Bad Fantasy Books (Dragonlance, Pern, Xanth, and more)

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > Bad Fantasy Books (Dragonlance, Pern, Xanth, and more)

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Empty Sandwich posted:

Lord Soth

The badass bad guy. He was a paladin, and now he is the biggest possible jerk: a death knight.

Oh dang, his fall was because he was boning someone who wasn't his wife. Eventually he became a skellington because of that. Well, poo poo. That's how it goes.

Please enjoy this picture of the most badass foe on Krynn:

this whole thread is a trip, but remember how this guy's whole arc was stalking a living woman

here is a snippet of their famous romance

# ¿ Aug 23, 2020 03:30

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 06:10

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Black August posted:

There is absolutely no interesting qualities to Tannis and he never actually suffers much at all for being half elf

I remember all the legacy hilariously dying out of nowhere in the younger generation books, like LOTR Transformers the movie.

I remember liking the second trilogy alot but hell if I'm gonna read it agian.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2020 04:04

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Bismuth posted:

How does no one remember how intensely horny the pern books were, i will never stop until someone else acknowledges it

I mean, where do you want to go.

It deserves an entire thread of its own, because some of the poo poo I remember I'm actively suppressing

# ¿ Aug 23, 2020 04:07

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Galewolf posted:

I only read the first book literally to that exact scene and was like ugghh.

I remember reading a random fantasy book about a blademaster/witcher type of guy and it had lines like "His erection was swift and painful".

Can't remember much besides he was bald I think and had two katanas and killed everyone with a throat cut.

I read like a dozen of them and the memories are starting to seep in

The ages of the "riders"...get a lot...younger...

# ¿ Aug 23, 2020 13:12

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

CPA Hell posted:

Anyone got pictures of a wizard screaming at tits? It�s kinda my thing.

How about a lizard monster bring flabbergasted by them

# ¿ Aug 23, 2020 13:44

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Black August posted:

dragon is over this poo poo

# ¿ Aug 25, 2020 03:33

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Bismuth posted:

I never actually read these books because as a kid I hated the dragon's big goofy horse lips. I know that was a dumb reason not to read a book but I dont regret it at all.

They were bad enough that i stopped reading the first one, literally throwing it across the room. Surprise surprise it was written by a 19 year old weirdo

# ¿ Aug 25, 2020 03:52

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

ArbitraryC posted:

Quality writing no, but it did give me a high score on my SATs.

Lol the only thing reading lovely books gave me. Not good grades per se, but the only way a lazy kid would ever learn the word bivouac, sure.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2020 15:15

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

There's a pretty fun Book Barn thread all aboit Pratchett, but here's a taste. A major earthquaking villain is an irate chicken

# ¿ Aug 25, 2020 15:25

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:

It all blurs together. Although the last thing you said was from Earthsea which in no way belongs in this thread.

this is a nice derail. the fantasy books that still hold up.

Anything Le Guin wrote obviously. Bought a collection of Steven Brust Taltos books (because someone around here mentioned them) a couple of weeks ago and blazed through the first book, and I'm old as gently caress.

e: Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy?

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 18:05

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Prof. Crocodile posted:

if we're broadening the purview of this thread to include good fantasy books, i'd like to call back to

the chronicles of prydain were more influenced by welsh mythology than by tolkein, and that made them stand out from the books full of rehashed d&d tropes that filled the bookstores back in the day. also, like ursula leguin, he was actually a good writer so he didn't have to resort to pooping dragons and sexy ogres to sell books.

I read these books! Well the first one. It was fuckign awesome!

e: I was so disappointed with the Disney movie Black Cauldron.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2020 20:21

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

The Breakfast Sampler posted:

I used to work at a library so I read a lot of really nerdy poo poo inline with this. and I heard a lot of gushing about this series from similar idiots as myself.

I was so grossed out by the first book that I just stopped, although I skimmed a couple from work out of conclusion curiosity. I feel worse for ever having read any of it, that's how bad and weird it is (I guess that's an endorsement of sorts.) but the whole thing has a tone of just abject dirtiness to it. not even in an abject way like the Gor (I guess, heard about it) or the Xanth books (which I read too many of.)

are there any current portal books that arent gross adolescent fantasies put out in the last couple of years? Its such a popular genre in other mediums.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2020 19:19

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Colonel Cancer posted:

Someone mentioned Farseer trilogy itt is it any good? I read the first book when I was in highschool and all I remember is a sad clown and some dude being angsty about getting laid and then faking his death.

