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FactsAreUseless posted:Literature doesn't have to be thematic - I'd suggest looking at an author like Daniel Orozco whose stories focus on experience, not theme. Literature needs to have good prose, but otherwise there's a wide range of things it can do.  I wonder if this is still "dumb as poo poo?"
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Mar 17, 2019 04:40
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Oh yeah, thematic depth doesn't have to be the focus of a text. Thanks for clarifying. This post is a work of art, how is it even possible?
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Mar 20, 2019 05:49
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Take the plunge! Okay! posted:Hahahahaha How is Death of the Author Not Real Just Read Pierre Menard Author of the Quixote Like Read The Library of Babel Sorry for being slow, but what are you getting at here? Menard's Quixote is only a distinct text from Cervantes' if the author beyond the text is relevant to its criticism, and that's what Borges' narrator talks about. Or is that what you were saying?
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Mar 20, 2019 05:53
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The_White_Crane posted:*sucks teeth* Fantasy was invented in response to the atomic bomb. It's utterly ludicrous to say that anything before that was fantasy.
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May 16, 2019 14:31
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I quit the wheel of time when the characters starting having exposition-dump conversations right after someone attempted to murder them, standing in the middle of the hallway where they just almost got murdered.
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Nov 22, 2019 01:55
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Tor.com has its own publishing that, last I checked, was entirely devoted to fantasy novellas. I've read two, Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and The Jewel & Her Lapidary, both of which I thought were sort of purple and melodramatic, but they were clearly still a cut above an ordinary doorstopper fantasy installment. And of course, they end. I think it would be worthwhile for a trustworthy source to review that catalogue and weed out the good ones.
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Nov 23, 2019 20:47
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This is in Mark Lawrence's Red Sister:quote:"The convent keeps records of the best times," Clera said. "The best time in each class in each year, the best time in the whole year, and the best time ever." This is with respect to a task of walking across a curving pipe without falling. So we have an in-universe minigame with in-universe scoreboards, and a high score explained to the protagonist, who now seeks to break it.
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Nov 30, 2019 02:51
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Heath posted: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. I've been wondering about this for a while. I think the idea is that fiction is supposed to be read at a level of remove, and understood as something explicitly fictional, even by the standards of the world itself. So it has to have the right tropes, payoffs, and so on a work of fiction can be critiqued not internally, but only in reference to what the story must do with respect to audience reactions, who are consuming a piece of media. Audience expectation must govern the actual 'in-universe' interactions. I think this might tie into how genre fiction stories themselves often take inspiration from video games, comic books, etc. there is no story outside of a deliberate framing in another fictional form, so we have to read it as a reproduction of a video game, etc., not as a first order production of 'another world.' In other words, a video game is something foremost that has mechanics, and the 'world' around it is only trappings for those mechanics to be participated in. It is a game the way a board game is, but it is aesthetically dressed up to make it immersive. A genre fiction audience wants the same out of a book a book is like a video game, a way to participate in 'read' mechanics, which are dressed up in aesthetic clothes to make the mechanics of the storytelling palatable. You already get this with a whodunnit, but epic fantasy and so on just does this writ large, it is all 'things to be interacted with.' Nerdburger_Jansen fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Nov 30, 2019 |
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Nov 30, 2019 02:56
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Antivehicular posted:This prose is pretty bad, but the concept doesn't seem weird or minigamey to me. I assume from context that this is a school setting, and plenty of real-world schools have athletic tasks and records like this; if the protagonist has a good reason to go after a record, it seems fair enough. I see this, but part of the reason school settings are so popular is because they're so structured, and so they allow the world to be viewed like a video game. (It's not just to appeal to kids, since I know adults are reading this, maybe even mostly adults). The school setting provides a plausible structure in ranks and classes and then in Harry Potter, you even have color-coded houses that correspond to personality traits. So maybe it's not a video game thing per se. Maybe it's a deeper thing where people like things they can lay out in colors and ranks and tables, like a DnD book, and that makes both video games and genre fiction the way they are. Of course even real schools don't really work like this. But sometimes it can't be coincidental. Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive, for example (or at least the first book I never read past it) is almost literally set in an MMO server, complete with spawning enemies and factions that compete over killing mobs to get rare item drops.
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Nov 30, 2019 04:28
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Heath posted: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. Right, and in Fellowship of the Ring, Rivendell is a 'rest stop' where the heroes take a nap and heal their wounds and status conditions, like coming to a new town in a JRPG. Edit: But, I should be clear, I think the focusing on treasure and magic items could in itself be a mythological thing, that DnD etc. aped to begin with. Someone with better knowledge of this stuff could confirm, but I think that there really were myths about barrows having lights over them if they contained treasure to alert the adventurer, like an MMO icon flashing for the player's benefit, and the magical items remind me of what the dwarves make for the Norse gods (these have 'properties' like being unable to break oaths sworn by them, multiplying every so often etc.). Nerdburger_Jansen fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Nov 30, 2019 |
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Nov 30, 2019 04:33
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quote:snarky My favorite word!
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Dec 8, 2019 07:38
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my bony fealty posted:AE Van Vogt's Empire of the Atom is I, Claudius in space, therefore it is historical fiction I have read this. It has spaceships that land on the battlefield to unload waves of cavalry. I think archers also fire from the ships.
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Jan 10, 2020 04:40
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Mexican authors shouldn't allowed to write about Mexicans either, unless they have >50% indigenous blood. I've seen the Mexican authors protesting they're practically crackers, whiter than half our presidents, lmao! The "Mexicans" that are part of the literary elite are literally just Spaniards. Wake up sheeple.
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Feb 5, 2020 03:25
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