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just another posted:It means that you should read and interpret the text without writing your own fanfiction about what the text or its author set out to "do" or accomplish, which is generally unknowable, and is unnecessary to understanding or making meaning from the text. Basically every author I know is pretty up front about what they planned to do or accomplish from writing their work.
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Sep 12, 2017 17:42
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The issue is not every book fits cleanly into a genre. Most people discuss genres as a description of things in a book, does it have spaceships=sci-fi, does it have magic=fantasy. While that's often useful, especially for marketing people, what is in many ways more important is what books and scenes influenced the book to be written. Let's take a look at some books that were influence by a different scene than the genre they have been placed into. Harry Potter for instance while being a staple of YA fantasy debatable the formative work of the genre wasn't written from the fantasy scene and was more inspired by classic novels which was part of why it felt like a breath of fresh air for many. Or lets go to the Peter Grant books which are placed in Urban Fantasy...but owe as much to Urban Fantasy as they do police procedural, so where should they go in a book store fantasy? or with the other police procedural books? both? You can also have a book that's heavily influenced from the past such as the Charles E. Gannon books where he goes well I havn't read sci-fi in like 30-40 years, which yes his books read like they are from the 60s but with modern editing it's somewhat jarring to realize his stuff was written so recently. While PNR is a decently established sub-genre what about an author that wants to write a romance novel but also sci-fi like The Fallen Empire by Lindsay Buroker or Paradox by Rachel Bach, I guess they go in sci-fi even though they are really more suited towards fans of both Romance and Sci-fi but how many possible fans do they fail to reach because it can't really be cleanly placed right in front of their face saying read me. A good portion of the time when a book is influenced by more literary works and marketers feel it would perform better being placed in front of that group of readers then it is called a literary work instead of sci-fi. They arn't saying it isn't a sci-fi or fantasy or whatever they are saying people who enjoy this group of books we feel are more likely to enjoy this book than you. just another posted:I'd love to read some examples because I'm guessing the success criteria are sufficiently ill-defined that a critic could make a plausible case in any direction depending on what they're trying to prove. Just talk to them about it at cons or read their blog. Here we go what did RP1 try to achieve, it was trying to be a giant love letter to the 80s and while I didn't like it and I know goons despite it. Plenty of people did like it and defend it even though they realized it was really trashy, it triggered that connection inside of them of nostalgia and make them feel good which is exactly what RP1 was trying to do, and what seemingly Armada failed to do.
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Sep 12, 2017 19:56
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:...the antagonists aren't remotely threatening. Agreed TheGreatEvilKing posted:The villains are hilariously outclassed and incompetent as anything they try is picked up by Merlin's spy drones. Yep TheGreatEvilKing posted:There is no conflict as to whether Britain and Merlin's interests align perfectly because the church was planning a sneak attack on Britain at just the right time Merlin showed up Wasn't really a sneak attack, wasn't going to happen for a few more decades if I remember right, but Merlin kicked up the timetable because reasons. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Merlin has no qualms about being a man except for accidentally getting an erection bathing with some dudes Book wasn't really about this not really sure why Nimue wasn't just male to begin with though  TheGreatEvilKing posted:none of the royals bother to ask why they can't just skip to AK-47s and save a ton of British lives TheGreatEvilKing posted:people don't try to reconcile a belief in God with the new revelations. The British discard all religious belief overnight, crush every Church force sent against them, and are never in any serious danger. What are you talking about? They worked hard to interrupt the scriptures in a different manner and actually used the scripture to argue that they were right and the church was wrong, the only book they disagreed with heavily was the book of Shueler or however you spelled it. TheGreatEvilKing posted:Hot queens marry into the royal family and contribute more troops, the Church's forces are poorly equipped, make bad decisions, and never seem to figure out that Merlin's spying on them. Merlin starts a half-assed scientific revolution where she provides many of the answers, but no one ever thinks to question political or social structures aside from The Church Being Bad. TheGreatEvilKing posted:The plot is routinely interrupted by 2-page infodumps about future tech and the good guys cannot fail because Merlin drags any pretense of dramatic tension behind the woodshed and executes it. DavidWeberBooks.txt