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Does The Magicians count as urban fantasy? I read the first book on the recommendation of a gal I went on a few dates with and by the time I reached the end, the more I thought about it, the more I  and I just have to vent. Spoilers ahead.It's a story of an incredibly magically-gifted teenager who at first just seems angsty, but gradually reveals himself to be a sociopathic narcissist who blames everyone but himself for his own failures. After he graduates from school, he coasts on the sacrifices of those around him and the magical community's plutocratic indulgence of all its failson layabouts. At several points along the way, whatshisface has a momentary flash of self-awareness and questions whether he's actually to blame, but immediately pulls a Principal Skinner and blames everyone else. I'd thought this was leading up to some sort of comeuppance and real character growth, but, nope, his companions lose their lives against the big bad while the protagonist flails about ineffectually. He then goes back to Earth, gets handed a high-paying corporate job where he does literally nothing and mopes, before his surviving companions resurface in the final page to literally call out the unfinished plot points and allow the sequel to start with things more or less reset. I'm genuinely confused about the authorial intent. Is the protagonist just an author surrogate and this is his actual mindset? Is the author just writing pulp and deliberately insulting the reader? Most bad books I just let go, but this one and its apparent popularity just confounds me enough to plague me months after I read it. Oh, and there's a sex scene that is kind of explicitly non-consensual, but is explained away as "they were just literal unthinking animals at the time, guys, so it's all good!" Cugel the Clever fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Apr 18, 2020 |
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Apr 18, 2020 05:26
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:It’s also the book’s deliberate intention to portray a magical university that functions like an actual elite Ivy League college (Lev Grossman went to both Harvard and Yale.) including the crippling neuroses of many of the students, their deep personal dissatisfaction, and the systematic rewarding of bad behavior and enforced inequality.
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Apr 18, 2020 15:39
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The show had its faults, but it's what introduced me to the series and the genre more broadly, so I remember it with at least a mild fondness. But I also haven't seen it in over a decade and it might not hold up very well. If you feel your TV adaptations have to err on the side of being as much a 1:1 adaptation of the source material as possible, it'll probably leave you frustrated.
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Apr 20, 2020 05:35
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Just finished Gil's All-Fright Diner and thoroughly enjoyed it as an easy romp, leaving aside the dozen-or-so too many descriptions of the protagonists' lust for the 17-year-old antagonist. Will have to check out Martinez's other work.
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May 2, 2020 20:56
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Is there a good way to get all the Dresden short stories in one place? If I recall correctly, they almost always come as single pieces in multi-author story collections, but that's ridiculously inconvenient.
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May 25, 2020 02:07
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docbeard posted:Also I have definitely watched way too much Arrowverse stuff in the last year but Cinder is 100% Dominic Purcell's portrayal of Mick Rory, right? Right? I agree with the opinion I've seen a lot in this thread that the direction the Verus series has taken in the last couple books isn't particularly satisfactory for me. I'm almost certainly going to read the last book and will look forward to checking out whatever's next for the author, though.
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Jun 9, 2021 05:53
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