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I have a soft spot for Al-Qadim.
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Jul 19, 2019 22:38
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 12:53 |
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Even as a kid I realized that the Cataclysm made zero sense at all. Punishing generations of people because some rear end in a top hat was really arrogant and petitioned management for the ultimate promotion was nonsensical, only the most die-hard fundie "God has a plan that involves little toddlers in Africa dying of AIDS" apologists would go for that poo poo.
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Jul 22, 2019 16:19
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I'm ashamed to say I never made the connection. Thank you very much, the minute you posted it I was like "ah poo poo, yeah, exactly."
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Jul 22, 2019 23:43
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I remember getting the 5th age book and it opened with two of Caramon's (that had been in the Tales and were likeable enough dudes) sons dead and I was just like "nope" and that's what turned me off Dragonlance forever. I was a hell of a loyal reader before then. I do remember I enjoyed that there was a Minotaur island empire that could have been a serious problem to the main continent but they were so busy killing each other in hierarchical tests of martial skill that they never turned their attention outward. I still think that's a pretty cool idea. I'm sure somebody's going to quote a story tho that ruins it.
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Jul 24, 2019 16:52
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Yeah that was the story that stuck with me. This big old minotaur sitting on the beach sharpening stakes and waiting for his final showdown. When the kill party shows up he picks the two best ones and proceeds to kill like 80% of his opponents, who are armed with real metal weapons. It was honestly a pretty Badass Moment as these things go. The knight finds out his "crime" was believing that the other races had value and that the minotaurs could learn something from them. Sedition. It's honestly a decent takedown of nationalism for a kid's fantasy story.
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Jul 24, 2019 17:08
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I THINK he also wrote this baller story where a knight deliberately gets himself captured by the enemy army and is straight up tortured for 3 days, but his faith keeps him strong and he literally goes into a trance where he sees all his dead knight companions calling him home. He comes out of the trance when they're about to slit his throat and personally challenges the Evil General to combat, fights him, and suddenly drops dead after giving it out as good as he gets. Turns out the knight had the plague. The enemy army left a plague victim in their camp for 3 days, LOL. They all get sick as hell and the army is beaten. Good poo poo, decent twist. edit: I believe it's "By the Measure" And yeah the "good Dragons are nice to the Draconians to see if there's anything redeeming about them" was good. The Tales are probably the best thing in Dragonlance, most of them are stupid or corny, but some are actually nice little genre pieces that are worth reading if you're a tween. edit: Looks like Richard Knaak might have put that poo poo on his shoulders and carried it away, because looking at Wikipedia I had forgotten almost all of them EXCEPT the ones he wrote, which stuck with me. Megaman's Jockstrap fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Jul 24, 2019 |
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Jul 24, 2019 19:14
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remusclaw posted:Yeah , I was not a fan of the fifth age either. These were not great books in general, but I was young, and I really liked the characters, and if you are going to kill all the characters off and create a miserable status quo I was just not going to keep reading. It's the same reason I fell out of old Star Wars EU stuff around the New Jedi Order. I would be curious to know if any of the Dragonlance books made the NY Times Bestseller list after Fifth Age. It's total anecdote but my friends and I all had fond memories of Dragonlance and then we read 5th age and it tanked the franchise as hard as the end of Mass Effect 3. We simply Did Not Give A poo poo about this new miserable version of Krynn. Now admittedly we were older and (debateably) wiser and perhaps too old for Dragonlance at that point but it wasn't the quality of writing that got us down, it was how absolutely mean-spirited the whole enterprise seemed.
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Jul 25, 2019 00:10
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I feel the same way but I'm starting to think that Krynn was always loving miserable and I just didn't notice when I was 12. The whole arc of OG Dragonlance is that they are coming off a miserable near-post-apocalypse into a brighter future. Some of the stuff in Twins is pretty misery-tourism but that's kind of the point, they went back in time to experience this old bad poo poo (or saw the awful consequences of Raistlin's Incel Meltdown) because modern day sure as heck was an improvement. On another note, I can't believe I'm thinking/writing this much about Dragonlance!!!!! homullus posted:Krynn and bear it
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Jul 25, 2019 01:59
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Libertad! posted:For the Dragonlance newbs in the audience, one of the eras the Twins time-traveled to was 30 years after the Cataclysm when the gods plunged a large nation beneath the waves and withdrew from the world. The Chronicles book series takes place 351 years after the Cataclysm. In the latter case the world was still in shambles, but it had enough time for generations to get used to the loss and for geo-political boundaries to be long-settled. Dragons of Autumn Twilight literally opens with a beautiful pstoral forest town with a gorgeous inn in a tree, and that's not an accident. The world is not in shambles, but it is definitely a poorer place than per-Cataclysm (and that's one of the themes of the OG series, is that they're bringing that stuff back into the world).
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Jul 25, 2019 17:05
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 12:53 |
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Lurdiak posted:Yeah and then all the later books are about that new better world being destroyed by an incessant series of new bad guys. That's just not true for the first decade+ of the series' life, it's Chronicles, then Legends which is basically stopping Raistlin in the past (no new better world being destroyed here, just protected) , then Heroes which is various backstory stuff but none of it is the new world being ruined, then Preludes which again takes place in the past, then Tales which is an anthology series and again nothing is ruined, and then the disastrous 5th Age poo poo which is exactly what you described and when (anecdotally) most of the old fans stop reading and the series never again makes the NYT Best Seller List.
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Jul 26, 2019 17:19
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