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Solice Kirsk posted:That's the one where Jon and Tyrion both wanna bang Arya right? Hell yeah.
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May 16, 2020 22:26
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pseudanonymous posted:Sanderson did such a bang-up job with the Wheel of Time, and the way he blamed every problem in his works on a dead man shows he's a real class act who can take the criticism that'll be leveled at anyone who touches such a well-known IP, I'm sure he'll be equally adroit at resolving the Merenese knot and bringing ASoIaF to a satisfying conclusion. You got a quote on this? I believe it but I'm a little dismayed that Sanderson would openly talk poo poo about Robert Jordan and also surprised that the dude's widow didn't raise holy hell over it.
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May 16, 2020 23:37
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:What year was the American Tolkien article written? You almost have to feel bad for the fucker that he suddenly went from having a story in his heart, food on the table, and some cult adoration to suddenly being the hot poo poo Fantasy genius shouldered with expectation and pressure... then you remember the rest of it and go "lol no gently caress that guy."
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May 16, 2020 23:55
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I’ve never truly understood all the hate against GRRM. I guess it’s fun/cool/In-style? Dude wrote some great books that people loved and got super bogged down into the details of his own story. He dug a hole in his own fiction and hasn’t been able to climb out yet. I don’t pity him but I also don’t wish him ill will, make fun of him, or laugh at him. He’s just a dude who was doing what he loved it and it got too big and got away from him.
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May 17, 2020 00:01
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If he'd added 5 years to the age of all the kids right from day one, he wouldn't have had the "I need everyone to be 5 years older" issue as well. If he gets rid of the timejump he needed for his story to work as originally conceived then it's not a colossal writers block when he's actually writing the story and OMG realises that ain't gonna fly and he needs to rethink stuff.
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May 17, 2020 00:06
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chaosapiant posted:I’ve never truly understood all the hate against GRRM. I guess it’s fun/cool/In-style? Dude wrote some great books that people loved and got super bogged down into the details of his own story. He dug a hole in his own fiction and hasn’t been able to climb out yet. I don’t pity him but I also don’t wish him ill will, make fun of him, or laugh at him. He’s just a dude who was doing what he loved it and it got too big and got away from him. I think most of it is due to him stringing fans along for a solid decade promising that he still gives a poo poo when all of his actions directly prove the contrary.
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May 17, 2020 00:06
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chaosapiant posted:I’ve never truly understood all the hate against GRRM. I guess it’s fun/cool/In-style? Dude wrote some great books that people loved and got super bogged down into the details of his own story. He dug a hole in his own fiction and hasn’t been able to climb out yet. I don’t pity him but I also don’t wish him ill will, make fun of him, or laugh at him. He’s just a dude who was doing what he loved it and it got too big and got away from him. If he said “gently caress you i’m never writing again” goons would love him.
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May 17, 2020 00:12
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hobbesmaster posted:If he said “gently caress you i’m never writing again” goons would love him. It would be honest.
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May 17, 2020 00:13
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There's a reason why King's fanbase gave him years of slack over Dark Tower. He repeatedly said "I just don't know where it's going from here" and people accepted that, on average. If Wastelands had ended with a "Meanwhile in New York..." I bet he also would have been torn to shreds.
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May 17, 2020 00:21
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Mat Cauthon posted:You got a quote on this? I believe it but I'm a little dismayed that Sanderson would openly talk poo poo about Robert Jordan and also surprised that the dude's widow didn't raise holy hell over it. Okay so 1) I hate Brandon Sanderson to a degree that is totally unhealthy, so I put things in a highly pejorative way. And 2) What he literally said was something like "all the things that people say are totally unlike the characters [in the WoT books Sanderson wrote] came directly from Robert Jordan's notes". If you really want me to dig I'm sure I can find the literal quote about it. And probably some others.
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May 17, 2020 01:56
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You know you would think "notes" implies a rough sketch that should be polished and worked on, not something to be added as is. D&D also had this problem, though they probably only had "jon fucks dany lol" scribbled on a napkin to work with. edit: Another way to put it would be, if you dont know the actual step-by-step process that someone goes through from notes to finished product intimately, depending on the quality, the notes may be not that useful. Dr. Video Games 0112 fucked around with this message at 02:14 on May 17, 2020 |
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May 17, 2020 02:08
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There's a Frank Herbert quote about how ideas are easy, actual writing is hard. Notes are useless and assume way too much about the ability of the author to predict how things pan out in a fluid writing process. I mean I guess some authors can, but obviously GRRM can't, he can't follow notes whether they are his own or his editor's.
