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Reene posted:Now that we have a new thread is jivjov ever gonna answer my fuckin question about Rothfuss' treatment of female characters It's pretty funny that the only guy who legit likes these books will post the least about them.
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Oct 8, 2017 05:29
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The thing that gets me about Rothfuss fandom is that there's just so little to be a fan of. He's written two novels and a smattering of short stories, all in the same world, and maintains a blog. I think he's done some podcasting? Plus there's the various Kickstarters he's participated in. And all of it is set in the same world. It's not like there's dozens of books across multiple worlds with a score of memorable villains and protagonists. You either love Kvothe or you don't. You either love paying for a fancy deck of cards or you don't. I just don't get it.
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Oct 9, 2017 01:03
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Evil Fluffy posted:That's not true, they might be fans of sex ninjas and fantasy world calendars and monetary systems. Sanderson mostly comments on Magic: The Gathering when he talks about his personal thoughts and opinions. I know he's some sort of advocate for special needs children because one of his own kids is. But given that he's a Mormon and the last well known Mormon sci-fi author is most recently best known for his insane rants, Sanderson probably figured keeping his drat mouth shut was for the best even if he happened to be (comparatively) liberal. But yeah it's hard not to appreciate Sanderson's work ethic regardless of how you feel about his actual talent. At least GRRM and Robert Jordan did things outside of their best known works and Jordan never really had an issue meeting deadlines. He just couldn't wrap the story up.
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Oct 9, 2017 04:34
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M_Gargantua posted:They're easy to consume fun genre fiction with just enough content to keep you entertained but without any meat that isn't rancid with sexism upon inspection. I found it to be a torturous slog from basically the first page. Not sure that "fun" and "content" have anything to do with these books. LASER BEAM DREAM posted:So what was it that caused the books to be liked by so many people after the first read like myself and, I’m assuming, a bunch of other people in this thread? I've said in the previous thread that they're basically Twilight for boys. It's a power fantasy starring a character that lacks any real depth, which makes it that much easier for the reader to imagine that it's he who is outsmarting their college professors and is naturally talented at everything, from academics, to comebacks, and of course being a rock star.
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Oct 10, 2017 06:36
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Pretty sure Kvothe is like the world's biggest beta, especially in NOTW.
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Oct 10, 2017 13:12
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I didn't even finish the first one.
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Oct 16, 2017 15:54
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the old ceremony posted:tbh if i had a book published i'd go online and rhapsodise about it incognito too It's that or go the other way and say how awful it is and how you have to read it to believe it. What I'm saying is that Bravest of the Lamps is Rothfuss and that's why he gets so touchy whenever we go after the man personally rather than the writing specifically.
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Oct 20, 2017 04:09
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"It's beautifully written" is the lamest, laziest way to praise the book.
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Oct 23, 2017 10:40
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Remember when Revenge of the Sith was going to tie the whole prequel trilogy together and we'd all believe in George Lucas again? Remember when Matrix Revolutions was totally going to justify Matrix Reloaded? All this is is you encountering the sunk cost fallacy in person and seeing right through it. Going back to thread favorite Book of the New Sun, it is a massive amount of reading you have to work through to get to the final payoff. But every bit along the way is enjoyable in its own right. I can't imagine trying to get through 2000 pages of garbage just for a shocking twist at the end. That is never going to make me retroactively have enjoyed the time Kvothe was in Tarbean.
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Oct 29, 2017 10:38
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Moana is pretty cool though.
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Oct 29, 2017 15:05
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TV Zombie posted:If the Kingkiller Duo is on top of Fantasy Books list, what are some good reads on that same list? Looking to read something new. The Book of the New Sun.
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Nov 2, 2017 14:52
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I'm so mad that Eragon exists.
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Nov 3, 2017 11:07
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Him and Jordan have the same problem where a million pages in they're still introducing new plots and points of view.
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Nov 4, 2017 05:27
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Kchama posted:This is entirely because he was ripping them off from Wheel of Time, and also real-life Romani (who Wheel of Time was using too). So he might have felt it was a bit too racist if they were Literally The Stereotypical Thieves Everyone Thought They Were and went too hard making them Pure Noble People. Oh god how did I miss that this was literally ripped straight out of Wheel of Time, all the way down to the red hair. gently caress.
