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Octoduck posted:I had fun reading this fantasy novel. Why do people say this like it somehow invalidates criticism? Here's a hint: when someone is talking about how good a book is, the fact that you or anyone else liked or disliked it doesn't matter at all. I liked this book too but all of that guy's criticisms were spot on.
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Nov 20, 2010 14:43
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mabbott74 posted:I don't know why people have a problem with Kvothe being so good at everything. He is known by many and there is a reason why. You don't get famous by being an idiot who is mediocre at best in 3 or 4 things. I mean, who wants to read a book about some guy who struggles through life never amounting to anything? If there were a huge audience for that kind of thing, then I would write and autobiography and make millions. Seems some people can't just read a book and enjoy it for being a work of fiction that has no relevance to real life. Kvoth isn't good at stuff in a heroic way. He's good at stuff in a mary sue no one can ever be better than me at anything way. His challenges basically amount to other people being jealous because they don't measure up, or other people not recognizing his innate brilliance and virtue. If you can't understand why people have a problem with that then that's on you. Just accept that not everyone loves a smug hero for whom everything is a cakewalk. It's interesting that you say that you could hardly believe that this was Rothfuss' first novel. For me it was the opposite. I liked the book, and wherever I ran into the major flaws (in particular the awful way Kvothe relates to women) I said to myself "this is a first novel, it's OK that he makes missteps." If this was book 10 of the Kvoth trilogy or whatever I'd be a lot less forgiving.
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Nov 20, 2010 16:57
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mabbott74 posted:Yes, and yet people forget that it is a biographical of a guy who grew up in a family of actors and performers. I can't point to specific pages, but when he's dalking about Denna/Diana/Dean whatever her name is to his buddy, and his buddy is all "she a bitch" his response is goony as gently caress. "Yes, she is cruel, like a cruel wind, a force of nature that cannot be controlled. And she's also a shy deer, you can't make any sudden movements or she will be startled and run away. That's why I'm hanging around while she bangs other dudes, creeping slowly closer until one day we will be lovers instead of friends." There is even a paragraph where he revels in the fact that he's superior to all her lovers because they don't truly understand her like he does, and they come and go while he's always there for her. Also when he compares her to six different kinds of flower. She's not a shy deer, she's not a flower, she's a human being and maybe treating her like one is a good idea. I mean OK his character is very young and probably a lot of us didn't realize that attractive women were actual human beings when we were fourteen years old. But the narrator is like 26 and he's still just as bad. I mean goddamn this guy is a creep all around. I like the book anyway but it really is something that I have to ignore because it is so egregious. EDIT: also every fantasy series is a trilogy no matter how many books there are in it. I don't make the rules. Liesmith fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Nov 20, 2010 |
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Nov 20, 2010 20:45
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HeroOfTheRevolution posted:This happens all the time in novels. Mr. Darcy is a complete creep by those standards but Pride and Prejudice is considered one of the best examples of a romance novel in literature. What's acceptable, romantic behavior for fictional characters is creepy in real life only because the real life people can't tell the difference between reality and fiction. Ahahaha no. I'm amazed you are comparing the two books. Darcy isn't a creep, he's an overprivileged rear end in a top hat who thinks he can buy anything he wants. His behavior is perfectly acceptable because he's rich as a motherfucker and explicitly doesn't want to bang Elizabeth. If Darcy pretended to want to be Elizabeth's friend when he actually wanted to gently caress her, that would be creepy. Instead he's rude to her at a dance, then falls in love with her because he mistakenly believes she isn't impressed with money, and asks her to marry him. He doesn't sneak around, he's totally straightforward. Also the reason that Darcy is an rear end in a top hat is because Austen intentionally wrote him that way. Pride and Prejudice is about people making mistaken assumptions about themselves and one another, then reevaluating (usually into yet another mistaken assumption). It's a brilliant character study and is one of the greatest novels ever written in the English language. Meanwhile I'm pretty sure Kvothe is a creepo because Patrick Rothfuss doesn't really know how to treat women. Granted, I can't be sure that's true. I've never met the guy so I'm basing that assumption on the stuff he has written and the fact that he looks like this 
Liesmith fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Nov 22, 2010 |
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Nov 22, 2010 01:35
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mabbott74 posted:And my issue is that everyone forgets that this is a book that is a biographical. Not only a biographical, but one of a person who was raised by actor/entertainers. Of course the people he hated are going to be represented as stupid and ugly. Of course he is going to be 10x smarter than anyone around him. It's his perspective! he's not though, he's a 26 year old. If I told a story about myself when I was 14, and I was already editing it to make myself look good, I'd probably leave out the lovely attitude towards women too.
