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Mel Mudkiper posted:wait this dude has multiple thousand page series going on at once? When I said this guy had legendary output, that wasn't hyperbole. Sanderson treats writing as a full time job as has a very structured approach to his writing. Also, this is his dream come true since all he ever wanted is to be a writer. Proteus Jones fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Nov 16, 2018 |
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Nov 16, 2018 19:34
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I thought it was meant for ten books or is skyward not part of whatever series the rule of kings is a part of
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Nov 16, 2018 23:12
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Mel Mudkiper posted:wait this dude has multiple thousand page series going on at once? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Sanderson_bibliography Dude writes.
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Nov 16, 2018 23:25
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Dragonsteel is ambitious considering it won’t be a thing for a decade at least.
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Nov 16, 2018 23:29
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CharlestheHammer posted:Dragonsteel is ambitious considering it won’t be a thing for a decade at least. Since each TSA book looks to be taking around 2-4 years... probably more like 18-25 years... 
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Nov 16, 2018 23:53
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The Cosmere is just such an insane project. The only other guys I can think of who pulled off such an ambitious world and character building project was Jack Kirby and Osamu Tezuka. The funniest thing is he'll probably finish his 10 book series before Rothfuss or Martin ever put out another volume.
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Nov 17, 2018 01:04
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Ccs posted:The Cosmere is just such an insane project. The only other guys I can think of who pulled off such an ambitious world and character building project was Jack Kirby and Osamu Tezuka. How about Balzac?
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Nov 17, 2018 02:32
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A human heart posted:How about Balzac? True. Though I'm guessing Tezuka was even more of a workaholic, what with the "four hours of sleep a night" trend he started among manga-artists. The bastard.
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Nov 17, 2018 03:50
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Hi, I'm told this is the closest thing to a WoT thread that there is right now, and also from context I assume that it isn't packed with die-hard fans who will not welcome my bad-faith barbed questions about it. I have this friend who lives his life according to WoT this and WoT that and who will not shut up about WoT no matter how much I silently nod and try to change the subject. Now that he finally seems to believe that I actually have read it and am not just faking it through cliff's notes and wikipedia, he insists to me that the only reason I don't recognize it as the apotheosis of literature and writing skill the way he does is that I didn't read it carefully enough and I should read it again. Specifically he says I should pay careful and close attention to Rand (the most interesting character ever, because he is running for Pope and President of the United States at the same time and he is just so awesome) and the way he treats Mat and Perrin, the way he treats Moiraine, and the way he treats Cadsuane as the story goes on, and that this is supposed to give me clues and deep insights into the character development process and how supremely skilled writers craft a world, and how I should do it if I were to harbor any aspirations to write fiction of my own. I don't know, for my part all I remember is that he progressively became more and more of a supercilious egotistical twat toward them all, intentionally, because he kept chanting to himself that I MUST BECOME HARD and  himself from any human emotion or weakness because if he showed any kind of vulnerability or empathy his enemies would attack him through his loved ones. Apparently there's more to it than that, and when I asked for details he just said "read it again and pay attention this time". Did I miss some super important but impressively subtle subtext and thread of clues woven throughout his arc, or am I just being gaslit?(nb: I enjoyed the Sanderson books approximately one million times more than the preceding slow-motion trainwrecks. Holy poo poo, something is actually happening! Rand reached rock bottom and did something and now he's becoming a person again! Oh yeah there's a character in there after all!)
