|
Sham bam bamina! posted:It's not even that long a story. It's puffed up with entire books' worth of people crossing their arms and tugging their braids and wearing clothes. Yeah that's why I said it was executed extremely poorly. Too much of Wheel of Time is just padding.
|
#
?
Nov 21, 2019 18:37
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 3, 2024 16:34 |
|
|
fauna posted:i know people have been saying that the art of the story is dying forever, and i don't think it's dying, but i do think it's changing. If you want to see the horrible harbinger of what might be coming next, look at web serials. Certain publishers and other platforms have been looking to hone in on this market of dumb readers where the most well-known story is like the worst mash-up of Meyer and Sanderson combined with one hell of a bullying revenge fantasy, telling what's at best 200,000 words of story over 1,600,000 words of prose. Serial Box is one of the groups trying to get ahead of the curve but even they aren't quite willing to match the sheer rambling, sprawling nature of these stories, instead treating their serials more like TV seasons with writers' rooms (and they've landed some pretty hefty IPs, like Marvel and DC.) Luckily, given that the author of that most well-known story has turned out to be a total diva convinced that his janky first-draft is a masterpiece to the extent that he can mock editors on his subreddit, and the sequel to it has been extremely poorly-received by everyone except his most devout fans, the enthusiasm may be cooling.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 00:17
|
|
|
Home, not hone. They aren't sharpening the readers – quite the opposite, in fact.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 00:20
|
|
|
I quit the wheel of time when the characters starting having exposition-dump conversations right after someone attempted to murder them, standing in the middle of the hallway where they just almost got murdered.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 01:55
|
|
|
Horizon Burning posted:Luckily, given that the author of that most well-known story has turned out to be a total diva convinced that his janky first-draft is a masterpiece to the extent that he can mock editors on his subreddit, and the sequel to it has been extremely poorly-received by everyone except his most devout fans, the enthusiasm may be cooling. I'm curious, but not familiar with what you're talking about : can you give some links?
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 02:23
|
|
|
sorry everyone, i got neuropath and neuromancer mixed up, i haven't read neuropath
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 03:38
|
|
|
Xotl posted:I'm curious, but not familiar with what you're talking about : can you give some links? The story in question: Worm. And, all in all, it was an okay ride providing you were skim-reading and only really paying attention to the few characters who were well-realized. It is a very clunky story that has glaring issues because it's the first thing the author, Wildbow, ever wrote and he did so without thinking more than a chapter in advance. The average fan pitch for this leviathan involves slogging through the first 250,000 words (the first eight arcs) because that's when the story gets good. It doesn't really get good, though. The story just jettisons even the pretense of being about anything deeper than expository worldbuilding, superhero fights and one hell of a revenge fantasy. The reason why people think this is an improvement is that the first 250,000 words are filled with meaningless high school drama and the author's bizarre thoughts about how the world works, including a storyline where the protagonist teams up with a literal Neo-Nazi gang to fight press-ganged, bestial Asians who have bombs in their heads (planted by another Asian person.) That's not to say there're not some interesting ideas in Worm, but it's ultimately a <200,000 word YA trilogy, and a lot of the ideas that the fandom claims are original are just drawn from lesser-known superhero properties like Irredeemable and City of Heroes, some quite heavily. It got big because Eliezer Yudkowsky gave it a shout out when people still thought rational fiction was new and exciting, which should tell you plenty about the kind of story it is. Basically, it's a superhero story for people who think they're too smart for superheroes. The protagonist is a blank slate who gets away with doing things like cutting out eyes and killing a baby because everyone else is worse than her and some of the situations are more contrived than the usual Ticking Time Bomb hypothetical. Which takes us to the sequel no one outside the most hardcore members of the fandom likes: Ward. Even the web serial thread on this very forum, named after this guy, doesn't talk about this serial except how much it sucks. The thing about Ward is, though, that it's basically the exact same thing as Worm, right down to Nazi gangs, mountains of exposition, fight scenes that drag on for over 4000 words, awkward overly-redundant writing with no sense of pacing or emotion, villains with heavy plot armor, and all of it without even the threadbare narrative spine that Worm had. So, it's really just revealed that the author isn't very skilled and hasn't actually improved his craft despite writing constantly for years since Worm started but now he's dosed up on an extremely loud, toxic fandom. Before Ward, Wildbow wrote two other serials, Pact and Twig, which even his fans don't really like or recommend. But where Pact and Twig had actual evidence of improvement, Ward is just a full regression. Perhaps because Pact and Twig didn't get to the heights of Worm. Over the years, the fandom enthusiasm for Worm moved from it being an interesting first draft to a masterpiece that'll redefine the entire genre of superhero fiction. So, it all started to go to the author's head. As mentioned, here he is, basically mocking the reasonable suggestions of a publishing company's editor that would help turn Worm into a YA series on his subreddit. The author was apparently entertaining multiple talks with publishers prior to doing this, especially when Avengers mania was in full swing. Since then, his rhetoric has shifted from the idea that it'll be published any day now to hiring a ghostwriter at some point in the future to write a new version of his magnum opus for him.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 05:12
|
|
|
Even just the concept of "slog through the first 250,000 words, it gets better!" is exhausting to me. Why would I do that when I could spend the same amount of time reading multiple novels that are good all the way through?
