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Serephina posted:... Witcher books ... That's pretty far from how I read that scene. Time of Contempt posted:Ciri felt the tears running down her cheeks, quickly, quicker and quicker, creeping like wriggling worms among the hair by her ears. Mistle lay down beside her, and covered her tenderly with the fur. But she didn't pull the dishevelled shirt down. She left it as it had been. Ciri began to shake again. That sounds less like "tee hee, hot lesbian sex as a reward," and more like "rapist fended off by marginally preferable rapist."
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Mar 30, 2022 06:10
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Boy is that some gross-rear end writing right there
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Mar 30, 2022 07:15
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I do wonder how much of that is the original author and how much is the translator. Maybe it reads less gross in Polish
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Mar 30, 2022 07:25
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To be clear, I wasn't saying it was good; I was just disputing how the passage had been described.
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Mar 30, 2022 16:23
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Domus posted:I think one of the obvious signs of a bad story is when a character has lesbian sex out of the blue. Never showed interest in the same sex in any way, no foreshadowing, just out of nowhere. It never seems to happen with male characters. Don’t get me wrong, I have no issues with two girls having sex. I just hate when it seems thrown in at the last minute for no narrative reason. strange, i tend to feel that way when a character has heterosexual sex out of the blue with no prior interest in the opposite sex
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Mar 30, 2022 22:57
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Hot take: sex scenes of any kind with any detail are almost always a mistake, outside of erotica. Rare exceptions exist and most of those are when it serves a comedic purpose.
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Mar 30, 2022 23:09
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Unless it's two trucks.
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Mar 30, 2022 23:10
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Or rollercoasters.
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Mar 30, 2022 23:15
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If a scene makes you feel like the author is just masturbating furiously, it shouldn't be there.
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Mar 30, 2022 23:17
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neongrey posted:strange, i tend to feel that way when a character has heterosexual sex out of the blue with no prior interest in the opposite sex Touché. Okay, sex of any combination of orientations/genders out of of the blue. I do dislike that lesbian sex scenes seem to just be for titillation in a lot more stories than male/male. I want my sexual preferences to be catered to, drat it!
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Mar 30, 2022 23:37
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I remember reading a book called geomancer by ian irvine and I stopped reading it because he kept interrupting the plot to have people gently caress and also the bit with the weird breeding factories was very gross, definitely think he wrote that book one handed. I don't get sex in books tbh, unless you expect me to undo my trousers I don't need a description, I know roughly how it works you can just do the literary equivalent of panning the camera over to a shrub and turning up the orchestra.
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Mar 31, 2022 00:19
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I'm fine with using sex as a plot element, but smut and regular writing do not mix, IMO. Either regular writing suddenly changing tone to "the author thought about this scene A LOT, if you know what I mean" or would-be erotica writers churning out some 60k word piece that (allegedly) has sexytime in it.
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Mar 31, 2022 03:37
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A shitload of 'classic' fantasy and sci-fi notoriously has what are obviously the author's fetishes and/or messed up social views intrude. Even supposedly kid-friendly stuff... Xanth and all. I think it's not as much of a thing as it used to be, but that's really not saying much. Kinda comes to mind how with the rise of internet porn, suddenly Hollywood blockbusters have a LOT less gratuitous sex and nudity scenes than they used to, because no one's going to rent them for 5 seconds of tiddy.
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Mar 31, 2022 05:28
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I'm glad that Witcher passage got quoted verbatim and others think it's squicky too, was worried there for a second.Ghost Leviathan posted:Kinda comes to mind how with the rise of internet porn, suddenly Hollywood blockbusters have a LOT less gratuitous sex and nudity scenes than they used to, because no one's going to rent them for 5 seconds of tiddy. neongrey posted:strange, i tend to feel that way when a character has heterosexual sex out of the blue with no prior interest in the opposite sex vvvvv edit: To clarify, it was being filed under gay fiction that puzzled me. Even now when I looked it it's title the online commentary is all "I'm interested in gay fiction, but I hear this has nothing in it?". It'd be like any generic fantasy book being filed under childhood development or whatever. Serephina has a new favorite as of 06:30 on Mar 31, 2022 |
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Mar 31, 2022 05:55
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why do straight people always think gay stuff is some kind of cynical ploy, god drat. is that how you relate to your own sexuality???
