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Stallion Cabana posted:another question about the boxes; Putting them in play invokes certain rules. Richard has great fun trolling some spirits about this. From memory:  Where's the third Box of Orden? We can't tell you. It's against the rules. WTF kind of spirit has rules like this? The Boxes are in play. That sets magic rules. One rules is that we cannot provide any information of the location of the boxes. Ok. Does Darken Rahl have all three boxes? Nope, just two. Aha! You just told me something about the location of the third box; where it's not. .... gently caress you.
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Oct 8, 2014 02:04
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MissKeewi posted:I have confessions to make: 1. Don't worry! I've read Atlas Shrugged twice and the Fountainhead once. I liked the SoT books as well! Then, I realized how stupid it all was (i.e. graduated high school), and haven't touched it since. 2. I actually don't remember anything but vague thoughts about the BDSM parts. I think I mostly skimmed that part to get back to the "good" stuff.
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Oct 8, 2014 02:11
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PurpleXVI posted:The only real "good" under Objectivism, as I understand it, is to accept your "station in life." i.e. if you're an untermensch, to work without complaint and obey the ubermenschen who know what's best for you, and if you're an ubermensch, to order around the little antmen who do all your hard work but lack your mental faculties and ambition. Oh goddammit. There's something that comes up a couple books down the line which I didn't "get" when reading these books in relation to Objectivism. You putting the philosophy this way made me get it. 
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Oct 8, 2014 03:25
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PurpleXVI posted:The only real "good" under Objectivism, as I understand it, is to accept your "station in life." i.e. if you're an untermensch, to work without complaint and obey the ubermenschen who know what's best for you, and if you're an ubermensch, to order around the little antmen who do all your hard work but lack your mental faculties and ambition. But wouldn't that contradict Ayn Rand's own proclamations that people should care only for themselves and being distrustful of government?  Or am I giving Objectivists too much credit?
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Oct 8, 2014 03:42
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Libertad! posted:But wouldn't that contradict Ayn Rand's own proclamations that people should care only for themselves and being distrustful of government? Well, in this case the "ubermensch" aren't government leaders, they're CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY. But considering that superpowerful CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY or an OMNIPRESENT GOVERNMENT are basically the same, yes, you're giving them too much credit. EDIT: The big difference is that governments are for, by and of the untermenschen, basically their "unfair" attempt at getting more power than they deserve by banding together so they can overwhelm the ubermensch whom they couldn't handle mano-a-mano. So she'd probably have been all for some sort of fascist government lead by a BIG STRONG MAN, but incredibly distrustful of a democracy.
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Oct 8, 2014 03:44
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Between Sword of Truth, Steve Ditko's Mr. A and The Question, and Watchmen's Rorschach being based off of the latter, I'm almost tempted to write out an Objectivist fantasy setting/RPG as a dark parody. All governments are simultaneously incompetent and evil, overwhelming violence and hatred can be justified by the PCs because "they're special," and the major NPCs have silly names like "Luke Darklord."
Libertad! fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Oct 8, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 03:50
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Libertad! posted:Between Sword of Truth, Steve Ditko's Mr. A and The Question, and Watchmen's Rorschach being based off of the latter, I'm almost tempted to write out an Objectivist fantasy setting/RPG as a dark parody. All governments are simultaneously incompetent and evil, overwhelming violence and hatred can be justified by the PCs because "they're special," and the major NPCs have silly names like "Luke Darklord." Ooooh boy. Wait until the... sixth? book (faith of the fallen).
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Oct 8, 2014 03:56
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Libertad! posted:Between Sword of Truth, Steve Ditko's Mr. A and The Question, and Watchmen's Rorschach being based off of the latter, I'm almost tempted to write out an Objectivist fantasy setting/RPG as a dark parody. All governments are simultaneously incompetent and evil, overwhelming violence and hatred can be justified by the PCs because "they're special," and the major NPCs have silly names like "Luke Darklord." I sincerely cannot tell if this is a joke on purpose.
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Oct 8, 2014 04:00
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Libertad! posted:Or am I giving Objectivists too much credit?
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Oct 8, 2014 05:28
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Libertad! posted:Between Sword of Truth, Steve Ditko's Mr. A and The Question I think you mean "Steve Ditko's basically everything."