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 05:17
|
|
|
Antivehicular posted:Even just the concept of "slog through the first 250,000 words, it gets better!" is exhausting to me. Why would I do that when I could spend the same amount of time reading multiple novels that are good all the way through? It's the same issue the Dresden Files have. You have to go through X amount of books to get to the 'good ones'. Of course, the bad ones are actually the ones that stick to the series's premise of Dresden as a wizard detective instead of just a wizard.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 05:22
|
|
|
Horizon Burning posted:The average fan pitch for this leviathan involves slogging through the first 250,000 words (the first eight arcs) because that's when the story gets good. why would you do this. im very serious. why would you read this
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 05:24
|
|
|
i looked upw hat "rational fiction" is and im insanely depressed now
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 05:25
|
|
|
The implication of "The First 250,000 Words/First 3 Seasons/First 4 Books are Bad but..." is that that's how long it will take you to develop Stockholm Syndrome.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 06:52
|
|
|
I'm screaming.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 08:18
|
|
|
Horizon Burning posted:Which takes us to the sequel no one outside the most hardcore members of the fandom likes: Ward. Even the web serial thread on this very forum, named after this guy, doesn't talk about this serial except how much it sucks. I actually just checked the writer's Patreon though and they are making nearly $80,000 a year there, so regardless of quality they are making as much as a really successful genre author would through selling conventional novels. I think that is slightly more than N J Jemisin was making from her books before she moved to having a Patreon and writing full time, at the point where she published those figures she had two Hugo awards for best novel under her belt. That seems to be a wild exception though, I checked a few of the Patreons for the other biggest English web serials and I suspect that The Wandering Inn pulls in similar money but the others seem to get perhaps a third of that.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 10:28
|
|
|
Patrat posted:I actually just checked the writer's Patreon though and they are making nearly $80,000 a year there, so regardless of quality they are making as much as a really successful genre author would through selling conventional novels. I think that is slightly more than N J Jemisin was making from her books before she moved to having a Patreon and writing full time, at the point where she published those figures she had two Hugo awards for best novel under her belt. The Wandering Inn makes double that, actually, but that author is suspected to be three people collaborating. Like I said, there's money going through here and publishers are looking at it. Wildbow's Patreon was sitting at about 2.5k before Ward went up, and the reason why Ward is going on for so long (it's already twice as long as Worm) is because the Patreon will crash once it ends, especially when the serial is not well-regarded by anyone beyond the hardcore fans (who are the ones who pay into the Patreon.)
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 11:56
|
|
|
Last year I was curious to see why Worm had the popularity it does so I read some of it and for reasons I can't quite explain it gave me the same vibe as like, one of those visual novels that are millions of words long and take a triple digit number of hours to read.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 12:12
|
|
|
worm exists as fodder for wiki pages every snippet of prose i've seen from it was totally sterile
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 16:51
|
|
|
Went to a random chapter and was not disappointed.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 17:09
|
|
|
my brain cannot parse that first sentence at all
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 17:51
|
|
|
Sham bam bamina! posted:Went to a random chapter and was not disappointed. The commas are all over the place to the point of almost making it unreadable. Is this the result of high school english lit education focusing on "themes" instead of language and prose?
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 17:54
|
|
|
I honestly think Robbie the robot is worse?