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Nov 6, 2017 00:45
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Lyon posted:I have all of the Star Wars books up to the Yuuzhan Vong. In elementary school, Star Wars and the Chronicles of Prydain were what got me into sci fi and fantasy. I'm sure a lot of sci fi/fantasy folks have very questionable book choices on their shelves from their earlier days. This is what crawl spaces are for.
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Nov 16, 2017 15:46
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Anyone interested in an opportunity to combine Penny Arcade fans, all things Patrick Rothfuss, and two hours of live action roleplaying? https://tabletop.events/conventions/td-at-pax-south-2018
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Dec 15, 2017 01:33
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PJOmega posted:Isn't this basically an escape room with an extra layer of cruft? I think they try to conform to LARP rules, like you can get killed in the event and you have stats and other such nonsense. Lightning Lord posted:The fact that it takes place "inside the Fae" and involves meeting a "popular character from Pat's world" leads me to believe this is a sex dungeon. Hopefully the character will be played by Rothfuss himself!
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Dec 15, 2017 05:04
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Solice Kirsk posted:They're donating less than 10% of ticket sales. And the majority of that 10% will be eaten by administrative fees. Charity is a scam.
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Dec 15, 2017 06:51
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Lightning Lord posted:You wanna gently caress Rothfuss? I spent money on his book so I figure fair is fair.
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Dec 15, 2017 11:38
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Except Rothfuss isn't even original when he has a character say, "I won't bore you with the details, suffice to say I did these things on my travels." That's straight out of Book of the New Sun.
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Jan 27, 2018 04:59
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Karnegal posted:Yeah, but it's rightly ridiculed when nothing else has happened in your book up to the point where you deploy that line. Like if The book of the New Sun were paced in Rothfus-style, Severian would still be hanging out at the torture's guild mid-way into the third book. Oh for sure. I was just saying that in addition to skipping over something that might have been interesting to read (it wouldn't have been), having the character say, "I'm not going to bore you with descriptions of these events because you can guess for yourself what it would have been like," isn't even original. Wolfe did it very appropriately where once we'd seen it once we knew exactly what the other instances would be like but Rothfuss was just being smug. "I've done so much that I can't even fit it all in."
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Jan 29, 2018 09:39
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anilEhilated posted:If that's your typical response to things Rothfuss tries to emulate and utterly fails at, don't ever venture anywhere near anything by Gene Wolfe. I'm in a Gene Wolfe reading group and this has been the topic of the last two weeks.
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Jan 30, 2018 07:22
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Hammer Bro. posted:And everyone is suitably... critical. Right? Sure. It's just a lot of being baffled by how other authors can say with a straight face that Rothfuss is something special and by how Wolfe doesn't seem to be well known outside of very specific circles.
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Jan 30, 2018 09:37
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Real alternative ending: Brandon Sanderson is hired to finish the series. Why would you wish that on Brandon Sanderson?
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Feb 2, 2018 12:13
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PJOmega posted:Good post overall, but I swear this is more of a genre thing. Most genre fiction protagonists are as chaste as a Hallmark holiday special. I get that they're predominantly written for teenage boys but it's really interesting. It's not really a genre fiction thing. It's frequently a YA thing, but even then there's subtext in a lot of books if you're looking for it. Sanderson has gotten better at this, but his early books are really bizarre. The characters are practically asexual.