Yeah well that happens for 3 books and it owns

The hero just getting life poo poo at him for hundreds of pages

E:

Colonel Cancer posted:

The Night Watch (Russian one not TP) had a hilarious movie back in maybe 2003. The bad guy pulls out his spine and beats people up with them while good guys use fluorescent light bulbs as lightsabers

Impossible to decipher what the gently caress was happening in that movie

Shageletic fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Aug 28, 2020

# ¿ Aug 28, 2020 19:26

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Philthy posted:

I read the first one about a year ago and what blew my mind is that he thought of all of this in the 1940s. Today everything has copied a lot of it, so it really wasn't anything new. But back then it had to be like.. holy fuckballs crazy awesome. It was a bit boring, so I never made it to the second or third. I guess I can appreciate the ground work Asimov laid with it.

His Robot series was more insightful, almost on par with Arthur C Clarke. Then when you find it crossing over with Foundation books, whoo boy

# ¿ Aug 30, 2020 19:06

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Zeniel posted:

The loving Zybourne Clock map is better than the Gor map!

The Gor map looks like a map of a circuit

E:

super sweet best pal posted:

Do you think there's still a market for bad sci-fi/fantasy pulp? Not that I'd sell well because I prefer to keep my sex fantasies separate from my regular work.

I was watching some thing on ytube and apparently theres an immensely influential self publishing hub in Japan thats responsible for 90 percent of fantasy anime adoptions.

Learn some Kanji people

Shageletic fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Aug 30, 2020

# ¿ Aug 30, 2020 19:20

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

SoR Blaze posted:

That's the Runelords series, the disabled people are called "dedicants" and the only thing I remember about it was that the villain's name was Raj Ahten, and he had like hundreds of dedicants, but the power you got from them sometimes had serious drawbacks. Like if you get strength from one guy, cool, you have the strength of 2 men, but if you got strength from like 20 guys you had to be really careful not to accidentally break your own bones from swinging your sword too hard or whatever.

Anyway the one that made you fast was called metabolism, and the protagonist ended up getting like 20 metabolism dedicants (which also seriously limited his lifespan because he's also living 20x faster) to match Raj Ahten in battle and he describes breathing as like sucking honey into your lungs.

I guess I remember more than one thing about the books. I think the villain was trying to conquer the world so he could get an army before a race of giant bugs invaded, but I never got to read the third book in the series.

Written by David Farland.

First couple of books were great, had some great action scenes that were more super heroics than anything else and ramped up the action until the interesting bad guy had towers full of ppl hes maimed to turn intl superman.

Then the good guy just gets earth powers for some reason and beats him.

The series then turns into books about fighting giant beetles and deteriorates from then until the author holds hostage the latest book about the hero's son or whatever until more fans buys his writing help seminars

# ¿ Sep 2, 2020 09:43

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Cobalt-60 posted:

I eventually dumped most of her books, because I realized I was never going to read any of them again. Except for a couple of her 500 Kingdons series, cause I like fractured fairytales. And this book, cause the cover art is awesome:

Lol this thread is past life regression. I read this book. Just remembering reading about THE EDGE and hot rodding elves thinking that was the coolest poo poo

# ¿ Sep 3, 2020 14:30

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

juggalo baby coffin posted:

ive never been a fan of sex scenes in books that arent specifically erotica, they are usually poorly written and awkward and extremely rarely have anything to do with the plot. i dont think ive seen one in a book where it couldn't just be substituted with 'and they hosed' and not harm the book at all. i think most writers are pretty visually-minded people, which helps for describing fantastical cityscapes, not so much for conveying sex, which is an almost entirely kinesthetic experience. its how you end up with a lot of 'glistening manhoods' and weird tab-a into slot-a type prose.

like most writers are pretty bad at fight scenes too, and a good fight scene is also very kinesthetic, but like someone said earlier a lot of writers write swordfights like they're the combat log in an MMO. if you apply the combat log approach to sex, which they do, its just awful.

Jerek thrusted with his turgid member, dealing 50 pleasure to Tarabella's trembling mons

just awful

For all his faults Robert Jordan in the Wheel of Time books did a good job with both by leaving most of the sex and sword moves (lol) to the readers imagination.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2020 11:09

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Horizon Burning posted:

Big yikes from me, dog. If you were going to try and link the modern fantasy genre to anything, you'd link it to Tolkein. There's a difference between 'young adult' and Young Adult and Outsiders, Judy Blume, etc. get labelled as distinct from the Young Adult genre these days. Whenever people play this card, they're just trying to legitimize their tropetastic genre by saying Divergent is the same as Catcher in the Rye.

man all Im gonna say is I read the Chocolate Wars expecting some high school hijinks. MISTAKE.

# ¿ Sep 15, 2020 11:12

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Empty Sandwich posted:

the Moorcock Elric stuff is pretty grim, isn't it? I only read a couple, but I liked them. it's been a long time, though.

