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Captain Monkey posted:They’re better written than anything by Dickens. Oh my god Dickens is the most transparently paid-by-the-word author ever.
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Jan 18, 2021 01:49
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People have been arguing to include genre fiction, and speculative fiction in particular, in school curricula for decades now. Also there's the classics that' have been retroactively reclassified as YA now that the categories are a bit more defined. Hands-own the dumbest part of this is how moot the entire debate is at this point.Teachers already teach YA books, and fantasy/sci books, and classics that are simultaneously YA. I read Harry Potter for senior year English for fucks sake. Maybe instead of buying into this Twilight v. Moby dick framing every drat time we should start demanding syllabi with entire 19th century novels on them.
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Jan 18, 2021 01:52
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Oh my god Dickens is the most transparently paid-by-the-word author ever. Dickens was not paid by the word.
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Jan 18, 2021 01:57
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I want to stress that, in addition to picture books, I love plenty of novels written for younger readers. Harriet the Spy was one of the most formative reading experiences of my life, and I still reread it periodically. Same for A Wrinkle in Time and especially A Wind in the Door. I have a copy of How to Train Your Dragon on my shelf because the drawings of farting Vikings and lumpy dragons are still hilarious after 16 years. And I don't believe that people have stopped writing good books like these – I haven't read The Hate U Give, but it's probably as good as Harriet the Spy and probably means just as much to its generation of readers. What I have a problem with is the idea of indiscriminate consumption as social justice, the idea that you're somehow doing the world a favor by reading absolute bottom-of-the-barrel fantasy drivel just because it has a woman's name on the cover, that you're subverting hegemony by getting on a corporate bandwagon. It doesn't matter to my point that there are still great children's books, because people fawn equally (or even more) over the 90% that's trash. It's insulting to readers and writers to make a marketing category into a moral statement and to conflate art with commodity and to give this commodity a moral precedence over works that have genuinely expanded human expression. There is a ceiling on how good a YA novel can be, because there's a ceiling on what you can reasonably expect a kid to get out of a book – I remember reading Slaughterhouse-Five as an 11-year-old and not really seeing what the point was of this weird story about a guy who lives his life out of order, and it was only as I matured that I realized in retrospect (at like 16) what it was saying. And it's not like Slaughterhouse-Five is some towering avant-garde brick like Ulysses that even adults have trouble fully grasping. It's false and extremely limiting to imagine that YA does everything that the grown-up books – by men and women! – do.
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Jan 18, 2021 02:01
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Being paid by the installment has the same ultimate effect, since if you want to inflate your story to fill more installments you are going to have to use...more words.
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Jan 18, 2021 02:08
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Removes The Odyssey from a school reading list and replaces it with Ulysses.
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Jan 18, 2021 02:23
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It's a lot of people arguing past each other missing the point that YA is just another example of the 10% rule only instead of insane people writing in fanzines and sending letters to Fantasy Publication Monthly they vomit their thoughts directly into the world the moment they are formed expected to be applauded for their wit and wokeness. The only difference between YA now and scifi/fantasy in the 50s-80s is how communication has allowed for it all to happen in real time. I'm sure tons of popular stuff each decade fades fast from memory as time passes. For the vast majority of these YA authors in 10 years they're going to be completely unknown and a small handful will be the ones frequently referred as hidden gems or literature. pentyne has a new favorite as of 02:34 on Jan 18, 2021 |
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Jan 18, 2021 02:31
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Ugly In The Morning posted:Oh my god Dickens is the most transparently paid-by-the-word author ever. You know I started reading David Copperfield during this pandemic and in conclusion: gently caress both of you Dickens owns
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Jan 18, 2021 02:50
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Sham bam bamina! posted:No, because the concept of fandom can inform a 21st-century author but is not applicable to a painter in the 15th century. I think you're trying to draw a much harder line than really exists. I mean, yes, Dante was a devout Christian, but there's nothing in Christianity about some Italian girl you crushed on becoming a holy being who can compel the Virgil to guide you through the underworld (pausing in Limbo so all the great writers can call you a genius), or about having to throw poo poo at Cerberus and hide from Medusa, or about demons using farts to communicate. Likewise the comedy Greek plays where Hermes shows up to crack some wry comments and get the audience giggling weren't holy venues for worshiping the God of Trade. Several philosophers got mad because the casual titillation of the stories the common folk enjoyed was seen as disrespectful to the gods. Or, for a different angle, Morpheus was not a god worshiped by the Greeks or Romans. Ovid invented him and he became popular and widespread enough that now we go "oh yeah, Morpheus, the God of Dreams" and use it as a reference to classical mythology. What is that but a fanmade character becoming canon?
