|
NLJP posted:edit2: Ah I forgot The Dresden Files: "Urban Magician" Harry Dresden Private Eye etc. is too cool for all of your bullshit. Dames, trenchcoat gets into the establishment's face, scrapes through each situation in banter and blood, general fuckup but only so that he can shrug through it all but actually he's really miserable and man just awful all around. A pastiche of a noir sleuth meets Die Hard and magic. I got through three books of this now 15 book series for some reason (people told me that's when it gets good I think). Now all this might sound ok again as a dumb escapist fantasy (which, yeah, got no problem with that kind of thing) if it wasn't so miserably badly written. One of those I won't ever understand being quite as popular as it is. Yeah, everyone in said thread will tell you the first two are poo poo, being literally the first books he'd ever wrote. The third is a bit better, but I'd say it doesn't really get "good", in the sense of being schlocky fun action-movie style fiction until the 4th book. You can really obviously tell that Butcher's learning as he goes, which I have no issues with, as he actually does improve as he goes. Hell, I actually think ambitious but poo poo books should be given a pass, the only books I can really hate are those that are hateful. I don't hate Xanth for the puns or poor characterization, I hate it for the pedophile apologia and all the rest of Anthonies hosed up gender issues. I hate the Sword of Truth, not because it's poorly written thinly plotted fantasy garbage, but because the author uses the series as an amateurish wannabe Atlas Shrugged. Yes, the Sword of Truth is basically Atlas Shrugged if Rand was a fantasy nerd and also borderline illiterate. My vote for worst loving book I've ever read?  Now, on the surface this book has an amazing premise, and even the plot in the book isn't that bad! The gist is that Earth is being "invaded" somehow by an alien biosphere. Alien lifeforms, labled Chtorrans due to the call of the most feared invaders the giant man-eating Worms, are just appearing on Earth. They are totally wrecking our ecosystems, basically wholesale replacing Earth's natural life. Which wouldn't be bad if absolutely everything Chtorran wasn't horrifically deadly to us. Their version of dandelions are basically made out of Asbestos for example. Plus there's 12 foot long men-eating worms with bulletproof hides. The main issues with the books are 3 fold: 1. The Main Character Sucks 2. The Plot Doesn't Move 3. The Author WONT loving DIE Point one is an issue because the main character sucks. As in, he is literally useless. His every action is revealed to be pointless. Every scientific discovery (HE'S SUPPOSED TO BE A SCIENTIST) is either worthless (There's literally a scene where another scientist basically throws out his research because other people already figured the same thing out), or just completely wrong (The worms are hostile only because we attack them on sight! If we approach them without weapons they won't attack! NOPE TURNS OUT PEOPLE ARE TASTY gently caress ME). The issue with this is that each of these "discoveries" TAKE HUNDREDS OF PAGES TO FIND OUT. An entire NOVEL of the series is based around the whole "Peace" plan to communicate with the Worms! Which leads to problem 2: NOTHING HAPPENS. Where do the aliens come from? NOBODY KNOWS. How did they get here? NOBODY KNOWS. How do we stop them? NOBODY loving KNOWS. The plot, which is nominally how to stop the invading ecology from killing us all, never advances. There's 4 books, which end on a cliffhanger, no sign of the last one in years, and NO ADVANCEMENT OF THE STORY. Well, characters advance, but unless the series actually ends with the extinction of the human race, dude is loving up everything. Oh and the last bit? The author wont' shut up. In every book there's uncomfortable pseudo-philosophic rambling that is then explicitly shown to be wrong! Imagine reading Atlas Shrugged, the whole goddamn thing, and then the book ends... with a detailed breakdown why the entire philosophy illustrated throughout the rest of the book is bad. The Chtorr books actively go BACKWARDS in content. Some hosed UP EXAMPLES: 1. The first book has a running narrative device of the main character thinking back to his High School Civics class as taught by a TOUGH BUT FIRM MARINE who has Nontraditional Teaching Methods. From these memories he gains insight on his current situations. A GOOD LITERARY DEVICE, I liked it! I got a bit annoying at how preachy Mr. Marine was, but it wasn't that bad. Until the end, where Main Character realizes that the entire class was basically brainwashing him into being a Proper Citizen and that the whole class was actually a propaganda laced lie. gently caress you. 2. Main Character's Love Interest rapes him. Command rapes him. His military superior tricks him into a loving UNDERGROUND VAULT, locks them both inside, and orders him to gently caress her. He does so. They get married. gently caress you. 3. Main's Gay Best Friend becomes a Telepath (Actually body swappers. People who can swap