TheGreatEvilKing posted:Merlin could seriously just end the conflict at any time by single-handedly eradicating the church and getting humanity ready to fight the Gbaba, but she doesn't do that and gets a bunch of British killed for no good reason No, because just killing the church leaders would of been seen as a plot against the church by evil and would of strengthened the unity of the church and belief in it. They needed to make the church the Villian in the eyes of the people. TheGreatEvilKing posted:The conflict as symbolism for religion vs science falls flat on its face because the church's religion is easily proven false by the records Merlin has. The existential threat of the Gbaba is ignored by all the characters in favor of dunking on a group of bad guys set up to fail. TheGreatEvilKing posted:The end result is nothing more than a puerile power fantasy that has all the subtlety of 5-year-old me giving the good lego men spaceships and laser cannon and the bad lego men swords. The bad guys are all power-hungry schemers or men of conscience trapped in the bad guy cause, the good guys are all perfect people whom everyone loves, and there is literally no reason to turn this into a 9-book series because the author managed to write it as a single book already! The only comparison I can really make is Atlas Shrugged, where the moochers have no chance in hell at beating John Galt and his strikers, and are set up as straw men to be knocked down like this fictional religion. Fair enough and yeah I liked it better when it was one book too.
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Oct 2, 2017 15:54
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Mel Mudkiper posted:That's the point! Why do warp drives work because it's loving MAGIC...err SCIENCE.
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Oct 2, 2017 18:02
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Mel Mudkiper posted:If you want fantasy and sci-fi to be literature, you have to allow them to undergo the same critical treatment that literature receives, which in many cases comes down to the very things BotL and others are doing in this thread. Real actual god honest academic criticism is about looking at the text as text, not as a story. The end result is the bones of the novel left bleaching in the sun. I get this, I really do, but I feel like what most people read sci-fi and fantasy novels for is often different. Mel Mudkiper posted:EDIT: For example, I make no secret of my love for Blackwater. If I were to give a Feminist or Queer Theory analysis of the text, it would generally be positive. However, if I gave it a Marxist or Black Studies analysis, it would be significantly more harsh. These readings are not binary or contradictory, they can exist within a single text without necessarily being at conflict with each other. That is the beauty of art. So here you are talking about a feminist or queer theory analysis of Blackwater would be generally positive but a Marxist or Black Studies would not. There is to my knowledge no overall and official sci-fi/fantasy literary analysis style that's approved and even then we would probably need multiple not just for subgenre's but for what the different readers are looking for. We had this discussion in the sci-fi and fantasy thread, where genre readers tend to place different values on these criteria than more literary readers. Plot World-Building Characters Prose Personally I order it something like this Characters > Plot > World-Building >>> Prose. I was a bit shocked in the previous thread when I found how much value literary fans put on prose. Yes it matters to me and good prose can improve the book and awful awful prose can ruin it, but it makes a much smaller impact than the other factors for me. Even within these very reductive groupings there are many things different readers would place priority on, lets take world-building. You have internal consistency, breath of ideas, real world parallels/political messaging. I find in literary works real world parallels tend to be the most focused on while in fantasy/sci-fi breath of idea's is often what's praised. So for instance to attack a novel with a brilliant and unique magic system you could attack why it has consistency problems, showing it's not brilliant, or compare it to other systems that did the same idea but better...and hopefully earlier as well. I have no problem if you want to apply other literary critiques to SF/F novels, but for the most part they weren't being written with those goals in mind they had separate goals, and while many of the critiques such as the one of Kay earlier I think does apply and is a negative, okay...sure, but it's not a big deal or even a small deal to me as a SF/F reader. It's not even on the level of a thing I have to tolerate. That would not stick in my head after I'm done reading. Instead it will just poof into the wind, unless someone specifically asks me about it or brings it up. I assume this is in many reasons in part why BOTL tends to critique books who's fans prop their works up as literary greats, and mostly tends to ignore books where the fans fail to claim this. But even those books with more literary aspirations in SF/F are still often appealing to the genre fans first. Hieronymous Alloy's "every author has a weakness" definitely applies to, it just comes down to whether you or the analysis you are applying places high or any value on those weaknesses.