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 18:10
|
|
|
TheGreatEvilKing posted:I honestly think Robbie the robot is worse? Pacho posted:The commas are all over the place to the point of almost making it unreadable. Is this the result of high school english lit education focusing on "themes" instead of language and prose? Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Nov 22, 2019 |
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 18:17
|
|
|
Oh, here’s one I remember - The Unincorporated Man. Insane libertarian bullshit about an ubermensch who is frozen for a thousand years or something, and wakes up in a capitalist hell state that the authors continually argue is the logical and correct result of libertarian ideologies. Played straight as a good thing. There is a paragraph or two the describes how courts and justice has become privatized, and the resulting competition of courts and lawyers have created a much more just and equitable system of judicial conduct. Insanity.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 18:22
|
|
|
my bony fealty posted:my brain cannot parse that first sentence at all it took me a few passes to realize that “facing down” means, like, “to do battle with,” and then he lists off the people he was facing down. So the point of the sentence I think is that he’s grateful for ... Bitch’s contribution to the effort against his opponents.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 21:37
|
|
|
Bonaventure posted:it took me a few passes to realize that “facing down” means, like, “to do battle with,” and then he lists off the people he was facing down. that is...what that phrase means, yeah
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 22:12
|
|
|
chernobyl kinsman posted:that is...what that phrase means, yeah the first few times i read it i thought he had discovered several people facing down on the ground
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 22:17
|
|
|
fauna posted:sorry everyone, i got neuropath and neuromancer mixed up, i haven't read neuropath Oh you should, its quite the experience
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 22:26
|
|
|
Bitch is a female character whose power is to mutate dogs into giant dogs. She's the recalcitrant muscle of the team. As a side effect, her power has left her viewing everything through canine terms, so, smiling is like baring teeth. So, the protagonist starts treating her like a dog and her behavior improves, although the rationale is based on those disproven alpha packleader theories (Worm is filled with errors like this that the author bases entire scenes or plot arcs around). Yes, that means that one of the most prominent characters is a woman called Bitch and dehumanizing her is seen as understanding her psychological trauma (another character specifies that Bitch does not enjoy her situation and would harm herself or others if she discovered the truth.) Instead of attempting to rehabilitate or understand or heal, she is dehumanized, belittled, and often beaten. Because she's rude. Even though it's the equivalent of doing those things to someone with doggie autism. This is the closest thing Worm has to a central idea, and it's even encoded in the worldbuilding: people who go through severe psychological trauma ("Trigger Events" are what give people their powers) harm others and destabilize the world and the only thing to do is fight them/make them fight each other. It's an irony, then, given the emotional rawness that bleeds through when the author illustrates the source of his trauma: high school bullying.
Horizon Burning fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Nov 22, 2019 |
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 22:37
|
|
|
Also the only characters that show any decency/are capable of being anything but villains are the ones rich enough to buy superpowers from the evil conspiracy that controls literally everything in the world (despite only being like six people)
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 23:04
|
|
|
Horizon Burning posted:Bitch is a female character whose power is to mutate dogs into giant dogs. She's the recalcitrant muscle of the team. As a side effect, her power has left her viewing everything through canine terms, so, smiling is like baring teeth. So, the protagonist starts treating her like a dog and her behavior improves, although the rationale is based on those disproven alpha packleader theories (Worm is filled with errors like this that the author bases entire scenes or plot arcs around). Yes, that means that one of the most prominent characters is a woman called Bitch and dehumanizing her is seen as understanding her psychological trauma (another character specifies that Bitch does not enjoy her situation and would harm herself or others if she discovered the truth.) Instead of attempting to rehabilitate or understand or heal, she is dehumanized, belittled, and often beaten. Because she's rude. Even though it's the equivalent of doing those things to someone with doggie autism. This is the closest thing Worm has to a central idea, and it's even encoded in the worldbuilding: people who go through severe psychological trauma ("Trigger Events" are what give people their powers) harm others and destabilize the world and the only thing to do is fight them/make them fight each other. It's an irony, then, given the emotional rawness that bleeds through when the author illustrates the source of his trauma: high school bullying. This is furthering the hypothesis I got from reading the first couple of chapters of Worm years ago: "this author has never met a woman, let alone a high-school-aged girl, and is regurgitating tedious misogynistic media tropes instead." How gross and clueless do you need to be to write this character, let alone name her Bitch?
