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The phrase "exposed ample breasts" occurs in the second paragraph of the prologue. This has got to be a record, right?
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Feb 11, 2020 05:04
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PHIZ KALIFA posted:they say abreast instead of amen because they are women, sorry, woolooloos. Roggan?
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Feb 11, 2020 05:08
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About the only case of fantasy slang that isn't annoying I can think of is Pratchett making fun of it with Dimwell rhyming slang, which doesn't actually rhyme. The footnotes suggest this is probably because it's made up to annoy people, like most slang.
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Feb 11, 2020 06:50
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Feb 11, 2020 18:08
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Sorry, Alice Through the Looking Glass would like a word with that graph. Or at least the Jabberwocky.
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Feb 11, 2020 19:17
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Domus posted:Sorry, Alice Through the Looking Glass would like a word with that graph. Or at least the Jabberwocky. It's why the line never hits zero 
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Feb 11, 2020 20:23
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Domus posted:Sorry, Alice Through the Looking Glass would like a word with that graph. Or at least the Jabberwocky. 
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Feb 12, 2020 04:33
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The original übernerd JRR Tolkien was the first and worst of this, but at least he had the decency to keep the worst of it to an appendix. "Frodo's name - in his native Uytferlian - is actually Iofrexich, which sounds similar to the Eolvefen word for 'small badger' and can thus be seen as a pun on etc etc etc which has some similarities with the medieval saxon word 'frood', thus Frodo."
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Feb 13, 2020 00:08
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Mr. Sunshine posted:The original übernerd JRR Tolkien was the first and worst of this, but at least he had the decency to keep the worst of it to an appendix. I'm more willing to accept it from Tolkien than "random self-published nerd" as well, because Tolkien actually knew how language works.
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Feb 13, 2020 00:21
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Tolkien also managed to keep most of it to the appendices and other supplemental material.
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Feb 13, 2020 00:35
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Yeah JRRT was really the king of that kind of stuff. One fictional language wasn't enough, huh? Gotta pretend you're translating it from one into another? If Frodo were a real person, it would be pretty stupid and more than a little racist to try and translate the meaning instead of the sounds. Like imagine if you met a Chinese woman and she was like "my name is Yawen" and you went "oh, okay, so I'm gonna call you Elegant Cloud or Elclow for short since that's what your name means"
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Feb 13, 2020 02:55
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Also re. supplemental material I read a great little anecdote from a retired publisher who said he loving hated JRRT because he would always get sent all sorts of random unsolicited manuscripts, but once the Lord of the Rings took off he started getting boxes full of poo poo like maps and dictionaries and drawings of characters and cloth samples and sheet music for songs and everything else with a 7th-grade fantasy novel somewhere in the bottom
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Feb 13, 2020 02:58
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Yeah, the fact that one nerdy linguistics professor's doofy passion project somehow became the template for the entire genre, to the point that a ton of fantasy-lit fans evaluate works more on worldbuilding than story, is a terrible cosmic mistake
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Feb 13, 2020 03:17
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coincidentally i just came across this and ughhhhhhhhhhhhhh
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Feb 13, 2020 03:54
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Antivehicular posted:Yeah, the fact that one nerdy linguistics professor's doofy passion project somehow became the template for the entire genre, to the point that a ton of fantasy-lit fans evaluate works more on worldbuilding than story, is a terrible cosmic mistake Same thing happened with Lovecraft-alikes, people took the monsters and the scope of the setting and missed the part where the people involved think that they're going crazy because they actually fuckin' could be because this poo poo is too stupid to be real and they don't want it to be and the ramifications it would have if it were true would be too massive to cope with; remember that part of the mythos is "I fell into a hole while travelling the Australian outback and landed in a massive underground library written by time-travelling brain-surfing triangle aliens but they're all gone now and so is the hole" and also "humanity was invented by aliens as a joke." Also, inexplicably, more than one misses the part where if the person involved is actually doing the business of writing the loving thing down somewhere physical, they have to survive the encounter. Read The Cult of the Nose, though, that thing is awesome.
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Feb 13, 2020 04:25
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Somfin posted:Also, inexplicably, more than one misses the part where if the person involved is actually doing the business of writing the loving thing down somewhere physical, they have to survive the encounter. One of my perverse joys in dreadful prose is how many bad writers will gently caress this up, or otherwise completely break first-person POV.
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Feb 13, 2020 04:35
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Sagebrush posted:Yeah JRRT was really the king of that kind of stuff. One fictional language wasn't enough, huh? Gotta pretend you're translating it from one into another? If Frodo were a real person, it would be pretty stupid and more than a little racist to try and translate the meaning instead of the sounds. Well that's what happened with the Native Americans when white people met them.
