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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I have no idea why you guys are picking this hill to die on. There is nothing that says you couldn't write a good story where people have well defined psionic powers or poorly defined magic. It comes down again to what the authors do with it, which is to throw it in a story willy-nilly with no actual meaning behind it. This is a reductive, allegorical reading of Tolkien, and doesn't translate well to fantasy generally. The fantastical mindset is spelled out in Eddison's note before The Worm Ouroboros: quote:It is neither allegory nor fable but a Story to be read for its own sake. The idea that storytelling has to be filtered through 'themes' is one of the myths that fantasy helps liberate us from. Of course there will always be 'political' commentators of fantasy, but they will always miss the point. Fantasy is fantasy to the extent that it rejects the primacy of the real world. A good fantasy has all its themes only in retrospect, and even then these are subordinate to the storytelling, where the all the 'wonder' is. You can say what you want about GRRM's world view, but in the end his stuff is just boring. He asks 'what was Aragorn's tax policy?' and doesn't have the guts to write a story that's about taxes himself. It's really boring, and it's really bloated. edit: Also, if it's true that GRRM has explicitly stated somewhere that dragons are a stand-in for nuclear weapons or whatever, that's very telling, since this is exactly the sort of banal analogy that infuriated Tolkien. It doesn't surprise me in the slightest that GRRM would actually go in for it. Nerdburger_Jansen fucked around with this message at 07:32 on Jan 27, 2019 |
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Jan 27, 2019 07:25
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authors do not get to dictate how their work is readNerdburger_Jansen posted:The idea that storytelling has to be filtered through 'themes' that's not how themes work
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Jan 27, 2019 07:54
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god drat that is such a bad post
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Jan 27, 2019 07:56
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quote:authors do not get to dictate how their work is read I did not claim this.
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Jan 27, 2019 08:19
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chernobyl kinsman posted:authors do not get to dictate how their work is read Neither do critics.
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Jan 27, 2019 09:52
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Literally every piece of writing has themes, by virtue of having been written by (and read by) a human with a worldview. It is impossible for even the worst writing to be devoid of ideas.
Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Jan 27, 2019 |
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Jan 27, 2019 10:15
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Books are either communist/egalitarian or they are not, that is all ye need know.
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Jan 27, 2019 10:53
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Sham bam bamina! posted:It is impossible for even the worst writing to be devoid of ideas. Au contraire.
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Jan 27, 2019 14:33
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Jan 27, 2019 15:16
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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:The idea that storytelling has to be filtered through 'themes' is one of the myths that fantasy helps liberate us from. Of course there will always be 'political' commentators of fantasy, but they will always miss the point. Fantasy is fantasy to the extent that it rejects the primacy of the real world. wtf
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Jan 27, 2019 16:41
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good fantasy should have nothing to say is a loving take
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Jan 27, 2019 16:43
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hackbunny posted:You don't need a fantasy metaphor for oil drilling destroying wonder and magic because that's literally, non-metaphorically what oil drilling does I believe there's a prejudice where if a story is about, let's say, an evil oil company destroying an Oasis full of magical spirits, it would be considered childish; but if its set in a world where the oil is Ünobtamite, the Oil Company is the Guild of Wizardy and the Oasis is the Unseen Court of the Genies then it's grown-up. This is not a particular dig at the Scar, my favorite Bas Lag book, because I think that Mieville at least have something to say about "prosaic fantasy": Exploring the "human" condition even in a weird-rear end world with cities built around dead titans and how people are gonna be people for good or ill
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Jan 27, 2019 17:43
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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:A good fantasy has all its themes only in retrospect, and even then these are subordinate to the storytelling, where the all the 'wonder' is. You can say what you want about GRRM's world view, but in the end his stuff is just boring. He asks 'what was Aragorn's tax policy?' and doesn't have the guts to write a story that's about taxes himself. It's really boring, and it's really bloated. Lord of the Rings has plenty of political topics, from Gandalf grooming Faramir for a possible coup against Boromir to the takeover of the Shire by Saruman. Aragorn was also a consumated politician and diplomat, having dealings with elves and dwarves, but he also happened to be a Mythical King Returned which is kinda the point of the books. Good Fantasy, like all good books, has something meaningful and transcendent to say, secondary worlds ain't no excuse for not doing the homework