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Nov 18, 2018 21:56
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Whats a apotheosis
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Nov 18, 2018 22:05
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Data Graham posted:Hi, I'm told this is the closest thing to a WoT thread that there is right now, and also from context I assume that it isn't packed with die-hard fans who will not welcome my bad-faith barbed questions about it. uuuugh If you want to drop a truth bomb on this dude, do this: Rand is intended as a study of / response to a war veteran with PTSD. The series was originally conceived with Tam -- i.e., a war veteran trying to return to life on the farm -- as the protagonist, but it got changed later to be about kids because that sells better. The whole "I MUST BECOME HARD" thing is Rand going insane and it's supposed to be a bad thing, that's why Rand rejects it at the end. Rand's the protagonist sure but that doesn't mean the work endorses his every action or viewpoint -- most of the time he's making one degree or another of horrible mistake, and usually suffering as a result. (Much of Rand's storyline even in the final books was Jordan-drafted with only minimal revision by Sanderson). I think some people get REALLY into WoT because 1) sunk cost fallacy and 2) if all you've ever read is genre fiction then an actual character study of a protagonist with actual mental health issues and real stress and protagonists who make mistakes etc. can be a revelation. It's also got unusually independent female voices for fantasy genre fiction, etc.  Compared to what was out there in the late eighties / early nineties, WoT deserves credit for moving the genre forward. At this point the genre has moved past it in a lot of ways though. For example, what were gender-forward steps in the 80's now often seem stereotyped ("Women do things like this, men do things like That").
Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 22:10 on Nov 18, 2018 |
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Nov 18, 2018 22:06
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your friend is dumb OP
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Nov 18, 2018 22:09
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Data Graham posted:Did I miss some super important but impressively subtle subtext and thread of clues woven throughout his arc, or am I just being gaslit? does this person like really, really love the Rothfuss books as well and refuse to admit any faults there? because that's definitely the particular kind of fantasy guy i am imagining here Hieronymous Alloy posted:
yeah I think we're at the point where we can admire that WoT is a historically important series to the genre at large, and even its many flaws were often done better than a lot of its contemporaries. but it's a huge red flag if someone defends it in the way Data Graham described lol eke out fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Nov 18, 2018 |
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Nov 18, 2018 22:12
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eke out posted:
Yup. The best possible interpretation of a dude like that is that they've never read anything else except for lovely pre-1990's genre fiction. Which is its own kind of condemnation. I mean, you look at the jacket quotes for Eye of the World, one of them's from Piers Anthony. Late-eighties American fantasy was a morass. Even like, Pratchett and Gaiman were still over in England then and not really known to American audiences.
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Nov 18, 2018 22:23
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The Wheel weaves as the Wheel wills.
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Nov 18, 2018 22:37
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I only wish I could lay down an unanswerable gauntlet the way Sanderson did by writing THE SPANKING SCENE TO END ALL SPANKING SCENES, NOW LET US NEVER SPEAK OF THIS AGAIN. Anyway yeah, I do recognize that there's the whole "Rand is going insane, this is what going insane looks like from the inside" aspect. Not that I'm totally convinced that that's all that's going on either. When I was in the process of reading it and people kept patiently explaining to me, "Hey Rand is going insane", my reaction was skeptical because to me, a person going insane wouldn't use the term "going insane", nor would the narrative surrounding it. It's such a facile and pat description of what I would think is a very complex and very specific mental breakdown process. You don't just say "oh he's going insane", you say he's suffering from schizophrenia or he's hallucinating or he's becoming convinced that the black helicopters are after him. It's like his word choice of the ouroboros "eating its own tail": good lord, can he not think of a more evocative word than "eating"? Like maybe "devouring", something heraldry-inspired or whatever? It's like for all the insane levels of detail we get about dresses and embroidery and tendrils of Power interlacing with black thorns and so on, the actual details of what's going on in people's minds are described at such a detached level I can't even engage with the idea that that's intentionally what he's trying to convey. What I do appreciate is that Jordan appears to have made the conscious decision to not write mythology, the way Tolkien did, but rather a political study. The whole WoT takes place over what, like two years, and in 15K pages it only makes the barest of gestures toward describing the world's history in any kind of detail. It's not about mythic history. What it's about is looking at analogues of (often reviled) historical figures and seeing what it's like to examine their rise to stardom from a perspective that treats them as a protagonist. Egwene is what happens if the girl next door grows up to be Hitler. Mat leads the Viet Cong. Rand, well... that's kind of what I'm trying to figure out. I don't get what or whom he's analogous to. He thinks he's doing the right thing, but he's not presented in any kind of relatable or positive light, so maybe the subversion is that he's supposed to be someone who history recognizes as a Good Guy, presented here as an insane rear end in a top hat just for the fun of it? I don't know. "War veteran with PTSD" is as good a thing to go with as any, but since my friend is a huge military worship type guy who disdains all other forms of fantasy and his first endorsement of Jordan is always "he was actually IN a war, unlike all those other pussies like Tolkien", I feel like the portrayal of Rand as "going insane", if an accurate way to describe his character arc, feels weirdly inauthentic for how it supposedly came about.