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Oct 8, 2014 05:47
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Since I never got to that part of the series, I went and looked up multiple explanations of how the Boxes of Orden work and it still doesn't make any goddamn sense.
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Oct 8, 2014 06:10
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It's maybe the dumbest magic item I've ever heard of. I guess it'd be a sure winner if you were a nihilist who wanted to kill everything and yourself, because worst-case scenario, you die.
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Oct 9, 2014 05:22
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At least the magic goblets in Indiana Jones only kill the selfish Nazi drinking them instead of every living thing in the world.Old Kentucky Shark posted:Even the Wheel of Time, the Elvis loving Presley of bloated 90's fantasy sagas, clocks in at a svelte 462 hours (19.5 days, or 5.7 work weeks) worth of audiobook. Goodkind is two thirds of a Robert Jordan, and God help us all. I stopped reading WoT in the first book because it was a literal Fellowship of the Ring name change. Like break it up a bit, guy . Frankly I'd rather read about Drizzt the Dark Elf. I like Brian Sanderson but not enough to torture myself through the series to get to his contributions. Same thing with SoT. I randomly picked up Chainfire in '06 because the name sounded cool and didn't know what it was. Got confused by the story and bored by the writing and skipped out. How lucky I was! I will be following this thread with glee. 
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Oct 9, 2014 17:00
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This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!
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DeusExMachinima posted:I stopped reading WoT in the first book because it was a literal Fellowship of the Ring name change. It's really not, though, and you should probably give it another shot because the first 4-5 books are pretty loving great.
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Oct 9, 2014 17:13
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Literally The Worst posted:It's really not, though, and you should probably give it another shot because the first 4-5 books are pretty loving great. I listened to the whole thing on audiobook, after giving up around book 8. The readers are really good, and even the bad books are more listenable than readable, since you can plow through them while driving or exercising instead of devoting precious hours of your life to reading them.
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Oct 9, 2014 17:47
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Literally The Worst posted:It's really not, though, and you should probably give it another shot because the first 4-5 books are pretty loving great. EotW really is. I think I g-quit early on somewhere between not-Strider and the not-Witchking.
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Oct 9, 2014 17:50
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It's ~subversion/deconstruction/fancy words~, just before cool dudes like Abercrombie did it. LoTR is to WW1 what WoT is to Vietnam as far as fantasy goes, well maybe shared with The (early) Black Company books. Unlike SoT, which just does it because Goodkind can't think of anything else to base his plot on besides objectionist rants.
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Oct 9, 2014 18:40
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Every time I read Richard Cypher this pops into my head: I'm Richard Cypher - professional dick hider... boys That that's the main character's name is just unfathomable. Even more so than the Darkly Doug or whatever the villain is called.
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Oct 10, 2014 16:29
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I can almost buy the Boxes of Orden if they're how the dude sealed all the direct-control and direct-death magic in the world, because you can't just get rid of that poo poo.
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Oct 10, 2014 18:14
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Glazius posted:I can almost buy the Boxes of Orden if they're how the dude sealed all the direct-control and direct-death magic in the world, because you can't just get rid of that poo poo. Nah, they're just what you get if you try to treat a classic AD&D adventure module as something that could actually happen. Those things were full of that kind of 'I'm smarter than you' logic puzzle poo poo.
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Oct 10, 2014 19:40
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TheCenturion posted:The thing that really REALLY bugs the poo poo out of me, about almost any series of THIS TYPE, including SoT, or GoT, and so on, is the idea that civilization will happily hum along at a stagnant level for thousands of years. This is basically what people who don't know much about history think happened: "First there were Greece and Rome, then the medieval period, and then the industrial revolution then modern times." And since a lot of ill-thought out fantasy is set in this weird mis-mash of ~1400 years worth of "medieval" history with wildly divergent technologies and societies all existing side by side... This reminds me of an interesting anecdote about a much better writer: supposedly, the first major modern alternative history novel, The Guns of the South, was written after Harry Turtledove had a conversation with a friend of his. She was upset that on the cover of one of her books, they had drawn a fellow holding a crossbow, a weapon which wouldn't be used in the area her novel was set in for at least a hundred years after. "It would be like putting a confederate soldier with an AK-47," she said. So what went of the cover of Turtledove's book? 
