TheGreatEvilKing posted:

The paw patrol is about the evils of private enterprise, yet the author complains the team is led by a police (government) dog.

Later the author complains that no one is a heroic government employee.

I don't even know.

quote:

As for the show’s relationship to society and government, Adventure Bay seems to have no municipal services or social safety net. There is no public fire department, police force, or health care system. Instead, the residents rely on a Blackwater-style private enterprise that offers policing, firefighting, medical, trash and recycling services, and assorted search and rescue services

Pacho posted:

I understand "show, don't tell" from a scriptwriting perspective, but from a literary perspective it doesn't really make that much sense because everything is "tell" unless we are talking about a writter being overly descriptive or lacking nuance which seems like generic bad writer problems. Also, I think extracting emotional labour from the reader is kinda the point of literature, isn't it?

nankeen posted:

fantasy, science fiction, horror, magical realism, "young adult", all of these terms are just insulting and unnecessary attempts to define the indefinable, and from now on i will make it my mission that if i hear any man invoke these terms, i will slay him

Disillusionist posted:

I'm reading the old thread in its entirety for fun and I'm actually learning a lot. For instance, I read The Way of Kings a few years ago and enjoyed it for the most part. The aspects I didn't like were: weird eyebrow people, major characters having similar names (I know Gavilar, Kalladin and Dalinar are characters but gently caress me if I remember who is who), the ~magic system~ and spren poo poo, and a few others. I did genuinely like how different it seemed from other "fantasy" literature in a lot of aspects, though. The setting reminded me of Morrowind to an extent because things were just different somewhat.

Thing is, I've since learned that there's very little original in WOK other than the particulars of the worldbuilding. And I've since learned the flaws of autist-level worldbuilding as represented in WOK. Now I no longer feel compelled to read the rest of the series because I am certain Sanderson isn't going to make up for all the schlock with more battles involving the use of dozens of ladders to scale massive chasms on the battlefield (seriously, it's the only element I can recall two years later that I enjoyed as unique, and even the purpose for the chasm-battlefield is contrived).

As an aspiring writer, the advice I see most often is Always Be Reading. However, I almost feel like if I want to write SF/F (god help me), I should mostly ignore the genre and read other poo poo. It seems like so much of fantasy lit is aping people who were aping Tolkien, and I, fortunately, have read very little SFF to date (which is probably why WOK seemed different to me). I feel like if I read a bunch of SFF just so I could say that I've "read the genre," the tropes and crutches of other authors like Sanderson et al will poison the well, so to speak. Is that fair?

Fell Fire posted:

I wish I knew more about that era. I might write something up anyway, when I have some free time. That's an interesting book that misses by being about all of the uninteresting parts.

Does anyone actually want a critical look at Dune?

chernobyl kinsman posted:

herbert's prose should be banned under the geneva conventions


his ellipses, not mine

Lex Neville posted:

wait thats not only published but also a genre classic? care to post what comes after?

Sham bam bamina! posted:

It didn't, actually.

Finicums Wake posted:

if i'm reading fiction, of any sort, i expect the author to at least seem like they're interested language, as that's the medium they're working in. i realize that genre fiction emphasizes different things than literary fiction, and that the prose style isn't really the point of the former. like i'm not going into sci-fi with the expectation of reading nabakov, or anything close to it.

i get the impression that many authors who write genre fiction are doing so for reasons other than the fact that they like writing. i suspect that if they had unlimited resources at their disposal, they'd rather tell their story, explore their world, etc. in an entirely different way. maybe i'm wrong. but it's hard for me to figure out why someone dedicating so much time to writing ends up with the kinds of prose i see in many science fiction books.

my bony fealty posted:

I would guess it's somewhat because the standards are lower for publishing. There's probably loads of lovely prose lit fic written too that never sees the light of day because lit fic readers ostensibly are looking for good prose as a key component of the books they buy where genre readers mostly are not. So genre authors have far less impetus to improve as writers if their goal is to achieve commercial success.

Is self-published lit fic is a thing?

Rand Brittain posted:

Ultimately a healthy publishing industry requires that a very large number of writers who are just okay or thoroughly mediocre be able to make a good living as authors.

Popeston posted:

I found this thread after searching the forum for The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O because despite having read it 2 years ago I sometimes remember it and get irrationally angry. So I'm pretty new to the thread and mostly skimming but I've seen Name of the Wind come up a few times and I'm wondering what people didn't like about it.

I read it on a plane journey so I didn't think all that much about it but it seemed okay. Like I get it's a flashback of the Greatest Dude Ever that dwells a lot on how great he is but I found it engaging enough. It's not amazing but I've read a lot of worse books. Which admittedly is a low bar but there's a lot of super poo poo books.

A human heart posted:

It's funny when guys on these forums who read bad contemporary science fiction pretend that it's somehow way better than the bad science fiction of the past.

Srice posted:

I was making a joke about the notion that better science = better writing.