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Nov 18, 2018 22:37
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Yeah, on one level, Rand has the PTSD bad just from the experience of being who he is going what he's going through On the other hand he also has Fantasy Magic Insanity that doesn't really follow any rules And both are happening at the same time in the same head. it is what it is. Jordan was attempting to write a better fantasy series than what had come before. He succeeded in a lot of ways but it's still a deeply flawed work.I'll also give Jordan this credit: his battle scenes are well drawn. He has a great flash-bulb staccato style of depicting combat that I think does draw on his combat experience and which I haven't seen another genre writer match -- everything's first person, everything's happening all at once, nothing's understood till afterwards. There's a marked contrast with Sanderson's battle scenes, which always come across as if directed by Peter Jackson and shot from a helicopter camera -- they're clearer and better depicted but much less visceral and immediate. If you just want to give the guy poo poo, make him defend the fifty four page bath chat scene in book 10. That's fifty four pages in hardback. Of Elayne taking a bath. Also your friend is an idiot because Tolkien fought in the Somme
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Nov 18, 2018 22:50
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tell your friend to buy an account so I can call him a dumb bitch
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Nov 18, 2018 22:51
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:There's a marked contrast with Sanderson's battle scenes, which always come across as if directed by Peter Jackson and shot from a helicopter camera -- they're clearer and better depicted but much less visceral and immediate. if stormlight is ever filmed and is not wuxia, i will be furious
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Nov 18, 2018 22:55
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eke out posted:if stormlight is ever filmed and is not wuxia, i will be furious actually that reminds me another good way to troll WoT discussions: "It's just a western, text Anime." Then you go through and list anime tropes that are present in WoT -- the three different color coded girlfriends (one brunette, one blonde, one redhead) being the most obvious, but then the cartoonishly described magic, the immensely overwrought length, etc.
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Nov 18, 2018 23:01
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"Have you read the Wheel of Time?" "Sorry, no, I don't like anime"
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Nov 18, 2018 23:02
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:actually that reminds me I mean harem anime seem to be a little more chase than whatever the gently caress WOT seems to be doing. Though I’m not sure if those last two things are tropes.
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Nov 18, 2018 23:10
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I don't really find the idea of character development in WoT all the impressive because if your book is 10,000+ pages long it would almost be harder NOT to be super analytical about your characters
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Nov 18, 2018 23:12
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Still weirdly hung up on length huh.
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Nov 18, 2018 23:13
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its weird not to be
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Nov 18, 2018 23:16
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Nah being obsessed over insignificant details is always gonna be weird.
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Nov 18, 2018 23:24
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Mel Mudkiper posted:its weird not to be It's actually not *that* unusual for successful genre fiction. Look at how many Tarzan novels Edgar Rice Burroughs pumped out -- twenty four, each about 200 pages long, and that's while also writing his John Carter series, his Pellucidar series, etc. There is a difference that Burroughs was writing a serial whereas WoT is a singly conceived work, but hell, Malazan is longer. It's just a different kind of professionalism.