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Jan 18, 2021 04:05
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Sisal Two-Step posted:This is somewhat related, but my friend and I were chatting yesterday about Tor's new marketing push to market their books the way fanfic 'markets' itself to its audience. For example, in this review of Gideon the Ninth: I like a fair amount of what Tor publishes but Christ their marketing and publicity annoys the hell out of me.
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Jan 18, 2021 04:25
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The weirdest thing to me about the Gideon sequel was the bone boob armor on the cover. Tbh though I didn't finish reading it, so it may have weirder stuff.
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Jan 18, 2021 04:29
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Lancelot is the most Mary Sue fanfic character to ever exist. He was inserted into Arthurian canon by a French author and he a.) became the most chivalrous knight 2.) became Arthur’s best friend 3.) completely shoved Gawain out of the picture 4.) started banging Guinevere and 5.) his son found the Holy Grail. And yet he’s an incredibly popular and well known piece if the Arthurian canon
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Jan 18, 2021 04:42
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cptn_dr posted:I like a fair amount of what Tor publishes but Christ their marketing and publicity annoys the hell out of me. I don't know who would find "endless quips that are downright dumb" as a selling point, and I don't want to meet them. Stupid_Sexy_Flander posted:The weirdest thing to me about the Gideon sequel was the bone boob armor on the cover. Weird? Checks out to me. 
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Jan 18, 2021 04:56
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Dienes posted:I don't know who would find "endless quips that are downright dumb" as a selling point, and I don't want to meet them. I'm pretty sure it's Homestuck fandom. "Ridiculous cosmic fantasy nonsense is happening to a character who is snarking about it and making a lot of pop-culture references" is at least 50% Homestuck DNA.
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Jan 18, 2021 05:26
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The Vosgian Beast posted:You know I started reading David Copperfield during this pandemic and in conclusion: gently caress both of you Dickens owns 
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Jan 18, 2021 06:27
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My hot fanfic take is that it's an expression of the human desire to take culturally-resonant stories and reinvent them, because that's what human cultures have done since the beginning of time. Virgil wrote the Anead to reinvent myths about the Trojan War, Ovid wrote The Metamorphoses to reinvent myths about the Greek gods, Malory wrote Le Mort d'Arthur based on stories about King Arthur, all the stories about Reynard the Fox from Ysengrimus to Goethe's Reinecke Fuchs are based on existing folktales. That's not to say that fanfiction is directly equivalent to these; I think fanfic is what you get when the human mythopoeic drive is hamstrung by copyright and canon. But it's not surprising that the media properties that first inspired fanfic (Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek are the two I'm thinking about specifically) bear a strong resemblance to myth cycles. They are premise-driven, with archetypal characters and a loose sense of continuity, being entirely or almost entirely episodic. They're prime ground for reinventing stories, which is why there have been endless Sherlock Holmes adaptations (since the early Holmes stories have long since lapsed out of copyright) and why people keep trying to recapture the 'magic' of Star Trek—and failing abysmally, because it's trapped in the dual hells of copyright and canon. No one but the people who NBC/Universal allow to make new Star Trek can make new Star Trek, and every new Star Trek has to acknowledge the existence of every previous Star Trek, or else the entire marketing tactic of canon* falls apart. The other big difference between fanfiction and works like The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost is that the latter have had hundreds of years to become distinguished as literary classics. They survived the test of time; I'm sure that there were a hundred other manuscripts about someone's trip into the Christian afterlife or recontextualizations of the Fall of Man that have been lost to time because they sucked poo poo. We're still in the thick of it, and there's so much noise that it's hard to tell what's going to end up surviving on its own merits and what's going to be lost to time because it just wasn't worth it. Also, I think Sham bam bamina's insistence that fanfic must be created within the context of a fandom is needlessly prescriptive, because I can think of works that are fundamentally 'fan works' but which are outside of the context of a fandom, but I do think that the fandom context is an important distinguishing factor, because it determines the possible range of a work. A work which depends upon your specific knowledge of Star Trek canon is going to be far more limited than a work which simply depends on your knowledge of Star Trek as a cultural object. Plenty of people who aren't Star Trek superfans enjoy Galaxy Quest. No one who isn't a Star Trek/X-Men turbonerd has heard of the Star Trek novel where the X-Men show up on the Enterprise. *I am convinced that 'canon' as it exists in corporate franchises was invented entirely to get fans of the franchise to devote themselves to consuming all the media that gets produced. You may not want to watch Rogue One, but it's canon! It's part of the continuing story that all Star Wars media tells and if you miss out on it you'll be missing out on part of the story. You won't know what happens and you need to know everything that happens in Star Wars, because it represents a real and consistent secondary world, and not a shambling amalgam of the work of hundreds of different creators over a span of fifty years, often working at odds with one another.
