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Mel Mudkiper posted:there is no such thing as objectively good and objectively bad because the concepts are inherently subjective This is literally the argument I've had ad nauseam in Trad Games over whether or not we can be critical of a game people think is "fun" to play. As far as I can tell, people decide they like a thing for whatever reason, be it social pressure or personal taste, and once they've decided they like it they don't want to consider the possibility that it fails at doing what it sets out to do well.
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Sep 12, 2017 14:08
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Liquid Communism posted:It could also be that you need to better articulate why and how you think that game could be better. Make a persuasive argument rather than just announce judgement on <thing> which they enjoy to whatever degree. Nah, it's the one I said. One of the points we make repeatedly is that just blanket declaring something good or bad is pointless. We have actual metrics to use, things that can be supported with evidence and statistics and the response is either, "I acknowledge this but I'm not going to play a different game because this is what's popular where I live," (so social pressure to like it) or, "Ignore that stuff and just have fun man," which is the game equivalent of "turn your brain off".
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Sep 12, 2017 15:25
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Liquid Communism posted:I think you have somehow missed out on the entire concept that you cannot dictate taste. At no point have I ever said you can't like a thing. This idea that your tastes somehow shield something you like from criticism is bonkers.
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Sep 12, 2017 17:36
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ZeroCount posted:You know something's gone wrong when fantasy, a genre that can theoretically be about absolutely anything, is mostly about the same thing over and over again. There's a sort of ghetto effect where people who only ever read genre fiction go on to write more genre fiction and the people who only read those books go to write their own and so on and so on. Fantasy as a whole has only become more incestuous and filled with authors like Sanderson who can only really blindly imitate the trappings of books that were already subpar imitations of something that came before. What's always been weird to me are the fans who discuss the magic systems as if they matter at all to the story or are somehow a selling point. It's often used to justify another aspect of the writing being weak, like you might here someone say, "The characters are pretty two dimensional, but the magic system is fascinating." As others have said, a setting isn't a story. World building isn't a conflict. A magic system isn't compelling writing and it can't make up for other areas where the author fails. For all the imitation of Tolkien that fantasy is, they miss the fact that magic is the least defined aspect of his world. When it's explicit, it's rarely more than a sword lighting up to warn the adventurers that evil is nearby and usually it's no more than some manifestation of nature. You have the ring, but even that is sort of nebulous in its capabilities. HIJK posted:but if what I like is bad then what does that say about me as a person!!??!?!??!!!??!?! I think this is grossly tied into capitalism, fandom, and identity. There's this trend where if you like something, you're supposed to consume every aspect of it. Like the novel? By the comic adaptation. Enjoy an author? Subscribe to his podcast and contribute to his Patreon. Did you hear he's going to run a kickstarter for a board game version of his book? Better slap down $100 on that too, $150 if you want all the limited edition pieces. And get a nerd culture box subscription while you're at it. You'll get weakly deliveries of low quality children's toys based on your favorite characters. If the thing you like doesn't have much in the way of literary value or depth, then it feels like a personal attack on you even though you didn't create it. But you have been made to feel like you own a stake in it because it tied it to multiple aspects of your life. It makes people react violently when someone says, "No, this thing has multiple objective flaws and is not deserving of the praise it's been receiving," because what they're hearing is, "You have objective flaws and are not deserving of the praise you have been receiving."
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Sep 13, 2017 00:54
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mystes posted:In Brandon Sanderson's books, the magic systems literally *are* the plot, because all of his books are mysteries where the mystery is "how does the magic system work?" I was going to make this exact post. The character development doesn't really matter. If the characters took a different route to solving the mystery, the mystery would still be solved and the baddy defeated. I admit I find some of the puzzles interesting, but this is also one of the reasons why the middle of his books are infamous slogs. It's all irrelevant and it's just leading to the eureka moment when the characters finally figure out how to save the day, again irrelevant of anything that has happened to the characters in the meantime.
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Sep 13, 2017 04:47
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I'm reminded of when my sister was dating a guy. He brought over his Firefly DVDs to watch them with her, then "forgot" to bring them with when he left. He spent the next several weeks pestering her about if she had continued to watch the series on her own from where they had left off. They're no longer dating.
