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ulmont posted:Forged spoilers: My big issue with it is that the Rachel plot spent so much time spinning its wheels and so much screentime on what it was doing that it ending with no fanfare might be surprising but it makes everything up until that point feel like a bit of a waste of time. I don't mind the anticlimax of "no, Verus decides to save himself instead of sacrifice himself for another" because that is exactly the character he is and that's interesting. I just think it feels unsatisfying and I'm sure if I reread the books I'm going to be bored stiff during the chapters that are basically dedicated to Rachel and her plotline knowing it will end that way. Admittedly while I like Verus as a whole I'm pretty comfortable in saying the author's idea of what is most interesting isn't mine because god knows I don't think I could be less interested in the Big Djinn War they are setting up.
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Nov 29, 2020 01:49
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Brain Candy posted:I liked it, was a good subversion of the healing power of friendship or love or whatever. Rachel was hosed up by some deeply groody soul magic, and Verus did not have the power to fix it. I don't think that necessarily follows. If anything I think it says the opposite. The Djinn are portrayed as having been driven insane by the cruelty of what was done to them which is actually pretty dead on for Rachel as well. If anything they are a more extreme form of Rachel. I don't think Alex is going to go to war 'for the mages' but if he is confronted with an unstoppable, insane and completely malicious entity, even if that entity was the result of being abused and used, he will kill it if it threatens him. The big question is going to be if he can do that without killing Anne or not. At this point the biggest question will be if Alex is willing to kill Anne to protect himself. He's already proven that he absolutely will murder others to do so, including someone he considered a friend. Right now Alex is holding on to the idea there is a way to remove the Djinn or break its hold on Anne and it really depends on how dark the series wants to end if that is true or not. There are obvious hints towards it (they seemed to be getting through to Anne at the end) but it's not particularly clear now. I will say it's a credit to the book that "Will the protagonist kill his possessed love interest in order to preserve his own life" is actually now a question on the table. Right now Luna and the crew (including, oddly, Sonder still) are absolutely people he is unwilling to hurt but they have not (again, except Sonder) been in a position to directly threaten him so he's never had to deal with that. However he has been shown to be perfectly willing to kill former friends in cold blood. And a bigger question is would he be willing to let Anne kill one of his other friends, especially with her all-in on kidnapping and shoving a Djinn into them.
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Nov 29, 2020 04:27
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Lawlicaust posted:Yup. And those stories can be done well. Like I called out Shades of Magic but that probably isn’t complete fair because it was clear from Book 1 where things were going. I hate that because everything else about that world was way more interesting but I knew what I was getting into. The story is well done for what it is as well. I don't really think it's either of those. It is that with most of that stuff out of the way now we're to the parts the series deals worst with. I don't think anyone who got into the series wanted it to go in the direction it did instead of dealing with the magic political infighting and moral ambiguity that was like actually interesting. There is such a tremendous gulf in tone between one and the other that it feels like reading two different books.
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Dec 1, 2020 01:06
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Oh huh. I thought there were two books left. Well, I still don't like how some of the plotlines ended but if there's only one left it kinda makes sense to start closing everything off.
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Dec 1, 2020 03:47
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Silly Newbie posted:From everyone's description, I'm getting a lot of Night Watch vibes from Verus, does that track? Sooort of. It is more over the top and is more political than bureaucratic. They have pretty different tones but there is some overlap
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Dec 7, 2020 05:46
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Honestly upon rereading I think a genuine issue is: Jacka kind of turned Anne into an author pet to the point where it clearly ended up dominating the series more and more as it goes on. He clearly is more interested in writing about her than basically any other character but that means he falls into the author's trap of trying to make the plot ABOUT her. Which always rings a little false because Anne was a part of the gang (and obviously set up as a Verus love interest once he realized making Luna Alex's love interest was actually really not cool) but he kept slapping more and more traits on her to make her Important. So she's a powerful life mage who has a split personality, was secretly trained as an assassin, lived with a rakshasa, is feared by everyone around her but Alex and maybe Luna, and is the perfect heir for the most powerful Djinn of all time. Meanwhile pretty much the rest of the cast is just not that complex and their drama comes almost exclusively from having different objectives and philosophies.
