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Hat Thoughts posted:I read the first book 5 years ago and barely remember it, should I read the second one? I was meh on the first one and then audiobooked the second after a failed attempt to actually read it. It was not a good book, but I did actually find a lot of enjoyment in listening and reading the (quite negative) let's read here: http://ronanwills.wordpress.com/category/lets-read-twmf/. I'll probably go the third book if he decides to do a let's read for it, but then on occasion, I also like watching bad movies because they're bad. If you don't remember book one, book two is not going to blow your socks off, and there is plenty of better stuff you could be reading.
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Jun 28, 2014 14:48
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Ross posted:Quoting an ancient post here but I just started reading this thread having recently finished TNOTW and about halfway through TWMF. He's still an insufferable douche in the "present" parts. Also, he is depowereed but then goes off and does awesome stuff to reassure the reader that he's still great - killing all the spider-crabs in the first book by himself (a feat which impresses the, apparently, significantly powerful Bast). Hell, he's even set up as THE BEST INNKEEPER EVER. Since almost nothing has happened to advance the plot in two books, I think it's safe to assume this is going to be trilogy number 1 of the Kvothe saga, and I will be immensely surprised if he doesn't regain all/most of his power before this thing is all over. Bast has pretty much made it clear that this is not a permanent thing and he's just working on getting Kvothe back to how he used to be. At which point, he'll still be in his twenties having spent a couple years not being the best at everything. This doesn't really read to me as a washed up character. The problem with the character is he's good at pretty much everything, he's an arrogant poo poo, and he never grows as a character. 70% of the side characters are more interesting than him, but they all exist only to tell us how awesome Kvothe is or to be mean to him for no reason so he can beat them (proving how awesome he is). Also, how far are you in WMF? I ask because I think most people agree that TNOTW was the better of the two books, so it's a little weird to see you knock the first and praise the second. TNOTW had more good sections even if a nearly equal amount of nothing happened. But it didn't have Felurian and the Adem, which helps its case a lot. Going to the Velius quote, what flaws does he have as a character beyond being annoying and arrogant (traits that he clearly still retains in current time indicating no real growth)? Also, how is he washed up? I keep hammering this, but I'm not sure being wealthier than everyone else in his area while having an inn filled with exotic imports and mysterious magical items makes him washed up. If washed up means that he's no longer a magical god (through his innate superiority to boot, not really through earning it via hard work), then I don't really have a lot of sympathy for the guy. He's like a lottery winner who squandered their cash and now has to live a middle class lifestyle (abloo bloo bloo). It might be more believable if we as readers saw much of anything to indicate that he has changed from the Kvothe in the story he is telling. However, most of the shift is simply given to us by Bast via text (he changed so much! I need to fix him!). As readers we have to take his word for it because we aren't shown anything. Bast says that since Chronicler got there (like 99%+ of the story so far) he's been better so again, we're only told that he was broken down, we don't actually see it. If Kvothe has a character flaw it's his arrogance, which isn't actually changed at all between young Kvothe and slightly slightly less young Kvothe. This means his "downfall" is either due to something beyond his control (the magical tree hosed him over), a no win situation he found himself in (who blames someone for a Sophie's choice?), or it was due to his arrogance. If it's the last one and he recognizes this but makes no effort to change his character that makes him an rear end. If he doesn't recognize it, then to him, it's the same to him as if it was a circumstance beyond his control, but we as reads should recognize that he's just being lovely. Kvothe would have been a lot more interesting if he wasn't such a huge Mary Sue. If I was 12-14 when I was reading this, all of this would probably have been fine for me because I would have been satisfied with a character whose main defining trait was being good at everything so long as there were scenes of baddassness. Wish fulfillment characters aren't necessarily bad, but they are juvenile. My main personal issue with the books is how they get such wild praise as great works of art and are "big L" Literature. In reality, they're middling YA fiction (which is fine, but it isn't what I'm in the market for nor is it what they're sold as.)
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Jun 30, 2014 20:33
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bitter almond posted:I love these books. I had quit reading most fantasy lit for years after kind of overdosing on it as a kid, and even though Kvothe is such a goddamn Mary Sue and there are some maddening things about the book, somehow it jammed together some of the best things and the worst things about fantasy lit and made them new for me again. I like how magic works, and how it seems sensible and balanced, but the Naming still leaves some more mystery to it. I love Kvothe's relationship with music, and I loved his parents as characters, and how they interacted with him and with each other. I like Auri, even though she's ridiculous, and I LOVE reading people who criticize the books mimic her. I even like Kvothe, though he's loving exasperating. Some of the starvation-level poverty stuff felt really true to me. I was that student in college who was really, truly poor. It permeated everything. I don't think you're reading the book very critically. Kvothe is not "really, truly poor." Really, truly, poor people don't attend the most prestigious educational institution in ye olde world. He has two sources of income (being a virtuoso lute player and making magical loving devices). Given the setting, his life and means are wildly better than the vast majority of people in his world. In reality he's living a middle class to upper middle class life, but he's jealous of his rich friends. Can you point to any text in the Imre sections that show Kvothe going without food for long periods of time or lacking the materials he needs to complete his studies? If you have to work to go to college, you're still immensely privileged, particularly in ye olden times. Auri is presented as a mentally ill adult woman whose only complication is that she is compelled to talk in a quirky way. She's older than Kothe, yet he constantly infantalizes her. I think most people suspect that she is actually supposed to be one of the ameyr, but unless they all talk like that, it doesn't really excuse the infantalization (more so because almost all the women who are presented as attractive and contemporary to Kvothe are infatalized - even the ancient sex goddess). People aren't complaining about Felurian because they're prudes. They're complaining about the juvenile wish fulfillment the scene represents. Kvothe has sex with an ancient sex goddess of sex and death, not only does he live despite the fact that this act is supposed to kill men, but he also is so good at loving that he blows Felurian's mind. A 16 year old virgin has so utterly impressed an ancient creatures whose whole existence is sex-centric that she wants to take him on as an apprentice so that he can go out into the world and sex women really good. But, the text takes painstaking care to make sure the reader knows that he is already REALLY good at sex (having never done it before). If you think this isn't ridiculous, I'm going to assume you never had sex for the first time as a teenager. --- Again, the books aren't the worst thing ever, but they aren't particularly special. If you're really into magic systems read Sanderson. The guy is at least as obsessed with creating rules for his magic systems, but they cohere better than Pat's.