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Jan 18, 2021 08:02
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Byzantine posted:I think you're trying to draw a much harder line than really exists. So every novel that isn't completely abstract is fanfiction of everything else, huh? War and Peace is fanfiction of the Napoleonic Wars, and of the Russian nobility, and of the liberal political movement with Bezukhov and all the others being fanfic inserts! Even sci-fi is subject to this rule - Arrakis is just a fanfiction Mary Sue version of Earth, for example, into which the fanfiction history and fanfiction original characters do not steal are inserted. Right now I'm reading Cities of the Plain, and it's honestly just a fanfiction consisting of author's inserts into the American Southwest fandom and the Mexican fandom with links to the theology, metaphysics and politics fandoms and more, and also it's an e-zine. Sounds like reasonable and useful discourse for sure. steinrokkan has a new favorite as of 08:23 on Jan 18, 2021 |
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Jan 18, 2021 08:16
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Djeser posted:My hot fanfic take is that it's an expression of the human desire to take culturally-resonant stories and reinvent them, because that's what human cultures have done since the beginning of time. Virgil wrote the Anead to reinvent myths about the Trojan War, Ovid wrote The Metamorphoses to reinvent myths about the Greek gods, Malory wrote Le Mort d'Arthur based on stories about King Arthur, all the stories about Reynard the Fox from Ysengrimus to Goethe's Reinecke Fuchs are based on existing folktales. I think it’s just when someone writes fiction about a thing that they’re a fan of
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Jan 18, 2021 08:24
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Has anyone read Bob Chipman's book on Super Mario Bros.3? Apparently discussing a game where a plumber saves a fantasy kingdom invites a number of politicial comparisons like the JFK assassination.
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Jan 18, 2021 08:37
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I did read the novelization of the Super Mario Bros movie once. I still distinctly remember that there was a single simile in the entire book ("he spat the words like they were poison"). It stood out like gently caress, because the rest of the book was just a clinical description of what was happening on screen.
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Jan 18, 2021 09:37
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Captain Monkey posted:I think it’s just when someone writes fiction about a thing that they’re a fan of Only the fourth paragraph in that post was about the definition of fanfiction, the rest is a theory of the origin and purpose of fanfiction, and why it's a thing now when it wasn't a thing in earlier times. Also your definition means that Twisted!, a novel about a man who learns he's a were-rollercoaster who turns into a rollercoaster when he touches a rollercoaster for the first time, is a fanfic of rollercoasters. While definitionally interesting, as it means that you could for instance talk about Peter Watts's Blindsight as a fanfiction of marine biology or The Freeze-Frame Revolution as a fanfiction of relativistic motion, or about the Southern Reach books as a fanfic of pop-science environmentalism and Lost, I think that it's too broad to really fit the common usage of "fanfiction".
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Jan 18, 2021 10:37
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Dienes posted:I don't know who would find "endless quips that are downright dumb" as a selling point, and I don't want to meet them. Fearsome pigeon
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Jan 18, 2021 13:43
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Mr. Sunshine posted:I did read the novelization of the Super Mario Bros movie once. I still distinctly remember that there was a single simile in the entire book ("he spat the words like they were poison"). It stood out like gently caress, because the rest of the book was just a clinical description of what was happening on screen. Someone else read that book? I remember it had a really fancy cover. I can't imagine how insane the movie must have been to see and I'm not sure I want to.
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Jan 18, 2021 14:12
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guys i just went 100 years into the future and the only fanfic that stood the test of time is that super smash bros one thats like 4 million words long. welp cya later.
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Jan 18, 2021 14:56
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Someone else read that book? I remember it had a really fancy cover. I can't imagine how insane the movie must have been to see and I'm not sure I want to. I only ever saw it once at a friend's house growing up, and I don't remember being told it was the Super Mario movie beforehand so the entire time I was watching it I kept second-guessing myself as to whether or not this was supposed to be Mario.
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Jan 18, 2021 15:52
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The fanfiction talk reminded me of the weird trend of unnecessary sequels written years later by unrelated people. There's "Scarlett" which is an authorized sequel to Gone with the Wind published in the 90s and involves Scarlett O'Hara moving to Ireland. Also "As Time Goes By" which is a novel sequel to the movie Casablanca that undoes the ending to the movie by giving Rick and Ilsa a happy ending together.