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Nov 22, 2010 14:10
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OK you got me it isn't that specific but it starts out in the intro saying that he's over 30 and then when he perks up a little it says that he's much younger than that he's just bowed by the weight of the world.
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Nov 24, 2010 16:36
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zedar posted:That said, I enjoyed reading the book. Just the more I think about it the worse I feel about it. This is exactly how I feel. I enjoyed the book but beyond that I really can't think of any positive things to say about it at this point.
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Dec 8, 2010 03:48
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keiran_helcyan posted:"I have known her longer, my smile said. True, you have been inside the circle of her arms, tasted her mouth, felt the warmth of her, and that is something I have never had. But there is a part of her that is only for me. You cannot touch it, no matter how hard you might try. And after she has left you I will still be here, making her laugh. My light shining in her. I will still be here long after she has forgotten your name." that one's good but the one where he explains to his friends that she's a shy deer and he needs to creep up on her is pretty fantastic as well.
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Dec 15, 2010 00:35
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actually SaviourX inspired the patron saint of Fantasy Fiction, peep the sig if you don't believe me.mabbott74 posted:Some people just seem that they go into books with the thought "ok, how can I bash this popular book to make myself seem like some iGenius." You're wrong pretty much across the board, reading critically isn't "making myself seem like an iGenius" at all. And in fact what you are doing is trying to bring down critical reading because you don't do it and are insecure about it. You read shallowly and respond in the most childish way and then when other people have actual criticisms about what they read you are dismissive. Because you're an idiot. I've been extremely critical of this book in this thread. At the same time, I liked "the story" enough when I read it. The difference between me and you isn't that I can't appreciate the simple story like you can, it's that you are incapable of looking beyond that and are actually proud of it. ----------------
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Dec 16, 2010 17:33
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treeboy posted:I think the initial assumption that he is incapable of critical reading isn't necessarily an accurate one. However it's quite possible that, like me, he chooses instead to forego the critical thinking and merely enjoy the story for what it is and nothing more. My personal experience and training is mostly in movie/cinematic storytelling but many of the concepts are (obviously) extremely similiar if not identical. I make an active effort not to over think entertainment unless I'm doing it for a specific purpose (i.e. improving my own work) I think the hostility towards any kind of criticism, even the pretty simple critical discussion we are having here, suggests to me that he's not able to read critically at all. He's totally dismissive of even really obvious criticisms like the fact that Kvothe is a douche who treats women badly and the fact that his being perfect at everything is a little dull. If you want to not read into things and just enjoy the adventure or whatever, that's fine. I don't think there's a ton of value for me in that but whatever floats your boat. I just took exception to that one dude's really childish post about how everyone in this thread was somehow mining for book barn cred because that is the only reason a person could complain about Patrick Rothfuss. uberkeyzer posted:I totally understand this argument and empathized with it until i read about 20 pages of the transformers 2 thread in Cinema Discusso and saw it trotted out about five million to defend jive-shuckin' robots with TRUCK BALLSs, and realized it can be used to defend the indefensible. You can make the exact same argument in the Animorphs thread (with the exception of the prose, I guess, although at least those books probably don't refer to every loving shade of red as "hearts blood") In conclusion, "hey dude turn your brain off and just enjoy what was your favorite magic spell Kvothe cast ^__^" is a useless thing to post, thanks. I love that the animorphs thread unironically has the word classic in the title.
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Dec 17, 2010 14:34
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Sil posted:e. I mean poo poo, the worst and still relevant thing you can say about Kvothe is that he's just a version of the somewhat obnoxious Byronic hero trope. You may not like the trope, but a) it's not particularly badly written or used by Rothfuss and b) it's not exactly unused by otherwise critically well received books. But no clearly it's GOONYNESS, because hurf blurf. Actually no the worst thing you can say is something I said earlier in this thread: quote:I can't point to specific pages, but when he's dalking about Denna/Diana/Dean whatever her name is to his buddy, and his buddy is all "she a bitch" his response is goony as gently caress. "Yes, she is cruel, like a cruel wind, a force of nature that cannot be controlled. And she's also a shy deer, you can't make any sudden movements or she will be startled and run away. That's why I'm hanging around while she bangs other dudes, creeping slowly closer until one day we will be lovers instead of friends." There is even a paragraph where he revels in the fact that he's superior to all her lovers because they don't truly understand her like he does, and they come and go while he's always there for her. None of this poo poo is byronic. It's just awful.