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Sep 13, 2017 06:57
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Liquid Communism posted:Your criticism may be relevant, insightful, and accurate (and honestly probably is, there is so much bad TG). This does not oblige them to care, though. Sure, I can't make anyone care, but I can't make anyone care about anything. So rather than giving in to nihilism, I'd rather look at the motivation of the people involved. When you have someone like BoTL go into a thread dedicated to discussing an author and recommending similar books, and he spends all his effort in trashing that author and calling out fans of the books, those posters don't owe him anything and aren't compelled to care. But when those people go into a thread dedicated to criticism, one set up specifically for the purpose of keeping the criticism in its own place, and then declare that such criticism isn't possible or is irrelevant, that tells me two things. 1) They absolutely do care, and almost certainly for the reasons I've outlined (social pressure, identity, regional popularity). 2) They're acting in bad faith. Peel posted:The comments about how Branderson's writing uses fantasy plots as a frame to present a mystery and a logical puzzle puts me in mind of say the 'death game' genre from Japanese fiction. A central part of the appeal of Kaiji, Liar Game etc. is to present a set of rules and then show how they can be manipulated. But it seems wrong to say that characterisation is irrelevant to those stories, so maybe Branderson just can't tell a story that feels well embedded in the game he sets up. If you're being generous, then you'd say that the events of the plot lead to the eureka moment the characters need either to exploit the rules or to solve the mystery. The problem though is that the journey to solving that mystery isn't necessarily interesting and it's certainly not necessary. The characters could have arrived at the solution any number of ways, so you end up feeling like you're waiting just to get the book over. The other issue is that he's written a stupid amount of content dedicated to characters sitting around doing research. Part of the answer is almost always hidden in ancient texts, so queue dozens of pages of characters reading fictional books by made-up authors. And Sanderson isn't a particularly witty or clever man. He can construct a puzzle and present a novel solution, one that's well foreshadowed in the text, but what he is miserable at is writing good passages or excerpts to his fake texts and he's poo poo at naming them. Atlas Hugged fucked around with this message at 11:25 on Sep 13, 2017 |
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Sep 13, 2017 11:20
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just another posted:Nobody here is getting too lovely with each other or angry or anything like that. There are disagreements, sure, but not all arguments are conducted in bad faith. This thread is fine so far. I was just explaining how in another thread, a similar argument about criticism through objective criteria was frequently rejected and how frustrating that was.
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Sep 13, 2017 16:36
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Peel posted:It's unsurprising, in that context, that the Culture series has a certain horizon to its idea of political possibilities. That said, there's a gap between the propositions 'the ideological universe of the novels is bounded' and 'this is artistically bad'. It's artistically bad if the author doesn't paint the false dichotomy as satirical. An outsider has to see that the two choices aren't the only two possibilities, reject both extremes, and strive for something different.
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Sep 26, 2017 11:50
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Peel posted:I dunno, can't cynicism or pessimism be valid artistic stances? To what end are they being cynical or pessimistic? They've introduced their two possibilities and are cynical about the one that the civilization went with. But what does that say exactly? It's all about layering or paralleling something real. If the false choice and the cynicism was supposed to be reflective of modern culture, sure. "Yes, American capitalism is a monstrous system that destroys the fabric of society, but it's that or communism and we know communism never works!" But I don't think that's what's going on here.
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Sep 26, 2017 14:48
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Wheel of Time of all series probably handles this best. They have a ten day week, presumably have months, and definitely have years, but none of the characters ever bother referring to them by name. The years are occasionally mentioned by scholarly characters or in the prologues and epilogues. Narratively there's no real advantage to saying "this happened last Thursday" and "this happened three days ago". So it actually just sidesteps the issue altogether.
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Nov 3, 2018 05:52
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Magic with rules is physics because magic by definition is mercurial and unknown. If magic in your story is able to be quantified and measured and understood, its not magic. Its just a different sort of physics than in the "real world" This is something that has always bothered me about Harry Potter. They're going to school for magic. The magic is explicitly not magical.
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Nov 15, 2018 01:56
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Taiwan group chat got into a heated conversation about whether or not magic in Harry Potter was a good metaphor for capitalism as a result of the banning, so good job trolling from beyond the grave Bravest.
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Mar 14, 2019 15:28
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