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Jun 30, 2014 21:20
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Lyon posted:I feel like the difference between Sanderson and Rothfuss is that Rothfuss's magic system has more mystery to it. Sympathy is very technical but naming appears to be much more mysterious and abstract. I haven't read that much Sanderson but his magic can feel too mechanical to me sometimes. It sort of struck me more like he wanted to do a deconstruction of the genre so his magic is more sciency. Then he realized he wanted actual big impressive magic too, so threw in naming. That part seems more cribbed from Earthsea. Sympathy feels a lot like a Sanderson magic system to me.
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Jun 30, 2014 21:41
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bitter almond posted:You're right, I'm really not reading them critically. Oh, I didn't read your original post that way. I think most people found the secret technique names of sex moves to be goofy, but that's pretty far down on the list of problems with that section of the book.
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Jul 1, 2014 00:11
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Velius posted:I'm sick and abed, and thus not really up to defending a fantasy series I don't feel that strongly about in the first place, at least when we're at the thousand word diatribe level. Accordingly, all I'll say is that your constant references to how Kvothe is an awesome barkeep and is super rich (for the area) and awesome at everything have now made me think of Kvothe as Dalton from Roadhouse. And I don't really have a problem with that. I never saw it, so sadly the reference is lost on me  . Is there a youtube clip that encapsulates why this is a cool thing?
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Jul 1, 2014 02:59
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MrFlibble posted:This is the part that bothers me. If this is the scheme then purposefully bombing his interview (I know he only does it a little and the dick teacher fucks him over royally for it unexpectedly) is stupid and having a system in place to share money after however many talents even more so. So he gets charged 50 talents and then the Bursar adds 30 to the bill to split between him and Kvothe? Makes no loving sense to want a big price. It's just a poorly reasoned solution to the arbitrary money problem that Rothfuss has been throwing Kvothe since the first book. There is no logical way that the plan works as a good plan. Either the bursar is overcharging the Mear, and Kvothe is purposefully getting a high tuition for absolutely no reason (unless he's trying to waste the Mear's cash, which would be a drop in the bucket anyway). Or, they're just flat out stealing money from the school, which makes no sense because if that's what they were doing, why would the bursar not just do that on his own and not give Kvothe poo poo? The only way it makes sense as collusion is if Kvothe comes in and goes, "so this guy owes me big, and he said he'll cover my costs whatever they are. He's richer than god, and if you overcharge him for my tuition, no one will even notice unless I tell him -and that's why you'll give me half." The Supreme Court posted:He's responded to criticism about the sex fairy living kvothe. Apparently all his critics are just prudes. Rothfuss is not a feminist (going by his blog posts and ignoring for the moment that Kvothe is a serious self-insert/wish fulfillment character). Kvothe is the fantasy equivalent of an internet Nice Guy, and Rothfuss doesn't seem like his own ideas are that dissimilar. I can give a longer explanation with a bunch of examples, but A.) it's been done elsewhere already, and B.) I don't think anyone here actually buys the idea that the text or Rothfuss is in anyway feminist. Now, admittedly, I teach classes in composition and film at a big ten school while I'm finishing a PhD in Writing Studies with a grad minor in Gender and Women's Studies. So from what I can tell from his blog, I am actually the sort of person that Rothfuss hates most (one of those stuck up academics keeping brilliant artists down  .)EDIT: A good read on why Rothfuss should probably stop blogging http://nomoredeadparents.wordpress.com/2013/08/16/the-hazards-of-authors-blogging/ Karnegal fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 02:34
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How about we just all agree that the tuition scheme is poorly thought out and/or written. I would say that at least it only took Rothfuss two giant books to realize that people don't really give a poo poo about the Kvothe needs money/Kvothe gets money cycle, but he'll probably need money again at the start of the next book.
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Jul 3, 2014 01:53
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Rand Brittain posted:How much time does he have right now anyway, to get thrown out while "I got thrown out from the University younger than most people are allowed in" to still be true? a year? that's what in Rothfuss time - 800 pages?
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Jul 3, 2014 04:41
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mallamp posted:To be fair, many women write romance novels (targeted for other women) that go pretty much like that aswell. Romance novels take a lot of poo poo, but I would argue that the books you're referring to have female characters with much more agency than those in Kvotheland. For instance, Kvothe's sex with his martial arts teacher is pretty business like on her end (we get no indication she even enjoys it. In fact, it's billed as work she has to do so that she can get to her other work of training him), whereas Kvothe is getting a bunch of consequence free sex. Even if someone gets pregnant, he's off the hook because their culture is so stupid that they don't think sex produces babies (an idea that exists only that Kvothe can have no-consequence sex).