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Dec 27, 2010 02:16
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So I'm not going to use spoiler tags because those are retarded, but I just want to say that the Felurian part was hilariously bad, like one of the worst things ever in a book. Patrick Rothfuss has really hosed up ideas about human sexuality and healthy relationships, and while those hosed up ideas sort of infuse all of his writing, the Felurian bit is the worst. To anyone who hasn't read the book yet, I recommend that you skip any page on which Felurian appears. You really won't lose out I promise. Also I love how Kvothe goes from ladder theory nice guy to Internet PUA. I guess one of the books that he found in the library was The Game.
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Mar 8, 2011 16:42
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It kind of makes you wonder what his editor was thinking. I mean you've got this hugeass tome, and long books like that drive away readers. Most editors would encourage him to cut certain parts and drat do the sex scenes need cutting.Benson Cunningham posted:No one would engage with Kvothe in the type of dialog she does, because she is not a character in a play, she is supposedly a human woman.[/spoiler] This is actually a really good stab at what keeps me from really liking these books. OK, lets say that Kvothe is supposed to be a creep and an unreliable narrator (he isn't, Rothfuss is a huge goon and if you read his blog it becomes clear that Kvothe's weird ideas about sex and relationships are the same as his creator's weird ideas about sex and relationships) but yeah, EVEN IF you but into all that and Kvothe is a really well drawn creeper, it still doesn't justify Denna. He says things like "she's a shy deer, and a cruel force of nature, blah blah" and that's creepy, but forgivable as a character thing. What isn't nearly so easy to overlook is the fact that she actually is a shy deer etc. and that he's totally right in the way he deals with her. The few times that they disagree, it is because he was too forward and she wants him to keep creeping up on her all indirectly. That's dumb, and it totally negates all the "Oh he's just an unreliable narrator or an antihero or a liar" stuff that people keep telling themselves ITT. It's a shame because whenever Kvothe is doing adventures and calling down lighting or whatever I'm there, Rothfuss totally has me and I don't care who knows it. But the sex stuff is just so childish it makes me feel ashamed to be reading it, like it's a Piers Anthony book or something. Liesmith fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Mar 8, 2011 |
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Mar 8, 2011 17:08
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tirinal posted:I don't know how you can spend 10 years in college without getting laid a ridiculous amount.
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Mar 10, 2011 00:35
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Donkey posted:Kvothe's helplessness: I haven't read Name of the Wind in a while, but I think I remember Kvothe claiming he had to kill an angel or somesuch to accomplish some goal. I always guessed that to mean that killed Denna (possibly related to the face that her patron may be a Chandrian - see Ash/Cinder theory) or let her die and the trauma from that ruined him mentally. I'm not sure its a spoiler since this is a casual aside from the first book, but I'm gonna spoil the angel thing anyway: It's gonna be one of the Adem. Not the ones who worked for that one country, but the real Adem that were created by that god when the Myr Tanriel or whatever its called was destroyed. People worship those now.
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Mar 11, 2011 13:02
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Lt. Jebus posted:I think you meant Amyr. Adem are the kung fu immaculate conception warriors. Oh yeah. whoops.
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Mar 11, 2011 20:38
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stasis posted:I've got about a hundred pages more to read of this, and I'm still waiting for something to happen. I can't really pick out a single plot point in this book that actually advances the main story in a meaningful way. Yeah I felt this way too, especially since the point he leaves off the story in the last book suggested that he would get expelled in chapter 2 or 3 of the sequel. And to be honest I'm not sure why he didn't, since getting expelled would be a better justification for his extra-university adventures than just wandering off like he does.
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Mar 16, 2011 03:18
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I was really weirded out when it turned out Simmon wasn't gay.