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Mar 12, 2018 16:46
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Mel Mudkiper posted:First, criticism is not concerned with quality. Criticism is concerned with significance. The idea that critics tell you whether or not a book is "good" has more to do with our weird capitalist bastardization of the craft. Its why I have said before there is a difference between Ebert the reviewer and Ebert the critic. So, the notion that we should have a critical toolkit to determine whether something is good misses the point. Critiquing is inherently looking at the quality of a work by analyzing and judging it's merits and faults. But yes, quality is subjective and the different critical perspectives are different lenses that can be applied to provide different insight, and there are perspectives that are outside of the generally accepted critical ones. Like is the point you are making here that a critical perspective is always from a specific lens and thus should in theory be exactly the same no matter who does the analysis, but quality is determined by your own personal lens? Because the primary reason why I can see you looking at a book through a critical lens of a certain fashion is because that one tints your own or possibly because you want to poo poo on fans who constantly hold their book up as supporting X, but when looked through critical lenses close to that ideal it fails to hold up. I have seen BOTL do this multiple times he appears to try to pick the lens that most fits with what the fans are praising the book for. The issue I have is while yes you can critique the works of sci-fi/fantasy along traditional lines is that the analysis will often be of low value to the actual readers of the genre. Then when average fan tries to attack back they often don't realize even what lens they are supposed to be looking through or more common that they even should be using a different lens. So it's fine but it's basically worthless to genre fans, and only useful to people who care about whatever perspective you analysed the work from. Mel Mudkiper posted:A serious reader does, and should, use a variety of toolkits when engaging with a text. This seems to be in support of more toolkits rather than keeping the same amount of toolkits. I understand why more *insert genre* literary criticism methods don't exist, but I'm saying that their lack of existence doesn't mean that they wouldn't be a more appropriate criticism of a work. Of course I know this is where reviewers step in, but those are like you said earlier, different.
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Mar 12, 2018 18:52
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See on one hand you could have a sexless novel; on the other you could have sex scenes written by SF/F authors. I know which one of those options 4/5 doctors recommend.Mel Mudkiper posted:I am not quite sure how someone creates a genre-focused critical method that doesn't end up being a way to justify preference Isn't that what Marxist, Feminist, Queer or really any criticism does, it is designed to justify it's own preferences. The thought wasn't to talk about how the spaceships were built but rather emphasis the importance of the elements that genre fans like, which even then is split into a couple of major camps. ShinsoBEAM! fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Mar 12, 2018 |
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Mar 12, 2018 22:49
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Mel Mudkiper posted:If this is what you truly believe I think you have a significantly inaccurate concept of what these sorts of criticism are. I meant the preference of the criticism being applied, such as the criticism example you gave assumes that feminism is a correct viewpoint* for the purposes of the critique as it attempts to view the work from that point of view. I was not trying to implying that criticism should be used to justify a novel you like. In the example I provided it would be a preference for whatever inherently makes a genre book a good genre work, and I wasn't saying this having in mind exactly what that should be with this brilliant list I'm waiting to drop on you. The point I'm trying to make is that there is no critique style for generic genre reader and what would match up with them. I'm not talking about a giant list of tropes or something like thousand faces, but more broad strokes that places high value on what the genre readers** find interesting over prose or political message that literary criticism often finds itself focused on. *I'm not saying it's an incorrect viewpoint, dear god don't go off on a tangent here. **I'm aware that there are many different kinds of genre readers but I'm not saying make only 1 style to critique them all.
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Mar 13, 2018 18:46
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Where are the likeable characters and the subversion of tropes? #3 under character depth and plot intricacy.
