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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Oh, and no one else gets to say that these chapters are just the calm before the storm (The... Gathering Storm Isn't this just their RPG roots showing?
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May 19, 2023 17:15
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) because I'm saying that first. Like, I get it. But it's also a little tiresome that it's been thirty years and Holden is still just basically a hatchetman for a political organization he disagrees with. Like, that was his whole thing in Caliban's War, and then again in Cibola Burn. I'm not sure how much of this is an intentional invocation of nothing-ever-changing which is basically the MO of this series, and how much of it is just the Coreys churning these books out and writing what comes easily.
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 21:51 |
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People don't care about the physics of nuclear weapons though. They have a significant cultural impact due to being the number one way we could all die in a horrific mushroom cloud. The reader's not going "well acktually nukes in space aren't nearly as scary," they're imagining Hiroshima.
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Jun 1, 2023 00:10
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The irony being that attacking the solar system seems like a rather ideologically driven decision then something the Laconians absolutely need to do.
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Jul 12, 2023 23:54
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I really can't escape the feeling that this story's RPG roots are showing, hard. More after work.
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Feb 28, 2024 14:38
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:I'll be interested in hearing it! And I completely forgot I posted that after getting pummeled at work. Before I begin, I should stress it's been a while since I read these books and I stopped at maybe 7 or 8 because that's what was out at the time. Milkfred E. Moore posted:Like I've said of a a lot of these novels, it feels like the bit the Coreys came up with and then built the story to get us there. I was going to go into a whole thing about how the siege of Laconia reminded me of a Dungeon Master scrambling to not have to get the rules for mass spaceship battle out, but I think this sort of thing really illustrates the point better. Bobbie's last stand isn't an organic event, it's something that happens because Bobbie's player had to quit after this session and wanted to go out in a "cool" blaze of glory. Now, I don't know whether or not the Expanse was gamed out like Malazan (ugh) was, but a lot of the wasted potential feels like a DM flailing around trying to figure out how to run political intrigue and just kind of reacting to the players ideas. "Yeah, you have, uh...3 Donnager class ships. I know I talked a lot about the Laconian gate defenses, but that's gonna take a bunch of time so...uh...I rolled a 1 and they're dead." It's also very reminiscent of book reddit's obsession with "moments". You wander over to the Wheel of Time subreddits or Brandon Sanderson and people keep talking about the time Rand fought with swords in the sky at Falme or whatever. Given that that's the target market of the fantasy industrial complex it doesn't shock me that the Coreys desperately want to build up to big moments such as Bobbie's death.
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Mar 2, 2024 04:04
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Honestly Laconia is kind of the lynchpin of the RPG logic on display. A big part of their nominal appeal is that Duarte is the guy who "solved" the usual problems of authoritarianism by...uh... look, the writers aren't going to answer that, ok? The latest book looks like the Coreys are split on Duarte actualizing the philosopher king vs the Laconians just being another corrupt dictatorship high on their own hype. Tanaka is a perfect example of a creature from the latter, but otherwise this is the smoothest dictatorship ever. There are no factions Duarte has to appease, nobody is stealing from the till, and the only division in Duarte's inner circle comes when Holden rolls a 20 on his "start poo poo" check. Even when the capital planet is bombed - the kind of reality check that inspires generals to start loading bombs into briefcases - the Laconian navy remains 100% loyal and nobody criticizes the leadership for letting this happen. The weird thing is that Daniel Abraham at least knows about this stuff because the Dagger and the Coin features a Hitler-esque dictator who destroys himself and his empire through his own lies, so I'm wondering if he didn't take over this book to add things like "torture teams" and Tanaka to show the readers that yea, he's just another dictator high on his own supply.
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Mar 5, 2024 15:01
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General Battuta posted:Tanaka is already unpleasant to read but this chapter makes her seem completely incompetent too. Do the Coreys hate her??? These choices baffle me. Is Tanaka supposed to be competent? She strikes me as the kind of crappy officer with no self control who gets promoted for being loyal over being competent a la the Husseins Junior, not some scary hypercompetent true believer. It goes back to Laconia being kinda not really fleshed out IMO. Is the Rocinante launching an airstrike on a school ever coming up again?