bodies with other Telepaths via brain cybernetic thing), who then almost tricks Main into loving him while he's in a Sexy Lady Body. Main is of course disturbed when he realizes he almost hosed his Gay Best Friend. This is logical. GBF then procedes to give a chapter-long rambling speech about FREE LOVE, and how being a telepath makes you realizes that Gender is an Illusion maaaan, and straight and gay are just shackles holding down your soul. He convinces Main Character to gently caress him in sexy-lady-body. They do the dirty deed all night long baby. It is loving UNCOMFORTABLE. Then they reveal that whole chapter of weird gender-fluid, transexual-buddhist claptrap was... well bullshit. When Main Character wakes up the next morning, Sexy Lady is now back in her own body and calls him basically a rapist. Why? Cause GBF, isn't a full Telepath, he's a Housesitter. His whole job is just to make sure Telepath bodies not being currently used for active mission (Telepaths are basically a branch of the CIA), he's supposed to take care of their poo poo. Make sure the bodies eat healthy, get exercise, pay their rent and bills, etc. Y'know, housesit. Instead he always takes bodies out to get drunk and have orgies. So... gently caress THESE BOOKS. EDIT: Der Luftwaffle posted:The Silmarillion is a printed and bound wiki. I get that it's a compendium of lore stuff, but good god is it dry as hell. The Silmarillion is straight up Tolkien trying to write The Bible. It's the Middle Earth's Old Testament. It's the Elven Torah. Looking at it like that, yeah it's dry, but it's exactly what it was meant to be right down to lists of genealogy for the Kings of Gondor.
|
#
¿
Jul 4, 2015 08:39
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 11:14 |
|
|
Oh, let me! http://www.imsdb.com/scripts/Star-Wars-A-New-Hope.html
|
|
#
¿
Aug 11, 2016 12:35
|
|
|
Earthsea is notable because it came out in 1964. It's not really a terrific book no, but it's highly influential on the genre.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2016 06:16
|
|
|
there wolf posted:Even as a Name of the Wind fan, that Ferretbrain quote is especially on point. lovely boy wish fulfillment gets lauded while lovely girl wish fulfillment gets derided as the end of civilization. You want an even better example, look at how many Harry Dresden fans get huffy when you group those books in with that other big urban fantasy detective series, Anita Blake. To be fair, Dresden Files is popcorn action schlock, Anita Blake is basically just pornography now.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2016 00:08
|
|
|
Plorkyeran posted:Anyone who has to ask that question has probably not ever actually played an MMO. There's a huge chunk of players who basically treat them as bad single-player games and either never group at all or only use the automatic group assembler and pretend that they're just playing with bots that have odd AI. WoW's latest expansion has two dungeons that can only be done by manually assembling a group (through an in-game tool that also doesn't require much in the way of socialization) rather than queuing for an automatic group and it's produced a steady stream of complaints from people who apparently will never be able to do those dungeons at all as a result. TO be fair, actually interacting with your typical MMO player is torture beyond belief.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 7, 2016 05:06
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 11:14 |
|
|
Dresden Files is straight up modern-day pulp. As in cheap disposable fiction writtent competently but workmanlike, with an emphasis on sex, violence, and the lurid. It's the 21st Century nerd equivalent of Doc Savage. They're fun, have only a few creepy/messed up moments (in urban fantasy overall getting sex stuff pretty OK is a BIG accomplishment. I mean, he unilaterally equates rape with evil fuckers, and actively discourages sex that isn't between two equals with total consent between them) but I wouldn't call it fine lit, but poo poo man there's so much worse it's not even worth picking on them. Can I just say though, gently caress the Magicians I have no idea why people like that garbo series. I think it's cause they're brain-damaged and think DARK+CHILDRENS THING= GOOD because Christ Harry Potter as a useless whiny rear end in a top hat in Narnia is not fun it's loving tedious. Characters basically never develop, interesting relationships are thrown in the garbage so people can act like mindless fucks because they have to be miserable, there's like 5 different series worth of concepts and ideas crammed together and barely developed, a giant magic furry rapes a woman to death, and gently caress Quentin I was waiting three books for you not to be useless and you hosed IT. Why couldn't we read about the cool gay wizard with relationship issues? He was more interesting. Or just have the superfluous add-on main character from the third book be there the whole time because goddamn she was just shoved in there.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 14, 2017 06:24
|
|