and really does the book no favors. He's trying to have this big mystery in a setup where there's no rules for the mystery. He introduces a lot of magic elements but doesn't really make it clear how this interacts with the mystery. In fact, it becomes clear that Butcher himself really doesn't understand himself, and is just making poo poo up as he goes along. I'll be a little fair to him. Writing a supernatural mystery is very hard. Harder than writing a regular mystery, in fact, because you have a lot more to set up. You not only need to set up the situation and circumstances, but also anything that might complicate the mystery that would not be obvious from it just being a normal non-supernatural mystery. The problem is, Butcher doesn't have the chops for a supernatural murder mystery, much less a normal murder mystery. Take the heart-exploding killing magic from Stormfront. Very little is really established about it and often-times the book contradicts itself several times on what it would take to cast it in a way to fit the crime. As a mystery, it's one of the worst I've ever read, and it does it to itself. My other major complaint over all was that Dresden is just a poo poo-head. Like, he's way worse than Honor is. You say it's good that he's not a psychopath but other people have said stuff that makes me wonder. And then there's the fact that he just won't stop being a shithead to everyone. He is constantly bitching about his own customers asking him to do things that he feels is below him because he won't say what a wizard is, despite openly advertising. And as I mentioned earlier, it's never said to be due to any kind of masquerade. He just thinks they should know, despite his own monologues about how regular people don't know about magic, even though that really doesn't make sense in such a setting. The Dresden Files also have a very strange human-oriented morality that doesn't help either. The point of all of this is to say that he wasn't really doing anything new with Dresden Files. It was more or less a regular story with a slight skin on it. It's as tepid as it gets. Even in 2000 it wasn't anything amazing. Tsukihime, of all things, came out just a few months later and is a much better urban fantasy story, and I can can assure you was a hell of a lot more imaginative and inventive. I don't know where you got that I like Weber and am seeking to compare Weber favorably to Butcher. I was pointing out the Weber thread because it's about how I've read the dumb-gently caress books of his and want to finally get to rant to people who aren't adoring fans. I do disagree that Butcher is a better author than Weber, though. I think they both are awful at what they do but had a niche in it that mad them popular. You could pretty much just replace 'Weber' with 'Butcher' and vice versa there and it'd make about as much sense. jivjov posted:Sorry I hit a nerve. But hey, read what you want, even if you don't like it. That's cool with me
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Aug 11, 2019 03:18
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Man, I will agree with most complaints about Dresden Files but if you're going to start pointing to loving Tsukihime then I'm going to assume you're looking at Tsukihime through rose tinted glasses from hell and back. It takes like a decade of retcons and cleaning up before Tsukihime is remotely not creepy as poo poo and then the only real interesting stuff tends to come from errata or side stuff.
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Aug 11, 2019 03:31
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ImpAtom posted:Man, I will agree with most complaints about Dresden Files but if you're going to start pointing to loving Tsukihime then I'm going to assume you're looking at Tsukihime through rose tinted glasses from hell and back. It takes like a decade of retcons and cleaning up before Tsukihime is remotely not creepy as poo poo and then the only real interesting stuff tends to come from errata or side stuff. There's a reason why I said 'of all things'. You can't deny it was more inventive than Dresden Files. Like, the point was that things that did Urban Fantasy better existed in the same time period. Storm Front, Fool Moon, and Grave Peril are straight up worse, even with Tsukihime's problems. EDIT: You ninja-editor! And you could easily put 'Dresden Files' in there and be a lot more correct. And hell, from what everything that's been said is, Dresden Files gets creepier as time goes on! Kchama fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Aug 11, 2019 |
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Aug 11, 2019 03:32
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Kchama posted:There's a reason why I said 'of all things'. Sure I can. Tsukihime has some interesting worldbuilding but that comes later down the line. The original story is *awful* to actually read. Like just awful. It has some okay ideas baked into it but they're buried under writing that is poo poo in Japanese and absolutely goddamn awful to read translated without a really good translator doing everything they can to make it read less terribly. It managed to latch on because of the few ideas it had and more significantly because people wanted to/were able to bone most of the cast. If you're going to lambaste how terrible Butcher's early work is (which is 100% fair, don't get me wrong) you can't really escape Tsukihime being *significantly* worse, even before you get to the part where it's a literal porn game that someone had to mod sex scene skipping into to get to the turgid prose. Kchama posted:Like, the point was that things that did Urban Fantasy better existed in the same time period. Storm Front, Fool Moon, and Grave Peril are straight up worse, even with Tsukihime's problems. Urban Fantasy absolutely existed before Butcher but for good or ill he has basically established the baseline for the genre now. Most writers do better than him but it's not unreasonable to say that we wouldn't have the same modern Urban Fantasy landscape without Butcher. Part of it is him getting lucky but he was able to hit on the magic formula, well-written-or-not, which seemed to really catch people in a way a lot of other stuff didn't. The Rivers of London Series or Verus or whatnot all are born out of his stuff and the fact that his stuff wasn't particularly original isn't really any more relevant than the fact that Harry Potter was just "boarding school adventures" with magic. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 04:11 on Aug 11, 2019 |
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Aug 11, 2019 03:39
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ImpAtom posted:Cut to shorten post quote:Cut to shorten post. Well, that's a shame, because the baseline is the basement then. By the way, if I sound like I'm defending Tsukihime, it's totally cuz I am. I read it a decade ago and it was really inspiring in terms of how I want to write and what kind of setting I'd want to make. Like, bad translation aside, it's use of first-person is something I hadn't seen done so evocatively, and really meshed with its setting to be Extremely Up My Alley. Like, I'll be honest: I won't say anyone sucks for liking Dresden Files. I'll rant about hating it, but I'm extremely cool with them arguing about why they like it. Or just chiming in to say they like it. Because I understand. EDIT: Also I couldn't understand half of what you were saying because it was written incomprehensibly, so I just guessed. People were born? Tsukihime was retconned and that's why people like it now? Huh? Kchama fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Aug 11, 2019 |
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Aug 11, 2019 03:48
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Kchama posted:EDIT: Also I couldn't understand half of what you were saying because it was written incomprehensibly, so I just guessed. ImpAtom posted:It managed to latch on because of the few ideas it had and more significantly because people wanted to/were able to born most of the cast.
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Aug 11, 2019 04:08
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Hub Cat posted:I think they meant to write bone and got autocorrected. Yeah, sorry. I need to stop trying to write anything more than five lines on my phone.
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Aug 11, 2019 04:11
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Hub Cat posted:I think they meant to write bone and got autocorrected. Oh. Yeah you're probably right. Eh, you could say that about anything that gets popular, though. It got a non-boning fighting game sequel, so people apparently thought the action was cool. I know I did. ImpAtom posted:Yeah, sorry. I need to stop trying to write anything more than five lines on my phone. Oh, that's cool. Sorry, I was just legitimately confused about a lot of the post as a result of some of that stuff. I'll do my best to try and be more understanding as a result.
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Aug 11, 2019 04:12
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Kchama posted:Oh. Yeah you're probably right. Eh, you could say that about anything that gets popular, though. It got a non-boning fighting game sequel, so people apparently thought the action was cool. I know I did. Nah, it's fair. It's a written medium and incoherent writing kinda defeats that.
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Aug 11, 2019 04:21
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