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 23:10
|
|
|
Antivehicular posted:This is furthering the hypothesis I got from reading the first couple of chapters of Worm years ago: "this author has never met a woman, let alone a high-school-aged girl, and is regurgitating tedious misogynistic media tropes instead." How gross and clueless do you need to be to write this character, let alone name her Bitch? About as gross and clueless as you need to be to write a story arc where the protagonist teams up with an actual Nazi gang (who are cool, suave, and stylish) led by a millionaire man who calls himself Kaiser to fight against a (bestial, savage, insane) pan-Asian gang which is made up of poor people. About as gross and clueless as you need to be to have the black character of the team, the supposed team leader, not raise a fuss about any of this, even when another black supervillain is barred from joining the alliance based on the color of his skin. About as gross and clueless as you need to be to have your most prominent black characters be: a sociopathic, psychotic bully, an angry guy from a broken home (who beats Bitch), and his sister who has learning difficulties because her mother was using drugs while she was pregnant with her. About as gross and clueless as you need to be to say to your fans that another character, a child abuser whose ethnicity isn't specified in the text, is also black. About as gross and clueless to give an openly racist superhero who had never been mentioned before a big heroic sacrifice redemptive moment during a giant monster attack because anti-racists ruined his superhero career. Horizon Burning fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Nov 22, 2019 |
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 23:27
|
|
|
Horizon Burning posted:About as gross and clueless as you need to be to write a story arc where the protagonist teams up with an actual Nazi gang (who are cool, suave, and stylish) led by a millionaire man who calls himself Kaiser to fight against a (bestial, savage, insane) pan-Asian gang which is made up of poor people. About as gross and clueless as you need to be to have the black character of the team, the supposed team leader, not raise a fuss about any of this, even when another black supervillain is barred from joining the alliance based on the color of his skin. About as gross and clueless as you need to be to have your most prominent black characters be: a sociopathic, psychotic bully, an angry guy from a broken home (who beats Bitch), and his sister who has learning difficulties because her mother was using drugs while she was pregnant with her. About as gross and clueless as you need to be to say to your fans that another character, a child abuser whose ethnicity isn't specified in the text, is also black. About as gross and clueless to give an openly racist superhero who had never been mentioned before a big heroic sacrifice redemptive moment during a giant monster attack because anti-racists ruined his superhero career. Clearly, I flushed a lot of this crap. I just remember ed there were Nazis and also ssf one people called the Slaughterhouse Nine who were boring AF.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 23:47
|
|
|
ahahaha wow
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 23:48
|
|
|
why does any of this surprise me, given that this was a huge hit in the same "genre" that gave us Harry Potter explaining to Draco Malfoy that he rationally opposes Draco's desire to rape Luna Lovegood because Harry might want to marry her someday and being raped would diminish her value
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 23:52
|
|
|
The last thing I'm going to say is that for a story where the author gets very basic things wrong without seeming to realize it (what an aquifer is, how a flashbang works, canine psychology, how schools operate, all Asians are the same, etc) there are multiple times where the story goes into a rather in-depth accounting of Nazi iconography, tattoos, symbology, and so on (such as why the Nazi gang is called Empire Eighty Eight.) It's very, very strange.
|
|
#
?
Nov 22, 2019 23:57
|
|
|
TheGreatEvilKing posted:Clearly, I flushed a lot of this crap. I just remember ed there were Nazis and also ssf one people called the Slaughterhouse Nine who were boring AF. A thing about Worm is that it's such a dense, convoluted thing that it's impossible to keep all the details fresh in mind, which is why its fans make it out to be such a subtle, intricate story. It's not, of course - it's just longer than War and Peace and there's so much filler and nonsense and bizarre things that it's inevitable you lose track of stuff. Especially since, once you hit Arc 30 (yes, really) you've read over one million words and none of the stuff introduced in Arc 1 matters anymore and it's easy to forget how a black bookstore owner actively conspired (and admitted to conspiring!) to let the main character be beaten up by one of her bullies, incidentally the only black superhero in the story, or that said bully is described like this: quote:She looked like a panther, black-skinned, savage, teeth bared just a little as she panted.
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2019 00:09
|
|
|
Horizon Burning posted:The last thing I'm going to say is that for a story where the author gets very basic things wrong without seeming to realize it (what an aquifer is, how a flashbang works, canine psychology, how schools operate, all Asians are the same, etc) there are multiple times where the story goes into a rather in-depth accounting of Nazi iconography, tattoos, symbology, and so on (such as why the Nazi gang is called Empire Eighty Eight.) It's very, very strange. that's not really strange and can be explained by "the author is a dumbass fascist" did not know Worm was such a trainwreck tho gee whiz
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2019 00:24
|
|
|
Why are so many "rationalists" so obsessed with high school decades after the fact to the point that it becomes one of the constants in their fiction? Not to say that bullying isn't a real, serious problem, but you'd think people who never shut up about how they overcame cognitive and emotional biases due to their galaxy brained logic powers would realize that being writing screeds about getting one over on your high school enemies makes you look kind of pathetic.
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2019 04:03
|
|
|
Grenrow posted:Why are so many "rationalists" so obsessed with high school decades after the fact to the point that it becomes one of the constants in their fiction? Not to say that bullying isn't a real, serious problem, but you'd think people who never shut up about how they overcame cognitive and emotional biases due to their galaxy brained logic powers would realize that being writing screeds about getting one over on your high school enemies makes you look kind of pathetic. Anime.
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2019 04:20
|
|
|
|
| # ? Jun 3, 2024 16:34 |
|
|
Lex Neville posted:genuine question: how common is it for a genre fiction narrative to be fully contained within, say, 80k words? That was the rule in the 60s (in Delany's autobiography he describes having to cut his first novel to fit into 146 pages), but it's unusual these days for a novel to be much under 100,000 words, fantasy or not. I blame word processors and marketing (and in sf's case, the decline of magazines), but genre fiction loves its endless books and endless series; look at Tom Clancy or The Pillars of the Earth, or those incredibly long wuxia series.
|
|
#
?
Nov 23, 2019 05:36
|
|
