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Sanderson should have his artistic license revoked
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Feb 14, 2019 21:25
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Fuzzy Mammal posted:Here's how she introduced thread favourite, a dragon: Mel Mudkiper posted:lol apparently sanderson has THE THREE LAWS OF MAGIC and they loving suck 
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Feb 14, 2019 21:32
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fans of Brandon Sanderson may also enjoy: paint by numbers
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Feb 14, 2019 21:34
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Is Sanderson just writing terrible science fiction? If it’s all rules-based and can be understood with experimentation then he means science when he says magic. His worlds just have odd fundamental laws.
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Feb 14, 2019 21:40
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Cacto posted:Is Sanderson just writing terrible science fiction? If it’s all rules-based and can be understood with experimentation then he means science when he says magic. His worlds just have odd fundamental laws. this guy gets it
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Feb 14, 2019 21:41
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Cacto posted:Is Sanderson just writing terrible science fiction? So just science fiction then?  
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Feb 14, 2019 21:41
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I think he's prone to setting down things like his laws and what not, over and above his natural tendencies, because he teaches a whole lot of writing workshops for aspiring fantasy authors and so is probably looking for catchy ways of summing up his principles. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4ZDBOc2tX8 Here: you can watch him lecture for an hour as he sets up his course taught at BYU on the topic. The rest of the lectures are available there as well I think, plus earlier ones from 2012. I'm torn between going through them for personal interest and pulling out what I think is revealing about his mindset and, well, not watching Brandon Sanderson for hours.
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Feb 14, 2019 21:44
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Mel Mudkiper posted:lol apparently sanderson has THE THREE LAWS OF MAGIC and they loving suck It’s crazy to me how tangential this nonsense is to good story telling. Like it’s already been said but this poo poo is pure tabletop rpg/ videogame bullshit.
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Feb 14, 2019 21:45
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fantasy = swords and dragons sci-fi = lasers and spaceships either can be HARD or SOFT you see
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Feb 14, 2019 21:45
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like a penis
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Feb 14, 2019 21:49
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Mel Mudkiper posted:lol apparently sanderson has THE THREE LAWS OF MAGIC and they loving suck this sounds way more like advice for new dungeon masters than it sounds like “here is how you write books” what a hack
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Feb 14, 2019 22:37
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ulvir posted:this sounds way more like advice for new dungeon masters than it sounds like “here is how you write books” Those rules are explicitly designed to do 2 things: 1. Not let magic* be a deux ex machina. 2. Let magic be onscreen and constantly active. And they work well enough for that. Clearly other styles of magic are available. *Superpowers, psionics, or whatever term you want (dragons?) if this is insufficiently "magic" for you.
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Feb 14, 2019 22:47
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Doctor Faustine posted:fae-analogues in contemporary fantasy almost always suck Read Little, Big if you haven't. Never not recommending Little, Big. It's a modern fantasy book that's all about faeries meddling in human affairs. That, and cousin loving, because no literary book is complete without Weird Literary Sex
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Feb 14, 2019 22:56
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Sanderson's Second Law This one really pisses me off, because he's so bad at weaknesses. Let's look at some other trashy magic: The Powder Mage - imbibing gunpowder enhances the senses, but it's also a narcotic, and one PoV character gets addicted and spends a whole book high off his tits (and doing lines of gunpowder literally every paragraph, it owns). There's room for interesting consequences there. Wheel of Time - Male magic users are doomed to go insane. That's about the only worthwhile plot idea in all 3.5 million words of it. Name of the loving Wind - Sympathy needs some source of energy to draw from, and Kvothe puts so much effort into lighting a candle he freezes his blood and almost dies in crippling agony. That's a fun consequence. The Witcher - Witcher potions are like super-steroids, and Witchers end up chasing them with vodka, with predictable consequences. In Mistborn, allomancers ingest metals to fuel their powers. And eating pewter is really harmful, but luckily allomancers can just burn off all their metals before they go to sleep, no big deal its easy. And using metalbending is really obvious and you can be detected for miles around, so our heroes have to be really careful and ration out every...oh wait no they just turn their copper on beforehand and everything is hunky dory. Or tin, which heightens your senses, so you have to be really careful with loud-noises and bright lights. Except the characters use tin in the exactly opposite way, flaring their senses so the massive and painful rush of sensations helps them to focus. ("I need to clear my head, I'm gonna go stare at the sun and hit myself with a gong") The worst is atium, which lets you see the future. Specifically, all futures, so there's an absolute cacophony of ghostly images flying everywhere showing what people might be doing (what was that about how fantasy books are written like film directions?). That's practically a gift-wrapped invitation to have some trippy mind-bending fight scenes. It doesn't need to be high-art, but something with an actual disorientating aesthetic. But no! Conveniently atium also boosts the users mental capacity enough that they can effortlessly track the myriad possible futures so they can perfectly handle all the new information. This is why I hate Sanderson so much. He puts so much effort into his magic systems, but then very carefully removes anything that could lead to a novel aesthetic or consequences for his characters. He fails even to be pulpy fun.