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Jul 3, 2014 07:14
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Hughlander posted:I thought he already got expelled. He attacked future king dork, spoke the name of the wind, got caught, expelled reinstated, and promoted to the next school rank in like 3 pages. It's the moment you figure out even if the legend is true none of it happened how anyone who heard it would think it did. Except the parts that were exactly the way they were described - Felurian, calling the lightning down on the bandits, being trained by the Adem. The book is really inconsistent about the idea that these are all legends. The most impressive ones are pretty much exactly true, and the poo poo that no one would ever care about in reality (getting whipped and not bleeding) are the only ones that are really exaggerated. Burning down the town is pretty much the only case for a misinterpreted event turning to "legend." The whole thing sort of falls apart because the events that are supposedly being misinterpreted only happened 10 years prior. They make no sense because a lot of them have ample eye witnesses. It's just not how legends and folklore work.
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Jul 3, 2014 14:47
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Solice Kirsk posted:Well Slenderman is a thing and it certainly is less than 10 years old with tons of goons knowing the origin and yet we still get kids stabbing each other to please him. I don't know if the analogy holds. Slenderman benefits immensely from the internet as a way of spreading (false) information. It also has a lot of fabricated evidence to back it up that just plain doesn't exist in Kvotheland. I don't see how most of the rumors actually work in his world. Kvothe going around saying "Kvothe has demon blood" is just an idiotic concept. How does that even work? Doesn't he just become the kid whose uncle "works at Nintendo?" Similarly, he makes up a chronicler story and then he's like, next week you'll have your own full mythology. That makes no sense. It's one thing to tell a fictional story as a fictional story, but why would everyone (having never heard of chronicler) suddenly buy into it as real and then start building a mythology for him? People are talking about Kvothe with the sort of fervor usually reserved for a religious figure, but that sort of legend doesn't generally happen within a person's lifetime. Think of it like a modern celebrity - a better analog for Kvothe than Slenderman. Sure, there may be rumors that Celebrity X is an rear end in a top hat or did something bad, but these are usually within the realms of normal human behavior. It's not like people generally believe that Tom Cruise has a secret moonbase or that Morgan Freeman is actually a robot. Also, no one really cares about what most notable people did prior to the things that made them famous or infamous. Like, we all know Hitler did some awful poo poo, and we can probably talk about that. We have a vague sense of failed at art as a back story, but what can you tell me off the top of your head about his childhood? What were is parents like? No one cares, and we have way better information preservation poo poo than people in Kvotheland. Now sure, there will be historians who know this stuff, but the general public is only really concerned with the big important stuff he is known for and he's arguably the most negative figure in the past hundred years. Likewise, the general public doesn't have wildly inaccurate ideas about what happened in the holocaust. Not everyone has it perfect, but we regard people with wildly divergent ideas (it never happened) as nutcases and assume they're racist. Now, what we do have a lot of is folklore about incidental stuff not related to specific historical events. In regard to Hitler, people make up a lot of poo poo - there is a lot of talk about his sexual deviancy for instance. This all has a cultural purpose though - maybe it's generated to put him down and separate the general public from him. Perhaps we need him to be really messed up across all facets of his life because we don't want to think of him as at all like us in any conceivable way. From what I understand, we're told that Kvothe is not believed to be a good guy in his world (I don't think they view him as Hitler, but it sounds like he has a big hand in loving things up), but most of the legends are about making him sound badass. Even if the people were making legends about a very contemporary figure, wouldn't they be more focused on the negative? Why are their singing his praises about how clever he was for getting out of his trial? Why not attribute the action to some sort of negative - putting a spell on the judge or consorting with demons? Everything they say just seems to be made to make him look more badass. The other big problem is that he actually does the most fantastical poo poo pretty much as described. I give Rothfuss credit for the idea of writing a book exploring the intersection of truth and legend, but I think the execution is totally bungled because Kvothe is such a Mary Sue. The big events that should be the ones that are distorted are the most unbelievable ones. The burning down of Trebon is the only one that really delivers. But, he did actually sex Felurian just like the story. In fact, the rumors might be a slightly less ridiculous version than the reality. Similarly, he does know "deep mysterious magics" he blows up bandits with goddamn lightning. That's not the science magic that he spends the whole series claiming isn't magic, it's real crazy magic. The Adem do teach him their super secret beat everyone martial art. I think the ultimate problem is that Rothfuss sets up a scenario where Kvothe was supposed to be rather competent but the stories people tell make him out to be larger than life. By the end of the second book is is just larger than life. He has access to magic (whenever he really needs it) that few people in the world even believe exists (even though the only magic school actively teaches it). He can fight better than anyone he is likely to encounter outside of supernatural forces. He actually bones an ancient sex goddess that has a track record of killing everyone she encounters. All of this is less interesting than if he had just got through obstacles with a bit of trickery and deception. Early on, it seems like this might be the case (him listening in on the entrance exam questions to get by on a combination of smarts and cheating), but by the end of the second book, we're pretty much at a point where he just is inhumanly good at everything.
