Mel Mudkiper posted:

half the fun of botl is watching self conscious nerds get defensive about criticism

Atlas Hugged posted:

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.

Silver2195 posted:

This is a in its own right. I've seen goons arguing that liking certain kinds of fiction says something about the reader as a person all over the place, and I'm not sure they're always wrong. To be fair, this argument is most often applied either to very overtly political fiction or to power fantasies of a certain very extreme and specific type, but sometimes it shows up beyond that.

just another posted:

Calling a text "good" or "bad" is normative. Regardless of your intent, I don't think you can do that without saying something about how you ought to feel about the text, and by extension, about those who feel wrongly.

What do you imagine the goal of passing a moral judgment on a text ("it's bad!") is supposed to be, otherwise?

the old ceremony posted:

speculative fiction, as i was taught to call it in high school, has fallen victim to authors playing it safe to protect their work's marketability. the whole point of the genre was always to isolate specific problems in contemporary society and deal with them in a rarefied and entertaining environment, but while genre authors are constantly trying to outdo themselves in edginess and gnarly deaths and rapes-per-page rate, actual social commentary is sorely lacking. WOMEN ARE AN ABUSED DEMOGRAPHIC shows up in every work, but there is never any attempt to deal with the specific ways in which women are abused beyond the inevitable rape scenes. there are no fantasy novels about sex trafficking, or the full complexities of an abusive relationship, or learning to live in an arranged marriage, or coming out as transgender, or being the single mother of a daughter in a patriarchal society, or being expected to care for ailing family members, or any of the problems that women in the real world deal with every single day. there are just endless male authors writing rape scenes, usually obviously with one hand, and patting themselves on the back for being progressive and dealing with real issues.

feminism is just the obvious example here, but of course it's not the only one. i'm sure patrick rothfuss genuinely thought he was writing a hard-hitting look at the realities of living in poverty and being romani an oppressed minority dealing with racism, but there was absolutely nothing real about his portrayal. it said nothing and meant nothing. because that's not the focus of his trash - the focus of his trash is magic, and heroism, and mysterious sexy damaged women. the same goes for the rest of the genre, none of it is rooted in reality and so it's just all weightless names floating around in a flat cardboard world doing poo poo that doesn't have any relevance to contemporary society and is therefore a waste of the author's time, a waste of the audience's time, a waste of my time, and a waste of all our money and the huge potential of the novel to change society. modern sf/f hasn't produced a 1984 or an earthsea for a very, very long time, and i don't trust any of the current crop to do so any time soon

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?"

This is every bit as dumb as it sounds.

Atlas Hugged posted:

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."

my bony fealty posted:

Don't forget that every fantasy story has to be at least a trilogy these days!

The biggest Rothfuss fan I know is a college-level English professor and this mystified me for a long time until I realized, she wants cheap hacky escapist bullshit. Maybe because she spends much of her working time in the academic/literary world, I dunno. But fantasy especially seems to excel at providing the literary equivalent of 4-chord pop music, and in droves. It's like superhero movies, they're all the same and they all suck.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'll be over here reading Jack Vance and pretending I'm better than those other genre fans...

the old ceremony posted:

good call imo

just another posted:

did you tell him you could tell he was wroth but didn't know what all the fuss was about

Peel posted:

This retrospective by Banks' friend Ken MacLeod is relevant here.



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'.

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Sanderson sounds like a tedious dullard

rear end frog posted:

since making that first post i've read through the intervening four pages and let me tell you: there is not a man posting in this forum that deserves the breath of life

Tim Burns Effect posted:

I'd be okay with YA if more authors were as openly and unashamedly in it for the money as R. L. Stine is

ShinsoBEAM! posted:

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.

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

I am sorry to inform you all that you have lost the internet

https://twitter.com/pixelatedboat/status/982791379481870336

Mel Mudkiper posted:

Sampatrick posted:

I think you'll actually find that literature has followed a downward trajectory since the moment that Homer wrote the Iliad