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Feb 13, 2020 04:39
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Antivehicular posted:One of my perverse joys in dreadful prose is how many bad writers will gently caress this up, or otherwise completely break first-person POV. Nah, dawg, it's just, like, his ghost telling the story. One of my favorite short stories is from the perspective of a dead author, but the whole story is a set-up to explain the dude's thought process while he's deciding to commit suicide, so there's really no other way to do it, and it's well set-up/explained.
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Feb 13, 2020 04:41
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Sagebrush posted:coincidentally i just came across this and ughhhhhhhhhhhhhh I use things like that because I do worldbuilding and conlanging as a hobby, and don't plan to ever write a story using them. Worldbuilding can be useful for fantasy and sci fi to flesh things out, but you can absolutely tell the ones who go overboard and/or stupid with it. Like, even though I like Tolkien's stuff, to use one of the current examples in the thread, he is for sure an example of overboard (so many songs, and unnecessary fluff).
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Feb 13, 2020 04:57
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You can have your opinions, but I'll never forgive Peter Jackson for removing Tom Bombadil from the movies. I WILL HAVE JUSTICE FOR TOM BOMBADIL!
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Feb 13, 2020 05:22
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muscles like this! posted:Well that's what happened with the Native Americans when white people met them. Also, European monarchs were until very recently generally referred to by their cognate name in other languages (Henry/Henrik/Heinrich, George/Jørgen/Jürgen, etc). Probably a remnant of their names being translated to/from latin in earlier times. Also also, up until the 1800s in Scandinavia, it was fairly common to "translate" the name of someone who immigrated from the brother countries: Svän Pährsson in Sweden would become Svend Petersen in Denmark.
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Feb 13, 2020 05:37
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Somfin posted:Also, inexplicably, more than one misses the part where if the person involved is actually doing the business of writing the loving thing down somewhere physical, they have to survive the encounter. To be fair, Lovecraft himself had a few stories where the narrator keeps writing well past the point of plausibility. Eg, "Dagon", where the narrator is still writing even as he goes to leap out a window to escape a monster...
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Feb 13, 2020 05:51
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Sagebrush posted:Like imagine if you met a Chinese woman and she was like "my name is Yawen" and you went "oh, okay, so I'm gonna call you Elegant Cloud or Elclow for short since that's what your name means" That's not at all comparable to translating a literary work (even imaginarily translating an imaginary literary work) though. And translators do do that. e: not the abbreviating bit
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Feb 13, 2020 07:41
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Like most topics in translation, trying to come up with a universal one-and-done rule for how names should be translated is gonna be an impossible task because of differences in language and culture, and trying to balance emotional impact vs literal meaning. In conclusion it is a land of contrasts and ALSO you should spell it "Sefirosu" like in the JAPANESESE
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Feb 13, 2020 08:48
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Worldbuilding can be really fun, but it doesn't have to be that deep to support a consistent and believable fantasy story. You might need to know more details if you're worldbuilding for a game, but for novels, you only have to know what's relevant. I remember seeing a screenshot of a Twitter rant about "bad" worldbuilding where the OP claimed that writers had to explain who domesticated the horses the characters ride and the grain they use to make their bread. They also seemed confused about the concept of forests in areas with harsh winters. It was... frustrating to see that list being passed around as useful writing advice.
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Feb 13, 2020 11:51
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Angry Salami posted:To be fair, Lovecraft himself had a few stories where the narrator keeps writing well past the point of plausibility. Eg, "Dagon", where the narrator is still writing even as he goes to leap out a window to escape a monster... This was just kind of a trend with the epistolary writing style, see the original Dracula. Shwoo posted:Worldbuilding can be really fun, but it doesn't have to be that deep to support a consistent and believable fantasy story. You might need to know more details if you're worldbuilding for a game, but for novels, you only have to know what's relevant. I'm reminded of one author who got a ton of bitching about how they depicted horses in their fantasy story, so they changed the horses to giant lizards and the complaints all stopped. And just ask TG about 'verisimilitude', step back and watch the PTSD attacks. (it's even worse in RPGs, to say the least) The joke goes that Tolkein invented fantasy languages and then wrote novels for them to exist in. Also he took them seriously- one gift he got from a fan was a goblet with the One Ring inscription around it, but since he could actually read it Tolkein wasn't comfortable drinking from it. So he used it as an ashtray.