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Mar 21, 2018 18:34
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Mel Mudkiper posted:But, for example, Star Wars doesn't and never has had an authorial vision to speak of, even if you believe an authorial vision matters. The "EU" being officially canon or not is irrelevant because the stories themselves are the collaborative works of hacks to support a "brand" But, but, my story group. I can totally get why someone would get mad at an awkward awful/authorial wipe, but it almost always occurs in multi-author universes where where there are giant gaps in logic and characterization that often get handwaved away anyways.
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Mar 26, 2018 21:24
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Stuporstar posted:It also has actual characters in it, not generic blank teenagers that are designed that way to be self-insert stand ins for the reader, which is apparently a thing that plagues most of the genre. I tried reading one once, couldn't finish the loving thing because I could not possibly give a poo poo, and asked a friend (who once immersed herself in the poo poo back when she was trying to write it) if this was a common thing. Apparently it is, which is why most YA is loving garbage. Fiction without characters. WTF is this poo poo Blank insert protagonist is a pretty tried and true formula that can work well in many aspects of fiction. Generally though you need it surrounded by a strong cast of supporting characters, and it tends to be a lot less jarring if you make the protagonist the more quite type. A good example of this in a more respected work doing this recently is Three-Body Problem, who's protagonist was significantly more bland than the worst YA examples I remember.
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May 29, 2018 15:26
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PetraCore posted:Blank insert protagonists remove the ability for a work to be really character-driven. Sometimes that's the point, sometimes the character drive is about the supporting cast and the protagonist is just a thin veil for the reader/writer to provide the most low effort relatable POV. ShinsoBEAM! fucked around with this message at 18:13 on May 29, 2018 |
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May 29, 2018 18:04
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Why the gently caress would anyone want to read a book where the author is doing something "low effort" I meant low effort for the reader, hence why it's more common in children's books and less common in adult books. Srice posted:In a lot of such stories no matter the medium the complaint I usually hear even from people that love the stuff tends to be focused around how the protagonist is so boring and how it'd be so much better if it was about (supporting character that is much more fleshed out) because at the end of the day the protagonist is still the primary focus. If they still love they book it clearly doesn't bother them that much. Almost nobody will outright say yes I prefer bland generic protagonist over a well characterized protagonist. But most people are okay with them as long as the rest of it is "good", meanwhile a bad protagonist will shoot the story in the foot for many a reason to a variety of people oftentimes for the exact opposite reason. It's generally fine if you hate a side character, but hating the main character will kill your book so making them mildly disappointing and bland is a safe way to ensure the reader isn't repulsed. edit: This is difficult for me because I personally would prefer a wildly awful protagonist with a lot of personality over a bland one, but that certainly does not appear to be the norm from market trends and book discussions on most forums. ShinsoBEAM! fucked around with this message at 19:57 on May 29, 2018 |
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May 29, 2018 19:44
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Stuporstar posted:That's because there's a whole bunch of publishers who cynically treat their readers (especially children) as though they're lazy and stupid, and pander to that. The only metric they give a poo poo about are market trends, and people who try to defend bad fiction based on its market value are empty ciphers of consumerism who don't seem to imagine a novel can have worth beyond mere entertainment. It's also common in political/message fiction, and that market success leads to your message resonating stronger which is often the goal of the work. Sham bam bamina! posted:Why do you think any of this is remotely a defense? Acknowledging the thing you're sticking up for as LCD-pandering swill that's tolerable at best and is used because it shifts units is not going to change the mind of anyone who hates it precisely for being that. Good thing books exist that arn't LCD-pandering then. Sometimes the popularity of something in itself is entertainment, being able to talk and discuss with other people what you like and dislike about something can be informative and entertaining in it's own right. Stuporstar posted:Or empathize. I've heard of more than one midlist genre author who was told by an editor to make their protagonist not gay or less black because they thought it would alienate readers, as if being asked to peer into the life of someone too different from Standard was too big of an ask. People are bad at empathy.
