mind the walrus posted:

I mean other people won't just say it but I'm already a pariah so I can-- GRRM did jack and poo poo for Elden Ring and we all know it. Not gonna stop him from collecting the checks or credit though.

mind the walrus posted:

I mean other people won't just say it but I'm already a pariah so I can-- GRRM did jack and poo poo for Elden Ring and we all know it. Not gonna stop him from collecting the checks or credit though.

pseudanonymous posted:

I can't imagine him being in a writing group with writers that much better than him, it seems like it would drive him nuts.

Coquito Ergo Sum posted:

I mean, my comment was kind of harsh, but I've finally read some of Brandon's books after hearing him praised for years now, and he's kind of an okay writer? He certainly doesn't live up to the praise his fans give him. Reading his prose often feels like reading a grocery list. His magic systems and worlds that he build are imaginative but he often doesn't give thought some of his implications, like in one Stormlight scene where he was so desperate to have his girlboss character win yet another argument with ration and logic that the narrative accidentally endorsed the idea of genocide. Or that unless he plans to twist around, he legitimized the brutal racial caste system he built for Stormlight.I don't think he's a bad writer and I admire his ethic and his engagement with aspiring young authors. I've even enjoyed quite a bit of what I've read, but I hear him say things that are a little too big for his britches sometimes.

pseudanonymous posted:

I think he’s a loving terrible writer. He missed the point of fantasy entirely and worse yet he’s influencing future writers to be bad.

thehoodie posted:

https://mobile.twitter.com/brendanjjg/status/1498411297104441346?t=Ebw0Bn8te_LQ9yIPBft_ug&s=09

emanresu tnuocca posted:

As much as Elden Ring is awesome the way these From Soft games are set up with each being basically a redo of the previous one you can imagine that GRRM was pretty much just asked to come up with new nerd words for concepts that already existed.

nine-gear crow posted:

Must have been torture for GRRM given how much he hates fanfiction. I love it.

the American Tolkien posted:

No, no.

Jaime does not actually own a Valyrian steel sword. The blade he used to kill King Aerys is common castle-forged steel, gilded to match his golden armor. But he can certainly get hold of a Valyrian blade for the fight — Widow’s Wail, the twin to Oathkeeper, both made when his father had Ice melted down and reforged. Widow’s Wail went to Joffrey, but we all know how that turned out. Now it belongs to Tommen, but the kid’s not old enough to use it.

A sword is not enough, though. This duel is life and death. Jaime is not likely to prance into that clearing smiling and clad only in cloth. He’ll armor himself before the match. His gilded plate-and-mail (this is not a fit occasion for the white of the Kingsguard), a crimson cloak, and a shield strapped to his right arm and emblazoned with the lion of Lannister. And of course he will have a helm. Knights who enter battle without one are soon dead. He can smile at Hermione before the match, then lower his visor. The helm, of course, would be fashioned in the shape of a maned lion. (Oddly enough, the Lannister arms look a lot like those of Gryffindor, which might give Hermione a moment’s pause).

He’s not going to waste time and effort swatting at birds with his sword, either. He’s encased in gilded steel. What are they going to do, crap on him? He’ll rush right through the birds, and go straight for Hermione. A sword is not a knight’s only weapon. While she’s watching the blade, he will slam his shield right into her face, knock her off her feet. Let her try and mumble those spells with a mouthful of broken teeth.

And if somehow Granger does get off that spell (cheating, really) and turn him upside down, Jaime is more likely to undo the straps on his shield and fling it at her head then to hang there meekly waiting to die.

But hey, let’s say everything goes the way your “experts” say it will, and Hermione wins. Sad to say, she will not live long to enjoy her victory. Sometime very soon, when she least expects it, a “boy” she does not know will bump up against her in the corridors of Hogwarts… and suddenly she’ll find a dagger sliding through her ribs, right into her heart. “A Lannister always pays his debts,” Tyrion will say, as he slips back into the shadows.

pseudanonymous posted:

I think he’s a loving terrible writer. He missed the point of fantasy entirely and worse yet he’s influencing future writers to be bad.

Kuiperdolin posted:

KellHound posted:

I listen to the podcast Writing Excuses which he is one of the hosts of. In it he said that he "edits" but finding a plot hole and writing more to fill it in.

Coquito Ergo Sum posted:

That makes a ton of sense. Rhythm of War has some really noticeable plot spackle.

I do remember one time Brandon got caught off guard by a co-host of Writing Excuses. Brandon has this rant he likes to pull out in interviews and lectures where he says something like "One criticism of Fantasy or magic systems is that they're bad because you can just solve all of the problems instantly with magic," and then he cocks an eyebrow and gives this smarmy lecture about how that sentiment is 100% wrong. He tried to throw the same rant into his podcast by throwing the question up in the air to the other hosts. The other co-host said he immediately agreed that magic in Fantasy has a "fix everything" problem and gave a really good rundown using examples like Batman and Superman having powers that exist to get themselves out of one moment, then never use those powers again. I think he doesn't get questioned very often.

KellHound posted:

A thing that struck me is he ways called soft magic systems magic without rules and hard magic systems are when the magic "makes sense." I feel like he gets so caught up in rule he kills magic.

pseudanonymous posted:

He's a litrpg writer. Like for real, that's what he does and is. He obsesses with explaining a system of magic, and obsesses about systems of magic, but only in the "wouldn't it be cool" sense, not in "what would magic working like this demonstrate about the human condition say" sense, and jerks off over his system, then rules lawyers or munchkins his own system. In extremely verbose, sort of overdone but grammatically simple and mostly kind of redundant but really long-winded explanations that just go on and on and contain in them infodumps about stuff that may or may not be really relevant, because it's "cool" or just to pad out the books.

pseudanonymous posted:

I think he’s a loving terrible writer. He missed the point of fantasy entirely and worse yet he’s influencing future writers to be bad.

pseudanonymous posted:

I think he’s a loving terrible writer. He missed the point of fantasy entirely and worse yet he’s influencing future writers to be bad.

