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The first trilogy was solid, but it quickly went downhill from there. I didn't get past the book where Tom is missing and it just follows some chick around looking at stuff through the Fog.
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Aug 10, 2017 08:51
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:Uh, I hate to break it to you but in a later book he goes back there like twenty years later and rapes his daughter (who was born out of the original rape). Wow, I didn't feel like responding since I'm sure someone else would point it out, but the sex was totally consensual, with Tom ignorant of her parentage (he's been gone for what they feel is 30 years), but Elena knowing fully who her dad was but didn't bring it up. Tom was horrified when he later finds out iirc. The 'rape-as-a-whole-concept' thing was put in very early in the first book, to show Tom as an anti-hero when everyone in the world assumes he's Jesus mkII, and his difficulty handling their expectations with his self-loathing. It's super-jarring, but sexuality is really not brought up ever again of a trilogy so Donaldson get a pass.
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Aug 10, 2017 14:28
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Straight White Shark posted:baby-talking dwarves Powaqoatse posted:Sounds like contrived time travel incest à la Heinlein to me. Author digs incest but doesn't want his protagonist to come off creepy, so they make up a weird scheme where he's innocently loving his daughter. Rather than derail with defending authors, let's get back to books we loath: Stranger in a Strange Land by Heinlein. It's well-known, and the back of the book describes it as 'A searing indictment of western culture'. Starts promising, with a guy being returned to earth after being raised all his life by Martian aliens; he knows nothing but the language but no social structure nor cues. Then it goes downhill. Everything we do is kinda poo poo and boring and 100x worse than the long-lived uberMartians, except for sex, since they don't have libidos, literally the only redeeming human virtue. So he opens up an actual cult based around having orgies with him as the head. Remenicant of other Heinlein works, every philosophical point the protagonist has is automatically correct since the author says it is (There must be a proper term for this!), and to prove it the protagonist uses his martian mind-powers on anyone who disagrees, showing how right he is. It's been a while, and I can't remember what a lot of his points where, but the book is hot trash with nothing to recommend it except its readable prose.
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Aug 10, 2017 17:27
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Man, I read it as a young male teenager and I still knew the "Legal Guardian vs 18yr old Princess in Pink" dynamic was whack
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Sep 4, 2017 13:48
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The hobbit was, and still is, a great book to read aloud to an audience. Apparently it was written as such?
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Sep 6, 2017 14:06
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I must say, after reading that article I am goddamn petrified of someone presenting me with poetry and asking my opinion of it; I'd not recognize something good if it bit me on the nose. I'll just be reading my schlock over here thank you, leave the philistine alone...
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Oct 6, 2017 13:00
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That definitely sounds like something that works better in words than it does on the screen.
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Oct 8, 2017 12:06
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It took me a loong time to decipher that book's title as "Pranks". The R is actually a P with the little bit sticking to the A, and it all gets kinda blurry around the supposed K.
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Oct 10, 2017 12:08
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Could you copy and paste it somewhere? That website refuses to load on several devices.
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Oct 23, 2017 13:56
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SerialKilldeer posted:And the protagonists knew this all along, and were just pretending to be scared! To the point of lying in their internal monologues. THIS! This bothers me so dang much, and it's leaked into other mediums. The Handmaiden movie relies exclusively on it, and it leaves a bad taste. I'm racking my brain for other examples in literature, but I'm sure I've come across this terrible trope in reading before.
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Feb 27, 2018 11:52
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Contributing to the derail! Penny Arcade had their day in the sun a decade (or two) ago, but the humor's rarely there anymore and I read it more out of a habit. The writer commented once about how he was having up&down psych issues back then, producing great work, but ruining his life. He's now medicated and admits his stuff is weaker. It's been literally twenty years running, it's not surprising that things have changed, both for the audience's tastes and the creators tendencies.
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Jul 17, 2018 04:41
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Horrible tangent, but yea the Shadow Warrior remake suddenly dropped a whole lot more character development in the final third of the game than anyone was expecting. It was far better done than it had any right or need to be. Back on track, how do people feel about the whole "Oh, it was all it dream!" twist used in the final moments of a story? I understand it was more common a long time ago (eg Alice in Wonderland) and the same source wrote how its really fallen out of favor as modern audiences hate it. This came up in a non-book medium, where several people where complaining about how it essentially wrote off any prior events. I'd like to hear other's takes on it.
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Nov 17, 2019 20:02
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I've not read it, but I thought that was kinda the point of the novel? Everything is awful, they're the playthings of an sadistic entity that wants to do to them the equivalent of "pulling the legs off of a bug" for all eternity. Creatively.
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Nov 21, 2019 18:30
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Good point.