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Feb 3, 2018 09:54
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Karnegal posted:I mean, that wasn't really my point. Admittedly, a lot of actual genre fiction has really cringe-worthy sex scenes, and that's not great either, but I also find it a little bit distressing that the genre is so confident with coming up with the most gruesome ways of torturing and killing people that it can, but then those same books will stand twenty feet back from anything involving characters having romantic relationships, offering maybe a chaste exchange of glances or a brief kiss if they're being daring. I mean, I don't need harlequin romance here. If you can't write a competent sex scene don't. But, you can just imply it and fade to black. The lack of realistic emotional relationships leaves us with a genre full of murder-hobos, which maybe explains some of the toxic elements of the fandom. I just call out Sanderson because he books are particularly egregious since his religious proclivities seem to make him totally uncomfortable writing about anything beyond a basic hug/kiss, but his imagination for violence seems stymied. I mean, look at mistborn's Koloss. They're a race of magical mutants with spikes driven through them whose bodies outgrow their skin causing it to rip and tear. That's a pretty messed up image, but Vin, the hardened girl who grew up on the streets has the sexual proclivities of a Disney princess. The Sanderson thread got mad at me once for pointing out that the only sex explicitly messaged in Mistborn is rape which as a result causes the book to be not just weirdly asexual, but openly sex-negative.
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Feb 3, 2018 11:14
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socialsecurity posted:That's not true though Elend and Vin directly have sex after they get married, still prudish etc, but it happens and wasn't rape. Even if you're right that means that the books have nothing positive to say on physical relationships for 95% of them.
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Feb 3, 2018 11:46
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I think the point people are trying to make is that fantasy would improve by leaps and bounds if it included realistic human relationships. That doesn't necessarily mean explicit sex scenes or power fantasies or wish fulfillment. Apparently that's a very high bar for most authors.
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Feb 3, 2018 11:59
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Torrannor posted:It should be pointed out that rape is given as much screentime as "normal" sex, namely zero. It's mostly implied and brought up as backstory, and it's not the seeming backstory of every (female) character like in Sword of Truth. I disagree. Sex that isn't rape is implied once (and then only after marriage). Every other time it's rape brothels where the girls are murdered if they get pregnant. This is actually a major plot point as the girls that escape are the ones responsible for giving birth to the magic users who aren't in the nobility (another part of the bad guy's plan in book 1).
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Feb 4, 2018 01:21
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Wild Cards started as an rpg group too
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Feb 5, 2018 09:47
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Torrannor posted:Perhaps I wasn't clear. There's no on-screen rape in Mistborn. There's not even direct threats of on-screen rape against one of the characters, apart from technically being slaves in a society where slaves in the outlying villages are in danger of being raped. Compare that to ASOIAF. In the universe of Mistborn, as depicted by the text, it's rape brothels where the unfortunate peasant victims are either executed or their bastard children are hunted down by demonic inquisitors to be sacrificed in a horrific blood magic ritual. Or you get to sleep naked after you get married. It doesn't really matter that rape isn't used as a weapon or depicted on screen. I never set out to "prove" that Sanderson was as bad as other fantasy authors, just to point out that he has weird hangups and his handling of relationships is bizarre. If you go strictly by what he's put into his books, you might come away thinking he doesn't have a very healthy opinion of sex.
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Feb 5, 2018 11:25
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I've said before that Sanderson isn't a competent writer, he's a competent puzzle maker. Everything he introduces in his books is plot relevant and a necessary piece to solving the conflict. He was a natural choice to finish Wheel of Time because he had the work ethic to go off of thorough notes and churn out the last three volumes. His natural talents let him fill in gaps where they existed, but he was operating within a well defined framework. It was basically his wheelhouse. But he doesn't make any sense to finish ASoIaF or King Killer because there won't be extensive directions for him to follow and he won't be inventing the mysteries from the beginning like in his own works. And where Wheel of Time had a scene missing here and there that his puzzlebox brain could extrapolate, King Killer is missing core concepts that he'd have wanted to insert in the first hundred pages.
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Feb 6, 2018 00:19
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my bony fealty posted:Its perfectly normal to be good at one thing and have garbage opinions about another Ben Carson is interesting because he may not actually be as amazing a surgeon as he claims. Since he fully believed that God was assisting him, he was simply willing to take cases that other, more realistic surgeons had turned down. Sometimes this worked out for Carson, other times not so much, but you rarely hear about his failures.
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Feb 15, 2018 08:45
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I've been at concerts where the band kept a handful of spare guitars to the side of the stage in case a string broke. But that's one guitar in a five piece and so switching out one instrument can almost go unnoticed if they're fast about it. One band swapped both guitars at least once per song. They must have used super light gauge strings and played like madmen.