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Mar 31, 2022 06:18
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moonmazed posted:why do straight people always think gay stuff is some kind of cynical ploy, god drat. is that how you relate to your own sexuality??? The straights are not okay.
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Mar 31, 2022 06:40
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There are a poo poo-ton of straight dudes who throw completely gratuitous lesbian sex scenes into their bad genre fiction purely because girl-on-girl is hot (and probably because of some weird 2000's ideas about how all women are "sexually fluid," which will also get used to make avowed lesbian characters get with male protagonists), so if you know that kind of guy, you can get gunshy about this sort of thing. If you don't know that kind of guy, congratulations!
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Mar 31, 2022 06:49
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I still kinda feel the "lesbian necromancers in space!" was a bit of marketing from whoever was behind promoting the book, cause there was maybe 2? mentions of her sexuality at all. If you are going to describe a character from a book, at least pick a description that fits better like "badass female necromancer who takes no poo poo" cause you will at least witness the badass more often. Haven't read the second one yet so I can't really throw an opinion on that one yet. I guess I think of it like describing Predator by saying it's a "slasher/thriller that flips the genre expectations" instead of saying "Arnold and an alien fight in the woods". It's not wrong, but it could be righter, if that makes any sense.
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Mar 31, 2022 07:10
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did you miss the part where she is constantly lusting after women
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Mar 31, 2022 07:17
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moonmazed posted:why do straight people always think gay stuff is some kind of cynical ploy, god drat. is that how you relate to your own sexuality??? Because for the longest time gay/lesbian scenes were used as a cynical ploy 99% of the time they appeared.
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Mar 31, 2022 07:30
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moonmazed posted:did you miss the part where she is constantly lusting after women or the sexual tension between griddle and harrow so thick you could cut it with griddle's giant two handed sword (BIG BIG SPOILER FOR GIDEON THE NINTH) and the whole tragic sacrifice in the climax thing at least i think we're talking about gideon the ninth, i'm just going off lesbian necromancers in space since the title wasn't mentioned but it felt like a sudden topic shift
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Mar 31, 2022 09:20
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Yea. My apologies guys, I tried for humor and apparently got the tone wrong. I thought it was kinda obvious, but in retrospect, not so much. My bad.
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Mar 31, 2022 12:32
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Gideon the Book has no sex, explicit or implied, but is just constantly low-key horny all the time, and it owns. The sequel also features the most erotic arm-bone regrowing you'll ever read.
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Mar 31, 2022 14:24
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Speaking of, the second person narration in Harrow the Ninth bounced me right off it. Not sure it was exactly terrible, but it was too annoying to read.
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Apr 1, 2022 05:57
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Carthag Tuek posted:Speaking of, the second person narration in Harrow the Ninth bounced me right off it. Not sure it was exactly terrible, but it was too annoying to read. It makes sense for plot and form reasons (and I think it was a very good choice for those reasons), but yeah I can't blame anyone for finding it offputting. It's something you CAN get used to, but a lot of people don't have years of experience doing tabletop RPGs or playing text adventure games or something.
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Apr 1, 2022 12:27
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I think it was just too much of it. I've read some stuff that uses limited 2nd person & switched more, which I didn't mind.
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Apr 1, 2022 13:46
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I've read some short stories where I thought second person narration worked very well at setting a specific mood. I'm not sure how I'd feel about it if it was in a full novel. I might like it, but it also feels like something that takes a bit more work to get through compared to other more common writing styles.
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Apr 1, 2022 15:47
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At least for me, it distances me more from the text. It's like I become more aware that I am being told a story as opposed to reading a story if that makes sense. I become a passive observer, which I also am when I'm reading 1st or 3rd person, but it doesn't feel like that. So it really works for me if I'm supposed to be distanced from the character, and it doesn't get too overhand (whatever the expression is). Iain Banks used it in Complicity which alternates chapters between 1st person journalist and 2nd person serial killer, which worked pretty well as I recall.