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Oct 10, 2014 23:06
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Spoilers Below posted:This is basically what people who don't know much about history think happened: "First there were Greece and Rome, then the medieval period, and then the industrial revolution then modern times." And since a lot of ill-thought out fantasy is set in this weird mis-mash of ~1400 years worth of "medieval" history with wildly divergent technologies and societies all existing side by side...
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Oct 11, 2014 00:17
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Pimpmust posted:It's ~subversion/deconstruction/fancy words~, just before cool dudes like Abercrombie did it. The War of the Ring in Lord of the Rings has a lot more to do with the Byzantine-Sassanian War of 602-628, with Aragorn filling the role of Heraclius, exarch of Carthage and later emperor, than World War I. Tolkien's time on the Western Front informed many aspects of the story and the War of the Ring--the behavior and nomenclature used by the Uruk troop Merry and Pippin get caught up in is very clearly patterned on his wartime experiences, just as the no man's land between trench lines influenced his depiction of the Gladden Fields. But Tolkien very consciously chose to avoid patterning the War of the Ring after any particular historical conflict, even the Roman-Sassanian analogy can only stretch so far. The closest he ever got to deliberately writing fantasy WWI was in the earliest drafts of his never-finished verse depiction of the Fall of Gondolin, which had Morgoth's orcs employing clanking iron machines very much like tanks. Of course that was written a few years of his wounding at the Somme; he started his first elf-based writing when he was laid up in a military hospital after that battle.
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Oct 11, 2014 01:26
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Just because of the events in LotR wasn't modeled after WWI, doesn't mean the entire story and setting wasn't. Tolkien's fiction was heavily informed by his experiences in the war, both in it's idealization of simple rural living, the intense lack of glorification of war, and far more. You're missing the forest for the trees here.
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Oct 11, 2014 01:54
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In what way does anything you just wrote conflict with zeal posted:Tolkien's time on the Western Front informed many aspects of the story and the War of the Ring ? You're not saying anything I don't already know or agree with, friend. What I said, specifically, was that the War of the Ring, that particular fictional political and military conflict, drew far more from the final war between the Eastern Roman and Sassanid Persian empires in the first half of the 7th Century CE than the First World War. I recommend you read about the subject, it is a very interesting period. Peter Jackson's examination of it led directly to his special effects shop basing Gondorian architecture on Byzantine models and, unfortunately imo, abandoning Tolkien's description of Minas Tirith's outer wall being built with the same imperishable black stone as Isengard.
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Oct 11, 2014 02:17
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I'm not actually sure where you're coming from because nobody said anything about any actual fictional conflicts in the story, basically. The quote was:quote:LoTR is to WW1 what WoT is to Vietnam as far as fantasy goes, well maybe shared with The (early) Black Company books. ...and I'm not sure where your response was aimed.
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Oct 11, 2014 02:29
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Spoilers Below posted:This is basically what people who don't know much about history think happened: "First there were Greece and Rome, then the medieval period, and then the industrial revolution then modern times." And since a lot of ill-thought out fantasy is set in this weird mis-mash of ~1400 years worth of "medieval" history with wildly divergent technologies and societies all existing side by side... Philip K Dick wrote The Man in the High Castle waaaaaaay before 1992. From what I understand, it was the first piece of culture to create a "what if the Axis powers won?" world, but it's focus on post-war Axis politics and what the world would be like are only one of its thrusts. It's also concerned with parallel worlds existing alongside each other. Basically, it's aware that it's an alternative history novel. I don't know if that level or type of sci-fi makes it stick out from the mini-genre.
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Oct 11, 2014 02:57
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MartianAgitator posted:Philip K Dick wrote The Man in the High Castle waaaaaaay before 1992. From what I understand, it was the first piece of culture to create a "what if the Axis powers won?" world, but it's focus on post-war Axis politics and what the world would be like are only one of its thrusts. It's also concerned with parallel worlds existing alongside each other. Basically, it's aware that it's an alternative history novel. I don't know if that level or type of sci-fi makes it stick out from the mini-genre. Alternate history novels have been around for a hell of a long time. There's also Lest Darkness Fall, or hell, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. I'd suspect that 1963 wasn't the first time someone wrote a "what if the Axis won WW2" story either, although I don't have any counterexamples handy.