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Feb 16, 2018 03:45
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Their roadies were really good from what I could tell. And they were just a regional band, not even big.
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Feb 16, 2018 04:06
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Brandon Sanderson. What more needs to be said?
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Apr 18, 2018 11:43
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Return to the Whorl by Gene Wolfe
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Apr 18, 2018 15:04
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Why not simply read East Asian literature instead of genre garbage? If you want to discuss it in good faith, there are two main reasons why. The first is that unless you speak an East Asian Language at an incredibly proficient level, you're relying on a translator and how good the translation is, and is to you personally, depends on the skill of the translator and the decisions they make. Do they keep idioms as literal as possible and explain them with footnotes? Do they look for an appropriate English idiom that gets the right idea across while sacrificing the flavor that you're actually reading the book for? Do they tone down the content to match the "sensibilities" of a western audience? The second reason is an extension of the first. Books written in English for a western audience take for granted that the audience will be familiar with references and allusions to the western canon. Likewise, books written in an East Asian language for a specific culture take that for granted as well. Translators have to consider how to approach these and there's no one best way to do it. It usually means that there are going to be a lot of footnotes and outside research put on the reader to get the most out of the story. So in short, people tend not to read those books just because it turns reading into quite a lot of work. Doing work isn't a justification not to read them, it's just not something a lot of people are going to be interested in doing as a leisurely pastime or while killing time on an airplane. For another perspective, I'm an English teacher in Asia. I've taught tons of novels to my students and several of these students speak English at near fluent levels. They have zero problem reading the words on the page and getting the gist of what is happening. But they don't understand any of the references to the Bible, TV shows referenced in the text, historical events, or general pop culture. And often times they don't know that they're missing a reference. If a reference is part of an innuendo or double-meaning, the student isn't confused about the literal meaning of the passage and doesn't realize that there's more depth to the story and that they need to look something up. They really need an ambassador of the culture to take them through the novel. If you're reading in your free time and you don't have access to that, even with the internet at your disposal, I can't begrudge you not wanting to read books where you're not the intended audience. It's certainly more enriching to dig deep into a novel from another culture, but you're basically doing an undergraduate degree to actually enjoy it. There's a reason why books like "Shogun" are so popular. They give exposure to a foreign culture while being from the perspective of an outsider that the audience can relate to.
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Jun 13, 2018 05:23
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Reene posted:There are books written by east Asian authors which use Asian-inspired settings but which are written and intended to be read in English. A lot of silkpunk, for example. "An Artist of the Floating World" and the works of Kazuo Ishiguro come to mind as well. He's ethnically Japanese, but is a British author who frequently writes in a Japanese setting, but they're intended for an English speaking audience. But there are far fewer books written by multicultural authors specifically for a western audience than western authors who borrow flavor.
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Jun 13, 2018 05:58
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A human heart posted:its not 'basically doing an undergraduate degree' to pick up the penguin classic ed of a book from china or wherever and read the notes and the introduction You can pick up any book off the shelf and enjoy it on a surface level, sure. No one is going to dispute that. But that's not what I said. You can read the introduction, which in my experience more often than not just say what the translator was thinking as they translated and don't go into a load of specifics, and still miss out on all of the cultural references that you couldn't possibly be familiar with. It's not like there are a handful of these things sprinkled throughout the book and the notes will say, "Please be aware that references to Taoism occur on pages 2, 92, and 206." The footnotes also don't go into much detail. They can't possibly due to space constraints. And if they are incredibly thorough notes, then your book is bloated and it's going to be an effort to get through it. Think how often allusions to the Bible crop up in books, from names of characters, to idioms, to character traits, to plot points, and so on. You're not going to have any deeper understanding of these things and what they mean to the intended audience and author just by reading a couple of notes. You're going to be aware that they exist, but you're going to need to track down those texts and cultural items as well and then read and study them independent of the text that references them to get the full picture. This is not necessary to just enjoy the book, but you're not going to get as much from it on a single pass as you would from a book that's written from your cultural perspective. Again, let me emphasize that having to do work to read a book is not a bad thing. But it doesn't always mesh with the reasons why people read books in the first place.
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Jun 13, 2018 06:50
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