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May 29, 2018 21:05
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nonathlon posted:I once solicited recommendations for crime fiction from a hardcore fan of the genre, and the results were the most ridiculously stupid things I've ever read: full of genius serial killers with exotic MOs, angsty cops that live off cigarettes and coffee, set in weird and illogical locations just for the sake of the location. I mean this happens in music and film too. As you enjoy something more and more the generic no longer satisfies and you often look towards the more experimental, the more weird, and you excuse the lack of polish or perhaps even praise it due to the unique feel it gives the work.
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Jul 16, 2018 15:33
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Ugghhhhhhhhhhhh "X is known as the Y of Z" you mean, because yeah it's awful. I have noticed a strong correlation with authors bio's comparing themselves to other authors and authors I do not enjoy.
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Jul 18, 2018 16:03
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Mel Mudkiper posted:To continue on, this is one of my frustrations with fantasy and sci-fi fan bases. They think they invent this cool thing, hand pick a few examples from classic literature to give it relevance, and then come up with this terminology and legacy for this great narrative trope while if they had actually ever read books that weren't scifi and fantasy they would realize novels do this all the time and it isn't a super unique Gene Wolfe plot trick he invented from the ether of his brilliant mind or whatever. I never heard of slingshot ending before nor am I really a fan of Gene Wolfe, but I clicked on that slingshot ending entry and it seemed fine. It's mostly just ahh that term was coined when KSR was trying to explain Gene Wolfe endings, but it's actually a much older thing. Like what's wrong with that? I guess they probably should link to whatever it is normally called instead in other works, but if it's not called anything that just comes down to SF/F fans liking to label and categorize things.
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Jul 19, 2018 14:32
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I think Sci-Fi and Fantasy fans want "literary" recognition mostly because of a personal sense of insecurity. They don't like feeling as if their favorite works are secondary to "real" literature. It always feels like this, and I think it's part of the common assumption that because a book is "literary" it's somehow "better" that is often reinforced by our teachers growing up. So to compensate people say look, this genre book is just as good as literary works!!!, in some attempt to get approval from a different group. Then whenever it gets critiqued people get mad and offended at the results, this gets even more muddied when said person is indifferent to aspects that are getting critiqued.
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Jul 24, 2018 17:50
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:One easy way to spot a bad novel is finding the word gently caress being thrown around in a fantastical imagined world. An author who writes of strange new lands but cannot think of anything more interesting for characters to say than the most common expletive in the English language could only be a bad writer. Let this not be mistaken for a plea for more stupid neologisms – it is merely a request for better dialogue. The correlation of the word gently caress and imaginative nadir can be observed in Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth saga, and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series. Let us add to that pile Joe Abercrombie’s First Law trilogy and it sequels: The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, The Last Argument of Kings; the stand-alone novels: Best Served Cold, The Heroes, Red Country; plus short “story” collection Sharp Ends Been saying this for years. Welcome back and once again a review I agree with. I also want to throw in my frustration with the lazy Turkish>Gurkish, it feels like it would of made more sense to have that be a Tengri stylized empire instead, of a Islamish one, but that would of probably required research so why bother.
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Aug 16, 2018 15:08
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Mel Mudkiper posted:*hillbilly elf* Just going look familiar fantasy thing but different doesn't seem much better, except in a parody. The setting serves the story, and yeah too many times fantasy authors go ohh uhh fantasy gotta have fantasy races lets uhhhhhhh ELVES!!! DWARVES!!! and it's awful.
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Nov 13, 2018 20:13
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BananaNutkins posted:Tropological criticism has been around a lot longer than that website. It's as valid a method for examining and deconstructing literature as any you espouse. Doesn't tropological criticism or whatever just come down to, X is overdone and I'm tired of it stop doing X unless you have a really good reason to do it.
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Nov 13, 2018 20:17
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Then by definition they are not fantastic The more you talk about fantasy it seems like any book that is actually fantastic cannot be a fantasy because being part of a genre is un-fantastic by definition.
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Nov 13, 2018 20:30
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Mel Mudkiper posted:fantasy asia is just as unappealing to me as fantasy Europe for much the same reasons Most fantasy asia books you run into in the west are just Western Fantasy in a asian backdrop, not that there is anything wrong with that, it's just funny how often they get tossed around like they are experiencing some non-western/non-white book while no...it's what you are used to just in a different setting.