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Feb 14, 2019 23:05
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tonberrytoby posted:The screenplay style scene description symbolizes the authors secret admission that visual media are superior in conveying the remnants of fantasticalness that remain in modern fantasy. Sad fistbump  Srice posted:datalogs Why do they do it? Datalogs are tedious, lazy and forced, and add nothing but production costs Pacho posted:Geez, first they drained wonder from the fantastical, now they are draining the wonder of our very own world Blue whales are the largest animal that's ever existed, so big it's hard to conceive of their size. They're bigger than us in the way a building is. Newborns are the size of a small bus, and people crossed the Atlantic and colonized America in ships smaller and lighter than the average adult  They have voices and languages, and hold conversations from one side of the ocean to the other. A heart-breaking fact is that they're aware of global warming, because we can hear them yell over the noise of crumbling icebergs hackbunny fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Feb 14, 2019 |
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Feb 14, 2019 23:34
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Feb 14, 2019 23:59
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Cacto posted:Is Sanderson just writing terrible science fiction? If it’s all rules-based and can be understood with experimentation then he means science when he says magic. His worlds just have odd fundamental laws. That's what I have been saying all along
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Feb 15, 2019 00:07
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hackbunny posted:Blue whales are the largest animal that's ever existed, so big it's hard to conceive of their size. They're bigger than us in the way a building is. Newborns are the size of a small bus, and people crossed the Atlantic and colonized America in ships smaller and lighter than the average adult whales are also not very closely related to elephants.
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Feb 15, 2019 00:42
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Cacto posted:Is Sanderson just writing terrible science fiction? If it’s all rules-based and can be understood with experimentation then he means science when he says magic. His worlds just have odd fundamental laws.  But there's actually a much better list of examples on that page. 
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Feb 15, 2019 00:55
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You guys are right about the whales, but the elephants line isn't really part of that; the ostensible humor is that the character is being affectedly blasé about something that actually is wondrous. It's afterward that Lyons drops the ball.The only description of whales in the chapter, let alone the book posted:I looked out over the ocean, watching the long, elegant forms breaking the surface, hurling themselves into the air to come crashing back down. After a few minutes, I stopped smiling. One of many, many sick-rear end attack animations posted:Tyentso raised her staff into the air and spoke in a language that tugged at the back of my mind—something almost but not quite comprehensible. She moved her free hand in the air, and I couldn’t so much see as feel the faint traceries left behind. Complicated skeins of mathematics and arcane notation lingered behind my eyelids before releasing, with a rush of imploding air, out the back of the ship. The energy trails arched into the water: dozens, no, hundreds, of tiny pulses created visible splashes.
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Feb 15, 2019 01:08
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"X, no, x times many" is another atrocity warranting the cutting off of several, dare I say most, fingers
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Feb 15, 2019 01:16
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quote:something almost but not quite comprehensible this triggers me greatly. half the words are unnecessary. "something almost comprehensible" says the exact same thing. in the book I am reading now there are constant references to slightly varying small amounts e.g. "three or four cigarettes" and "one or two notes" and it is very amusing (in a good way, is clever)
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Feb 15, 2019 01:33
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quote:Complicated skeins of mathematics and arcane notation lingered behind my eyelids before releasing, with a rush of imploding air, out the back of the ship.  I think some of these descriptions are supposed to be cues that let us know what particle effect we've seen in a movie we're supposed to envision. The words themselves don't seem to describe anything. "I was like in Dr. Strange," etc.
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Feb 15, 2019 01:42
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quote:You would have needed an Intelligence of at least 16, and three levels of wizardry, to understand it. Because he was only a level 4 bard, which learned those spells two levels below, he failed his comprehension check.
