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Well, BotL called out my dumb rear end for not attributing his ideas on Jemisin being about how the wrong people are masters, and he's right! I didn't attribute it! My apologies, BotL!
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Dec 19, 2020 09:35
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Now the m*ds need to apologize
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Dec 20, 2020 02:39
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Well, BotL called out my dumb rear end for not attributing his ideas on Jemisin being about how the wrong people are masters, and he's right! I didn't attribute it! My apologies, BotL! Show me these ideas.
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Dec 20, 2020 08:39
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Syphilicious! posted:Show me these ideas. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=498789962
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Dec 20, 2020 11:25
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Sham bam bamina! posted:http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?goto=post&postid=470857064 Thanks. I was hoping this was about Broken Earth but I guess this other series has the same problems
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Dec 20, 2020 20:05
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American War: The Guantanamo Bay of Metaphors The year is 2017, everyone is going batshit about political polarization in America, the media frenzy about Donald Trump and Civil War and socialism vs fascism and the internet and fake news has reached a new turning point so all the seal clapping Tweeters can feel like they're part of a real power struggle instead of idiots on the internet saying stupid poo poo. Out comes this book, a book about a second American Civil War that arrives at enough time to get a bit of media attention then is buried under the rug because someone said something stupid on Twitter. American War is not an insightful book, or a well written one. The Earth has been overrun by climate change, the American capital has relocated to Columbus, Ohio because DC has been overrun by storms, and the North and the South are fighting a civil war again. Why are the North and the South fighting? Certainly not because of the historical tensions that date back to the nation's founding and recently resurfaced back in the attempt to storm the Capitol, oh no. No resurgence of Lost Cause imagery or even something as banal as some kind of demagogue emerging, the great North-South conflict starts because... American War posted:The primary cause of the war was Southern resistance to the Sustainable Future Act, a bill prohibiting the use of fossil fuels anywhere in the United States. That is excerpted from a fictional history textbook about the future Civil War, and it goes on to tell us that the triggering event for the war is...a suicide bombing attack that kills the President of the United States. Despite the title, American War isn't actually a book about America at all. It's a book about the Middle East that's a thought experiment imagining what would happen if the positions of the United States and the Middle East were reversed, which is why El Akkad's America looks nothing like anyone anything could identify as America and all of the actual American mythology is replaced by a frankly banal one about some misdrawn stars on a flag and the South's desire for freedom that is, uh, totally not related to the Confederacy! American War posted:He said that her country once occupied the most fertile land in all of the world; mother of sugar and mother of cotton and mother of corn. He taught her about the first time the North had torn her country to shreds. He said people think of that war the way they think about most wars: just a bunch of young men killing young men on the orders of old men It's kind of nuts! This is the only real reference to the prior civil war in the text, even though this new Southern Free State is desperately trying to come up with some kind of mythology to justify its existence and there's an entire body of Lost Cause literature to draw from. The American Southern rebels live in fear of drones, they recruit young men to become "homicide bombers" and blow themselves up in terrorist attacks, and the South is getting support from... American War posted:"And how about you?" Sarat said. "Where you from?" In case you were too stupid to understand the genius metaphor at work here, the book gives us this. American War posted:Excerpted from: The speech ends with "Thank you, and God bless America" in case for some reason you didn't get it, and with that the book falls together. The Southerners live in fear of drones and recruit suicide bombers because they're a bad stand-in for ISIS or al-Qaeda or whoever. The Bouazizi Union magically assembles out of its constituent Middle Eastern peoples with long histories of violence and sectarianism because the author needs it to to make his point. The protagonist, Sarat, a woman recruited by the terrorist radicalizer Albert Gaines, is waterboarded at the "Sugarloaf" detention center because it's a direct call out to Guantanamo Bay and proceeds to do more terrorism so we can have our clumsy metaphor. Why am I doing this in the sci-fi/fantasy criticism thread? Because Omar El Akkad here has fallen into the trap of so many fantasy and sci-fi writers - pick a situation you want to condemn, wrap it in science fictional trappings, and then watch as you completely distort the metaphor into unrecognizability. American culture does not think highly of suicidal tactics - those are associated with al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Japanese kamikaze pilots. In American pop culture, deliberately killing yourself to hamper an enemy is a sign of the fanatical or the insane, but the American South immediately resorts to these tactics because the author is so enamored with his Pudd'nhead Wilson style swap that any attempt to make his fictional United States actually look like America is damned to failure. This would be enough of a sin if the novel was compellingly written, but the novel is both boring and assumes the reader is stupid. This is how El-Akkad describes murdering a man: American War posted:Sarat watched. She pulled her knife from her pocket and unfolded it. She walked outside, toward the man, who had his back to her. She was no longer afraid. She moved as a wraith, a cold conflagration in the skin of a girl. She approached the man and when she was upon him she reached around his neck and slashed open his throat. Let's compare this to a sudden confrontation in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The Road posted:When he looked up the roadrat was holding the knife in his hand. He'd only taken two steps but he was almost between him and the child, Look at the difference between the two. McCarthy presents us with a life or death struggle that ends in moments, and his sentences run on to show the terror of the father and how frenetic the scene is as all the motion - "dove" and "grabbed" and "rolled" all merge into one followed by the father's weapons training taking over and shooting the roadrat in the head. El Akkad's struggle reads more like a dull list of stage directions, and this pattern recurs throughout the book. Characters love lists like "a republic, a democracy", or "a visitor, an interloper". This is how El Akkad describes a vicious cage fight. American War posted:The champ screamed as he fell. An unsmoothed protrusion in the mesh of the cage had cut a deep gash all the way along the length of his chest. Blood poured from the wound and spilled out the boundaries of the ring. This is a clear metaphor for the retaliation of the United States after Serat assassinates the head of the US armies and they start blowing up everything and killing everyone, but it's also boring. El Akkad describes metal ripping open a man's chest with the passive voice one would expect from a trip to the grocery store. The language is highly sanitized and emotionless. Even the torture scenes are dully written. The recurring theme is that the US would hate to live under such a hideous policy as the one they inflict on the Middle East, but the descriptions are so dull it's hard to care. In the end, the book aspires to be a meditation on empire but fails when it comes to actually having anything worthwhile to say about empire. There's a growing trend in both the topical political novels and fantasy novels to assume that empire just magically grows out of nothing because it's all bad and selfish people all the way down, but if you look at modern empires there's always a mythology to get impressionable and idealistic young people to sign up, whether it's the White Man's Burden, "civilizing the natives", living space, or creating a worker's paradise via terror, it's there! The book spends a lot of time with Serat and how she's radicalized by Albert Gaines - who recruits young people to become suicide bombers a la ISIS - but the Southern Free State's founding myths never amount to anything more compelling than the Unabomber's manifesto. The book straight up tells us that stories are important for "winning the peace" but never bothers to put the work in to create something like America, and then bludgeons the reader over the head that the Bouazizi Empire wants America destroyed so they can rule the world by...having the lone Empire character tell us about it. In conclusion, the book is poorly written, boring, the metaphor is badly thought out, and it only got the hype it did because of America's broken political discourse. It's worth pointing to as a symptom of the fantasy cash machine moving into "literary" books, but as a depiction of an American civil war it's laughable.
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Jan 11, 2021 02:47
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:the American capital has relocated to Columbus, Ohio because DC has been overrun by storms I would read an entire book about how Columbus got the nod here. It's a nice enough midwestern city, but...
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Jan 11, 2021 03:19
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quote:He said that her country once occupied the most fertile land in all of the world; mother of sugar and mother of cotton and mother of corn.
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Jan 11, 2021 08:26
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mother of corn indeed
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Jan 11, 2021 10:47
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Lightbringer Series: Joss Whedon vs Dante and MiltonMilton posted:Who first seduc’d them to that fowl revolt? Brent Weeks posted:It was the kind of beauty that made you poo poo your pants. Having suffered a bout of insomnia lately, I picked up Brent Weeks' five-book Lightbringer trilogy in an attempt to cure it. While my attempts were mostly unsuccessful, I foolishly finished the entire five book series. These bricks are apparently highly rated on Amazon, with reviewers praising the magic system (sigh), plotting, and characterization. I'm not going to sugarcoat it here: Lightbringer is not good, and there are a lot of reasons for it. I still think it's worth reviewing! The central problem of Lightbringer that makes it worthy of examination (rather than being immediately tossed in the trash with Earnest Cline, Jenn Lyons, and other witless fantasy authors) is that it's clear Weeks is familiar with writing outside of the usual dull Tolkien derivations that get endlessly regurgitated into incoherent cliched mishmashes. A religious pilgrimage resembles the Purgatorio. Characters reference Aristotle and Plato rebranded with "worldbuilding" fantasy names. Characters reference Greek myths such as Phaeton and the Sun Chariot. It's clear that Weeks is at least well read enough outside the nerdosphere to write something other than the traditional soulless industrial fantasy trash, as he attempts to tackle weighty subjects such as the Problem of Evil, but is ultimately choked out by the vile constraints of genre he so eagerly embraced. This is Weeks' second series, after the terminally dull Night Angel Trilogy. Said trilogy is mere adolescent power fantasy horseshit, so expectations should not have been high. Then again, "Christian allegory" is hardly a new category in fantasy, so let's dive in, shall we? Lightbringer is ultimately about the adventures of the Guile family as their story transitions from an adolescent power fantasy to learning the truth that submission to God makes all things possible. That is not a joke. Let's start from the beginning. The story's protagonist (and titular Lightbringer) is Kip Guile, an abused fat child. This may sound like a callous description, but it is one Weeks embraces wholeheartedly. Let's take a look at the first volume. Weeks posted:But what could he do? Face soldiers? If there was one, there might be ten, and if ten, maybe a hundred. Kip was no fighter, he was a child. He was fat, weak. One man would be one man too many. Weeks posted:From the look on his face, apparently Kip was a thief. Unbelievable. Where was he hiding whatever he'd stolen? Between rolls of fat? Weeks posted:"I've never run one before, my lord. You know, I think we set the tube too narrow. He's fat. He could suffocate." More examples can be produced, but the point is made. Kip spends three books - about 1800 pages - gaining unearned magical powers, having prophecies named after him, and generally being an obnoxious teenager. The story proper begins when he is rescued from his ruined village by his father Gavin Guile. Gavin Guile is essentially the magic pope, who is granted the God given power to absorb light and 3D print colored plastic that kills people. It's less interesting than it sounds, and even the text subtly acknowledges how dull it is. The Broken Eye posted:You think your chromaturgy is a wonder? It is mere science. Men moving bricks. But my power? Orholam's [God] power, unleashed from the heavens themselves? Gavin has quite a few subplots going on, not least that he is actually Dazen Guile, the real Gavin's brother, impersonating his brother after the civil war they fought over his love interest. Gavin nominally rules the Chromeria, a corrupt theocracy that condones slavery, has him regularly commit mass murder of sorcerers before their magic drives them insane, promotes the dumbest morons to positions of power based on patronage, and executes prisoners by frying them alive on Archimedes' mirrors. He is opposed by a series of rebels, first King Rask Garadul (who is unceremoniously killed by Kip as part of that dull crutch, chosen one prophecies) and later the White King, who leads an egalitarian rebellion seeking to end slavery, stop killing wizards when they turn into plastic action figures, and maybe figure out a way so that everyone can use magic instead of just the chosen few. Lest the reader worry that this antagonist is far more sympathetic and interesting than our protagonists, rest assured, his promises of equality turn out to be lies designed to enslave people by the literal devil. Many tedious subplots fill out the pages between such revelations, such as Magic: the Gathering duels that decide the fate of nations, long descriptions of how awkward it is Kip can't gently caress his wife, tedious Ender's Game style combat between teenagers, because of her vaginismus. There is a lot of crap crammed into these thousands of pages! The Iron Dream to Jesus The first two books come across as the standard escapist power fantasy. The antagonists pick a quarrel with the Chromeria because the Chromeria does something like keep slaves or suppress pagan worship. Gavin - and later Kip - comes in with a bunch of magic power and blows up all the bad men to defend a corrupt society. Hard Men need to make Hard Choices and get applauded by the common folk. The Chromeria politicians disagree what to do about the war not because it's a challenge, but because they are stupid and ineffectual. Weeks posted:"I move that we send a delegation to Garriston, to assess the threat from the alleged rebel Garadul and report back to us directly." For the first two books, Gavin is the all conquering hero, able to sweep in and perform amazing feats of "mere science", casually destroying ships of the line with a wave of his hand, flying, and being acclaimed as the greatest hero who ever lived by a legion of sycophants, who, despite recognizing the corruption of the Chromeria and recognizing Gavin as its leader who nominally acts by the will of God, fails to put two and two together that maybe the great hero could reform the corrupt vipers nest. The corruption is embodied most in the character of his father Andross, who is an omnipotent political leader strangely incompetent at actual politics. Brent Weeks portrays a master politician at work posted:But Andross Guile flared with anger. "You'd deny it Klytos? Still? How many of our ships must they sink? How many of our people must they kill? We face nothing less than the old gods, and those heretics who would bring them back. We will have a little respite this winter-but it is a respite that will help our enemies more. Few ships can traverse the Cerulean Sea in winter's storms, and our enemies are on foot. We will have only those few Ruthgari soldiers and the remnants of the Atashian forces, under that idiot General Azmith. This is how politics goes in Brent Weeks' world, victory goes to the person with the best one-liners and all of the stupid people fall in line after realizing how badly they got burned. This is not politics, this is a nerdy wish-fulfillment fantasy. No one ever has to spend time doing mundane things like building support or compromising, it's all one-liners all the way down. I bring this up because it's emblematic of the beginning of the series. Then it abruptly turns from boring authoritarian power fantasy to Christian allegory. Gavin loses his rainbow magic and is forced to go on a pilgrimage seemingly inspired by Dante's Purgatorio. The devil appears and reveals himself to be behind the rebellion against the Chromeria. Characters taking the hard choice by ordering assassinations or torturous executions actually suffer consequences for their evil actions, and for one shining moment the series seems to stop cribbing off derivative hacks like Terry Goodkind and actually start drawing from good source material like Milton, Dante, and the Bible. Herman Melville did a lot with this! Unfortunately this brief moment of hope runs into Brent Weeks' skills as a writer and dies horribly. This is how Weeks writes Satan threatening a child. Weeks posted:"You cannot hide for long, thief. I will find you and take what is mine, and I will teach you what eternity means. I will snatch you from this time to a place where we can be interrupted for decades of torture, and then I'll bring you back, to your own family, your own home. You will betray your own father for one hour's cessation of pain, and then I will take you again, until you have broken yourself, and you beg to torture by your own hand them whom once you loved. I will flay you, I will tear off your fingernails, I will grind your bones to spike shards and make you dance as they pierce your skin. I will impale you from anus to broken teeth on the axle of my war chariot before I ride into battle. But no matter what pain you come to know, you will heal every time I allow you nightmarish sleep. You will not die. I, who am the Lord of Flies, will never let you more than glimpse that bourne." I apologize, but there's a lot wrong with this rant. "The asymptote of suffering" is just a hilariously bad phrase, as though Abby here was drawing Teia a graph. Abaddon is seemingly supposed to be written as regal, yet he uses contractions. Abaddon is trying to use a higher register but is talking about the anus. This is supposed to be terrifying to Teia, a magical assassin and elite fighter who can turn invisible, but it's not threatening at all. It's long. It doesn't leave anything to the imagination. Compare this to the book of Revelation: The Bible posted:And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound!" The context is obviously different, but the angel is effective. They speak in a higher register that is not broken by contractions, anuses, or awkward math references, it leaves plenty of imagination to the reader - what will these other trumpets unleash? - and it's short. Now, Weeks proceeds to ruin it by having Teia call Abaddon a little bitch, completely owning him and sending him back to the Men's Rights subreddit from whence he came, but also have the reader believe that when another angel promises to kill Teia to spare her from Abaddon's clutches, she is legitimately grateful because Abaddon is just that scary. It doesn't work, and the scene's failure is ultimately due to Weeks' lack of ability as a writer. This is not garbage source material, this is a human being confronted with the presence of absolute evil, but because Weeks' prose is so shoddy and his word choice so poor, it goes from religious horror to a laughable farce. This pales in comparison to Week's decision to write in God himself as a character. By this point, over five novels, the shortcomings of Weeks' prose have made themselves known again and again. Despite writing about magic and spirits, Weeks cannot conjure awe or wonder to save his life. He loves interrupting the plot to explain some made up rule about magic rainbows. In all of his awkward fumbles at the thesaurus to try to make Abaddon intimidating, the word "concise" fell off a cliff and died. His characters mostly have three voices - incompetent, psychotically evil, or lovable snarker. Gavin completed the pilgrimage to meet God - and kill him - so Orholam himself, Lord of Lords and King of Kings, appears - and He's the same lovable snarker as the rest of the cast. Weeks posted:"You know," Gavin said, "I hadn't thought of you having... well, personality. No offense. You know what I mean, right? I kinda like you. Despite myself. You oughta come down every once in a while. Mix with the locals." Once the story introduces God it just collapses into thematic inconsistency. Weeks really wants to write about power fantasy heroes dispensing righteous judgment, but also have Dazen Guile throw himself on God's mercy and the importance of forgiveness and redemption. God is here to judge Dazen for his sins, but also explain to him that he actually was just that heroic and awesome and everyone loves him anyway despite being a total failure as a leader. Ultimately God's intervention is to hold hands with Dazen and power him up to shoot super magic again, Kip dies on the Then Brent Weeks throws in a bonus chapter, after the acknowledgements, with Teia murdering all her enemies while God and the Guiles forgave people with much greater sins, because Weeks can't keep a theme to save his life. That's Lightbringer. Execrable prose, a fascination with biological determinism that borders on racism (the Blackguard are called that because they used to be...all black people, which makes you better at shooting rainbows), incoherent Christian metaphor, making GBS threads on Dante...it's all there! I haven't even covered the Magic: The Gathering game Andross played with Kip to give her to Kip as his slave and I'm not going to. To care about that we'd have to care about the fundamentals and it's just garbage all the way down.
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Jul 17, 2021 03:48
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:long descriptions of how awkward it is Kip can't gently caress his wife, tedious Ender's Game style combat between teenagers, because of her vaginismus I know this is just a misplaced clause, but it implies either that Kip is married to the anthropomorphic personification of tedious Ender's Game fights or that said fights are caused by the vaginismus, either of which sound more interesting than this series.
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Jul 17, 2021 04:12
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I enjoyed this effortpost and would like to hear as much about the Magic the Gathering game as you are willing to write.
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Jul 17, 2021 05:00
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Oh, yeah, snarky remarks aside, I enjoyed the post. It makes me think of when I started reading middle-grade fiction as a kid and grew to dread running into stealth Christian books, because they were practically guaranteed to have a dull ending about submitting to God and having faith that it was all part of the plan. Doing it as the end of a five-book fantasy series seems even worse!
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Jul 17, 2021 05:12
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I'm gonna assume the Magic game is like this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redemption_(card_game)
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Jul 17, 2021 15:14
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lukevictorious posted:I enjoyed this effortpost and would like to hear as much about the Magic the Gathering game as you are willing to write.
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Jul 17, 2021 15:44
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I really like the names in that series.
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Jul 18, 2021 02:46
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lukevictorious posted:I'm gonna assume the Magic game is like this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redemption_(card_game) I wish! There was enough of a demand that I can talk a little about Nine Kings, the Magic the Gathering knockoff and how it's used in the novel. I'm going to get this out of the way first, it's explicitly Magic and not say, Yugioh or whatever because Weeks tells us so himself. Weeks posted:Thank you to mathematics professor Dr N. Willis, who read The Black Prism and immediately asked me if I'd played Magic: The Gathering. (His sneaky way of seeing if I would play with him, without admitting his geekery straight out.) I had never played MtG, but soon saw the mathematical beauty of the game. The seed for the in-world game Nine Kings was planted there (though the mechanics and play are different). He also admits to ripping off Tennyson there which, well, I cannot think of two people more dissimilar in their ability to use words. Moving on! I'm not going to talk too much about the mechanics of Nine Kings because it's both boring but immediately familiar to anyone who has played MtG or Hearthstone or whatever. You get the ability to play stronger cards as the game goes on, there are colors that correspond to the rainbow magic instead of the color wheel, creatures attack players, yadda yadda yadda. This would be tedious and annoying in a book series supposedly about power and the nature of evil, but unfortunately this leads us right back to Brent Weeks politics. This isn't even my fault, thread posters explicitly asked for this. We need to go back to Andross Guile. Andross is an evil mastermind character written by someone who quit his job to write fantasy novels, and literally cites Dan loving Brown as an example of how to write well. Guile is Kip's evil grandfather (who is secretly his father because we needed that as a plot twist for...some reason) who doesn't like that Kip is the family bastard and decides to test him by having him play a collectible card game. Weeks posted:"You play Nine Kings?" Andross Guile asked. So we have a lot of weirdness to unpack here. First, this is nominally a renaissance setting. Muskets exist but the technology to mass produce them doesn't, and we don't have a printing press at all. Magic the Gathering was the first collectible card game in reality, and that came out in 1993. The closest thing to a "Card Guild" is that WIzards of the Coast owns the intellectual property to Magic: the Gathering, writes all the rules, and enforces what cards can and cannot be used. They are a for profit corporation, and part of their business model is to sell randomized card packs that might contain a card you need for your deck, and also to declare that all the cards from last season were invalid in the Standard format and get you to buy new ones. A character later in the book, Janus Borig, is something called a "Mirror" who can just randomly make new cards that also have magic powers. Remember what Weeks wrote about artisans up there? Apparently Janus Borig can make as many new Nine Kings cards as she likes because she has magic to let her paint the truth, and here's where it all falls apart. These aren't part of the seven hundred cards mentioned above, these are entirely new cards with random abilities that also have the magical ability to cause Kip to experience historical flashbacks. Right away we have this bizarro land completely bonkers card marketplace where anyone can apparently make Nine Kings cards and just randomly build whatever loving deck you want. You could just make a card called "The Great Evil King" that wins you the game on turn 1 if its in your deck, and as far as I can tell no one is stopping you. There's mention of a "Blind Man's Mark" Borig puts on her cards to make them official, as well as a reference to "justicars of the game" who apparently can ban cards, but this is entirely a craftsman industry in a renaissance setting where people travel by horse or galley and the criteria for accepting cards is that they have a well known mark that artists can duplicate. Hell if I know! This would all be minor nitpicking if Brent Weeks hadn't decided to make Nine Kings so critical to the plot. There's two different plot threads: Andross summons Kip up to play high stakes games of Nine Kings to determine whether he gets to stay in the elite guard and do the tedious Ender's Game tournament or whatever, and the plot arc where Borig makes magical cards that grant people flashbacks to reveal the truth about the Chromeria or order of God hating assassins or whatever the gently caress. Weeks, again posted:The old man [Andross] was expressionless, though. "Another. This time, there are stakes." It's just kind of nuts. Andross is a representative of one of the seven nations that make up the confederacy, sure, but he doesn't really have direct control over the Blackguard. Granted, he is secretly insane from going nuts and it's implied he has nearly infinite wealth to waste on stupid poo poo, but one has to wonder why this supposedly intelligent master politician is so busy burning through expensive favors and bribes on these worthless trivialities. I understand what Weeks is trying to achieve here, he is trying to show that Andross is powerful yet petty and by extension show the Chromeria is corrupt, but it runs into the problem that Weeks is not a very good writer and the stakes are laughable. This is the plot of a highly intelligent mastermind, but it runs on a collectible card game where you can just pay artists to make up overpowered cards. There are two climactic Nine Kings games I am going to highlight, because it just shows how silly this plot arc is. The first is for Teia. I mentioned her situation briefly in the actual review, but it bears a breakdown. Teia is a slave. She is owned by an abusively horrific mistress who threatens her with being sold to the slave brothels and makes her wear a vial of olive oil around her neck as a reminder that she could be sent to the slave brothels and raped by a bunch of creeps. Teia is participating in the same tedious boring elite guard Enders Game tryouts as Kip, and they have a teenage crush thing going on. Andross buys Teia and wagers her in a card game as a sex slave for Kip. Weeks posted:"One week, then we play the first game. I'll arrange it with her present owner. And you can fantasize about what you'll do with her if you win. Of course, you have to win first." Andross Guile chuckled. "You think you'll free her, don't you? Truth is, you're not as altruistic as you think. No one who shares a drop of the Guile blood is. Blood is destiny, bastard. Don't forget it." More Andross posted:In return, I offer you the girl. Think about it. Not only will you get someone to warm your bed, which, face it, you have no hope of otherwise, but also a drafter's contract is worth a lot of money over the course of her life. Now, to be fair, the last part is as a trade for the dagger plot device rather than the Nine Kings game, but the juxtaposition makes this entire thing a farce. Andross is an evil, corrupt man wagering a teenage girl for use as a sex slave. They are gambling by playing a children's card game.  This leads Kip to the magical flashback cards that he needs to beat Andross, which, uh... Weeks posted:"The cards weren't outlawed because they made good game cards, Kip. They were outlawed because they told stores that the Chromeria no longer wanted told. Just as when I release the new cards - the first new cards in many, many years - they will not be popular among those they depict" So we get an entire description of a made up game. Weeks posted:So Kip set the field of play to outside. Outside made it harder to control the light, which was usually a good call against red. So many of the sources of light indoors were torches or fires - light sources that gave yellow and red and sub-red easily - that it was harder for greens and blues to source their spells. This is a climactic struggle for a young woman's life. It is written with the dull tone of a board game rulebook. This isn't something like Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry stories, where the realism juxtaposes with the atrocities to show how numb the characters are to it, this is a climactic high stakes struggle written incredibly dully. Kip wins by breaking out old illegal cards because I haven't beaten the Yugioh comparisons to death and wins Teia as a slave, whom he frees. The second game I want to talk about is the game at the end of the series. Kip is revealed as the titular Lightbringer, a Christlike Messiah who will save the Chromeria and its uniformly terrible people from the White King, who has revealed that actually he's just a bad guy who lies about equality to convince idiots to follow him so he can become Satan. Unfortunately Andross wants Kip to divorce his wife to remarry for politics, so we have one more Nine Kings game for high stakes. Weeks posted:"If I win, I don't want to be named Prism; [magic Pope] I want you to publicly acknowledge me as the Lightbringer." So we are now playing Magic: The Gathering to have Andross, a powerful politician who at this point has been named military dictator, announce Kip as the prophesied Messiah. This sounds like a joke. It should be treated as a joke. Is it? Weeks posted:"Yes, should you win, I will begin paving the way immediately; I will protect you; and I will fully champion you the moment you're ready to announce your identity-in the unlikely event it's not immediately apparent to the whole world." No. It's not a joke. Why is Andross doing that? Weeks posted:The irony of Kip taking his side evidently wasn't lost on him, as Andross suddenly smiled. "There is now nothing in this world that could keep from from this game, and this wager. For you see, I won't be playing against you, Kip. I'll be playing against Orholam Himself. For the answer to the question 'Who is the Lightbringer?' is not a name; it's not a man or a woman. The answer to that question answers how Orholam interacts with the world-if He does so at all. It's nuts. So now we are using Magic: The Gathering not just to settle this dispute, but as a means for the characters to test God. Weeks posted:Andross rubbed his nose for a moment. "Think of Nine Kings as an aid to thinking, the way an abacus is an aid to arithmetic. At some point one should grow beyond the need for the physical prop, but the cards are actually best for those like you, who have difficulty looking at their friends and seeing them as a list of strengths and weaknesses-you, who would vacillate before spending two lives even if their deaths are necessary to forestall ten thousand more. This is why Nine Kings is more valuable for you, but I am better at it, and better at politics as well. Now, I will give Weeks credit here. The prior game was a dull Yugioh episode where Kip triumphed by using semi-banned cards to beat Andross. Weeks attempts to write this not as a boring gaming recount session, but as a clash of two different characters with different philosophies - Andross is cold and calculating, willing to sacrifice the lives of others, and Kip is a Christlike messiah who loves friendship and went to Sunday school. Unfortunately, it's still Brent Weeks, so he is unable to characterize the clash without having Andross and Kip just describe their personalities to each other as above. And of course, we still have awkward fake game mechanics. Weeks posted:"Huh, would you look at that, " Kip said. "Never realized it before, but the Ironfist card actually has a perfect empty place for 'King' to be written in. The other cards don't have that spacing. It can't be an accident." Actually, Kip's hand had a nice collection of earlier attack soldiers and defenders, but it needed a noontime striker like Ironfist. There's a lot going on in this scene that I haven't talked about, such as that Kip is playing a deck made out of cards featuring the protagonists and Andross is playing a deck made from the antagonists, or the dull argument about friendship and loyalty against sacrificing people. Kip ultimately wins by disguising his card as another, a play my real life Magic judge friend says gets you in trouble, and when Andross calls him out on his bullshit Kip's friend intervenes to threaten him with violence. Weeks posted:"Whose play will he back, grandfather? Corvan practically raised me. How much loyalty have you inspired in him? The problem is that all of this highfalutin nonsense about how Nine Kings is the true test of character and Weeks' attempts to build this elaborate mythology around what is, in the real world, a pay to win card game. There's an insane secondary market for people's magic collections and the game's entire business model is around controlling card rarity to convince people to buy more randomized boxes in the hopes of getting whatever the hot new meta cards are. It is a game with rules upon rules upon rules which are designed to be looked over with a fine-toothed comb so you can put together wombo combos that let you completely dumpster people who didn't waste all their time studying this minutia. In short, it is absolutely perfect to appeal to the dull people who obsess over magic systems and feeds their power fantasy that if the world really worked like their nerd games they'd be able to wield absolute power by playing Channel and Fireball. It satisfies the same desire as soulless descriptions of magical 3D printed rainbows due, and while it's terrible literature, the executives at Tor and Orbit laugh all the way to the bank. Does this juxtaposition of nerd power fantasy with the moral of submitting to God's plan make any sense? Absolutely not! The two ideas are at odds with one another, so we get bizarre scenes where the all powerful God needs Dazen Guile to use his magic powers to blow up all the bad guys instead of just smiting them with divine lightning because... I don't know, and the book just babbles about divine mystery. Nothing about this works, so we should not be surprised that Weeks fails to connect with his Magic: The Gathering metaphor for life. This is not like Rothfuss where perhaps a better writer could have salvaged these ideas, this is an example of how these ideas are bad and a better writer wouldn't have tried at all.
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Jul 18, 2021 04:09
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my brain got distracted by "The cards themselves were often worth their weight in gold" because cards don't weigh much at all and it made me think it was a sarcastic comment along the lines of 'the cards were worthless'
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Jul 18, 2021 08:27
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I’ve seen tarot esque decks and standard playing card-esque decks used in fantasy before but never come across a series dumb enough to try to wedge a collectible card game into a pre modern fantasy setting. The closest is the flashback section of yugioh near the end of that manga, but in that case it’s characters literally summoning monsters from giant stone tablets that are centrally stored inside a giant pyramid which I think only the upper class has access to, so it’s no longer like a collectible card game.Horizon Burning posted:my brain got distracted by "The cards themselves were often worth their weight in gold" because cards don't weigh much at all and it made me think it was a sarcastic comment along the lines of 'the cards were worthless' Okay I looked this up and a magic card weighs like 1.5 grams, which by gold prices would be around $75. Not nothing but not exactly the great sums that the passage is trying to imply lol Ccs fucked around with this message at 13:59 on Jul 18, 2021 |
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Jul 18, 2021 13:53
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Andross is an evil mastermind character written by someone who quit his job to write fantasy novels, and literally cites Dan loving Brown as an example of how to write well. And also probably played too much Star Fox back in the 90s.
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Jul 18, 2021 14:30
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What always confuses me is that authors that try to give games importance in their story without researching anything about the genre's development and high level play culture. Be those CCGs or MMORPGs, any review of the quality of the game by real world standards would suggest that they should be embarrassing failures that nobody plays. Especially with a recent* book about not-mtg. During the pandemic a lot of play shifted online, which exposed almost all mtg players to the different dynamics of playing when something is at stake. Which fundamentally alters the way people approach deckbuilding and shows every player a rough idea of how a deckbuilding game meta actually functions. And by something at stake I mean around 0.05$ of f2p rewards, which is entirely sufficient stakes to make online magic imitate a tournament. *I presume it is recent, I do not think it deserves me looking this up.
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Jul 18, 2021 15:51
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Pretty sure I took psychic damage from all the awful excerpts posted in this thread. Did learn some neat things though.
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Jul 20, 2021 03:03
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It was edifying to read the criticisms, thanks for the effortposts!
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Jul 20, 2021 13:07
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