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Jul 3, 2014 23:22
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Above Our Own posted:Your reply seems to be comparing celebrity as it occurs in the modern age, instead of the more analogous premodern societies where legendary corruption of fact did occur even while the objects of legend were still alive, but I think your other points stand. I read a really good blog post last week from a PhD student who studies folklore on why the majority of fantasy authors have a really poor understanding of myth, legend, and folklore. I've been trying to find it again for the past few days, but I've had no luck. At any rate, there was a specific call out on Rothfuss for inaccuracy in the area. I really wish I had the article, it was a good read
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Jul 5, 2014 02:42
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The Denna/Kvothe relationship is just stupidly written unless there is a narrative reason that she needs to be so weird about the whole thing. Like every other woman in the book, she's clearly very into Kvothe (despite his creepy as gently caress Nice Guy nature), but they can't just have a relationship because... If the narrative explains why they can't be together (Chandrian stuff, probably) than it isn't Kvothe's fault and he remains good at pretty much everything that he can be good at. In general, he doesn't gently caress up so much as circumstances beyond his control conspire to dick him over. When people don't like him, they're written as racists or just dicks -even though he's wildly unlikable. He isn't a gently caress up "when it counts" he gets hosed over "when it counts."
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Jul 27, 2014 03:00
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the JJ posted:Now I know I haven't read the book in forever but I'm p. sure he, e.g., thought she was sleeping with all those dudes and therefore she would approve of his new PUA ways and thus want to get in on the action. Like, iirc their last big interaction was precisely him loving up because he's a horrible nice guy autistic AND because he thought his magic sexness entitled him to Denna. Like that was the whole point of the arc to me, neatly enclosing what a tremendous gently caress up he is despite seemingly boundless Mary Sue ism. Like yeah, the next few books need to be real on the ball to make the rest worth it but the sex goddess subplot works (for a given value of works) for me because it is wrapped up in the book. I mean there's that, Denna's encounter with the girl in the city, and the doom tree's method of getting under his skin ("oh no, your damsel is in distress, go be the hero in all those stories of yours!") all circle back around pretty competently to: no, Kvothe's complex is really loving this up. The thing is, the Denna relationship just never makes sense. He doesn't screw up by acting all PUA (which is certainly lovely), he screws up because the narrative needs him to fail. If Denna actually didn't like him then it would 100% make sense that all his wildly shifting approaches wouldn't work because you can't magically game a woman into wanting to gently caress you. However, even if we buy his initial "I am not skilled in talking to ladies" (even though every lady he meets want's to sex him), it still doesn't hold up because Denna pretty much confesses her love for him in book 1 while drugged. So even if he was the shyest dude ever -he's not- once we get past the period where she's drugged, I cannot fathom a legitimate reason for him not to say "Hey, while you were under the influence of the resin, you said some things that make me think you want a relationship of some sort with me. If that's true, I pretty obviously like you, so maybe we could go on a date to musicville sometime." Shyness doesn't even make sense as an excuse since within a couple months of the dragon affair he is off wooing his aunt with songs and letters. Like, I know he constantly tells us that he is totally oblivious to ladies, but the text doesn't actually support that. It's the same as his claims about being "really truly poor" when in reality he's just living a middle-class life around a bunch rich people. If we were supposed to see his new approach to sex as not working, he wouldn't be having sex with every lady he meets. EDIT: The tree/Denna thing is just awful - "oh no the girl I like is in danger! Better run off to martial arts land for a few months."
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Jul 28, 2014 20:19
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Sunsetaware posted:Speaking of the resin, Rothfuss sure likes to mention Denna's perfectly white teeth a lot. Will he follow up on that and have her involved with fantasy drugs, or is Denna just so perfect by coincidence? I'm mostly expecting the latter. Given her "OMG" reaction when she finds out she ate some resin, I imagine she just has perfect teeth because she is the love interest of the protagonist.
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Jul 28, 2014 21:43
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Wittgen posted:Also, he's still poor enough that buying a street snack is an impossible luxury. How is that not poor? I'm just going to quote something I wrote 20 pages ago instead of rehashing it Karnegal posted:Really, truly, poor people don't attend the most prestigious educational institution in ye olde world. He has two sources of income (being a virtuoso lute player and making magical loving devices). Given the setting, his life and means are wildly better than the vast majority of people in his world. In reality he's living a middle class to upper middle class life, but he's jealous of his rich friends. Can you point to any text in the Imre sections that show Kvothe going without food for long periods of time or lacking the materials he needs to complete his studies? If you have to work to go to college, you're still immensely privileged, particularly in ye olden times. As to growing up poor and it sticking with you - sure that's totally a thing. But he didn't grow up poor. He grew up in a relatively wealthy group of elitist traveling performers. The first part of book one is the rue and pals thumbing their noses at the towns people they're preforming for (they should of offered us more and beds, but we wouldn't take their licey beds because we have nicer poo poo anyway). He is certainly poor for his couple years on the street, but I have a hard time buying into that being a real big life experience since he seems to ignore that it happened most of the time. I mean, there's a whole list of stuff wrong with the Tarbean section as it doesn't fit with the rest of that book, and the whole section is resolved when he just wakes up one day decides to be awesome again and promptly solves all his problems in an afternoon.
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Jul 31, 2014 18:42
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Chichevache posted:People who go through traumatic events often cope with them by ignoring them or pretending they didn't happen. Kvothe certainly doesn't come across as an individual who is mentally healthy enough to confront that past head on. Yeah, but it doesn't affect him at all. Suppressing bad experiences isn't some sort of magical cure for psychological trauma. He really just decides he's better one day and then the time spent there never impacts the narrative again until he decides to wander through in the end of book two. I don't recall any horrible flashbacks there, he just goes through like a baller tossing money to the guy tending the mentally ill kids and listening to people talk about how good Kvothe is at sex.