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Dec 8, 2020 18:22
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sharknado slashfic posted:Is there still a dedicated Dresden thread or did it get rolled into this? I just started reading the beginning of Battle Ground and had no loving idea what was going on and then found out I somehow missed not one but two books this year? 2020 really has been pretty distracting. Yeah though from what people say it is a hobbit situation where it is one book stretched over two
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Dec 12, 2020 03:06
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It's pronounced sword.
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Dec 30, 2020 22:54
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NerdyMcNerdNerd posted:I actually enjoyed Forged an awful lot, warts and all. If nothing else it's the book where we got the most Cinder/Verus time, which is cool and good. There are things I don't like, but the most obvious one is Anne- which is something that drags down a couple of books, really. And I'm not entirely sure what it is about her that prevents her from being a satisfying character, but I feel like if she was, it would have elevated the series as a whole and made a number of the books hit so much harder. Honestly I think the big thing that keeps Anne from being interesting is the Dark Anne thing. It's just not interesting because rather than a coherent character who takes actions based off their personality she just has a Flips Evil Switch who acts basically however stupid-evil the plot demands. Alex is an interesting character because there is no barrier between his personality and his actions. When he does terrible things it is because he has chosen to do terrible things. Anne doesn't have that because there's like three different layers of abstraction between her personality and what she ends up doing. Even if Dark Anne is 'a part of Anne' you're still dealing with an incomplete character who only embodies certain specific emotions. And that is before she got possessed by a world-destroying Djinn so now you have Anne, who is in the backseat to Dark Anne, who is in the backseat to a Djinn.
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Jan 17, 2021 09:25
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toanoradian posted:Cold Days is full of big revelations. I enjoy the reveal of the new war, it'd be interesting to see how Dresden will handle this one. The other one, of an infection that turns the villains of novels 1-3 evil, left a sour taste in my mouth. Saying that they're 'corrupted' seems to cheapen their descend into evil. Also, Kravos of Grave Peril was never shown sane, so I can't really sense corruption there. The final battle is almost as exciting as the one in Dead Beat, but the climax is far better. I love it, tragedy and all. The last ten chapters or so was exhilarating. It's interesting to see your response to Skin Game. A lot of people hated it when it came out but a lot of that might have been hype and buildup and expecting something different than we got. For your question: All the items are related to the Crucifixions'. The Placard is the sign placed around Jesus's neck, the knife is the remains of the spear of Longinus most likely. This might be answered more definitively in the next two books but I checked right out after the COVID stuff so someone may correct me.
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Feb 14, 2021 04:24
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Masonity posted:I hate to break it to you... Huh? It's 2016, what are you talking about?
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Feb 14, 2021 21:38
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Omi no Kami posted:Hmm, I'm looking for a terrible book out of morbid curiosity, but I can't for the life of me remember what it's called: it was a fascinatingly bad story about a guy who was basically a cross between Florida Man and an NRA lobbyist, who went around shooting every single monster he saw with just oh-so many guns, pausing between action beats to wax poetic about all of the awesome guns he was using to horribly murder things. My brain seems to think it was an Eric Flint book called Monster Hunter, but I'm pretty sure both the author and title are way off. That sounds like Monster Hunter International to me.
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Apr 18, 2021 19:31
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Omi no Kami posted:Yes!! That's it exactly, thank you! I'm impressed you got it from my terrible description... I wonder how I got to Eric Flint, maybe weirdo author + Baen vehicle? I dunno. The severe gun fetishism is pretty memorable! I only read part of the first one and just did not enjoy myself. It's stupid but it wasn't fun-stupid at least for me.