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Jan 27, 2019 17:55
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Tolkien was very aware of and fine with the fact that his works have parallels in and something to say about the primary world, he just didn't like it when people said "well obviously it's about WWI/II and Mordor is the Germans/Nazis"
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Jan 27, 2019 19:43
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AFancyQuestionMark posted:Neither do critics. sed contra, the reader has full control over the reading by virtue of being the one doing it
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Jan 27, 2019 20:04
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Literally every piece of writing has themes, by virtue of having been written by (and read by) a human with a worldview. It is impossible for even the worst writing to be devoid of ideas. I think the problem is that half of the people in this thread don’t know what a theme is. they are not, for example, not something through which a work is read but are rather emergent properties of that work, whether deliberately “put there” by the author or not chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 20:10 on Jan 27, 2019 |
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Jan 27, 2019 20:06
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Jan 27, 2019 20:21
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Mel Mudkiper posted:good fantasy should have nothing to say is a loving take The idea that a story only has its value because it has 'something to say' is to make all fiction allegorical to a greater or lesser degree. Or if you like, allegory is the extreme end of 'having something to say.' I don't think it's really a crazy opinion. It just means taking seriously Eddison's idea that a story can be read for its own sake, or that fiction's value can be intrinsic rather than extrinsic. Many of the criticisms in this thread are premised on the idea that without an extrinsic value, a story is bad. Fantasy is interesting in that it rejects the primacy of the real world, and so more seriously offers the possibility that a story might be read for its own sake. Nerdburger_Jansen fucked around with this message at 22:34 on Jan 27, 2019 |
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Jan 27, 2019 22:31
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chernobyl kinsman posted:I think the problem is that half of the people in this thread don’t know what a theme is. they are not, for example, not something through which a work is read but are rather emergent properties of that work, whether deliberately “put there” by the author or not I think you are responding to something that you read into my post, and not what was there.
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Jan 27, 2019 22:33
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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:The idea that a story only has its value because it has 'something to say' is to make all fiction allegorical to a greater or lesser degree. Or if you like, allegory is the extreme end of 'having something to say.' Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 22:41 on Jan 27, 2019 |
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Jan 27, 2019 22:37
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Sham bam bamina! posted:The idea that a story can be read "for its own sake" without appreciating or even apprehending the ideas that animate it is not only nonsensical but a contradiction in terms. You want a reader to care about a story while denying it anything of emotional or intellectual substance to care about. Anything that would motivate someone to bother with telling a story in the first place is a theme. I'm rejecting the idea that the value of storytelling is extrinsic, and the idea that the only way that a story can have intellectual or emotional substance is insofar as it references something else, i.e. insofar as it is not a story in its own right. A good story is moving primarily because of its art. You can ask in retrospect 'but what was the story about?' but this is always a secondary activity, and not a very critically interesting one. It's the sort of question you ask a middle schooler on a standardized test.
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Jan 27, 2019 22:41
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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:Many of the criticisms in this thread are premised on the idea that without an extrinsic value, a story is bad. Nobody is arguing that. Moreover, the main argument of the thread is that a lot of genre lit has poor intrinsic value; ie: It's badly written
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Jan 27, 2019 22:44
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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:I'm rejecting the idea that the value of storytelling is extrinsic, and the idea that the only way that a story can have intellectual or emotional substance is insofar as it references something else, i.e. insofar as it is not a story in its own right. Nerdburger_Jansen posted:A good story is moving primarily because of its art. You can ask in retrospect 'but what was the story about?' but this is always a secondary activity, and not a very critically interesting one. It's the sort of question you ask a middle schooler on a standardized test.
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Jan 27, 2019 22:45
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I don't know if you deliberately left it out or if I just didn't have it in the post for five seconds when it first went up, but I would like to see your answer to this:Sham bam bamina! posted:Anything that would motivate someone to bother with telling or reading a story in the first place is a theme. Themes are not the didactic metaphors that you're imagining them to be; they are literally any meaning at all.