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Feb 15, 2019 01:58
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i'm going to take a bit of a look at brian staveley's 'the emperor's blades', which is one of the few books in my life i haven't bothered to finish. even the three sanderson books i read, i finished. but staveley's ponderous tome couldn't even manage that. it holds the dubious honor of being a book that, when i got bored of it, i predicted how the plot was going to go and flipped through the book and found i was entirely right. now, i don't generally like the fantasy genre. on the other hand, i've been really enjoying the baru series by seth dickinson. in fact, staveley's books were recommended to me by an associate because i mentioned liking the baru novels. staveley absolutely does not measure up. we'll start with the blurb just to get the thread in the mood quote:The emperor of Annur is dead, slain by enemies unknown. His daughter and two sons, scattered across the world, do what they must to stay alive and unmask the assassins. But each of them also has a life path on which their father set them, their destinies entangled with both ancient enemies and inscrutable gods. seriously what is it with K names in bad fantasy Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 08:09 on Feb 15, 2019 |
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Feb 15, 2019 08:01
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Sham bam bamina! posted:You guys are right about the whales, but the elephants line isn't really part of that; the ostensible humor is that the character is being affectedly blasé about something that actually is wondrous. I was really addressing the dullards ITT who don't think whales are fantastical enough to sit at the fantasy table Sham bam bamina! posted:
What the gently caress haha. I really really really need to dig up my fantasy writing attempt from high school because I could be rolling in the dough, too
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Feb 15, 2019 08:53
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ulmont posted:2. Let magic be onscreen and constantly active. ah, yes, onscreen, the important aspect of literature
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Feb 15, 2019 10:39
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ulvir posted:ah, yes, onscreen, the important aspect of literature Kindles have screens
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Feb 15, 2019 10:40
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lol OP is probated again. This is starting to feel like Cool Hand Luke. Except funnier. Anyway the new hotness in fantasy is creeping beyond the Middle Ages to the Steam Age, with crude guns, early industrialization, and whales, but with magic. Why? What started the trend? Will it continue and give us derivative hacks for decades, or will the fad end and move onto something new? I can’t believe people will still be hungry for elves and swords in twenty years.
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Feb 15, 2019 10:53
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poisonpill posted:lol OP is probated again. This is starting to feel like Cool Hand Luke. Except funnier. Yet again YA fantasy beats adult fantasy to the punch. The Old Kingdom had WW1 era England clashing with middle ages fantasy back in the early 2000s. And it owned.
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Feb 15, 2019 11:05
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Sanderson’s Third Law See, I think this one does have some merit. I get that y'all like to poo poo on the obsession with ~*worldbuilding*~ and the tendency of authors to write like they're doing a D&D sourcebook, and that's fine. But I think that if one is creating a secondary world, whether one's going to brand it as fantasy or sci-fi, it's worth trying to draw out the maximum amount of use from the changes you make. If you're going to go, "Oh yeah, in my world, one in every hundred people can communicate instantly with telepathy!" then you should consider how that affects the rest of your setting -- like, if you've got instant global communication in your otherwise generic Imperial Rome knockoff, what does that do to the economy, to military strategy, to the spread of cultural norms? Do these people make a poo poo ton of money by sending messages, or are they all being kept as slaves and forced to work like living telegraphs? I dunno, I just think that if you add stuff to your setting which isn't in the real world and then don't actually have the setting reflect the changes in any way, your story ends up feeling slapdash. 
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Feb 15, 2019 11:39
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My Book Report On The Emperor's Blades - by Milky So, how does this story begin? The blurb has primed me to prepare for an assassination, an adventure, and maybe some political intrigue. Maybe we'll get a perspective on the event that's going to set the story in motion. Maybe the assassination, the lead up to it, or even the immediate aftermath. See, I actually like a good prologue. A lot of people say that authors shouldn't include them, but I don't agree. A good prologue can ease the reader into the story, establishing tone, themes or atmosphere before getting the plot rolling. They can even introduce a particular thought, question or philosophy that the reader is invited to reflect upon, to keep in mind when reading the rest of the text. For example, I like the prologues in the various Expanse novels because they typically depict an event that kicks the plot into motion. The first novel, Leviathan Wakes, includes a prologue that establishes the following parts of the story:
So, when the advice is given to not include prologues, it is because of prologues like this one in The Emperor's Blades. I won't do too many comparisons between it and Leviathan Wakes, but I think it's interesting to just compare the first lines. First up, Leviathan Wakes: The Lovely Corey Boys posted:The Scopuli had been taken eight days ago, and Julie Mao was finally ready to be shot. In one line, it establishes who we're following, where she is, that she's been a prisoner for over a week, and she's ready to die. Then, this novel: Brian Fantasyman posted:Rot. It was the rot, Tan’is reflected as he stared down into his daughter’s eyes, that had taken his child. I think it's immediately apparent that the second one doesn't work as well as the first. The first one makes me say, wow, who is this Julie Mao and why is she ready to be shot? The second one... Well, I don't know enough about this rot or why this character cares. Is his daughter dead or alive? Who knows, it's not immediately obvious. As an aside, the name Tan'is, like Valyn and Kaden, is a crime against interesting names. Also, I feel that 'the rot' should be capitalized at the very least, given that it appears to be a particularly special affliction. To sum it up, the prologue of The Emperor's Blades is pretty boring. Tanis (I'm not going to bother with the Fantasy Apostrophe) is a tough soldier and he's going to kill his daughter because she is sick. What the rot is and does is not immediately clear. We don't know who he is a soldier for or his rank or his status. The specifics of Tanis' location is not clear either. All we get is that there is 'a valley' and that there is a ditch being dug by the "doran’se." A pit is also mentioned, which hundreds of other sick people are clustering around. Given that Tanis is never placed among these features (is he above the valley or in it, for example) it's very hard to picture. More importantly, it prevents us from understanding what this rot means to this character and his wider society. They're not chucking bodies into huge pyres, for example. It's not, say, a ritual to keep the sun rising. We don't know if this is in the wilderness, in a city or outside some small hamlet. It's just a thing that is happening somewhere. For example: quote:Screams and imprecations, pleading and sobbing shivered the air as the long lines of prisoners filled the valley. The scent of blood and urine thickened in the noon heat. Tan’is ignored it all, focusing instead on the face of this daughter of his who knelt, clutching at his knees. Faith was a woman grown now, thirty years and a month. At a casual glance she might have passed as healthy—bright gray eyes, lean shoulders, strong limbs—but the Csestriim no longer bore healthy children, not for centuries. Straight away there's a problem: imprecations is a word I actually had to look up, and I'm a history teacher! All it means is curses. Screams and curses shivered the air? The smell of blood and urine thickened in the heat? Disregarding that sort of 'you know what I mean, let's move on' type of language use... Where is Tanis standing in relation to these prisoners? I find some of these sentences, especially 'focusing instead on the face of this daughter of his' really clunky. I could nitpick at the use of years and months, maybe? But what is this rot? quote:There were other words for it, of course. The children, in their ignorance or innocence, called the affliction age, but in this, as in so much else, they erred. Age was not decrepitude. Tan’is himself was old, hundreds of years old, and yet his sinews remained strong, his mind nimble—if needed, he could run all day, all night, and the better part of the next day. Most of the Csestriim were older still, thousands upon thousands of years, and yet they continued to walk the earth, those who had not fallen in the long wars with the Nevariim. No; time passed, stars swung through their silent arcs, seasons gave way one to the next, and yet none of these, in and of itself, brought harm. It was not age but rot that gnawed at the children, consuming their bowels and brains, sapping strength, eroding what meager intelligence they once possessed. Rot, and then death. First, hello clunky exposition. Second, so this mysterious rot. It's... aging? Becoming mortal? The answer may surprise you. But Csestriim? Well, combined with the previous about mortality being an affliction to them, these are our elven analogues, I guess. Not only does the name hint at it in that 'derived from Warcraft and Dungeons and Dragons' way, but they have ancient enemies who they war with: the Nevariim. Yes, really. Anyway, Tanis and his daughter talk. quote:“It touches you gently,” he pointed out, “but its grip will grow stronger.” The dialogue is fairly generic sort of 'ominous prologue' dialogue. It sounds portentous but doesn't really tell the reader much at all. Not only is the rot bringing mortality to the immortals, but it is also causing them to develop - gasp - emotions. They see this as rotting, too. Tanis mentions that he's been watching his daughter, wondering if the rot was going to afflict her. Is this really an if given what was said earlier about no Csestriim bearing healthy children for centuries? Anyway, being an Extremely Logical Character, Tanis reflects: "It was no good reasoning with one whose reason had decayed." Tanis and his daughter talk a bit, then he kills her by stabbing her in the heart and the prologue ends. From this point on, the Csestriim aren't mentioned for about six chapters - and even then, it's just to tell us that they are all thought to be extinct and humans live among their ruins and blah blah blah. I'm not sure when they come into the text properly, if they ever do, but they certainly had nothing to do with the story - as much as I read of it, at least. I know from skimming through it now, they don't seem to become a major factor in this story. Every time the Csestriim are mentioned, it appears to just be to remind the audience that they lived a long time ago and they are dead - or are they?! Sequel bait? Maybe. I genuinely don't know. My assumption is that Tanis isn't dead and maybe becomes an antagonist or reluctant ally in Book 2 or 3. Yes, this is a trilogy. What I do know, however, is that this prologue just doesn't work. Compare again to Leviathan Wakes. The first chapter proper of Leviathan Wakes immediately links back to the prologue. One of the protagonists, a spaceship captain named James Holden, picks up a distress call... from a ship identified as the Scopuli! Then the next chapter, from a different perspective, tells us that a detective named Miller is hunting for Julie Mao. It all fits together. Who will find Julie first? What's that thing in the engine room? Meanwhile, The Emperor's Blades