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Apr 1, 2022 16:02
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Disco Elysium is good imo
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Apr 2, 2022 00:33
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I am so literal-minded that reading “You are in a basement” just takes me right out of the story if I’m not actually in a basement. Whereas, “Quentin Freeblefwop was a space narwhal with psychic powers and the ability to travel through time” just makes me 
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Apr 2, 2022 01:29
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I've played enough D&D/other narrative games that I'm perfectly fine with it as a presentation method, I think what happens for me is that it adds another level of processing for my brain in that I'm now at least somewhat imagining myself in the story's context instead of just taking it in. It can be great, but it feels like it could get more tiring after a while.
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Apr 2, 2022 01:38
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If first person is a character telling the story to the reader, and third person is a narrator telling the story to the reader, I interpret second person as a narrator telling the story to the character, without the reader being addressed directly. I don't know what it's for, but it seems more introspective than third person, except when it's just trying to imply that something weird is going on with the narration. It's really common in fanfiction though, for some reason. I blame Homestuck. Second person feels like it has more purpose in video games and gamebooks, where it comes off like it's addressing the player as the character they're playing.
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Apr 2, 2022 03:01
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In a weird callback to earlier chat, I randomly picked up Hyperion the other day, then this morning I looked at the author's name and went wait a minute... I liked the first story within it, it was an interesting level of weird and then it just went for it right at the end. But looking at the chat from earlier it sounds like I should probably just finish this book and ignore the rest of the series?
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Apr 10, 2022 18:17
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Fall of Hyperion is still worth reading if you liked the first one, imho. It concludes the story and the brain eater hadn't gotten that far with Simmons yet. But stop after that.
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Apr 10, 2022 19:30
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I genuinely think that Hyperion has a great enough ending to not need to be continued, but Fall isn't terrible. There's nothing in Fall that enhances or even matches the highs of Hyperion though, IMO. But that's it as far as Dan Simmons goes. Stop immediately after Fall.
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Apr 12, 2022 03:53
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Well, I liked Hyperion overall. The structure was really neat, a framing story uniting multiple characters interspersed with them telling the story of what brought them there, and most of those stories were decent to get good. But a couple of the stories dive straight into the recent thread topic of unnecessary sex scenes. They're very different stories but they could both be mostly described as "male protagonist meta the most beautiful woman he's ever seen, and they have sex every time they meet, and it's the best sex he's ever had every time". The second one in particular is a good story, but it just feels like it's constantly being interrupted. Like dude, it feels kinda silly when your characters just have to bone down when they're scuba diving 150 feet underwater, just stick to the interesting part of the story.
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Apr 12, 2022 19:14
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That's a good way to get bends in your dick
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Apr 12, 2022 19:20
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Been reading Wise Man's Fear, the second King killer chronicle. Now, I know what's coming, but the majority of the book is more of the same. And then out of nowhere he's brought into the fae by the sex fairy queen. And he's super good at sex despite being a virgin. And makes her fall in love with him, because he's super good at writing songs and magic and also a virgin so she lets him go to see how good he'll be when he gets some experience. And then she keeps training him in the erotic arts because her greatest lover will never disappoint another... And it goes on and on and on. Like chapters of it. It's way more egregious than I thought it would be.
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Apr 17, 2022 13:00
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Ambitious Spider posted:Been reading Wise Man's Fear, the second King killer chronicle. Now, I know what's coming, but the majority of the book is more of the same. And then out of nowhere he's brought into the fae by the sex fairy queen. And he's super good at sex despite being a virgin. And makes her fall in love with him, because he's super good at writing songs and magic and also a virgin so she lets him go to see how good he'll be when he gets some experience. And then she keeps training him in the erotic arts because her greatest lover will never disappoint another... Its worse than that. He is let go because he negs the goddess of sex on her sex skills and she falls for it.
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Apr 17, 2022 13:28
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Ambitious Spider posted:Been reading Wise Man's Fear, the second King killer chronicle. Now, I know what's coming, but the majority of the book is more of the same. And then out of nowhere he's brought into the fae by the sex fairy queen. And he's super good at sex despite being a virgin. And makes her fall in love with him, because he's super good at writing songs and magic and also a virgin so she lets him go to see how good he'll be when he gets some experience. And then she keeps training him in the erotic arts because her greatest lover will never disappoint another... Look forwards to when he gets back home and he proceeds to gently caress his way though the university and creeps on basically every woman there, but a female character explicitly goes "Oh, it's not creepy when he's ogling you, it's totally hot and flattering actually!"
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Apr 17, 2022 13:44
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