Thranguy posted:

Would Moby Dick still have been a great work of Melville had gotten fundamental aspects of the whaling experience dead wrong?

Eugene V. Dubstep posted:

VictualSquid posted:

I am looking forward to seeing the return to those biting and well reasoned critiques that made this thread great.

nankeen posted:

the botl ban was legitimately ridiculous but i do get that people were getting angry enough to start a mass off-site exodus in protest of having their favourite media randomly slandered by a cantankerous finn. the fact they were that angry is totally unreasonable and not botl's fault, but it was still an issue. oh who am i kidding i'm a fraud. i'm outside the finnish embassy as we speak. i' mdressed as a holy fool and i haven't stopped drinking since the day i was born. i'll kill you all! i'll burn this whole drat kingdom to the ground

nankeen posted:

can anybody give me a single concrete example of botl's creeping/stalking/harassment crimes that's not "he was mean to the action figure goon in two different threads"

Hieronymous Alloy posted:

One of the really amazing things to me about litrpgs is that people could, theoretically, just write gamebooks

like then the reader could actually play the game and it might even be fun

I spent a whole weekend working through https://www.projectaon.org/en/Main/Books just a few years ago

but no they have to even take the joy of actually playing a game away from the reader, all that's left is the empty fantasy of succeeding at a game instead

i mean they're writing out the game rules and everything just print a character sheet on the first page folks!

Kerbtree posted:

Are you thinking of the Fighting Fantasy books? Warlock of Firetop Mountain ring any bells?

Neurosis posted:

I cannot imagine anything more creatively restrictive than writing to this. 'Well, I had this grand arc planned for this character, but his speechcraft wasn't high enough to pass the skill check, so I had to do something boring.'

The_White_Crane posted:

No her big thing is to create a setting where people have magic superpowers that lead to them sometimes wiping out entire towns completely by accident, then portraying them as unfairly repressed and trying to make them a metaphor for the treatment of black people in the U.S.

Strom Cuzewon posted:

Why do people keep trying to do this (badly) when X-Men exists and already did it (badly)?

my bony fealty posted:

lol y'all just can't help yourselves from saying a woman of color's chosen method of exploring her heritage and oppression is invalid can you

Cacto posted:

You gotta get out more. There’s thousands of years of totally legitimate real art by some of the most famous artists featuring dragons, demons, super powered people or whatever. Even old literature is packed full of supernatural themes. You can go down the rabbit hole of whether modern fantasy or sci fi is like what came out back in the day in its portrayal of the supernatural, but the inclusion of weird poo poo doesn’t force someone to write poorly.

Gravitas Shortfall posted:

I love Pratchett but this is a both good and bad criticism. Good because Pratchett is a bit too enamoured by the idea of "democracy is stupid, what we really need is a dictator who actually cares", and bad because there's never a popular uprising against Vetenari, it's always disgruntled elites

The Vosgian Beast posted:

Nah it's not even convincing people anything it's like

Man I get mad at dumb stuff too but like

Man that's a mean wedgie

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

So there is a clear correlation between sexual assault and slavery, and you can't really discuss slavery accurately without the fact that much of slavery's evil comes in the form of legalized rape.

TheGreatEvilKing posted:

It is precisely because of the modern reckoning with sexual assault and the trauma it inflicts that authors reach for it as a way to show how evil their villains are. It is a convenient shorthand to avoid studying human nature or reading good fiction. Why bother portraying a utopian ideology that can justify any horror, or researching mental illness, or coming up with a foil to the hero when all you need to do is describe where the bad man put his penis?

derp posted:

Vonnegut is good and thus should not be discussed in this thread

Sham bam bamina! posted:

Even this is ridiculous. If anything, you're just going to hate the book. A leftist's reaction to reading Atlas Shrugged isn't up to some roll of the dice; it's pretty clear how that's going to turn out.

Lex Neville posted:

Interaction with any work of art does not inherently lead to any kind of internalisation of its or its creator's morals, to any extent. Your choice of words consistently implies that it does and it precludes you from grasping what everyone's been telling you.

Sham bam bamina! posted:

That is a pathetic fear to have. People with other ideas, no matter how horrible, are in fact people. The idea that you shouldn't even be able to understand where a fascist or racist or whoever is coming from, what brought them to where they are, is absolute horseshit. A lack of knowledge or empathy (to be clear, not sympathy) is not a point of pride.

porfiria posted:

Those Hitler paintings are utterly uninspired but evince some level of training or practice—clearly either the work of a studious child or a fascist.

Heath posted:

Even ignoring the dig at the poster, you can judge Atlas Shrugged on its artistic merits apart from its politics, and it fails on that level - there's very little, if any, artistic merit to Atlas Shrugged even as simply a prose novel or a story. It's hard to give it credit as a piece of artistic expression when it has a 60 page speech that's effectively a political manifesto with the express purpose of persuading its audience.

derp posted:

How many fantasy novels can you count where the magic power depends on having a 'pure bloodline'