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May 17, 2020 05:26
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Being an Ideas Man is the easiest job in the world.
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May 17, 2020 12:34
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Elias_Maluco posted:Me I feel he started throw in new plots at every direction because he didn't knew how to advance the main plots anymore, he got lost. That's what I felt reading the last 2 books He should start the next book with flashback of Robert and Eddard Stark in a tavern, trying to decide on who’s turn it is to go fetch more mead. Robert pulls out a coin and says “heads I buy, tails you buy”. Eddard turns to Robert and states “Just so you know, Robert, you are now creating two different timelines.” Robert responds smugly “of course I am, Eddard”, and flips it. Later on, on the way to the Tower of Joy, Eddard thinks out loud: “I wonder what happens in that other timeline?” ((BOOK REVERTS TO BEGINNING AND STORY IS WRITTEN CORRECTLY)) Hasselblad fucked around with this message at 14:33 on May 17, 2020 |
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May 17, 2020 14:17
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This is just the thing, world building is a cheat, stories are generally about characters or morals, the moment your story is a big mythological whodunnit on the level of "why are the ice elves bad?" you're already on rotten ice (lol) and if you let yourself fall into the trap of thinking that before you deliver the punchline to ice elf story you must first flesh it out with a shitton of mythology which 'resonates' with your narrative you're pretty much just manipulating the audience with fake themes, this is exactly the "it's like poetry, it rhymes" school of writing. But really it's not like writers like GRRM are being cynical when they do this, people demand 'epic fiction', describing big places and ancient histories triggers that part in our brain that goes 'awwwww'.
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May 17, 2020 14:38
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pseudanonymous posted:I thought the Queen of Thorns lady did it, so why put the poison on Sansa. Like was there a poison sniffer or something? I never understood what the point of that was, just to make Sansa feel guilty and needlessly complicate things? I love people making GBS threads on Preston Jacobs theory about the Purple Wedding (which is pretty well cited from an actual close reading of the book) and yet being utterly unable to grasp the politics of the situation for poo poo. Involving Sansa makes perfect sense in the context of, basically, whether the "Baratheon" dynasty is going to be a genuine Tyrell-Lannister project, or just a Lannister one. It's a move that rebalances things in favor of the Tyrells, since they can't use Sansa themselves. Tywin marries her to Tyrion after finding out about Olenna's plan to marry her to Willas Tyrell. It's not like there weren't a zillion Lannister cousins to marry her off to. Hell, Lancel gets married to a slutty Frey just to lock down the Crossroads, I'm sure they'd have found someone in Casterly Rock to replace Tyrion and eventually make a bid for Riverrun/The North. The Tyrells want to kill her for the same drat reason Tywin married her to Tyrion and Littlefinger yoinks her away. It's like class analysis 101. Like, yes, Littlefinger has a creepy pedo boner for her, but that's not actually what's motivating most of what he does with her. There are a lot of criticisms of GRRM to be made, but the political actions in the books are always dead on, if considered in a system where bloodright inheritance and tribal loyalty trump just about anything and are the only way of ensuring political and economic stability. Roose Bolton even monologues about it. The books hammer it home again and again: in a world like Westeros, no one is a free citizen in the sense of being an independent and individual political agent. Even people who want to betray their tribe and family will at best be pawns and at the complete mercy of the people they side with. No one has any foundation of independent power, and in that matrix, pretty much every action of every character does make sense. The books are just beating people over the head with the idea that "feudalism is bad, militarism is bad, monarchy is bad, house allegiance is bad, over-identification with blood family is bad", but people still wear house slogan t-shirts and merch, because any kind of political analysis of class is verboten in America. Like FFS, it doesn't needlessly complicate things, it would honestly have been stupid for the Tyrells not to capitalize on the opportunity to neutralize Sansa as an asset.
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May 17, 2020 17:05
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emanresu tnuocca posted:This is just the thing, world building is a cheat, stories are generally about characters or morals, the moment your story is a big mythological whodunnit on the level of "why are the ice elves bad?" you're already on rotten ice (lol) and if you let yourself fall into the trap of thinking that before you deliver the punchline to ice elf story you must first flesh it out with a shitton of mythology which 'resonates' with your narrative you're pretty much just manipulating the audience with fake themes, this is exactly the "it's like poetry, it rhymes" school of writing. Worldbuilding is something I like, but you realize pretty quickly how simplistic any worldbuilding world is going to be, because ultimately you have one brain doing everything rather than just the batshit stuff that happens in reality. Like a story or worldbuilding is called unrealistic if it doesn't have logic whereas actual history is untethered from sanity.