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Aug 1, 2014 04:31
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Chichevache posted:Who is the person who tells you it doesn't affect him and that he's so cool and awesome that he overcomes through sheer willpower? Are we going back on the unreliable narrator wank? I thought the thread had come to the consensus that if that's what was going on here, this was a real lovely attempt at it, but I could be confusing it with a discussion of the book elsewhere. To summarize: if Rothfus wanted to do an unreliable narrator he did a piss poor job of it. If you're going to do unreliable narrator, you need to either write a short story or give enough evidence that that's what's going on as the story is happening. We're at what, 2500 pages of book at this point? What are people hoping for with the unreliable narrator thing? If we get to 3500 and we get a "haha, that was all bullshit" are people going to be happy? They shouldn't because that's a godawful pay off. It's like reading a murder mystery where you finish the book only to find out that the murderer was a character you never met. It's wildly unsatisfying and just plain lazy writing. We have no significant evidence to support the unreliable narrator theory. It really just stems from fans of the book saying "man, these books would be better if Kvothe was an unreliable narrator." And that's true. That's not what the book is though. In fact, all evidence points to Kvothe not being a liar. Bast is clearly a powerful Fey being, but he's following Kvothe like a puppy. He only really contradicts Kvothe on his physical description of Denna. And that scarcely counts since beauty is subjective and we tend to think the people we love are better than they are. It's not like Bast is calling him out on any actual facts. I assume people like the idea because they see it as going along with the idea of the book as a genre deconstruction and an examination of legend and folklore vs reality. The issue is that it's not a particularly good deconstruction. It's primarily a lot of Rothfus via Kvothe going "oh look at what a cleverpants I am" - "but that would only happen in a story -haha reader you know that this is a story; indeed a story within a story. gently caress am I clever  . The folklore vs reality thing only works if you buy into the absurd way that Rothfus seems to think these sorts of stories spread. I 100% buy a world where people have legends about a guy who hosed an ancient sex/death goddess and lived. I don't buy that a teenage virgin does it with no proof and the rumor is spread 1/2 way across the known world inside of a couple of weeks.This also highlights a problem where the various things the book is allegedly doing contradict each other. If Kvothe is an unreliable narrator, we would assume he's full of poo poo about Felurian. If he's full of poo poo, then how do these legends even spread? We can't chalk this up to Kvothe as an unreliable narrator because all the people we encounter in the present know the story. Maybe he could convince a few gullible saps that he knows or some children, but people hundreds of miles away aren't going to be talking about it -it would be a kid giving a "my uncle who works at Nintendo" story except that the majority of the adult population instantly buys into it. That's one of the big problems with having the subject of your legends being someone who was alive and doing all that stuff like a decade ago. Legends need a much more significant separation from the figures that inspired them. The whole unreliable narrator theory just seems like a way to avoid calling out Rothfus for bad writing. His poo poo just doesn't all hinge together. The guy should have probably just have stuck to writing a book about a middle-class kid going to rich-kid wizard school, since that seems to be what he really wanted to do in the first place.
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Aug 1, 2014 06:58
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Wittgen posted:I saw what you posted before. I disagreed with it then and I disagree now. If you have to work multiple jobs and maintain academic excellence as a full time student just to barely keep your head above water, you're poor. Yeah, you're really lucky and privileged to be able to attend the university, but you are still poor. Poverty isn't just starving and totally destitute, though Kvothe is that at one point as well. No. Working a job to pay for school and pay for your living expenses and managing to do so is called being middle class. He's not even missing meals. There's no social wellfare to support people in his world. He's doing great by the standards of said world. Not being able to go to school at all because you can't afford it is being poor.
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Aug 1, 2014 07:00
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Wittgen posted:This is why I think that Karengal has lovely beliefs about what constitutes poverty in the real world. I've been saying that Kvothe is wildly better off than the majority of the people in his world so it's insulting to claim that he know about what it means to be "truly poor" and that this is represented in the Imre sections. In the real world, a person who can attend one of the best schools in the world while paying their own living expenses and never missing a meal is not truly poor. (Remember, if we're comparing Kvoth's experience to the real world, we're talking about a person who received no scholarships and is paying off loans with absurd interest at the end of each semester). Their ability to do all three of those things mean that they are better off than the majority of people in the world. A lovely opinion about poverty is thinking that middle class white people are the ones who have it tough.
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Aug 2, 2014 08:03
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Strategic Tea posted:But almost all those young adults make it out fine because they aren't in genuine poverty. They're going through arty, urban unemployment or doing the ~poor student on ramen~ song and dance. Most begrudgingly know they have family to fall back on in the worst case. And only guessing here, but that's probably the closest Rothfuss (who spent like ten years as an undergrad) has come to being truly poor as well. This is what I'm saying. In the real world this isn't actual poverty. Meanwhile in Kvothe world, Kvothe never actually has to deal with actual poverty once he decides to leave Tarbean. The fact that he just wakes up one day and decides he's going to solve all his problems is a pretty good indication that actually investigating a character climbing out of poverty isn't a think Rothfus is interested in. That would be fine if he didn't feel compelled to hit us over the head with HOW POOR KVOTHE is all the drat time. He really is doing great in the context of his world, and the only time this wasn't true was the Tarbean portion, which I've noted never really seems to play a significant part in his life again.