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Apr 18, 2021 19:37
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Cinder and Alex are both terrible people. Cinder however has never denied he is a terrible person and has actually proven to be fairly forward and unfront with his attitudes. He's a terrible person but he is also probably the most trustworthy person in the series in a very weird way because he's pretty upfront and faithful. He's just the kind of faithful that means he'll immolate someone but he won't pretend he is someone who won't immolate someone. Alex is a bad person who spent a good chunk of the series doing everything he could to take a position of "I'm not ACTUALLY a bad person, you force me to do this stuff" and while that is unarguably true it was also born from an attitude of "I shouldn't have to have consequences for my actions and behaviors" and the reason poo poo kept biting him in the rear end wasn't just because the plot hates him (though it does) but that he was desperate to cling to his vision of who he was even when he acted directly against it. Thus it's way easier to criticize Alex because the character by definition spent a lot of time lying to himself and justifying some pretty awful behaviors. This doesn't mean Alex is iredeemable wizard hitler or anything, he's just kind of a selfish rear end in a top hat who takes a bit too much satisfaction in hurting and killing people while also not wanting to actually suffer consequences for that. And he's in the kind of book series where that behavior doesn't get shrugged off or ignored but has actual consequences more or less. Alex also can show empathy and kindness and genuine signs of goodness because he isn't one-dimensional in that particular way but at the end of the day he's capable of being immensely cruel and ruthless on a level beyond just "protecting others." Both characters had a terrifying bodycount and have done a lot of terrible things, but for most of the series Alex would insist it was someone else's fault he did those terrible things and Cinder would say it is his own fault. (It also makes Cinder more interesting as a dark mage than the vast majority who are just cartoonishly evil terror monsters or the majority of Light Mages who boil down to "we are literally incapable of deviating from our thought processes.") ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 02:27 on Aug 7, 2021 |
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Aug 7, 2021 02:22
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StonecutterJoe posted:So according to his Patreon, Schaefer had an accident and cut the gently caress out of his hand (he fell onto a glass he was holding)...and he's apologizing for it and trying to keep up with his writing anyway. I've heard this story so often I feel like writers need someone to sit down and slap the keyboard out of their hand when they try to hurt themselves to finish a dumb book.
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Oct 1, 2021 00:34
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Darkrenown posted:Yikes, I don't remember much about CA besides the general Roman Pokemons and the rather dull "kids with no powers has to be smarter" -> "kid finally gets powers and is pretty good at it" -> "flying dragonball z style final fight" progression. I just meant the writing wasn't noticeably better. One of the gimmicks was that one of the Pokemon had the power to make people incredibly horny against their will and there was at least one couple that was pushed together by the horny-making Pokemon. The fact I have to type that sentence is a problem all on its own even putting aside that the way Dresden has developed makes it clear that Butcher thinks that kind of stuff is hot instead of really uncomfortable. (See: The vast majority of the White Court writing.)
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Oct 3, 2021 02:16
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Kchama posted:Oh hey, I found artwork of what Jim Butcher wished Harry Dresden was like. For all of Butcher's many flaws I don't think he actually pictures Dresden as anything less then a weird tall hoboman shoveling burger king into his face. It just so happens that is also the #1 most appealing feature to every woman in the Dresdenverse.