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May 17, 2020 18:38
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Jack2142 posted:Worldbuilding is something I like, but you realize pretty quickly how simplistic any worldbuilding world is going to be, because ultimately you have one brain doing everything rather than just the batshit stuff that happens in reality. Like a story or worldbuilding is called unrealistic if it doesn't have logic whereas actual history is untethered from sanity. I like it too, I'm a giant nerd and proud of it, I'm not really saying it's vile craft or anything, world building elevates immersion and at the end of the day we consume fiction for escapism, but really when you think about it it's this act of world building that the kind of really makes most fantasy into fiction that can't even pretend to be anything other than escapism, even when it's GRRM writing dark political fantasy for adults nobody really reads ASOIAF and encounters themes or philosophical notions that they haven't encountered before. And you also hit on another point that really demonstrates how world building is well, more of a craft than an art in the sense that GRRM's "dark political realism" is pretty much a straight retelling of real horrific historical events, borrowing from history is of course a pretty simple trick for a modern day writer with access to wikipedia but it's still gonna make most of us go 'hmm, woah, such an imagination on that guy, what a world, right?' I don't know what I'm even going on about. Fantasy is okay and cool, escapism is cool, it's just that it's pretty clear that narratives that emphasis on the mythological aspect of 'world building' is a great tool for immersion but it's also a pretty sneaky way to sneak in a plodding and perhaps in-existing plot that ultimately has a trivial message along the lines of 'hey, war is bad, and don't forget that everyone is the hero of their own story'. Prove me wrong GRRM. Prove me wrong.
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May 17, 2020 19:46
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GRRM is now (co-)owner of a small railroad in Santa Fe. He apparently has visions of "immersive experiential train experiences."
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May 17, 2020 22:33
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Uncle Lloyd posted:GRRM is now (co-)owner of a small railroad in Santa Fe. He apparently has visions of "immersive experiential train experiences." Are trains more expensive than boats he might be forced to actually write WoW if he goes bankrupt.
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May 17, 2020 22:38
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They don’t call him George RailRoad Martin for nothing.
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May 17, 2020 22:44
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Jack2142 posted:Worldbuilding is something I like, but you realize pretty quickly how simplistic any worldbuilding world is going to be, because ultimately you have one brain doing everything rather than just the batshit stuff that happens in reality. Like a story or worldbuilding is called unrealistic if it doesn't have logic whereas actual history is untethered from sanity. To be honest this is why I can't do fantasy fiction anymore, and I've just replaced it with history books.
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May 17, 2020 22:53
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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JRR Tolkien did world building better than anyone else probably because he spent decades of his life carefully crafting it and then wrote some stories in it.
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May 17, 2020 23:57
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:JRR Tolkien did world building better than anyone else probably because he spent decades of his life carefully crafting it and then wrote some stories in it. And his middle-earth background is sketchy enough that when people do youtube videos about the mythology, there's a lot of "presumably" and "sometime around here" because the Silmarillion sometimes just says "this happened after X but before Y" with X and Y a century or three apart.
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May 18, 2020 02:20
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And that actually is one of my favorite peices of Westeros lore really, their written history as presented is so implausible it couldn't actually be true, which seems like a cool take until you realize the wall is 300 m tall and grrm just doesn't understand numbers.
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May 18, 2020 02:50
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Uncle Lloyd posted:GRRM is now (co-)owner of a small railroad in Santa Fe. He apparently has visions of "immersive experiential train experiences." He's been railing his readers for the best part of two decades now so this is in character.
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May 18, 2020 03:19
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Blade_of_tyshalle posted:And his middle-earth background is sketchy enough that when people do youtube videos about the mythology, there's a lot of "presumably" and "sometime around here" because the Silmarillion sometimes just says "this happened after X but before Y" with X and Y a century or three apart. GRRM peppers ASoIaF with lures for the Green Children, the Night King, the Summer Islands, Asshai, Old Valyria, The Iron Bank, the Red God, the Three-Eyed Crow, Dorne, the Maesters, and so many other little threads that poo poo like "Varys is a mermaid" ends up seeming weirdly plausible and possibly central to the overarching story because all of his worldbuilding is given equal weight and import because Mr. "I've only written seven words in High Valyrian" has only sketched out his world as far as the words he's written. It's to the point that when he introduces the Stoneskin plague and Fakegon/Connington as major plot points in ADWD you're more conditioned to roll your eyes and go "gently caress me more?" instead of thinking "oh cool a new plotline to add depth and texture to the world." With hindsight, GRRM's overambition really sticks out in a narrative that was already severely overcomplicated halfway through book two.