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Aug 3, 2014 15:47
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Chichevache posted:I don't know why you're so offended by me making a point. His argument was that Kvothe and Mary Sue characters are boring and he wanted to know why Rothfuss didn't make an interesting character. Sometimes people need to be reminded that interests are subjective and that while the Mary Sue character may not work for him, it does work for others. Some opinions are lovely. Like if you think that women are inferior to men or white people are smarter than black people. That's an opinion that you can have, but it's also reasonable for us to call you out on your lovely beliefs. We're not talking about a 16 year old's fan fiction, we're talking about a book that's getting compared to Tolkien and inducted into the genre's cannon. Mary Sues are lovely characters because they don't develop. They just add to their already staggeringly long list of talents. When your characters are good at nearly everything any conflict that actually provides difficulty for them is likely to be overly contrived - all these people who just hate Kvothe "because" and who we're clearly supposed to take a assholes. Take Hemme and Kvothe. The guy hates Kvothe from the very beginning for no real reason and treats him like poo poo. We're supposed to see him as a villain - and he's a particularly one dimensional one. When he has his big "why don't YOU teach the class" scene (which comes after him doing some stock bad guy stuff like the "gates of hell" bit) we're supposed to think Kvothe is the man for schooling him. This is reinforced when the other instructors bust his balls after the fact. Both he and Kvothe would be wildly more interesting characters if Kvothe had tried to be a smug smartass about how he's too smart for the class, and Hemme just shut him down by asking him to be quite and giving him a "see me after class" wherein he exasperatedly explained how loving school works. That's the thing. Kvothe's only actual flaw is that he's a smug rear end in a top hat, but pretty much everyone who treated him poorly for being a smug rear end in a top hat is presented as a bad person, so it really nullifies it. Karnegal fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Aug 7, 2014 |
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Aug 7, 2014 21:12
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Maud Moonshine posted:Would that necessarily have been better? More realistic, maybe, but I personally don't think I would have enjoyed reading it. Cringe humour doesn't really work in a written medium so it would just have been... cringey. I think a real Mary Sue would have got up and given a class which showed Hemme that he knew his stuff and would have resulted in Hemme adoring him and an immediate promotion to a more difficult class. That would have been really bad writing. At least in the text as it stands Kvothe got in trouble for what he did, and that's what drove the story forward. Mary Sues aren't utterly perfect. They wouldn't work at all even in fan fiction if they were because then they're just omnipotent dieties. What they are, are characters that have a ridiculously long list of talents -many of which are attained through native aptitude. If they do have to work at something they usually achieve it much faster than normal because of their special nature. They pretty much always have whatever skills they need in a given situation. So, for example, if they're stranded in the woods, either they have some master survival skills or they intuitively know what to do (sound like someone we know?). Essentially, the more special and singular your character is, the more likely that they're a Mary Sue. The problem is amplified when they lack real credible weaknesses. Kvothe's weaknesses are being bad with women (demonstrably untrue from the get go) and he's an arrogant poo poo (which never gets him in real lasting trouble). Sure, maybe we'll see him catch some poo poo in book 3, but that's a long way to go with no character development. Talented characters are perfectly fine, but the issue is characters whose talents are so all-encompassing that there isn't much of anything out there that can actually present them with a real meaningful challenge. Their range is also problematic because it reeks of juvenile wish fulfillment "my character is a great singer, and a sword-fighter, and a chef, OH and his grandfather was actually a king, and he knows magic, and he trained with some ninjas, and he can see at night, and..." It's just a list of unrelated talents. In reality, you only have so much time to get good at things. Mary Sues on the other hand are good at a ton of wildly disparate things. Kvothe is a Mary Sue because he always has the skills and knowledge necessary to get out of pretty much any situation without aid. I know how to do a lot of things, but there are plenty of situations where my knowledge and skills will require me to seek aid. If my car gets hit, I probably don't know how to fix it. I need to get around, that's a problem that I'll need to go to someone else to fix. Kvothe doesn't really have these situations. His REAL problems (not the bullshit "I wish I had more money" wanking) are pretty much all related to the Chandrian. To date, we've yet to see any real compelling evidence that anyone HAS that information. So if it's a weakness it's one that everyone has. Where the 2nd book REALLY emphasized this problem was in Kvothe's insane feats of prowess. He was overpowered and talented in the first book, but there was still a little bit of Kvothe overcomes things by being clever (spying on other students' interviews). In the 2nd book, he really does just use ancient powerful magic on a scale that only a handful of people in the world believe in outside of stories, and he really does just woo an ancient sex deity with his smooth virgin gently caress skill.
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Aug 8, 2014 00:46
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SolTerrasa posted:Everybody says this, I don't know how you could read it that way. He Names her, there's this whole bit about it, it's in weird poetic language. He sings four notes that he reads from her instinctively or something like that. It's not explicitly said, but it's obvious. Yeah - he stops her with her true name - which is bullshit. But then when they're talking he says he's a virgin and she essentially says "BS you're too good at sex to be a virgin." - This is bullshit as well. Calling her name just stops her from magicking him. It doesn't mind control her to think he's great at boning.