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Nov 14, 2018 05:07
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The Ninth Layer posted:As we are talking about the fantasy genre the defining characteristic of the genre is that its stories are explicitly imaginary and separate from the concerns of reality. Compare this to science fiction which at least pretends to have continuity with our world even if it is tenuous or improbable. Or most literature for that matter. Fantasy generally has heavy influence from culture, beliefs and myths of our ancestors, sci-fi looks towards the future and builds off our current culture, beliefs, and myths.
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Nov 14, 2018 22:23
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Mel Mudkiper posted:again, this genre distinction sounds meaningful only as long as you ignore all the times the definition is wrong. Isn't your definition that fantasy is fantastical wrong almost all the time according to you. Genre as a whole comes from humans trying to shove things into near boxes because that's what we do whether it's justified or not, so when you come up with a hyper definite definition of what is fantasy is and rigorously judge everything to that standard, you are just a more highly educated version of the person who refuses to admit that a story is sci-fi because it featured FTL and that's impossible.
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Nov 14, 2018 23:40
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Mel Mudkiper posted:The entire genre is a marketed product How is that different than insert music genre? Genre's in books much like music are better traced through the influences and the community which yes makes it more brand-like, eventually a genre(sub genre) becomes so incestuous with itself it can't attract new readers as the old ones slowly go away, until it dies off hopefully to be reborn later when new ideas get injected. Following deeper and deeper into stuff can be fun as the books tend to get crazier and more experimental as you get closer to a crash. I like good music, but I also like new music that's trying stuff out even if it...kinda doesn't work out, and a lot of that more experimental music can only be understood/enjoyed through a lens of what came before it.
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Nov 15, 2018 16:04
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I mean, the genesis sure. This is not an idea I have put as much thought into yet and I could totally wrong be wrong, but I always saw at least the golden age of sci-fi to be an absolute response to the Atom Bomb in the same way fantasy originated as a rejection of modernism. Wouldn't most modern sci-fi be a form of post sci-fi then according to you since it has evolved since then. I mean that's not even an entirely wrong idea as the base state of any genre will shift and move overtime.
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Nov 15, 2018 22:29
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Are you for real? As if "the duality of science as creator and destroyer" isn't the loving definition of the Industrial Revoution. I think that's more destruction of a way of life, a culture, or the grinding up of an individual, while the atom bomb is extinction of the human race. I personally think it's all sci-fi, but the atom bomb did cause a noticeable change in the genre.
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Nov 15, 2018 22:31
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I don't really like Thomas Covenant series at all, but wasn't the entire point of it was to take a giant poo poo on the fantasy genre and have the protagonist be a huge unlikable rapist/rear end in a top hat/insert bad thing here.
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Jan 6, 2019 19:34
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anilEhilated posted:That doesn't make it good, interesting, enjoyable or anything else positive you could reasonably expect from a fantasy novel. It's almost like this is why most even genre fans don't like these books. Just the people who like them tend to be more vocal than the crowd who doesn't.
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Jan 6, 2019 21:11
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hackbunny posted:"2.5 inches deep" is where I tapped out Agreed, should of been in metric instead.