Has the most metal ending in all of fantasy

gently caress i love some Moorcock

# ¿ Sep 19, 2020 13:51

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Milkfred E. Moore posted:

Gideon the Ninth is marketed pretty... shakily, though. Should've emphasized the cookie-cutter YA elements and not the cool elements that barely feature. But it's not really an 'old ruins and dungeon' story. It's like Homestuck + Warhammer 40k + Twitter memes.

Oh, hey, something I can contribute to.

I wrote three novels worth of web serial over two years. It got a lot of positive reviews, readership numbers that beat pretty much every web serial that wasn't by one of the really established people, #1 for a few weeks on TopWebFiction's overall rankings, and so on. I even spoke to some publishers about it, and I'm now in the process of rewriting it into a format that's more a trilogy of self-contained novels than a meandering, sprawling serial.

All in all, it earned me about sixty bucks over the year I had a Patreon up.

Don't go the Patreon route. The biggest difficulty with online fiction you're going to have is getting people to even read your stuff in the first place. It seems counter-intuitive, but people are more willing to pay 4.99 for something bad on Amazon than take a punt on something that's free. Paywalling via Patreon is therefore extremely counter-productive. The online writers who make decent money on Patreon either have years of work ethic behind them and a once-in-a-lifetime fanbase (Wildbow) or they're playing to market and offering up to, like, fifty chapters ahead via tier benefits. Some of the personalities may, in fact, be more than one person.

Realistically, your options are to:

a. Play to the online fiction market. That means LitRPGs, xianxia, isekai, harem, Omegaverse, erotica, anime elves, with dragons, etc. whatever garbage that idiots pay money for even when they admit it is garbage. In that case, you might as well skip Patreon and go right to Kindle Unlimited.

b. Sack up and focus on writing something good and go through the traditional model.

More to the point, the online fiction ecosystem isn't nearly as healthy as it was a few years ago. It was decaying when I entered it and I'd argue it's basically dead now. The biggest site for connecting people to indie online fiction (WebFictionGuide) is closing down. The only sites left are places like RoyalRoad (LitRPGs, etc - big money if you play to the market and get lucky) or Wattpad (romance, etc) that have really specific tastes. I've had publishers tell me that they won't consider stories that have been listed on big sites, and Wattpad was mentioned specifically. So, that's something else to consider.

I've seen too many talented writers decide that they'll put their fiction online and get four or five chapters in before realizing that literally no one is reading it and just burn out. The question is, really, what are your goals? To get people to read your stuff? To make a living off it? To make the jump to traditional publishing? To just build a work ethic? Once you have that answer, you can figure out which route you should take.

Anyway, yes, I'll take a large fries.

And why is it that all these bad fantasy books have protagonists whose names start with K?

Tepidly doing the querying thing on a novel i sweated on (isekai i guess but super weird) but feeling like id rather just write another one thats already super marketable. Trying to see how.quickly I can write a 55k YA that takes place in a prep school for gifted youngsters. But since Im writing it, I'm stuffing alot of my criticisms of the CIA in it so far.

Whats the easiest poo poo to make money off anyway? Its a fun writing exercise and it'll be interesting to see if I can do it (before i gently caress off bc of boredom).

# ¿ Sep 19, 2020 14:09

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Mr.Chill posted:

I remember being frustrated that most Dragonlance books were not specifically about and starring dragons, then found the Douglas Niles book "Dragonlance: The Dragons" and my wish was granted.

It was pretty good, if I remember correctly.

lol you want dragons I'll get you dragons

loving choke on it

# ¿ Mar 20, 2022 15:24

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Demon. Chicken.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2022 15:57

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Nigmaetcetera posted:

I started reading Imajica. I�m two chapters in and there�s a shitload of footnotes that are utterly loving bizarre, so I have a feeling it�s going to go loving nuts asap.

It's Japanese portal fantasy OP

# ¿ Mar 30, 2022 05:56

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

Ah yes the bottom invertion

# ¿ Apr 2, 2022 12:07

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

sweet geek swag posted:

I agree, though I liked certain aspects of the first half of the Last Battle. Once they 'die' the story gets too heavy handed though. My favorite is The Silver Chair because I'm a sucker for Journey to the Center of the Earth type stories.

Lol I remember the stinging taste of betrayal reading the Last Battle when I was 14. Like I remember yelling at my friends about the books were actual Christian bullshit. Haha good times

E: I'm half sure it affected my turn towards atheism. Thanks Caroll. You made me an unbeliever.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2022 18:19

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# ¿ May 15, 2024 06:10

Shageletic: Jul 25, 2007

sweet geek swag posted:

The Chronicles of Narnia were written by C.S. Lewis.

lol welp

# ¿ Apr 8, 2022 23:19

The Something Awful Forums > Main > General Bullshit > Bad Fantasy Books (Dragonlance, Pern, Xanth, and more)