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Mar 18, 2024 16:20
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General Battuta posted:God, I don't know. But if she's not fun to read about and not competent what kind of villain is she? A kinky animal-murdering doofus? She reminds me of that evil rapist prison guard officer in David Weber's Echoes of Honor whose character trait was that she really enjoyed raping and got blown up in the first five minutes.
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Mar 19, 2024 01:54
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The great sin of most of the SF&F industrial complex is becoming so enamored with their plot devices they eclipse the human element of the tale. That is all I can think of with this dark gods and light alien nonsense. General Battuta posted:I think (if I had another draft on this final book) a cleaner way to do this story is to return to some of the tone and themes of Leviathan Wakes. (It's right there in the title.) This is legitimately good because it retains the human element of Man vs Man, instead of the bizarro whatever the gently caress this is where James Holden shoots himself up with <PLOT> to trigger a cutscene to unlock the ability to do 9999 damage to the final boss.
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Apr 25, 2024 17:45
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I hope I'm not just making GBS threads up this thread, but I am still thoroughly lost by what this story is now supposed to be about...? Duarte is an evil dictator who is also Jesus - and not in the Gabriel Garcia Marquez delusional way. The inhuman light aliens are now somehow the first humans in the garden of Eden. We have set up a conflict so high stakes and so absurd - extradimensional aliens will destroy the laws of physics! - that there is no possible way that any human agency can resolve this conflict. Like, yeah, these novels have always been pulpy space adventures, but these plot devices seem to have metastasized.
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Apr 28, 2024 03:34
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General Battuta posted:I hate Tanaka's final scene (and for that matter Duarte's) so much. It's pathetic. This is what you do with these characters? This is the absolute climax of the entire Laconia plot thread and arguably your whole series? It's so...grimy and ugly and small. I mean, I can't justify Tanaka going out like the South Park kids' Fingerbang band, but Duarte the dictator dying in a grimy, ugly, and small way is pretty on par for the brand Think of Hitler shooting himself or Stalin dying in his own piss. Duarte trying to murder his own daughter would seem to come down pretty heavily on the Laconian ideals being complete bullshit and just being another space dictator, but I've bitched about the incoherence of that plotline enough without mocking the shoehorned Jesus allegory. Milkfred E. Moore posted:So, the climax of this series is a weird showdown in a place that hasn't really been relevant since the third novel (which is fine) where the reader's understanding of it seems to be inversely correlated to how much attention they've paid throughout the series, where it all depends on weird esoterica about light aliens and a lashing out alternate universe cosmic mind and a messiah who seems like he can actually do as he says but it's bad because humanity won't have lovely pop songs and conversations anymore even though it sure seems like people are maintaining their identities given they keep talking to Tanaka and judging her and whenever Duarte's voice shows up it's on a whole different level. I thought Duarte was able to mind control the battleships' crews to attack Naomi's fleet? From what you're describing here it sounds like less of a therapy session and more like Duarte is going to be the immortal dictator. Even if he doesn't mind control people he can still Avada Kedavra them to death. It also makes Holden's decision not to take up the real ultimate power more meaningful. Yeah, it's just a lovely version of the One Ring, but still, I take what I can get here.
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Apr 28, 2024 12:44
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 21:51 |
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:Revolutionaries are frauds and murderers taking advantage of people who don't know any better. Any supposed messiah is doing the bidding of foreign powers and/or caught in the ruins of history. The best the third would can hope for is to be recognized as a shipping company -- and yet, in doing so, would leave civilization unable to combat the fascists. The only thing you can hope for is a political shark who is slightly less stupid than her compatriots. The height of humanity is a monster who knows he's a monster. Corporations are fine, they just shouldn't start wars or experiment on children. There's nothing you can do about this, so, be gentle. I think the biggest miss of the Expanse is that no one believes in anything or has any drama that would justify this. Laconia has no ideology except for LessWrong game theory bullshit. I don't remember Inaros having any actual vision for what the free Belt would look like. Our Let's Reader covered Anna and the Mormons, but it's bizarre to me that we get here because most of the "monkey bad" scenarios come from people who believed in things. The Holocaust and Holodomor would not have been possible without Hitler and Stalin's visions. The extermination of the Native Americans does not happen without manifest destiny. Now, you don't need an overarching ideology to do absolutely awful poo poo - the Belgian Congo comes to mind - but it's shocking to me that there are no true believers anywhere in the series.
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Apr 30, 2024 23:58
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