Proteus Jones posted:

Considering it's a novella from 1944, that would be the oldest of oldgoons.

chitoryu12 posted:

Harry and Voldemort are just two different incarnations of that guy in PvP who finds an exploit in the metagame and spams it in every fight.

Djeser posted:

I don't know, goons are EXTREMELY eager to talk about it every time it comes up

LITERALLY A BIRD posted:

i don't like it

Dabir posted:

dresden files more like dreadful piles

xcheopis posted:

Oh, ok, a dolphin trying to rape a human is not "weird sex stuff" got it.

Elviscat posted:

I think you're missing the point.

Stuporstar posted:

But what if I intend my sex scene to be farce, huh?

muscles like this! posted:

One thing I do in long running threads is check my post history to make sure I'm not mentioning something I've brought up before and doing it for this thread I discovered a post from 2015 about how The Kingkiller Chronicles still hasn't released the third book in the trilogy and now, five years later it still hasn't come out. Fantasy authors are the worst some times.

Groke posted:

Or keep children locked in a cage in his basement. Or be a pedo and/or a nazi. Or worship Ayn Rand.

Writing (and then not writing) some bloated, overrated books; and having an annoying online persona? Not bad enough to walk among the truly bad. Not by far.

Groke posted:

Still talking about Rothfuss, right?

I read both of his books, years ago when each came out. Thought the first one started out promising and entertaining enough, then things got gradually less good and by the time I was done with the second I realized I'd probably never bother with #3. Not that it seems likely to come out.

Characters are ridiculous, plot is pointlessly convoluted, setting kind of meh, most of the actual prose I can't remember anything about. Have read much worse but can't say it was good.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

I think this was Westworld, not GoT, though I may be wrong.

Strikes me as the height of petty idiocy to get mad because people guessed your foreshadowing, so you make your ending something no one predicted and thus makes no sense.

The Vosgian Beast posted:

You know I started reading David Copperfield during this pandemic and in conclusion: gently caress both of you Dickens owns

Djeser posted:

My hot fanfic take is that it's an expression of the human desire to take culturally-resonant stories and reinvent them, because that's what human cultures have done since the beginning of time. Virgil wrote the Anead to reinvent myths about the Trojan War, Ovid wrote The Metamorphoses to reinvent myths about the Greek gods, Malory wrote Le Mort d'Arthur based on stories about King Arthur, all the stories about Reynard the Fox from Ysengrimus to Goethe's Reinecke Fuchs are based on existing folktales.

That's not to say that fanfiction is directly equivalent to these; I think fanfic is what you get when the human mythopoeic drive is hamstrung by copyright and canon. But it's not surprising that the media properties that first inspired fanfic (Sherlock Holmes and Star Trek are the two I'm thinking about specifically) bear a strong resemblance to myth cycles. They are premise-driven, with archetypal characters and a loose sense of continuity, being entirely or almost entirely episodic. They're prime ground for reinventing stories, which is why there have been endless Sherlock Holmes adaptations (since the early Holmes stories have long since lapsed out of copyright) and why people keep trying to recapture the 'magic' of Star Trek—and failing abysmally, because it's trapped in the dual hells of copyright and canon. No one but the people who NBC/Universal allow to make new Star Trek can make new Star Trek, and every new Star Trek has to acknowledge the existence of every previous Star Trek, or else the entire marketing tactic of canon* falls apart.

The other big difference between fanfiction and works like The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost is that the latter have had hundreds of years to become distinguished as literary classics. They survived the test of time; I'm sure that there were a hundred other manuscripts about someone's trip into the Christian afterlife or recontextualizations of the Fall of Man that have been lost to time because they sucked poo poo. We're still in the thick of it, and there's so much noise that it's hard to tell what's going to end up surviving on its own merits and what's going to be lost to time because it just wasn't worth it.