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Nov 21, 2019 21:34
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Dwarves [with-a-v] have always been Scottish, and I have no idea who first did that; since it wasn't Tolkien for sure nor was it in early dwarf [but-with-an-f] films such as Snow White, Willow, etc. It probably wouldn't be too hard to find who first made Tolkien dwarves Scottish if you looked hard enough.
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Dec 21, 2019 12:57
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The best professional review I'd read of Reamde went along the lines of "At first glance, it has all the same ingredients as his previous novels such as Snowcrash, but it's so awful that it makes me retroactively question my own taste and I'm afraid to go back and see that I'm right about this." To me, its like he's taken everything that was cool and fun, and just made it a bit more grubby so that everything is neither believable nor meshing with the other elements. I didn't care about his ridiculous MMO fanfic, and I'm incredulous that a couple of plucky nerds are going to save the world, by pulling out their own rifles in an American Wet Dream (tm) shootout in the woods. I kinda got a glimpse of this in Anathem, where a plucky group of pure-maths grad student monks save the world through no skills other than being smugly smarter than the pebians about them. It's... pandering, if we're being generous.
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Jan 21, 2020 15:06
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I've read a graphic novel adaptation (Mort? The one where they kidnap Vimes' wife for some reason). It didn't hold up, despite what seemed an earnest effort. Absolutely ALL of the charm of Pratchett's work is in his prose. You could take the characters, mannerisms, dialogue, plot, the whole she-bang and any other rendition of it would fall flat. The example above with the Discworld comic, there's a scene I recall in the book where some guardsmen come to arrest the wealthy spinster. She asks for a moment at the door, then re-opens it swinging a sword clumsily but with great momentum. Pratchett does his magic with a short paragraph description and it gets a hell of a lot of comedic life, it's quite vivid. The graphic novel gave it a few panels but it didn't work. Live action (or animation) could give it good emphasis and probably their own spin of humor, but still everything of Pratchett's visual lens, ie the entire point of reading his work, would be gone. Some things don't translate mediums very well, that's totally fine. I'm bloody glad he burned his work.
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Feb 14, 2020 19:46
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Funny, I never felt as if it was his illness directly affecting his writing, but more about just throwing in the towel and pushing out as many goddamn books as he could before he croaked. Selling out in the best possible way, if you would.
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Feb 22, 2020 00:34
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My first exposure to Eddings was reading The Ruby Knight ie the first Sparhawk book as a standalone. Thought it was super cool as a tween. I then ran through the rest of his stuff, and it's been a steady roll downhill since. I threw in the towel after The redemption of Athalus, which I picked up since I thought he'd do something new with a standalone. I was kinda right - but also horrified. Last I heard he was still flogging dead horses, I can only think his audience is new people who've not gotten their fill yet. edit: Ahahaha, guess so! Also I will be darned, he was a lot less prolific than I thought Serephina has a new favorite as of 23:03 on Feb 25, 2020 |
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Feb 25, 2020 21:18
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LITERALLY A BIRD posted:also, I briefly mistook this as a great username/post combo. Also YES not a single drat thing about male/female relationships in those books made sense. I was a teenager and still knew it was bullshit how the men just shrugged and accepted their marital fates. And disgusting. I now recognize it as grooming, and Eddings glorifying it. Its all over his books, it's foul.
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Feb 26, 2020 09:20
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Mr. Sunshine posted:Yeah, that's Stephen Donaldson's "The Gap" series, isn't it? The entire plot of the first book is exactly what you said, some space pirate gets a hold of a girl with some kind of control implant, and not only rapes her but literally enslaves her, forcing her body to act against her will. It must be 20 years since I read that book, but I still vividly remember a part where he makes her give him a blowjob, and then pushes some buttons on the control to make her smile at him afterwards. You know, now that you mention it Donaldson had an awful lot of rape going on didn't he? His premier series, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, had his entire antihero persona set up from rape, that other trilogy that was about going through the looking glass (forgot name) had one or two instances in it, and his short story compilation Daughter of Regals had rape in at least one.. hrm. gently caress. I don't like this re-examining of childhood favorites anymore =[ Elviscat posted:It's really sad, Asimov and Tolkien needed exactly 0 hosed up sex to sell novels.
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Feb 29, 2020 23:19
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Yea "don't meet your heroes" is kind of a thing. I really do appreciate how Clarke and Asimov fit in so much hard astrophysics into their stories, which is why their stuff was always so cool while always being plot-focused.
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Mar 1, 2020 03:35
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It's all terrible. Which is appropriate, given what thread we're in.
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Apr 26, 2020 16:22
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As a kiwi, I'm laughing at the idea of a farmer being given a lengthy description as if he was some sort of exotic creature. Like Matt, from over in Hamilton? What's next, a lurid description of the salacious lifestyle of a retail clerk?