uses 1100 words to tell us that a soldier has to kill his daughter because she's aging and having emotions (maybe) and doesn't feel bad about it because he is logical, then he does it. It tells us nothing about his society. It doesn't even make it immediately clear when it is happening. It appears to be something they're used to and accustomed to (Tanis watched his daughter for thirty years wondering if she'd succumb to the rot, and that it had been happening for centuries) but their method of dealing with it - this cold, rational, logical people is to just murder them one by one and throw them in a pit or ditch. Who were these To me, this is a failure of worldbuilding. Good worldbuilding isn't a list of magical systems and fake histories, it just tells you what it's like to live in the world. What is it like for Tanis in this world? I don't know. How does he feel about this council telling him to kill his daughter? I don't know. What is it like for the Not Elves in general? I don't know. They're killing hundreds of their own children on what seems like a fairly regular basis, but there is zero heart in it. Tanis isn't calculating or cold or rational, he's a big void of nothing. Why is it so bad for their children to be afflicted with the rot? Tanis' logic appears to be that since you'll die anyway, we should just kill you now. That doesn't seem very logical or rational to me. I feel like this was intentional on Staveley's part, that he was trying to write without feeling. But the only thing he wrote was a boring, uninteresting prologue. He removed the feeling but didn't replace it with anything. So, Tanis is a big void of nothing, and his prologue is too. But it was bland and inoffensive and part of me was willing to see where Staveley might go with something that felt so very tired, especially given that this book was recommended to me after I'd praised The Traitor Baru. Maybe the core assassination plot would be intriguing. Maybe, a chapter or two in, I'd see the prologue in a new light. It's not, and I didn't. There aren't even many bad lines to pull out of these thousand words and marvel at. There's a lot of weak, messy writing: usage of 'tried', usage of thinking words to avoid describing what Tanis is thinking about, and so on. It's all very distant and yet says little of anything. I really can't stress enough that we have no idea the society Tanis comes from or even where he's located in this murder valley. But rest assured, the  parts come later.Actually, I lied. Here's a line from the dedications that made my eyes roll back into my head. quote:The Csestriim have no words for gratitude or love, but there is a phrase common in their writings: ix alza—crucial to, of absolute necessity. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 12:36 on Feb 15, 2019 |
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Feb 15, 2019 12:00
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Ok, but what is her agency? This kind of response is suspiciously socratic and I already foolishly wasted my last scroll of detect sincerity on a YouTube comment section, so I'm gonna have to decline to bite on this one until you can demarcate "agency" from "strength" a little for me.
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Feb 15, 2019 13:56
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Ceramic Shot posted:This kind of response is suspiciously socratic and I already foolishly wasted my last scroll of detect sincerity on a YouTube comment section, so I'm gonna have to decline to bite on this one until you can demarcate "agency" from "strength" a little for me. Agency means that the character is depicted as an individual with their own ability to make decisions and their own well defined goals and ambitions that may not necessarily align with the goals and ambitions of the protagonist or the narration. It also means that they are a fully developed person who has an existence that is not confined by the necessity of the narrative.
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Feb 15, 2019 14:17
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:But rest assured, the
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Feb 15, 2019 14:26
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To be fair, "this novel has a prologue about emotionless elves murdering their children for displaying signs of mortality, and this has nothing to do with the premise or eventual plot of the novel" is pretty egregious.
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Feb 15, 2019 14:38
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poisonpill posted:lol OP is probated again. This is starting to feel like Cool Hand Luke. Except funnier. I'm going to guess that Dishonored did that, considering the whales
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Feb 15, 2019 14:43
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I have often in my darkest time toyed with writing a story about a fantasy world like Middle Earth going through trench warfare of WW1
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Feb 15, 2019 14:50
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poisonpill posted:lol OP is probated again. This is starting to feel like Cool Hand Luke. Except funnier. It's been a thing since the 70's and got turbo charged in the 90's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk It only really works well when it goes explicitly Marxist for some reason, like in Mieville or Swanwick, perhaps because you need that class warfare and oppression angle to really make it "click" as actual victorian era and not pseudo-romanticised silliness with extra goggles. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 14:53 on Feb 15, 2019 |
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Feb 15, 2019 14:51
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Agency means that the character is depicted as an individual with their own ability to make decisions and their own well defined goals and ambitions that may not necessarily align with the goals and ambitions of the protagonist or the narration. The character he's talking about is the protagonist.
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Feb 15, 2019 16:01
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