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Nov 18, 2018 23:27
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The dude writes 1000 page books because he likes describing a bunch of bullshit incidental detail and a weird alien world. Theres like 4 novella length stories (Kaladin, Dalinar, Shallan, young Kaladin) in way of kings that when taken together and combined with Dandersons desire to fully elucidate a weird warrior culture where hands are super fetishized creates a 1000 page book. Sanderson writes so much because he views it as a workmanship like craft more than a inspiration based art. he doesn't spend hours trying to think of the prettiest, most evocative way to describe a sunset, he just says "the sunset existed. it was red and pretty and made kaladin remember his home" except actually good. this is not a jab at writers who desire to evoke feelings with every line of prose. it is just what Sanderson does. Sanderson wants to describe cool anime fight scenes, Dragonball Z power up moments, and friends eating food together as quickly and efficiently as possible without it reading like dogshit. It's cool if what I described isn't your platonic ideal of a book but I like it and your continued efforts to be all "but why is it so lonnngggggg" despite people repeatedly saying "this is why it is so long" makes it sound like your arguing in bad faith and just want to come into the dumb anime book thread to poo poo on people for liking genre fiction and not being as smart and cultured as you.
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Nov 18, 2018 23:33
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To be fair he is making GBS threads on WOT this time. Granted not in any interesting or unique way but baby steps
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Nov 18, 2018 23:36
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CharlestheHammer posted:To be fair he is making GBS threads on WOT this time. youre right, sorry. i just conflated every boring, zero effort complaint about length into one mass in my mind and forgot where the conversation lead
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Nov 18, 2018 23:40
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not to derail, but I am not complaining or arguing in bad faith. One doesn't critique the grand canyon I am not making a value judgement about a book series being 10,000 pages as much as I am simply gazing in awe upon it
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Nov 18, 2018 23:52
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I mean you can just say it like once, at this point we get it.
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Nov 18, 2018 23:56
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CharlestheHammer posted:I mean you can just say it like once, at this point we get it. I thought you were Sanderson fans
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Nov 19, 2018 00:02
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I thought you were Sanderson fans that doesn't mean we want to listen to someone ooh and ah about the most surface level aspect of the books in the most patronizing way possible over and over again
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Nov 19, 2018 00:07
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I thought you were Sanderson fans This burn doesn’t work. Should have used Jordan. From my understanding he used a lot of filler. Mel I’m sorry your terrible at this.
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Nov 19, 2018 00:19
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CharlestheHammer posted:This burn doesn’t work. I am just happy you got the joke real talk though sorry for derailing I just continuously am amazed at the fact there is a 10,000 page fantasy epic
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Nov 19, 2018 00:23
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:If you just want to give the guy poo poo, make him defend the fifty four page bath chat scene in book 10. That's fifty four pages in hardback. Of Elayne taking a bath. Lol, why don't I remember this? I remember the 66 page spanking montage in the White Tower, and I remember that he used the word "punch" 56 times in Book 5 because suddenly apparently everyone became obsessed with drinking punch, but I don't remember the Elayne bath epic. Was it before or after the telepathic three-way sex scene Hieronymous Alloy posted:Also your friend is an idiot because Tolkien fought in the Somme I know that and you know that, but tell him and all you get is "  lol Eagles, lol Tom Bombadil, gently caress fairies and unicorns, OORAH  "e: oh there it is, of course, "mirrored stand-lamps", "bustling", how could I have forgotten Looks like it's only 4-5 pages before the pirate ladies come in though Data Graham fucked around with this message at 02:04 on Nov 19, 2018 |
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Nov 19, 2018 01:34
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I am not making a value judgement about a book series being 10,000 pages as much as I am simply gazing in awe upon it I feel the same way when I see your post count, how could one man possibly post on an internet forum 50,000 times. What could he possibly be saying that hasn't been said at that point?
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Nov 19, 2018 03:03
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hot date tonight! posted:I feel the same way when I see your post count, how could one man possibly post on an internet forum 50,000 times. What could he possibly be saying that hasn't been said at that point? Football mostly
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Nov 19, 2018 03:05
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Football mostly Yes but 50 thousand. How many football fields would that be, lined up end to end
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Nov 19, 2018 03:32
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