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May 8, 2020 13:26
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I was reading through an English translation of Count of Monte Cristo, and the forward mentioned how the writing style was very different and influential and appeals to modern audiences. I enjoyed the read thoroughly, thinking how accessible it is compared to other great classics (translated or not). It took a long while after to notice that tiny asterisk on the cover saying that it's an abridged version, and I've since felt like a dirty philistine.
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May 20, 2020 23:59
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I mean yea, that's basically what it was. If you are a hack, and copy something popular in a terrible way but it hits so close to home that people draw awkward comparisons to the source work, could it be considered unintentional satire? Also my favorite bit was quote:because sex before marriage which was done out of True Love is not a sin, so she is still a spiritual virgin and I’ll be honest, I started drinking heavily at this point and it’s all a bit of a blur.
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Jul 26, 2020 07:22
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I've not watched any of the GoT stuff, but I thought I heard that the tv quickly blitzed through book content and was forging their own stuff halfway through? But yea, that's a trap you see a lot of good ideas/authors fall into; they have an fun idea for the middle of a story, can keep it floating forever in almost an anthology style of thing, can easily backtrack to write the genesis... but have no 'point' to the story arc. All beginnings and middles, no endings. Comics and adult graphic novels are rife with this (perhaps by intent, superheros who go on for decades is kinda the point), but occasionally it seeps out into other mediums like Science Fiction as well. I can't think of any lauded work that doesn't either end on a strong note or the ending doesn't matter as the work was all about the journey and/or prose.
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Aug 3, 2020 11:24
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Ugh. I feel queazy reading that. If you squint hard enough, the grammar is justified, but the first impression of every sentence is that something was done wrong. edit: vvvv That is invigoratingly disturbing. I say that after having just finished watching The Lighthouse, no less. Serephina has a new favorite as of 15:33 on Nov 26, 2020 |
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Nov 26, 2020 11:25
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quote is not edit.
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Nov 26, 2020 13:35
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Having rewatched MiB recently it's definitely still a good 90's film, and the agents are unambiguously forces of good. There's even an explicit border agent scene where they chase down a guy leaving town w/o a permit and they just hand-wave him away after the funny shenanigans. Will Smith's presence in more recently films however, are usually a red flag. Especially anything with his son in it. Did Phillip K Dick have weird misogyny in his books? It's been ages since I've touched old sci-fi and I had no recollection of Asimov being a creep in his works either
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Dec 7, 2020 05:20
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Ah yea, forgot about that one! I'm trying to think if the story itself could have been salvaged if he swapped the sexes of those two characters, but then you're just swapping misogyny for misandry. Except maybe not, since all other major characters are men? The thrust of the short story (that the fall of man will not come from ubermench, but from some lowly evolutionary advantage) could certainly have been done without involving sex drives.
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Dec 9, 2020 05:55
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It's purple, but it's legible. The previous stuff was so bizzare that it took me several re-reads to understand that the sentences where grammatically correct, technically. Literally yes, the idea that Mankind should be honing itself towards excellence in all areas, physical and mental. The PKD short short story had the protagonists all worried about super psychics and braniacs.
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Dec 10, 2020 11:29
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He literally and explicitly states that the mistake was in using drugs in the first place, you goddamn muppet. Next you're gonna be loving raggin' on your gradma for her dementia, that old hag should just pull herself up by the bootstraps and get a working brain again amirite?
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Dec 13, 2020 18:16
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All I remember from the one Shananarara book I read (Elfstones?) was a half-elf who can use magic stones for great destruction vs demons, but his human side keeps holding him back. And there's a great big important tree. And demons. As youth fiction goes, there was zero rape or other weirdness that stuck with me, so it probably doesn't belong in here. Also, was this thread always in PYF?
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Jan 26, 2021 10:47
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I've lost the plot of this conversation, are we talking about bad books or video games?
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Feb 1, 2021 17:01
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Not the update I was expecting from this thread, but certainly a pleasant surprise. He better have some pretty nice abs.
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Apr 1, 2021 00:49
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New Super Metis posted:Most widowers remarry very soon after the death of their wife. It's not at all uncommon. That always surprised me, and I looked it up and all I could find where stats on older people. Like, nothing for the 30-year old widowers other than one throw-away line in a study of "younger people are more likely to remarry, of course". Doesn't really help that most studies are paywalled. Regardless, it's always amusing to see people get criticized for remarrying. "No, you have not grieved long enough. Says I, a member of the public."
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May 25, 2021 10:32
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Dienes posted:You know sci-hub is a thing, right? Cheers for that! I'm fairly blue collar, so looking things up properly is kinda foreign to me.
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May 25, 2021 13:08
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The second option, clearly! Gave us such classics as Discworld's Josh Kirby covers, and this.
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Jul 22, 2021 14:17
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A bit more of a literal interpretation of algorithm, just a set of instructions to churn out results without using much personal judgement or artistic touch.
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Sep 2, 2021 06:49
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