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Feb 13, 2020 12:12
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Angry Salami posted:To be fair, Lovecraft himself had a few stories where the narrator keeps writing well past the point of plausibility. Eg, "Dagon", where the narrator is still writing even as he goes to leap out a window to escape a monster... To reverse that on you, The Music of Erich Zann includes a sequence in which a non-viewpoint character desperately attempting to write out some small piece of their life story as the void bears down on them, and is also, easily, one of Lovecraft's best stories
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Feb 13, 2020 12:22
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lol as pilloried in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the end of the Mythos story The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long On another sheet of paper, the most badly charred of the seven or eight fragments found by Detective Sergeant Douglas (of the Partridgeville Reserve), was scrawled the following: "Good God, the plaster is falling! A terrific shock has loosened the plaster and it is falling. An earthquake perhaps! I never could have anticipated this. It is growing dark in the room. I must phone Frank. But can he get here in time? I will try. I will recite the Einstein formula. I will—God. they are breaking through! They are breaking through! Smoke is pouring from the corners of the wall. Their tongues—ahhhhh—" Ahhhhhhh 
NoneMoreNegative has a new favorite as of 12:36 on Feb 13, 2020 |
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Feb 13, 2020 12:34
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Shwoo posted:I remember seeing a screenshot of a Twitter rant about "bad" worldbuilding where the OP claimed that writers had to explain who domesticated the horses the characters ride and the grain they use to make their bread. They also seemed confused about the concept of forests in areas with harsh winters. Not really on-topic but reminded me of a friend of my sister's. We used to live on an island and when the friend found out the island had meese, they asked my sister "HOW DID THEY GET THERE?!?!??"
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Feb 13, 2020 14:13
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Shwoo posted:Worldbuilding can be really fun, but it doesn't have to be that deep to support a consistent and believable fantasy story. You might need to know more details if you're worldbuilding for a game, but for novels, you only have to know what's relevant. I kind of have to disagree. I don't think the problem is deep worldbuilding and thinking way past the limits of the story you want to tell, since that stuff contributes a lot to consistency and believability. It's thinking that all the stuff you thought of has to go into the finished story. Go ahead and come up with some elaborate pre-history that explains where the horses came from, but don't feel like you need to include it if it doesn't end up relevant to the story.
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Feb 13, 2020 14:21
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NoneMoreNegative posted:lol as pilloried in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the end of the Mythos story The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long "E=mc2! E=mc2! E=mc2! Ahhhhhh-"
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Feb 13, 2020 16:43
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Jerry Cotton posted:Not really on-topic but reminded me of a friend of my sister's. We used to live on an island and when the friend found out the island had meese, they asked my sister "HOW DID THEY GET THERE?!?!??" Meese can swim! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFKoNuc4YAU
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Feb 13, 2020 18:10
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there wolf posted:I kind of have to disagree. I don't think the problem is deep worldbuilding and thinking way past the limits of the story you want to tell, since that stuff contributes a lot to consistency and believability. It's thinking that all the stuff you thought of has to go into the finished story. Go ahead and come up with some elaborate pre-history that explains where the horses came from, but don't feel like you need to include it if it doesn't end up relevant to the story. yeah but like drat do people like to state that no you NEED to include it so your readers know you did the work. those types of readers are the ones making those posts on Twitter etc and that's the content of the posts: "you need to do this and you need to put it in the work or your work isn't fully fleshed out" it is writing advice from the readers who write to editors to complain that the author is an idiot who failed to reasonably explain in the story how and why these people knew how to bake bread when in the real world blah blah blah
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Feb 13, 2020 18:24
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Yeah, I love worldbuilding. It's really fascinating, and I tinker with my worlds all the time. It just gets annoying when people insist that every detail of the world must be there on the page, or it doesn't exist. I found the screenshots I was thinking of, and the specific wordings for the wheat and horse things were "Who domesticated the wheat that you're using to make that bread?" and "Uhm, also, who is breeding all of those horses? And where did they come from originally? Like, how did they end up here?" Like it's unrealistic to have bread unless you go into detail about its entire history. It's just bread.
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Feb 14, 2020 00:59
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Shwoo posted:
We don't even know that poo poo about our own world!
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Feb 14, 2020 01:09
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The forest one is wrong too since some of the biggest forests on the Earth are in Canada and Siberia.
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Feb 14, 2020 01:19
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I think it's easy for both writers and nitpickers to realize that, in the context of creating the setting of a story, worldbuilding only matters when it affects the narrative. If the only purpose of horses are to carry characters around your map, why does it matter how they were domesticated? Maybe it's fun for the writer to decide that all horses in this world arrive from hell-portals and are bound by ancient blood pacts, but unless the plot involves, I dunno, the pacts expiring and the Ur-Horse demanding mass sacrifice of teenage girls in denim skirts to renew them, putting that in the the text is just a distraction.
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Feb 14, 2020 01:37
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Sagebrush posted:coincidentally i just came across this and ughhhhhhhhhhhhhh The key is to come up with all this stuff, and then don't show it to people. Just use it to keep things consistent, maybe as a treat for sharper readers. "Wait, why did he mention the Ur-Horse ag-oh, right, the hell-portals."
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Feb 14, 2020 03:06
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does anyone know when the pratchett estate is going to release, like, his unabridged notes or whatever? when's the discworld silmarillion due out. i wanna, fuckin, roll in that poo poo like a goddamn lusty piglet.
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Feb 14, 2020 03:42
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You mean the notes that got crushed by a steamroller?
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Feb 14, 2020 04:02
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