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Jan 18, 2021 16:21
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Djeser posted:Only the fourth paragraph in that post was about the definition of fanfiction, the rest is a theory of the origin and purpose of fanfiction, and why it's a thing now when it wasn't a thing in earlier times. yeah rollercoasters are cool dude
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Jan 18, 2021 16:24
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muscles like this! posted:The fanfiction talk reminded me of the weird trend of unnecessary sequels written years later by unrelated people. There's "Scarlett" which is an authorized sequel to Gone with the Wind published in the 90s and involves Scarlett O'Hara moving to Ireland. Also "As Time Goes By" which is a novel sequel to the movie Casablanca that undoes the ending to the movie by giving Rick and Ilsa a happy ending together.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:33
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Artemis Fowl was pretty fun as a kid, but Eoin Colfer... really doesn't seem very good outside that. And that's for what are children's YA books.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:47
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Remember that godawful trend of taking a public domain classic novel and throwing zombies or some dumb bullshit like that into it? That was fanfic.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:50
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The line between literature and fanfiction is an almost entirely modern thing that arose as a result of copyright. I recall Don Quixote's sequel was written because the author was fed up with all the unofficial sequels being published. That and all the sequels, remakes, ripoffs, pastiches, parodies and spoofs we watch are basically fanfiction for all intents and purposes. The Boys is definitely fanfiction.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:54
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Stephen Baxter's done a couple of decent HG Wells sequels. Simon Clark's Night of the Triffids, though, hoo boy does that belong in this thread.
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Jan 18, 2021 17:59
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DACK FAYDEN posted:Does the Hitchhiker's Guide sequel authorized by Douglas Adams's widow count as this cause man it was not any good at all Gonna do a hot take here and say that Douglas Adams was only good when he stuck to the script of the radio play. The last half of "Life, the Universe and Everything" is just nonsensical, "So long" has like two jokes in the entire book, and "Mostly Harmless" is just miserable. Dirk Gently isn't very good either, and the Netflix series is superior to the books. Mr. Sunshine has a new favorite as of 18:06 on Jan 18, 2021 |
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Jan 18, 2021 18:03
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Mr. Sunshine posted:Gonna do a hot take here and say that Douglas Adams was only good when he stuck to the script of the radio play. The last half of "Life, the Universe and Everything" is just nonsensical, "So long" has like two jokes in the entire book, and "Mostly Harmless" is just miserable. So Long was basically “Depressive Episode:The Book” and as much as I could identify with the misery wafting off the page it was just... bad.
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Jan 18, 2021 18:17
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I really don't get why he wrote Mostly Harmless because So Long and Thanks for All the Fish ending on God's Final Message to His Creation was the perfect way to send it off.
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Jan 18, 2021 18:18
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Is Douglas Adams like Terry Pratchett, only less funny and without the work-ethic?
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Jan 18, 2021 18:20
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The line between literature and fanfiction is an almost entirely modern thing that arose as a result of copyright. I recall Don Quixote's sequel was written because the author was fed up with all the unofficial sequels being published. No, The Boys is a parody. Why do you think that any work that acknowledges the existence of other fictional works is fanfiction?
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Jan 18, 2021 18:21
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Mr. Sunshine posted:Gonna do a hot take here and say that Douglas Adams was only good when he stuck to the script of the radio play. The last half of "Life, the Universe and Everything" is just nonsensical, "So long" has like two jokes in the entire book, and "Mostly Harmless" is just miserable. My theory has always been he started getting bad around the time he befriended Richard Dawkins.
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Jan 18, 2021 18:26
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Inspector Gesicht posted:Is Douglas Adams like Terry Pratchett, only less funny and without the work-ethic? Yes? Adams had a terrible work ethic, made such a drama out having to write, his sequels getting steadily less and less interesting, and really he was happiest being a celebrity or "that guy who wrote" rather than actually writing. It's a real case of someone having one blinding moment of inspiration and then failing to live up to that. (One and a half. I thought the first Dirk Gently book was decent.)
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Jan 18, 2021 18:48
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Gats Akimbo posted:Stephen Baxter's done a couple of decent HG Wells sequels. Day of the Triffid's was probably the first "adult" book I read as a kid, so I would love to hear about this terrible sequel. (and I secretly hope its just chronicalling the adventures of that one already-blind dude from the first book)
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