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Mar 20, 2011 18:06
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Decius posted:Admittedly it took humanity quite some time to realize this in reality too. One current theory is that this knowledge was a main reason why societies went from matriarchal to patriarchal. But that was during the stone ages. Not by people who had developed a sophisticated society, philosophy, letters and science. That theory is that women understood pregnancy and it was kept from men though, which makes a lot more sense. It's hard to believe that women with a strong community and oral tradition couldn't figure out that sex makes pregnancy, but it's much less of a stretch to believe that men wouldn't make a connection between having sex and then months later the same girl gets noticeably pregnant.
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Mar 31, 2011 11:52
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Read Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. In fact, that goes for everyone reading this thread. Faulkner does the world-building/unreliable narrator thing better than anyone (yes, even Erikson). Good Books Crew.
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Apr 15, 2011 16:03
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I don't think comparing one set of fantasy novels to another set of fantasy novels fits any definition of blasphemy that I've ever heard.
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Apr 25, 2011 20:28
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A lot of people in this thread seem to think so but signs point to no. Looking at his blog it becomes apparent that Patrick Rothfuss is just a weirdo.
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May 15, 2011 14:17
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BananaNutkins posted:Nothing about art is ever objective. Anyone who says this is an idiot. Seriously "It's all subjective" is the refuge of people who know nothing about art and want to believe that everyone else is in the same boat. There are innumerable things about all the arts that can be objectively measured. Composition, for example. Or use of language. If you write a sonnet with 15 lines in it, well hey I might really like it subjectively. But objectively it's a lovely sonnet. What you like is irrelevant. Nobody cares, it has no value to anyone but you. You can dislike a thing and it's still gonna be art. You can love a thing and it's still gonna be Transformers.
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Jul 29, 2011 18:07
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Evfedu posted:No really lets have the argument about objective aesthetics again. I'm pretty sure we can solve it this time. There's no need to solve it, it's solved. It's always been solved. How much you like something is not and has never been a measure of artistic merit
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Jul 29, 2011 18:33
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There is definitely evidence for Kvothe actually being genuinely as cool as he says: every time his eyes flash or he suddenly glows with arcane power or his voice snaps with authority in the current day omniscient narrator timeline, it undermines the possibility that there could be some subversive unreliable fantasy narrator poo poo going on.
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Jul 29, 2011 20:54
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Ostiosis posted:A problem I had with it was that anytime he would talk to Deanna I would get serious "Nice Guy" vibes from him. I didn't finish the second book, but from what I've seen in this thread, he eventually blows up at her (and calls her a whore or something? I could be wrong here, sorry if so). In the book, is this depicted as justified or a serious lack of character? It's portrayed as a mistake, but if you read closely it's only a mistake because he actually reveals how he feels about her. Like, it's OK for him to be a douche who feels like he's in the friend zone, but it's not OK for him to tell her he loves her or that she has to belong to him now because he's put in the time. It would be OK if she didn't get mad, though. Basically Kvothe only ever regrets the things he says or does if they lead to him not getting what he wants.
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Jul 29, 2011 21:15
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BananaNutkins posted:I think the problem most people have is that Kvothe is a goon because Rothfuss is a goon. It's poor form to self-insert yourself, but it feels like that's what he's done. Since the author hasn't written any other books, we don't know if he can write any other persona, and the characters here are all viewed through a goony lens, especially the women. The problem I have is that Kvothe is a goon and is also treated by basically everyone he meets as this magnificent hero. Also, he's right to treat Denna the way he does because as soon as he stops creeping up on her she gets mad, as if creeping up on her is actually what she wants in a man. It's like Ignatius J Reilly if everyone he met admired him and women swooned when he glanced contemptuously at them and his mom was killed by evil fairies All that said, what was he supposed to say about the sex scenes? If he ignores criticism on forum messageboards as a matter of course (and really that's not a stupid thing to do), he probably has no idea what people dislike about his books.
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Aug 8, 2011 13:30
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/\/\/\ Not bad so much as disappointing. The first book is a heist novel, and the second book is a pirate novel that contains a heist or two. It's not nearly as interesting, the characters are more boring, and the main characters are once again forced by the powers that be to work on their behalf, only to be ultimately betrayed, then turn the tables on their idiot captors. That's not a spoiler by the way it's the whole point of the book, and I'm only complaining about it because the villain(s?) isn't/aren't very interesting this time.drkhrs2020 posted:Good Writer: The third book will answer that by revealing that Kvothe is trying to control his 'legend' but it turns out he's been scraping by and taking credit for other people to impress Denna. Or something in that vein The third book will reveal that he's been sneaking in all the creepy poo poo in order to convince everyone around him that he's not really a hero, but it just doesn't work he's too cool for them to believe it Liesmith fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Aug 11, 2011 |
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Aug 11, 2011 17:55
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Ccs posted:Well Kvothe didn't hold up so well against those soldiers Bast sent so it's clear the current Kvothe is either embellishing or has just lost a lot of powers. He threw that fight on purpose, because the only thing more awesome than being an invincible ninja wizard is being a secret invincible ninja wizard.