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Jan 9, 2019 20:36
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Mrenda posted:I feel I'm somewhat to blame for the idea that the best (fantasy) work is themeless, messageless, meaningless. If you squint a bit at what I said you could come across that idea, maybe. I'm more saying that the author (and the author's idea for the work), the story, and the text the reader constructs are all distinct stages with less influence over each other than many would commonly assume. Every work has themes, message, meaning, even if that message isn't high brow, smart, correct, it doesn't have to be about some giant problem humanity faces that your lit professor would talk about, it could be something very simple, love/revenge/improving oneself, these are all fairly common themes even in uhhh the absolute trash I sometimes read on KU. Most of the times these arn't written to be like a message to the reader, but to get them involved in the story and go yeah I have felt this way before so that they can relate to the characters and the situations they are in. AFancyQuestionMark posted:I am surprised we haven't seen the return of short-story magazines or even serialized fiction to any meaningful extent, which are forms that more easily allows for experimentation with new styles and narratives than either traditional publishing or self-publishing avenues. With the latter two, an author has to find an audience that is receptive enough to their stuff to be willing to pay for it and sustain their writing, so anything kind of has to rely on familiar genres that would appeal to specific audiences for marketing purposes. But with, say, a monthly magazine of shorter pieces, authors could spend much less time and effort on each work, thus reducing the pain if any single story doesn't pan out. So there's much more room to experiment with fresh ideas in this format. Serialized fiction is back and in a big way, it's just all self-published crap online, it's slowly becoming a bit more curated and some of them are even *gasp* starting to get editors but for the most part the cycle goes write some serialized webnovel nonsense that goes on for a while, if it does well go back rewrite parts > get an editor > publish on KU. Ohh and in China where it sorta is published the whole time it's really not any better except they force their authors to stick to a schedule of like 5+ releases a week, and are encouraged to write poo poo that goes on forever so it's kinda worse overall.
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Jan 28, 2019 23:13
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my bony fealty posted:another stupid sci fi thing is using the United Nations as the future one world government. The Forever War, The Expanse, many others do this. This is because it's easy and lazy, it's like the exact opposite of worldbuilding.
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Feb 27, 2019 20:55
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:now, of course, the holy grail is isekai xianxia litrpg I got you, it's also has the dungeon/town building aspect of litrpgs too, it's only missing a harem and the pentagram of webnovels would be complete. https://www.amazon.com/Two-Week-Curse-Realms-Book-ebook/dp/B07F7QQGZ9/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=10+realms&qid=1551411120&s=gateway&sr=8-2
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Mar 1, 2019 04:32
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Somebody fucked around with this message at 16:46 on Mar 2, 2019 |
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Mar 2, 2019 16:35
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Karia posted:He doesn't have a last name. Everyone else has one. Shallan Davar, Dhalinar Kholin, Szeth-son-son-Vallano... But Kaladin is so cool he just has a badass nickname. Only lighteyes have surnames, I don't think it's ever been explicitly brought up, but it's there.
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Mar 3, 2019 23:40
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my bony fealty posted:One gets the feeling many Sanderson fans would really rather just watch an Avengers movie again or play another round of Fortnite but want to be able to talk out loud about that great book they're reading The length of a movie drastically changes what kind of story you can tell and books as a medium has different advantages and disadvantages over the moving picture. Also, do you not have coworkers/friends that like to tell you in great detail what great tv-show they are watching is?
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Mar 4, 2019 16:27
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Contrast this to poo poo like Weber where he interrupts a starship fight to rant about the history of a missile. The missile is unimportant. It does not represent anything. It is a fictional technology so nerds can feel smart about how totally plausible their fiction about a girl and her psychic cat fighting Soace Robespierre is. This is incorrect, the missile is very important. It represents superior technology and the ever moving upward movement of technology which is super cool, and the detailed descriptions are used to build anticipation and helps to paint a picture in the readers mind of how awesome it is when it overcomes the opponents defenses. I understand that this is nonsensical for many readers, but this is to the best of my knowledge why I actually enjoy these scenes so much.
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Mar 5, 2019 23:54
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Ships of Merior/Warhost of Vastmark by Janny Wurts: See, this is epic fantasy at its highest levels. Absolutely jawdropping prose, with a soaring plot and characters who leap from the pages. I'm gushing. These two books made me cry in good ways, and I would follow this author anywhere. They're the second book in her epic series "War of Light and Shadow" and form a complete story arc as Arithon completes his bard's apprenticeship with Halliron, as Lysaer finally finds and raises an army to kill Arithon, and as everything goes to Hell for everyone. Also includes the mages dealing with an invasion of evil space ghosts in the background, which was hilarious and desperate to read. I'm sold.
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Mar 11, 2019 20:25
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 14:30 |
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Is this the thread where we will be holding the memorial for BotL?
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Mar 13, 2019 15:05
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