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May 18, 2020 04:05
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mind the walrus posted:
I vaguely remember when the books began and I started reading, thinking it was cool that there was a series that did not overly rely on magic and a ton of odd races, more just a good political story. What a sweet summer child I was.
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May 18, 2020 15:39
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Lol if you think there are notes or that D&D gave any poo poo about them since they straight admit to pulling the Arya vs NK poo poo out their rear end
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May 18, 2020 21:32
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D&D outright invented the character of the Night King in the first place. The reason being I would bet is that GRRM has not fleshed out any details about the Ice Elves beyond what’s already in the books which is nothing.
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May 18, 2020 21:53
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Hasselblad posted:I vaguely remember when the books began and I started reading, thinking it was cool that there was a series that did not overly rely on magic and a ton of odd races, more just a good political story. Ya. Welp.
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May 19, 2020 01:24
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:JRR Tolkien did world building better than anyone else probably because he spent decades of his life carefully crafting it and then wrote some stories in it. It's true, and I want to use this moment to plug this excellent blog by an actual military historian: https://acoup.blog/ Right now he's doing a review of the Helm's Deep campaigns, and previously done very interesting series on the siege of Minas Tirith, and a bunch of stuff on Game of Thrones (though I don't think he's read the books). The recurring theme is that Peter Jackson made a bunch of mistakes that you'd sort of expect an amateur to make, plus obvious sacrifices to enable safe film making. Tolkien on the other hand had a surprisingly good grasp on military organization, even extending beyond his experiences in WW1. It shows really clearly in the text. Meanwhile absolutely nothing in GoT makes any sense at all.
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May 19, 2020 02:05
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PittTheElder posted:It's true, and I want to use this moment to plug this excellent blog by an actual military historian: https://acoup.blog/ This is great, I'm really enjoying this.
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May 19, 2020 15:14
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 https://twitter.com/ditzkoff/status/1262757062766850051?s=19
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May 19, 2020 17:31
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mind the walrus posted:Tolkien also had a much better handle on was/wasn't relevant to his narrative, and that includes weird elbows like Bombadil and the appendices. I feel like a modern author would have had Bombadil be like Poochy, where he gets mentioned repeatedly and shows up to save the day because the author was in love with his weird character. As is, he's just this strange forest spirit guy who I think got retooled into Treebeard but wasn't also eliminated from the story. He's an appendix, if a neat one who implies by existence that there's powerful magical beings in the world who don't really give a poo poo about Sauron.
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May 19, 2020 17:49
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Never Forget
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May 19, 2020 20:10
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At least the final season of GoT gave us some good memes.
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May 19, 2020 20:36
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Blade_of_tyshalle posted:I feel like a modern author would have had Bombadil be like Poochy, where he gets mentioned repeatedly and shows up to save the day because the author was in love with his weird character. And even that appendix has some relation to the story, because without meeting Bombadil and him helping them escape the Barrow wights, Merry wouldn't have gotten the magical dagger he used to kill the witch king. I think the text states that a 'lesser' blade wouldn't have done anything, but I don't have a copy in front of me.
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May 19, 2020 22:06
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Uncle Lloyd posted:GRRM is now (co-)owner of a small railroad in Santa Fe. He apparently has visions of "immersive experiential train experiences." I can't think of a more apt thing for him to own than something that initially builds up a head of steam before putting on the brakes and ultimately drifting to a halt in the middle of nowhere.
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May 19, 2020 22:40
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Shimrra Jamaane posted:D&D outright invented the character of the Night King in the first place. The reason being I would bet is that GRRM has not fleshed out any details about the Ice Elves beyond what’s already in the books which is nothing. The Others turn living things in to their undead thralls and they are only weak to things like As far as the Night King going from in-setting folklore to Freezer Burn Dracula, I'm not sure if that's entirely a D&D gently caress up or if they just felt it made more sense than trying to just have a nebulous "Great Other" that the book refers to. That thing definitely made out as the leader of the Others and whose defeat is all but required for the Others to be beaten.
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May 19, 2020 22:42
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