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Aug 8, 2014 03:07
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Benson Cunningham posted:I don't think Penny Arcade are the guys you should look to for literary criticism. I really feel like the PA guys (or at least the one who draws the strip) and Rothfuss are kindred souls. Neither of them have gotten over high school/college, despite their success. Laverna posted:
If you're a SF/Fantasy fan and you've tried your hand at writing before, you've probably written a Sue at some point. I certainly did. Only I did it in high school, and it got buried in my hard drive instead of getting published and hailed as one of the greatest current works in the genre. This is his first book and he started it right out of high school or there abouts. I think he's just not as good of a writer as he's been made out to be. He took what, a decade to write the first book. And that book wasn't great, but it seemed like he had potential to be better with what he had learned. I sort of assumed, hey it's his first book and it probably has a lot of artifacts due to being 10 years of writing. But book 2 pretty much showed that he isn't a significantly better writer for all of that time. If anything he needed more time to get it to the same level as the first book. I doubt book 3 is going to be some masterstroke. Karnegal fucked around with this message at 08:58 on Aug 8, 2014 |
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Aug 8, 2014 08:38
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ulmont posted:Eh. There are a lot of good books where the main characters are complete and utter badasses who, to the extent they have flaws, aren't defined by them. For example, look at Corwin and Merlin from the Chronicles of Amber, or Sam from Lord of Light, or Jack of Shadows from Jack of Shadows, or most of Zelazny's other protagonists... It's been a LONG time since I read any Zelazny, but doesn't his cast have quite a few hyper-competent people as opposed to a singular individual? I mean we're essentially dealing with demi-gods, right? Being a Mary Sue is about context. If you're surrounded by people who can fly, and shoot fire from their hands, and speak any language they encounter, and yadda yadda, then having those same abilities doesn't make you particularly special.
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Aug 8, 2014 20:05
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ulmont posted:Nah. What I'm trying to say here is: I'll leave Amber to Benson, he's read the books more thoroughly than I have, but I'd like to know where you see Kvothe being changed? Allegedly, present time Kvothe has chanegd from past Kvothe, but we haven't actually seen any evidence just a vague note that stuff has happened. What changes have we actually seen in his character in the story we've been through?
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Aug 9, 2014 06:27
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Wittgen posted:Kvothe spends years on the street penniless. When he gets off the streets, he constantly obsesses about money. While penniless, he is frequently beaten by guards or other street urchins. For the rest of the book, he is very quick to resort to force when threatened. When he thinks his bookie has betrayed him, he jumps to violent coercion. When he is worried about the other bandit hunters committing mutiny, he makes voodoo dolls. When things look like they might go to poo poo in ninja land, he gathers his strength. It's almost like he was traumatized by being forced to live in a cut throat might makes right environment. We don't have a lot of characterization for him before that as it happens at the beginning of the book. We have no idea how he previously reacted to serious negative circumstances because he never faces any until his parents are killed. Again, you need something for a comparison. There simply isn't anything available. His life is all sunshine and gumdrops and then his parents die and he's arbitrarily an orphan because reasons (this a section with some of the worst logic in the series). What we do see of him as a child is that he is an incredibly brash character, which fits in with an aggressive approach to confrontation. We don't actually see any change because we have no basis for comparison. With no actual transformation shown in the book, I find it far more likely that the traits you're talking about are just stock badass protagonist stuff. I don't buy that Tarbean changed him for an instant. If it actually had changed him psychologically, he would not just wake up one day and decide to be fine and start rooking people like a pro. He doesn't even have real physical trauma from the experience. All the time he spent supposedly malnourished has not left him missing teeth or in poor health. We're told that he looks like a trim, sexy nobleman's son with after a mere bath. The whole segment feels really tacked on. It's written differently than much of the rest of the book. I think Rothfus wanted to write a book about a kid going to magic school, but Harry Potter was already a thing, so he aged Kvothe up a bit and added some grittyness with Tarbean detour so he could write about a teen going to wizard college instead. knows a black guy posted:I just finished both books and enjoyed them a lot. I've skimmed the last couple pages of this thread, reading the complaints about the writing, and I understand and agree with most of them, but it didn't lessen my enjoyment. Yeah, seconding The Lies of Locke Lamora
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Aug 9, 2014 23:29
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Neremworld posted:Maybe I just don't get the prose but it's really painfully bad, especially when he tries to be 'poetic' or purple it up, which is constantly. The oft-quoted part about silence is really the worst, since not a single line in it makes any damned sense. The words are there, I understand the words, but it doesn't mean ANYTHING at all. I can't imagine any single bit of it, especially the cut-flower sound of a man dying. They don't sound anything alike. Stringing words together at random is not good prose. Yeah, his prose is really not very good, but a lot of people really seem to think it's amazing. I usually try to go, "Hey, what does [insert one of the hundreds of nonsensical purple prose passages) mean?" Rarely if ever do you get anything approaching a reasonable answer. At best people get flustered and go "well, I like it." Which is fair I suppose, but that doesn't make the writing good. The only reasonable explanation I can think of is that people who think his writing is super good have never read much of anything aside from genre fiction and never read actual poetry outside of a couple Shakespeare sonnets in high school.
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Aug 12, 2014 11:00
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wellwhoopdedooo posted:Some people like songs that tell stories explicitly, some people like songs that inspire feelings and if they have stories, they're buried under so many layers of metaphor that it's impossible to pull anything concrete out. So read something abstract and experimental. I'm on a film kick, so to make a film analogy, it's like slapping a tripy abstract sequence in the middle of an otherwise straight action movie. It's not constantly applied, doesn't mesh, and feels like the creator is trying to pretend they're deep. Rothfus isn't writing in a style that is designed to give impressions and evoke emotions over telling a narrative. He throws a few pieces in here and there and then people act like it's emblematic of his writing, and it's not. Benson Cunningham posted:I believe when people say the prose is good they mean it flows well and has pleasing rhythm. I feel like that's pretty undeniable, regardless of the quality of the content. Everyone I see claiming he's great at prose is citing garbage like the silence in 3 parts section. Above Our Own posted:"It was the patient, cut flower sound of a man waiting to die." No, that means nothing. What is a cut flower sound? Silence? Oh HOW loving CLEVER! People have a low bar for fantasy because people praise crap like Rothfus' purple prose as amazing writing instead of demanding more from the genre. There are great films in the sci-fi and fantasy genres, films that people teach in university film courses as required viewing. It's not like people can't produce meaningful work in the genres.