Lot 49 posted:

Can you expand on this please?

quote:

I love fantastic and wondrous stories. Since I was very young, I was entranced by stories of chivalrous knights and fair ladies and slaying dragons. Stories about spaceships whizzing about and people shooting lasers and blasters. These stories enabled me to escape the dreary circumstances of my life into a world where anything seemed possible, where often unrecognized greatness, through trials, came to be recognized. I followed many heroes and heroines on their journeys, their great destinies revealed and their opportunity to fulfill a noble purpose. I didn’t have to just live in my normal, boring, prosaic, and sometimes unhappy life, I could live out many lives in many circumstances, undertake many adventures. For me, it has always been a gift and a treasure, but something else was always lurking alongside the escape – introspection.

Some might argue that art has no duty whatsoever but to be art. To be creative, to be an expression of human thought and will. I don’t disagree, but I think in most mediums, art can be seen on a spectrum from what might be considered low to high. The lowest art merely entertains, it merely distracts, it merely escapes. But the highest art often entertains, distracts, escapes, and reflects. It reflects the human condition.

Great works of literature are usually very well written. They use good prose (or poesy), have good characterization, good structure (plot or stanza), interesting or novel use of language, a unique setting, and conflict that engages the reader with stakes. But truly sublime literature has a why. It offers an insight into the human condition.

Science Fiction, and Fantasy, and all their assorted sub-genres and paraphernalia are merely marketing tools. Historically, some readers like books that contain spaceships, lasers, and exotic alien girls and some readers like stories that contain horses, swords, and exotic elf maidens. The trappings signal to the reader that this is the sort of story that they like, and often the plots follow similar conventions, with similar types of characters, similar conflicts, and similar resolutions. This is not sublime. But sometimes a wooded fairyland or the distant nebula of an unknown galaxy is the setting where assumptions are questions, where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, where the strange unknown is not merely a costume cloaking the known, but rather we are confronted with the unknown.

In some ways, this type of writing can be more easily accomplished within the fantasy and science fiction genres. Readers are comfortable with unexpected rules and situations, with humans dealing with dwarves and goblins or AI and hiveminds. Readers hopefully hope for the new and strange and yearn to experience a sense of the fantastic and wondrous. This gives a writer a platform to give it to them. To reject what is for what isn’t. To reflect on the human condition, through a twisted mirror.

Kuiperdolin posted:

Coquito Ergo Sum posted:

I kind of can't parse what he's trying to say, but if he's saying what I think he is and sci-fi/fantasy can be an interesting vector to examine the human condition then I'd say I agree. But in execution, enh. A lot of his theming is very skin-deep.

mind the walrus posted:

The only interesting thing is that he tries to claim that subgenres and such are all marketing tools, while falling back on a very shopworn marketing tool-- the "y'know pop art in disreputable genres have merit too you guys!" which is true, but also trite and very old and only really hits if you're young/pretentious and still conflate your literary diet with your identity as a person.

Like that poo poo kind-of worked in the 80-00s but in a world where LotR won an insane run of Oscars, the MCU has been nominated for Best Picture and a controversial Star Wars movie was enough to give actual Nazis a stronger foothold is global political discourse, like... find a new tune.

mind the walrus posted:

and a controversial Star Wars movie was enough to give actual Nazis a stronger foothold is global political discourse, like... find a new tune.

nine-gear crow posted:

It's, ironically, a parallel take that said Nazis use when being gatekeeping bigoted pricks about said genres. "Everything's woke and bad now because the stuff we like panders to normies too much now and there's all these women and people of colour and LGBT+ people in here and it makes me so mad it burns when I pee."

Issues regarding the quality of his writing aside, Sanderson's at least a seemingly decent person from what I've experienced of him, which is a lot more than I can say about a bunch of other fantasy authors and/or fantasy consumers. Also, credit where it's due in regards to Writing Excuses, the dude realized where his blindspots were a couple years ago and diversified the stable of authors and experts he has on so it's no longer three white Momorn dudes and one white non-Mormon lady sitting around talking about things that may or may not be out of their depth.

I mean, poo poo, Sanderson hasn't been on a Writing Excuses episode in literally over a year now, and was only showing up like every other episode prior to that for like the last three years.

Kuiperdolin posted:

Collateral posted:

What? I didn't watch the last one, it was apparently v bad.

KellHound posted:

Yeah, I think it's cool that he is so willing to share what he knows and how he works. And it's also good that he is willing to step asside when out of his depth, even if it took him showing his rear end a couple of times before he realized it. Like he only ended up showing his rear end BECAUSE he was willing to share the spotlight and bring in new people to challenge him.

Whizzing Wizard posted:

Brandon Sanderson just announced he has written 4 "secret" books in addition to all the other poo poo he's written over the last few years. And now he's selling them on Kickstarter?

Surely this means that our favourite NFL blogger has also written the rest of his series in secret???

Evil Fluffy posted:

He should do a Kickstarter and all of the stretch goals are different authors who'll write it instead of him, with the caveat/threat of "if this isn't funded, JK Rowling will get to finish the series."

Shimrra Jamaane posted:

So I haven’t played Edlen Ring but I’ve been reading from multiple places that despite the game itself being a masterpiece that it has the least interesting lore and general world building of any FromSoft game so far. The GRRM touch.

Coquito Ergo Sum posted:

It's fine. I don't know what the actual problem is. Did you get any specifics, or?

banned from Starbucks posted:

How much lore does a dark souls clone even require? Never played any of them