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Dec 7, 2021 06:58
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Beachcomber posted:I would say in the circles he moves in Power is the aphrodisiac at work. I would agree if not for like Susan and Murphy. You don't have to be supernatural to want the Dresden
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Dec 7, 2021 07:50
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I wasn't too big on Verus's ending TBH. I really disliked how by the end it just devolved into "Alex is the unambiguous good guy who never suffers any real consequences for his actions while anyone critical of him at any point dies a horrible violent death." It's a super unsatisfying ending for most of the characters who died to be honest and while they were shocking deaths they didn't feel like satisfying deaths narratively. Beyond a certain point it felt like the author fell into the trap of being angry at characters who opposed Verus so they just got poo poo on 24/7 until they died. Likewise even for Verus's friends (or ex-friends) I found the outcomes unsatisfying. Variam in particular spent the entirety of the last book either possessed or offscreen. I don't think he got a single line of dialogue in the entire book that wasn't a Djinn? Anne's plot being resolved by Alex just going "NO U" instead of anything involving the character just cemented how frigging boring a character she is. The most interesting moment she had was in the ending where it became clear she was loving terrifying to be around even for a friend and that doesn't really get explored enough. Sonder and Caldera just sort of died in ways that were shocking but unsatisfying because they had almost nothing to do with the characters themselves. Luna comes out probably the best but even then her sacrifice to save Variam feels kind of rushed and amounts to "she is doing the thing Alex was already doing in the first place." I will say though that I almost liked what they did with Richard. The idea that he isn't a great scheming mastermind but basically just a con man and what Alex looks like from the outside was a really cool idea that kind of got soured when he returned and just acted like a giant evil moron for no reason. I don't mind the idea of him being undone by not understanding Alex but he fell into the trap of just feeling stupid instead of intelligent but not capable of understanding empathy/sacrifice. I was actually down with Richard's plot until the final scene where I just went "eh." It wasn't the worst ending but I think it'll be hard to reread the books knowing how many of the long-running plots just sort of fizzle without a satisfactory resolution.
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Jan 4, 2022 14:57
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biracial bear for uncut posted:Just because you disagree about whether the consequences are "real" or whether Alex suffered any consequences for his actions doesn't really mean that the consequences aren't there. No, I just think they weren't consequences. Everyone Alex had any reason to dislike at all ended up dead, all of his friends are alive, he managed to avoid dying with a consequence that is vague and poorly defined, and otherwise he's back to status quo. Oh no the Light Council is trying to find him and doesn't like him. That's sure different from where he was five books ago. Variam seems to have had more long-term consequences than Alex but damned if we'll ever find out because that was a character who the author clearly didn't care about in the slightest except as Luna's boyfriend. Alex basically demanded Anne get fixed and then trusted Arachne's dress to fix the consequences which they did. It wasn't anything to with Anne the character at all. jng2058 posted:I've done the entire Verus series via audiobook, and I'm about 1/3 of the way through Risen now. They keep the same reader, Gildart Jackson, all the way through and he gives Verus, and by extension the whole story, a kind of dry witty air that I think works well for the character. Not S tier like Marsters or Reading & Kramer doing Wheel of Time (especially the middle to late books when they really got into the groove) but solid B or A tier, I reckon. Yeah, he does a lot to sell the character, though he makes him feel older than I think he's supposed to be.
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Jan 6, 2022 22:33
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Lucid Nonsense posted:Am I the only one who was irritated by the end of Risen where Jacka spent way too long insisting to the reader that Verus is dead when it was obvious he wasn't really going to kill him off? It was incredibly annoying, yeah. I really just got overall annoyed with the ending the more I think about it. I get what it is going for but I just don't think it succeeds. I think I'd probably be a bit more forgiving if it wasn't the last book but it effectively ends the same as the rest of the books but without any chance of actually exploring any issue it throws out.
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Jan 15, 2022 04:33
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Verus is a setting where Souls exist and any SoT reading is irrelevant as long as it doesn't address that. Alex is still Alex because we're given no indication he doesn't still gave his same soul. He may be altered but you can't call him a new person just based off physical elements.
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Jan 25, 2022 21:45
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biracial bear for uncut posted:There's a sci-fi series with a similar question running in the background (starts with a book called "We are Legion, We Are Bob") and the conclusion there is that the only way the copied/cloned personality is the original one is if there is an unbroken chain of experiences and memories for the subjective self. If the chain is broken, the new personality that wakes up is a different--even if very similar--person. I don't really buy the 'he only superficially resembles Alex' part. He acts more like Alex did when poo poo wasn't exploding 24/7 bit he still acts like Alex and Luna treats him like Alex. He died and was reborn but that is a far cry from "isn't the same person." Even if you ignore the concept of a soul it seems like Anne in particular would be pretty sensitive to 'person is replaced' stuff.