Also, I think Sham bam bamina's insistence that fanfic must be created within the context of a fandom is needlessly prescriptive, because I can think of works that are fundamentally 'fan works' but which are outside of the context of a fandom, but I do think that the fandom context is an important distinguishing factor, because it determines the possible range of a work. A work which depends upon your specific knowledge of Star Trek canon is going to be far more limited than a work which simply depends on your knowledge of Star Trek as a cultural object. Plenty of people who aren't Star Trek superfans enjoy Galaxy Quest. No one who isn't a Star Trek/X-Men turbonerd has heard of the Star Trek novel where the X-Men show up on the Enterprise.


*I am convinced that 'canon' as it exists in corporate franchises was invented entirely to get fans of the franchise to devote themselves to consuming all the media that gets produced. You may not want to watch Rogue One, but it's canon! It's part of the continuing story that all Star Wars media tells and if you miss out on it you'll be missing out on part of the story. You won't know what happens and you need to know everything that happens in Star Wars, because it represents a real and consistent secondary world, and not a shambling amalgam of the work of hundreds of different creators over a span of fifty years, often working at odds with one another.

Djeser posted:

Only the fourth paragraph in that post was about the definition of fanfiction, the rest is a theory of the origin and purpose of fanfiction, and why it's a thing now when it wasn't a thing in earlier times.

Also your definition means that Twisted!, a novel about a man who learns he's a were-rollercoaster who turns into a rollercoaster when he touches a rollercoaster for the first time, is a fanfic of rollercoasters. While definitionally interesting, as it means that you could for instance talk about Peter Watts's Blindsight as a fanfiction of marine biology or The Freeze-Frame Revolution as a fanfiction of relativistic motion, or about the Southern Reach books as a fanfic of pop-science environmentalism and Lost, I think that it's too broad to really fit the common usage of "fanfiction".

Strategic Tea posted:

I think I do agree with the practice by copying point fundamentally, but there is one obvious difference.

Someone copying a famous artwork is presumably copying something of the technique, whether that is the actual painting style, the eye for anatomy, or whatever.

Does fanfiction really copy the style or craft of the original? It seems to me it usually copies the subject matter while using totally different styles. Kind of like imitating the brushstrokes of a portrait verseus sketching the subject on a trip to the beach.

John Lee posted:

I types up a big page-long rant here and then thought better of it. (Then got a paragraph into a SECOND one immediately after that sentence.) Suffice it to say that I've absolutely experienced hostility in new situations, numerous times, including times when people repeatedly insisted I would not, and that while I can't detect any real difference in my style of casual-formal-polo-and-khakis, other people definitely have.

Kchama posted:

Huh, that's very interesting to know. It's one of those things you don't expect to be super ancient, but 1666 would prove me wrong.

Sisal Two-Step posted:

Isn't Isekai the name of the website where you can find out info on estranged parents and their world views

Spermando posted:

He's quite hunky.

Ambitious Spider posted:

See Isle of Dogs. A Wes Anderson movie set in Japan about dogs was something I was very much looking forward to. That movie though... oof

Darkhold posted:

I'm not sure this is entirely the right thread but I recently came across this:
https://tidbits.com/2014/05/02/funbits-bears-in-boats-fighting-crime/

Review of a self published book about teddy bears that investigate a crime in Paris. The review also talks a good deal about the features of whatever writing program the guy used to write said book. The gold however comes after that where he rants in the comments over every criticism in the review quoting entire sections of his book saying how brilliant each of those passages are. He compares himself to Fitzgerald and Keats and at one point replies to his own replies so much the comments go to one letter per line.

packetmantis posted:

Does it talk about how Patton Oswalt killed her?

Carthag Tuek posted:

i dont mean to harp on this, but can you elaborate? people say that about lots of authors but im never sure what it even means

Carthag Tuek posted:

okay i know unreliable narration, im not 5 years old, and i did get that there was something deeper behind the story as it was presented in the opening chapters.

just please dont call that unique ever again tia

NoiseAnnoys posted:

i like it a ton but, my favorite stephen chow film is still god of cooking for purely sentimental reasons.

i wish there were more good translations of insane wuxia novels in the west. i need more bonding material with my inlaws.

Asterite34 posted:

So would say that this shark is gonna end up... sleeping with the fishes?

Serephina posted:

You need to read the second book,

The thread on book 2 posted: