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pseudanonymous posted:Is this guy literally burning books? It's such a weird thing to say to me, like book burning has some pretty bad connotations. Though anyone who immediately devours three volumes of Malazan to me is pretty suspect. I found those entirely unreadable and gave up after a few chapters. It was a thing for a while to have outsized reactions to things books did, like you read some passage and "I got so mad I threw the book across the room/burned it/took it out back and shot it"
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Jun 30, 2019 00:15
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Is Moby-Dick purporting to be a factual account about Heath fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Jun 30, 2019 |
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Jun 30, 2019 20:59
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I picked up Titus Groan due to the review BotL have it in the previous thread. I will post thoughts once it gets here and I have read it
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Jul 5, 2019 23:56
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I cannot even conceive of what a LitRPG is supposed to be. It's it like a CYOA? with stats? I remember reading some of the Lone Wolf books as a kid but I doubt they're anything like that
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Jul 23, 2019 17:42
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I looked up some examples of this and even as someone who has been brain poisoned by video games since basically day one I am utterly perplexed by this concept. I think I get what it is but I don't get why.
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Jul 23, 2019 18:06
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I guess what I don't get is why the actual nuts and bolts numbers of things are included. Even a decade ago my friends and I would make fun of people posting in writing forums about how they kept active inventory sheets of characters and couldn't figure out how to resolve a scene because their character literally didn't have enough potions to survive a fight scene, which is something so baldly absurd to me that I can't even comprehend how it's a problem since you can either just rewrite the scene or have the character have found 3 potions instead of 2 earlier in the story, and even that is taking it on its own terms. This stuff looks like a level beyond even that kind of ... I don't even know what it is. I mean, from one perspective it's always interesting to see how literature evolves alongside and responds to other artforms and cultural artifacts, but it seems to me like having things like numerical stat outputs is really distracting and doesn't add any kind of substance to the writing since it's all arbitrarily decided by the writer in the first place, unless they're writing the story as they're rolling dice to determine outcomes, in which case they may as well just publish a freemium DND campaign or something.
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Jul 23, 2019 18:38
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idiotsavant posted:“Let’s use critical literary analysis to examine sci-fi and other genre fiction and discuss if genre can have true value as literature” We have strayed far from the light of the bravest of the lamps
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Jul 24, 2019 01:39
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nankeen posted:it's the first category of fiction i've ever looked at and been completely unable to understand how anybody finds any joy in it whatsoever Basically this, I have been thinking about this all day and it is utterly incomprehensible to me. Like I get that some people find something in it, but it's literally pretending to play a video game and pretending to read literature at the same time but it utterly robs the joy out of both of those things. What room is there for beautiful prose when it's perforated by damage outputs or social link rank increases or whatever the gently caress? What fun is there in simulating a video game being played when the whole idea is that you get to be the character on the screen running around doing stuff? It's mindboggling, which is probably why I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Like I get why people enjoy trashy romance even if I don't read or enjoy it myself, I understand why people enjoy dating Sims and things even if I don't, but this is the kind of thing where I want to meet someone who reads these and enjoys them and just crack open their consciousness because their mental narration has to be unlike anything I've ever considered. It's like that ulilililia book, I get that it tickles his brain but he's also actually autistic.
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Jul 24, 2019 04:36
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https://www.amazon.com/Land-Founding-LitRPG-Chaos-Seeds-ebook/dp/B0172GEB68/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8&pldnSite=1 What the actual gently caress is this quote:The series with over 100 THOUSAND ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Reviews!
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Jul 24, 2019 05:39
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:But if you were aiming to break into the ridiculous market for the purpose of shamelessly making money, you wouldn't go for romance or whatever - you'd go straight for LitRPGs. After I saw those Kong novels and that that's apparently the bar for this kind of thing, I will admit that for a hot minute I really was thinking that I could do this. I am at least a capable writer and I could churn out what is effectively a decent video game fantasy story, but after reading this post I realized that I really couldn't do this since I have no connection whatsoever to this kind of writing. In other words, I'm not capable of meaningfully providing what these people would want because I have no loving idea what they want. I could probably emulate it but not well, and I feel like trying to make the writing or the plot actually interesting in some way would actually be an impediment. Given what the quoted post says I'm not all that convinced that there's even much legitimacy to the popularity of this genre in the first place.
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Jul 25, 2019 06:12
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The one I linked on the last page is one of the top rated ones
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Jul 29, 2019 03:23
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:the were-hyena piss rape scene.  quote:A full review will be coming as I finish the book. 
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Aug 25, 2019 20:11
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I'm about three quarters of the way through Titus Groan on BotL's recommendation from the previous thread and it's really illustrating to me the difference between pre- and post-LotR fantasy. In spite of being old as hell this book presents such a different view of the fantasy novel archetype that it feels like something fresh and new. It's dark and dreary and oppressive, and all of this reflects in the psychology of the characters inhabiting the world. The book takes place almost solely in the massive castle of Gormenghast, a sprawling, rotting mishmash of the eccentricities of the past, which casts an indelible shadow over the present and the characters who are forced at every moment to adhere to the precedents set for them, no matter how nonsensical they are for any modern consideration. Ridiculous ritual that has to be observed to the letter every day forms the central backdrop of the lives of everyone, but in particular the royalty, who inhabit the castle. Virtually everything is rotten and lovely, rusted, leaky, just dreadfully old, so much so that age seems to absorb even the new in very short order. Of course, one man's attempt to secure a position for himself outside of the role imposed upon him by tradition is central to the story, but I won't talk much about that yet since I haven't finished it. The novel is squarely fantasy but it lacks all the elements of a "traditional" fantasy novel save for the fact that it isn't based on a real place and that it takes place in a castle and centers around the royal family, giving the book a sense of being out of time. There are some anachronistic technological presences, like hypodermic needles, that serve to disrupt what would be an otherwise very medieval environment. There's virtually no magic in the novel, or if there is it's all very subtle. Most of all, the writing is very baroque and visual, and Mervyn Peake knows how to use color imagery in a very emphatic way as a contrast and highlight against what is otherwise a very grey book. Everything about Gormenghast itself feels black and grey and dim, while the characters have their own distinct color palettes. The Countess of Groan has her flaming red hair, her mass of white cats, her ink black robes; Fuchsia, in spite of her name, has Raven black hair and is always wearing crimson dresses; Steerpike is the color of straw and tallow, pale; the Earl is melancholy, weary, black and phantasmic; the twins, Cora and Clarice, are basically defined by their purple outfits; Swelter is a mass of chef's white, huge and commanding with an imposing presence, while at one scene his evil machinations are bathed in a vivid and unnatural green light. Everywhere color is significant, and from what I know about Peake he was a costume designer for stage plays, and it shows in his writing and the way he thinks about how to present his world. If you're a fantasy fan and you're craving something out of the ordinary Sanderson tripe and want to read something with some more challenging writing, I recommend picking this up. It's about 400 pages, but it's a pretty smooth read in spite of its language. Peake doesn't shy away from using some very obscure and uncommon word choices (I frequently have to look things up) but it never feels like thesaurus trolling.
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Aug 25, 2019 22:17
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Do you have a competing analysis, or do I need to write an effortpost on genetic determinism in Jemison's work? Do it anyway
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Oct 2, 2019 19:46
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Women: anything but people
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Oct 17, 2019 22:26
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The rejoinder is always "but they're really popular and/or make a lot of money!" because the relationship of quality and profit is always implicit
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Oct 25, 2019 03:45
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fauna posted:i am writing a book about men swine!
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Oct 25, 2019 04:44
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not you, but rather men
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Oct 25, 2019 04:44
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What was that one dumb wizard webcomic where a guy had to rape a woman to save her life?
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Oct 31, 2019 00:44
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Is it a cliche, or is it over used because it's easy? For whatever it does or doesn't say about the author's attitudes toward women, it ticks a lot of dramatic and titillating boxes, and it's more convenient for the author to have that as a driving force for a character because it's such a singular event that it forms an easy shorthand from which the character expands outward into the story. When this discussion comes up, I always think of this: A friend of mine associated with one of those guys who would spend every waking moment making up fantasy or sci fi stories and "world building" but would never actually write a word of prose. He would spend hours writing up descriptions and general outlines in chats to her but as far as I know never actually put pen to paper. And in his descriptions, out of every new "world" he created, every single storyline, without exception, featured a character who was raped at least once as her defining character trait. Second-tier traits were that character's relationship to the main character: sister, daughter, wife, etc. It was clear in all of his descriptions that the prima facie of these characters was "a woman in the main character's life being raped" long before it was ever a semblance of a person with a name. What that meant was that he never had to actually build a character. The rape proves a driving force for both the main character and the raped character as was necessitated by the plot's convenience. It requires no nuance. The pain is dramatic and clear, at least in theory. It's emotionally evocative and taboo, disgusting and titillating to the reader's taste, since it's clear there is an audience who conceives of sex in literature almost entirely in terms of violence. As a result of that intrusiveness, it doesn't require much thought on the part of the reader or the writer, as such things tend to impose details upon our minds whether we like it or not; for example, a book I was reading just last week made me put it down for a couple of hours to mentally prepare for a molestation that it had been hinting at. None of that is to say that a rape necessitates lazy writing. Like any trope, it's all about how it's used. But there's a certain kind of sexual writing that seems to occur preferentially in fantasy fiction, and probably to a lesser degree in sci fi. I don't know if perhaps it's just a biased sample or whether sci fi has its own unique sexual sphere of mind, I don't consume a lot of it.
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Nov 1, 2019 06:03
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Ha ha ha hoo boy. All I know is that the one suited alien in Mass Effect is willing to expose herself to deadly space germs and take off her suit to gently caress you and that's my basis for sci fi sexual relationships
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Nov 1, 2019 06:24
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chernobyl kinsman posted:its because those books are written by sexually insane nerds with psychotic ideas about women for sexually insane nerds with psychotic ideas abotu women. hope this helps My thesis is that they are also lazy
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Nov 1, 2019 22:58
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What's the purpose of it except to make the reader feel clever? What does it actually contribute to the stories or the characters in them except as background? Would the story suffer for those details not being there?
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Nov 19, 2019 19:54
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I'll never forget the scene where Samwise bumped into a wall and revealed a secret room with a tiny Saruman figurine in it
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Nov 20, 2019 19:26
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Bilirubin posted:2) Internet nerds need to read Gravity's Rainbow so they get both aesthetic, glorious prose AND minutia to pore over This worked for me. About 7 years ago or so GR was the first novel and indeed the first fiction I had read for some time. I was mostly reading nonfiction and had since my mid teens probably. GR was so mind bending and dense that it kickstarted a pretty consistent reading of challenging fiction - GR made other capital-L Literature seem less intimidating, since I figured if I could read that and come away from it with anything at all, surely I could handle anything else.
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Nov 21, 2019 05:58
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Genre writer friends of mine have had that complaint whenever they consume something that leaves things unanswered or has an ambiguous ending. At least one of them gets actively distressed if anything major is left uncertain or doesn't pan into the larger plot. They take the Chekov's gun very seriously - nothing can be in a story for its own sake or to add flavor to the writing, it has to be in service of the plot or the "world," which is why you'll get so much explanation of magic systems and poo poo even though it doesn't directly relate to the plot in any meaningful way.
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Nov 29, 2019 16:42
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I haven't read any of him, but I only know of it because those same people (who also have not read Chekhov) specifically cite that "rule" and God forbid we break rules.
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Nov 29, 2019 17:05
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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:This is in Mark Lawrence's Red Sister: But now you learned that she's really determined! That's character development, right?
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Nov 30, 2019 03:09
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I feel as though the "gameyness" of at least fantasy predates video games by a long time, and even moreso D&D, which is the clear influence on most 80s fantasy. The Hobbit and LotR feel like they started the trend of really important, named magical items being central to the plot. The One Ring obviously, but also things like Sting and Glamdring. Someone more educated than me could probably trace this back to things like the Grail or Excalibur, so that impulse towards phat loot has been around for a long time.
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Nov 30, 2019 04:30
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Lex Neville posted:what defines the dragon though an insatiable lust for human pussy, in most of these books
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Dec 5, 2019 21:37
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I believe they refer to that as a fuckman
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Dec 6, 2019 15:41
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Don't bronies use those terms
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Dec 6, 2019 20:32
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Putting that writing next to Tolkien's is not doing it any favors. I have no specific affinity for Tolkien but his prose is so languid in comparison, so much more tactile, when placed next to "The woman’s name is Essun. She is forty-two years old." The description of the Hobbit hole evokes so much about it by describing first what it isn't, and then what it is (not wet and muddy, not dry and bare, but comfortable, and associating it with what a Hobbit is - Hobbit society and comfort are synonymous.) Establishing that and then moving on to describe the Hobbits physically reinforces that idea - barefooted and a little chubby, prone to laughter and a good meal, you know instantly so much about their society by way of their physicality, their "race." By comparison this author rattles off some physical stats about the (unremarkable in any sense, according to the prose, making me wonder why I've bothered to read about it at all) domicile, and I know nothing about the society save that there's a bourgeois hierarchy to which the owner of the home does not belong. And she takes twice as many words to tell me half as much. Much the same for her description of the main character. It's worth nothing that Tolkien describes the people first, and the character of Bilbo by way of them, but this author describes the race by way of the character ("she's like most women of the midlats" followed by "Mongrel midlatters, Yumenescenes call (called) people like her—enough Sanzed in them to show, not enough to tell,") and throws three terms at us whose meaning is not obvious and has no reference outside of the story - I know basically what a dwarf is, I have no idea what a Yumenescen? or a Sanzed is, except that they're different people and are probably of a different race. Also the way she writes (wrote) tense is a loving terrible affectation
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Jan 6, 2020 20:42
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Prologues are best when they set up something that misleads you. If it's just straight exposition or "worldbuilding" it should be extirpated. A decent writer can work those details into the prose itself.
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Jan 6, 2020 21:06
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chernobyl kinsman posted:like can you imagine a work that began by launching a salvo at Harry Potter and then still expected to be taken seriously as a book for grownups Do you really want the answer to this
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Jan 6, 2020 21:22
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Is "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" speculative fiction?
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Jan 9, 2020 17:27
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Consuming isn't condoning. If something speaks to you, it doesn't validate the fascist mindset simply because it was written by a fascist. There's something to be said about the power of having a window into the mind of someone who thinks in a radically different way from you, especially if what's being written has nothing (at least overtly) political about it. I think literature has a unique power in that it can unite you emotionally with people quite distant from you. I don't mean that in some kind of love-for-your-fellow-man kind of way, though that can be a consequence of reading literature; but instead that it allows you to empathize intimately but at a distance, and works to inform you not only of how they think, but of how you think as well. There's always a sort of background anxiety that I, at least, experience when thinking about reading someone who I know I'm at odds with ideologically, a kind of hissing apprehension that I might receive some kind of mind-worm and begin to agree with them on some level, as though if I peruse the work of a fascist and find myself nodding at something, appreciating their ideas and portrayals of power. Of course, in reality we generally don't have our opinions jostled so easily, although I'm sure all of us could point to something we've read that chilled us but was revelatory, and perhaps changed our entire mode of thinking, without having expected to be swayed when we went into it. I have a Mishima book on my shelf that I've owned for some time but haven't read, because I know very little else about him besides a vague notion that he's a fascist, and I'm not even sure what that means in the context of the man himself - I imagine the psychology of a Japanese fascist differs significantly from that of an American right wing that I'm more familiar with. I can feel that anxiety, justified or not, coloring my interpretation of the book and giving me the kind of prejudice that won't allow me to engage fairly with his work on its own terms. One might ask why one should bother to be fair to a fascist, but I am engaging with the man's art, not the man himself. For what it's worth, I'm reading Ulysses right now and every 25 pages or so I'll remember that Joyce wrote his wife passionate love letters about her farts, and I'll become conscious of the fact that while reading I am walking around in the mindspace of someone who has a fetish that gags me to think about. The difference here is that that moment of awareness seems to me a very absurd and amusing thing that adds another dimension to the writing, because the thoughts that produced these skillful words coexist in the same mind right next to the part of his brain occupied by his wife's rear end. So in this instance the coloration given by foreknowledge about the author added something; I'm not sure if I would have the same sort of reaction to a writer I knew was a fascist, which is why I've hesitated reading Mishima.
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Jan 11, 2020 08:50
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nankeen posted:lol sorry everyone i'm perpetually stoned The genres blazin'
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Jan 14, 2020 00:56
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chernobyl kinsman posted:this is unreadable She's doing a bit to mock the book's writer
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Feb 1, 2020 03:12
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Is this still about that Japanese fascist dude? Because if you're going to draw a line about not reading works by awful people, he seems a pretty safe one to avoid. What does Mishima or his legacy materially gain from you reading his work? What does he lose by you choosing not to?
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Feb 1, 2020 22:29
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