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Jan 27, 2019 22:51
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Sham bam bamina! posted:All stories reference something else! They don't exist in some weird, self-sufficient ontological bubble; they're written by friggin' people who draw on themselves to communicate to others. Those are the two reference points inherent to storytelling. I think he's confusing "writing something meaningful" with "writing an allegory for civil rights in the US during the 60s." Even in the most bizarre sci-fi scenario with made-up cultures of starfish aliens the story and the language has to be meaningul a) in its own context and b) to us human readers
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Jan 27, 2019 22:53
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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:I think you are responding to something that you read into my post, and not what was there. Nerdburger_Jansen posted:The idea that storytelling has to be filtered through 'themes' is one of the myths that fantasy helps liberate us from. this is not a sentence that makes sense, brother. it does not make sense to discuss "storytelling being filtered through 'themes'". i do not know what that is supposed to mean. stories are not "filtered" through themes. themes emerge from within stories - all stories. Sham bam bamina! posted:All stories reference something else! They don't exist in some weird, self-sufficient ontological bubble; they're written by friggin' people who draw on themselves to communicate to others. Those are the two reference points inherent to storytelling. ya. for example, nerdburger, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant cannot be reduced to a simple allegory about environmentalism. however, it should be extremely obvious that stewardship - of the planet, of resources, of knowledge, of the natural world - is a major theme. the Lords are called stewards of the Land, the forestals are called stewards of the forest, and so on. the destruction of the One Forest is presented as a terrible cataclysm, and Lord Foul is a threat not to human beings or to society in general but to the Land itself specifically. the original trilogy was not produced outside of time; it was written in the 1970s - in the midst of the Second Wave environmental movement, at about the same time time Greenpeace, Earth First!, and PETA are all being founded. the novels are not about these things, but they do reflect them in their themes of environmental conservation vs. destruction, connection with and love of the natural world, and so on. Nerdburger_Jansen posted:A good story is moving primarily because of its art. "themes" are intrinsic to art, brother. all art has "themes" because themes are just patterns of meaning. chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Jan 27, 2019 |
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Jan 27, 2019 22:56
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quote:Nobody is arguing that. Moreover, the main argument of the thread is that a lot of genre lit has poor intrinsic value; ie: It's badly written I agree with all this, but it doesn't contradict what I said. I do think fantasy is badly written – but it's not badly written because it fails to be sufficiently 'about' something. quote:All stories reference something else! They don't exist in some weird, self-sufficient ontological bubble; Right, but the whole point of fantasy is to be ontologically removed from the place it was created from. It can't actually be totally isolated in that way, but this is precisely what distinguishes it as a genre. If you go farther, you can get something like surrealism, which depends even less on theming. quote:they're written by friggin' people who draw on themselves to communicate to others. Those are the two reference points inherent to storytelling. The point of storytelling isn't just communication, though - otherwise nonfiction prose would always do just as well. Art is about form for its own sake, and not just function. If anything, the latter has to be subordinate to the former for it to be any good. A decent story will move a person without their understanding why, or give them something they didn't know they wanted. quote:If a story moves you, it is at the very least "about" the aspect that moves you. Would you deny that love can be a theme of a romance? A lot of the talk in this thread has to do with how bad fantasy doesn't sufficiently evoke a sense of wonder. But what is wonder supposed to be, if not awe at the appeal of something that someone doesn't know how to articulate? The art comes first – at best, discussion of themes is an attempt to rationalize it post hoc. quote:ya. for example, nerdburger, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant cannot be reduced to a simple allegory about environmentalism. however, it should be extremely obvious that stewardship - of the planet, of resources, of knowledge, of the natural world - is a major theme. the Lords are called stewards of the Land, the forestals are called stewards of the forest, and so on. the destruction of the One Forest is presented as a terrible cataclysm, and Lord Foul is a threat not to human beings or to society in general but to the Land itself specifically. This is an interesting example, because I like the Chronicles (I get why a lot of people don't, especially on a prose level, but I think I'd try to defend them if pressed). There is something to what you say about it dealing with the health of the land, and sometimes this is made explicit (as when Covenant refers to 'scenery'). But this reading of the Chronicles is impoverished because again, its appeal to theming makes it one-sided. Part of the puzzle of the Chronicles is that even though it is about the health of an entire land, there is the suggestion that all of this exists within the protagonist's mind (and it may even suggest that what is internal and external can't be distinguished, or shouldn't be), and the decay of that land reflects the decay of his body. The land acts as a backdrop for Covenant's psychological dramas. Can an environmental text possibly be as solipsistic as the Chronicles are? Shouldn't a story about stewardship precisely address how these things exist independent of the individual, and can't be reduced to their personal struggles? No, but that's because the Chronicles are intentionally full of contradictions that resist their being read as environmentally-focused (which the author bangs us over the head with, by saying that Covenant's power comes from his status as a contradictory character). The read on the books given here doesn't even mention the theme explicitly outlined at the start of the first volume, in the piece of paper handed to Covenant by the old man in the robe! This is as close to one can get to an author just outright telling the reader 'here's what you're about to read is about,' yet the environmental gloss doesn't address it in any substantive way. The more interesting way to read Covenant, in my view, is that it invents a new mythic archetype – the one who saves through inaction and indecision, or whose impotence and reticence makes him especially suited to a peculiar kind of action. But then, this new mythic archetype is interesting precisely insofar as it doesn't reduce to platitudes about environmentalism and stewardship that we could have found outside the story anyway.