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Aug 13, 2014 10:38
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Maud Moonshine posted:Yeah. It kind of makes me not like him? I may be prejudiced by other things I have read from him, but it comes across a little pretentious - as if he's saying 'this book is too smart/abstract/literary for you'. Rothfuss being up his own rear end is hardly news. If anything, I'm more surprised that the press isn't more in a GRRM - "Why isn't he writing the thing we actually care about!?" mode.
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Oct 27, 2014 19:47
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Boing posted:I just finished The Blade Itself and I can't figure out what you're referring to. I'm worried I missed it! Could you explain? Logen has a sort of split personality. Logen Nine fingers and the Bloody Nine. All book he is a relatively laid back dude, but at the end he goes berserk and butchers all the inquisition hit men sent to take him out
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Oct 28, 2014 15:22
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Solice Kirsk posted:Thats not fair. Remember, he skipped over a trial that launched Kvothe into modern myth, a pirate attack at sea, surviving a ship wreck, etc. So, the part where he skipped what would of been things actually happening in order to smugly "subvert genre conventions"? wellwhoopdedooo posted:Yeah, you missed a lot. It's really obnoxious when someone does something lovely and then does a "if you don't get it you're not as smart as me" hand wave and people lap it up. This argument is awful. If I say, you might not like it when I punch you in the face, and then I punch you in the face, you have every right to get indignant because it was a lovely thing to do. The guy isn't acting like he got bamboozled, he's saying the book is poorly written. Barbe Rouge posted:The Phoenix Guard AKA Too Many Words: The Series So, totally what Rothfus is doing? Karnegal fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Nov 13, 2014 |
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Nov 13, 2014 20:27
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Man, this has turned into a grab-bag of awful arguments. Those of you who are supporting this poo poo are blowing my mind. No one is offering counter points about the book's merits. You ARE the fanboys and sycophants that people are ragging on. This is a books forum not a circle jerk to your favorite lovely genre fiction author forum. If you aren't going to read books critically don't bother entering into conversations on books. Rothfus has posted enough poo poo on his blog to demonstrate that he is 1.) up his own rear end, and 2.) a pretty lovely human being. That's fine. A lot of people who make art are lovely people, and you don't have to like them to like what they produce. Defending Rothfus as a person is a losing proposition, so maybe try to defend the books you supposedly like on their own merits. The argument that things that are popular are good is loving terrible. Being popular has no bearing on something's quality from a critical standpoint. Plenty of popular things are reprehensible, bland, or generally bad. McDonald's is popular, but if you want to make an argument that it's good food, you're a clown. As to the argument that "but, but the forward said you might not like it!" This is either naive or stupid. We're talking about an author with a large following, he (and more importantly his publisher) knows that he has plenty of fans who will buy whatever he puts out, and he's cashing in here. The forward is just covering his rear end to try to evade criticism. That's all the forward is, and attempt to avoid critique. Any piece of art will have people who like it and people who don't, but trying to avoid critique by claiming that your work is only for certain special people who get you is a chickenshit cop out. This is a book that would never ever have been published if it wasn't produced by an established author whose publisher knew that he could put out any piece of poo poo and sell a respectable number of copies to his base. Deviating from convention in and of itself is not worthy of praise. You have to do something meaningful by way of the deviation. Rothfus isn't doing something innovative or special here, he's just being weird because he can. Someone mentioned Kevin Smith earlier and that is a great analogy because Smith's "don't critique my movies, go make your own movies" argument is loving awful, and this is the literary equivalent. Any time you try to shut down criticism before a discussion starts you're in the wrong.
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Nov 17, 2014 08:56
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Benson Cunningham posted:Scott Lynch ROT spoilers : Lynch killed off too many of his characters in the first book. It sort of limits your options in a long series.
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Jan 10, 2015 13:09
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If you write your book while keeping an excel doc of the protagonist's funds at any given time, you probably need to to play a little less D&D.
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Mar 2, 2015 12:12
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anilEhilated posted:I knew they let themselves go once they dropped the original singer but this is a new low. They've been bad since Tarja left/was booted. Weren't they also the ones that were like OMG Richard Dawkins is awesome AFTER he came out as a misogynist and pedophilia-apologist? But man, what a descent from Hans Christian Andersen to Patrick Rothfuss as a literary inspiration. Karnegal fucked around with this message at 10:47 on Apr 8, 2015 |
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Apr 8, 2015 10:44
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Benson Cunningham posted:This is a thing I guess: http://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/38pdo9/im_patrick_rothfuss_word_doer_charity_maker_and/ This is the most Rothfuss thing ever.
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Jun 11, 2015 01:28
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Rurutia posted:So I guess it's not within the realm of possibility that he's grown in the many years since having written most of the books in college and realize the flaws in them that we've noted throughout and is probably rewriting the vast majority of it as a part of his revision process. Well, given that his second book was worse than his first book, I don't think he's going in the right direction. Also, given Long Regard, I think you'd be hard pressed to make an argument that he's improved significantly since then. But then, if you didn't like Long Regard it's because you don't get his art, not because it's lovely art.
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Jun 15, 2015 06:01
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