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Jan 25, 2022 22:07
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biracial bear for uncut posted:That last bit ignores the fact that Anne was stupid and unreliable even before her personalities were haphazardly combined. If anything, throwing all of Dark Anne's impulsiveness and disregard for long-term consequences into the mix of current-Anne's personality just strengthens my argument. I'm also convinced that Anne at the end of the book is literally a different person than she was throughout the rest of the series, but I don't give a poo poo about her character or plotline so I haven't argued about her or used her in an argument. I mean at this point you are arguing that everything the book says is wrong. Which is cool because I agree that character is the worst but it doesn't really work if you don't buy the initial concept. I agree your concept is more interesting, it just doesnt work for me. docbeard posted:I think regardless, we're left with either a fundamentally changed Alex or a new being that thinks he's Alex and I'm not really sure there's a difference there that matters much. I would say it matters because The idea that you are yourself even as you change is pretty important to the series. Young Alex is the same person as Dark Apprentice Alex is the same as Shopkeeper Alex, etc etc. They are all parts of the whole. it kind of loses something if at the end Alex isn't still Alex.
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Jan 25, 2022 22:24
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biracial bear for uncut posted:Where does the book ever explicitly say Alex is not a different entity entirely? Where does it say he is?
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Jan 25, 2022 22:41
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The twist about Locke's backstory in the last book basically ruined everything interesting about the series anyway
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Feb 28, 2022 21:43
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Syphilicious! posted:What was the twist? Locke was actually the reincarnation of a super evil mage and is one of the most important people in the setting and his reincarnation caused the great plague and yada yada and he was not, as was the interesting part of the series, a conman way over his head.
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Mar 1, 2022 21:22
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Like many UF protagonists Peter is the weakest part of his own series but everyone around him is so much more interesting and better written that he aggravates me more that he is wasting screentime.
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Apr 8, 2022 04:48
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biracial bear for uncut posted:Welp, add "My son is humiliating me by writing better books" to Jim Butcher's reasons for never finishing the Dresden Files. Is it actually any good?
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May 15, 2022 05:45
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Xtanstic posted:They're so great and I always laugh at the narrator's terrible American accent Terrible American accents are the best thing. Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber is the best thing I've ever heard.
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May 20, 2022 00:44
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TLM3101 posted:I mean, yes. Which is why I absolutely get why a lot of people bounced off after Rhesus Chart. That said, I found the deconstruction of the various entities in question interesting in their own right. That said, it's still early days for Nightmare Green, as Stross has taken pains to point out, and already we have Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep in control of the US and UK respectively. So for all the pop- and nerd-culture riffing, the series has now shifted in focus to riding out Nightmare Green - which is going to get still worse, and apparently wasn't preventable at all - by any means necessary. Which, to my mind, is a bit more interesting than having the series end on 'The Elder Ones rise, everyone dies', though I get why people can wish he'd have stuck to his guns. I don't think it needed to be everyone dies but it could have been more creative. Go Magnus Archives on it
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Jul 10, 2023 14:36
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Killing Murphy off so he could write more about sex vampires made it clear that whatever Butcher wanted from the series is not what I wanted. Admittedly the COVID denial did that first.
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Apr 16, 2024 23:43
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I don't really think there's any special reason to assume Butcher will get better about it. Like even at its absolute best the White Court Vampires are horrible rape monsters that he had to write in a "actually threesomes reset the love-o-meter" loophole just so that one of the major 'good guy' characters wasn't literally raping people all the time. He twists himself into knots to justify why the White Court are not "Harry literally explodes any single one of them on sight" and are instead someone Harry allies with. And there was a time that it seemed like that hypocrisy was an intentional character point but the series decided instead to portray anyone who could call him out as So Dumb And Goddamn Crazy. Though to be fair that could be the reason he's basically stopped writing in that he realized he wrote himself into a situation where his Spider-Man With Wizard Powers character is a rape elemental surrounded by rape elementals and that sounds like a genuinely unpleasant book to write even if you got some women issues.
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Apr 24, 2024 15:53
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