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Aug 13, 2011 17:48
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Lord Turtle posted:I think that something has been overlooked in the discussion of Wise Man's Fear. And that's that Rothfuss managed to create a generically asian culture that is not simply better than every other culture in every way. The Adem are inherently warlike, have a cultural bias against any form of public music and to top it all off they don't know that sex makes babies, something that even chimpanzees are able to suss out. He even manages to present these facts in a way that makes some sense. If you read the Adem section about babymaking and come from and came away from it saying "well that's convincing, it makes sense that a female dominated culture would ever not know where babies come from" then I dunno what to say.
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Aug 17, 2011 09:57
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frozenpeas posted:Imagine if Sherlock Holmes had long passages about sitting in the dark doing cocaine and being depressed. Yeah, that's why Watson exists. Kvothe needs a Watson. Guy whose never read sherlock holmes spotted
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Aug 22, 2011 01:36
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God, Rothfuss' blog makes me feel really good about myself. Whenever I feel awkward or am confronted with the revelation that I have some terrible opinion, I think of Pat Rothfuss and just smile
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Mar 3, 2012 17:02
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frozenpeas posted:Patrick Rothfuss definitely writes wanky self-insert nice guy fiction but if you aren't capable of accepting that fantasy stories identify and pander to basic human desires you should probably stop reading fiction. This is horseshit. Oh don't you see, you can't be critical of this guy's genuinely reprehensible attitude to women or his poor characterization because everyone has dreams! Give me a loving break.
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Mar 16, 2012 16:43
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I'll bet he ends up fighting an angel over her (limping dude???) and then she ends up becoming one of the angel dudes anyway. Owned Kvothe.
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Mar 17, 2012 13:37
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I'm kind of hoping that it really is an unreliable narrator, but is done in a really lovely way, without any forshadowing or anything, just out of nowhere "I lied about my past. OR DID I???"
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Mar 18, 2012 14:29
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Silkki posted:I didn't say that Tolkien had done bad writing. I didn't even imply it. I love his books. Welp, that was the only part of your previous post I agreed with and now you take it back?
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May 25, 2012 13:14
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I hope his next project doesn't have any sex in it. His sex scenes are like the Zybourne Clock thing where Johnny Fiveaces is gonna do it cyber hard*. Only they are fifty pages long. *Johnny Fiveaces powered down the magnabike with a not quite unhearble hum and checked his chronometer. “drat.” he hissed threw his clinched teeth which were surrounded by the stubble of five days where in he had not shaven himself at all. It was almost chromodawn at Clashpoint. Alreddy the sun was sitting Walliston’s Hill ah blaze like so much molten meddle or a coin, gyreating in the air, tossed there by the uncaring hand of an imaginary god that doesn’t exist, borne from the interior minds of the hobbled masses. The sky was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel that was orange. drat, he, Johnny, thought. We thought we were opening a new beginning with our mad dreams of time travail but ironically the only time now is the time of which we’re out of. It’s almost humorous. Yeah, I could almost laugh, if I hadn’t cried that part of me away when my parents were maccasared by Dr. Malaprop and the government sanctioned murderers of “CAPITAL”. He lit a Nicosheen brand swaggerette and took a dip drag, sinking farther into his inferior horologue. He thought of Nina and her mellifluous buttocks that he used to love to bang. Even now his nano enhanced hearing could almost hear her vagina lips quivering with moisture and also pleasure, like a slice of synth-ham being tongued by one of Malaprop’s slamhounds. When he got back to City5, he was going to do some sex, no doubt about that. “That’s right doll” he said to nobody and the wind. They were going to do it hard. He smiled, blowing smoke from his nostrils. They were going to do it cyber hard.
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Oct 9, 2012 12:34
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I don't recall whether it was ingwit or brendle who wrote that, but all their stuff is great.
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Oct 9, 2012 13:14
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