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Jan 27, 2019 23:25
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Sham bam bamina! posted:I don't know if you deliberately left it out or if I just didn't have it in the post for five seconds when it first went up, but I would like to see your answer to this: How about this – the more accurately a story can be described as having a theme, the more closely it will approach a didactic metaphor. Or don't Orwell and Rand have the strongest, most obvious themes?
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Jan 27, 2019 23:28
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Please post an example of a story you think has no theme
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Jan 27, 2019 23:34
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Nerdburger_Jansen posted:This is an interesting example, because I like the Chronicles (I get why a lot of people don't, especially on a prose level, but I think I'd try to defend them if pressed). There is something to what you say about it dealing with the health of the land, and sometimes this is made explicit (as when Covenant refers to 'scenery'). But this reading of the Chronicles is impoverished because again, its appeal to theming makes it one-sided. Part of the puzzle of the Chronicles is that even though it is about the health of an entire land, there is the suggestion that all of this exists within the protagonist's mind (and it may even suggest that what is internal and external can't be distinguished, or shouldn't be), and the decay of that land reflects the decay of his body. The land acts as a backdrop for Covenant's psychological dramas. ya you are right that covenant's struggle with impotence and inaction presents another theme. saying "the story has environmentalist themes" is not saying "the story is only about environmentalism and has no other themes, or that it is an "environmental text", whatever that even means. i also don't know what an "appeal to theming" means. you seem to be looking for one single analysis that encompasses all possible meanings within the text, and that is a priori impossible. discussing one aspect of the text does not preclude there being other aspects to the text. the map is not the territory. an analysis that contains all the meaning of the original text would be the text itself. this is basic New Critics, Cleanth Brooks poo poo. quote:Can an environmental text possibly be as solipsistic as the Chronicles are? Shouldn't a story about stewardship precisely address how these things exist independent of the individual, and can't be reduced to their personal struggles? again, you are approaching the idea of "themes" as though they mean "didactic morals". the Chronicles is not a political tract or a call to action. it is a novel. there is nothing that it "should" address, because it is not laying out a coherent political or philosophical platform chernobyl kinsman fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Jan 27, 2019 |
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Jan 27, 2019 23:39
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  You know what, I think the guy who created an account specifically to post like a dipshit in this one thread might not actually be worth my effort.
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Jan 27, 2019 23:57
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avs is that you
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Jan 28, 2019 00:05
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Avs would never create a character this boring
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Jan 28, 2019 01:07
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Mel Mudkiper posted:good fantasy should have nothing to say is a loving take
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Jan 28, 2019 01:07
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no it's not me lol, just a genuinely silly little man i love this site
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Jan 28, 2019 01:08
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we're heading into the literary version of (the other) murakami's superflat world, but un-self-aware and with big pulsing dicks on everything
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Jan 28, 2019 01:11
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Hell yeah
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Jan 28, 2019 01:31
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pikachode posted:we're heading into the literary version of (the other) murakami's superflat world, but un-self-aware and with big pulsing dicks on everything 
Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Jan 28, 2019 |
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Jan 28, 2019 01:31
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I'm substituting 'ontologically removed' for the word 'different' in all my posts from now on.
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Jan 28, 2019 02:00
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Eugene V. Dubstep posted:I'm substituting 'ontologically removed' for the word 'different' in all my posts from now on. It’s one of those touchstones of academic jargon that I really enjoy because it means I can tune out until the last sentence because everything in between is gonna be unsupported by any real evidence
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Jan 28, 2019 02:12
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