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Oct 11, 2014 04:31
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Alternate History has been around since Greco-Roman times - I recall one writer... Livy, maybe, who wrote about "what if Alexander the Great went West instead of East?"
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Oct 11, 2014 04:42
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RPZip posted:I'd suspect that 1963 wasn't the first time someone wrote a "what if the Axis won WW2" story either, although I don't have any counterexamples handy.
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Oct 11, 2014 04:50
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You're all absolutely right. I'm using "modern" way too loosely there; "recent" would be a much better word. Guns merely kicked off the resurgence in popularity the genre has experienced, from what I understand.
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Oct 11, 2014 04:57
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Well, I think it's at least cool to note that Lest Darkness Fall and A Connecticut Yankee are about time travelers who gently caress poo poo up in the past and Man in the High Castle's more interesting part is that there are people who travel from our world to this parallel world. What's the oldest alternate history novel that's focused on the alternate history without these other sci-fi macguffins?
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Oct 11, 2014 05:24
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Hobnob posted:According to the Encyclopaedia of SF, as early as 1945 (in Hungarian) or 1947 in English - Noel Coward's play Peace in Our Time. Yeah, that sounds about right. MartianAgitator posted:Well, I think it's at least cool to note that Lest Darkness Fall and A Connecticut Yankee are about time travelers who gently caress poo poo up in the past and Man in the High Castle's more interesting part is that there are people who travel from our world to this parallel world. What's the oldest alternate history novel that's focused on the alternate history without these other sci-fi macguffins? I looked up the Livy passage mentioned earlier, which is found here. Livy makes the interesting point that, at the time, Carthage and Rome were allies; Rome was only a growing regional power at this point, and wouldn't grow into its full strength until the grueling Punic wars with Carthage. Livy suggests that the two cities might have worked together to crush their common enemy; this would be the rough equivalent of, I dunno, an alien landing just prior to World War 1 that had the Entente and Triple Alliance powers work together to crush them. Or maybe aliens landing in early WW2 and having the Russians, Americans, Germans and British all end up fighting against them, which is a (terrible) book series that Turtledove already wrote. Livy ends up saying that of course the Romans would have kicked Alexander the Great's rear end anyway, because we're Romans, so eat it filthy effeminate Greeks.  Alternate history owns.
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Oct 11, 2014 06:26
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Oh my god I just found this thread and now I have to read the whole thing. SoT was my favorite series in junior high, I had multiple signed copies of every book, posted in SoT fanfic forums, the whole bit. Then I got to high school and realized how truly awful they were (book 7-8 I think). And oh my god TG has become some horrific combination of Heisenberg meets Anton LaVey. Age has not done him well. Edit: Okay, thread read. I didn't catch the fire/gun control when I read the books, so that's a nice find. For alternate histories, I really dig me some Island in the Sea of Time by Stirling. The modern island of Nantucket moves to 3000 BC, but same place geographically. Hilarity ensues. Loel fucked around with this message at 23:50 on Oct 12, 2014 |
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Oct 12, 2014 22:37
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I loved reading these books as young teenager and still have fond memories of the first book. As I got older though the problems got more and more apparent until I bailed out of the series at the seventh or eigth book. The kill all pacifists one. Not only was killing all the pacifists too much for me, I was sick of the way every book was solved by Richard rear end-pulling the solution at the last moment, it just felt unearned. Then reading other people online pointing out all the other issues I'd missed made me a little sad that the books sucked so much after having so much fun reading them.
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Oct 13, 2014 04:53
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I'd never read Sword of Truth because I couldn't even get into the first book when I was twelve, but I'd always thought either Kvothe or Harry Dresden was the biggest Mary Sue to ever describe themselves, but I was wrong. I was so wrong. 
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Oct 13, 2014 15:16
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TheKennedys posted:I'd never read Sword of Truth because I couldn't even get into the first book when I was twelve, but I'd always thought either Kvothe or Harry Dresden was the biggest Mary Sue to ever describe themselves, but I was wrong. I was so wrong. People calling Harry Dresden a Mary Sue don't actually know what that word means. There's seriously nine straight books about Harry being miserable and getting into worse and worse situations and barely coming out of them thanks to some bullshit plan he came up with at the last second.
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Oct 13, 2014 18:20
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Author Stand-In might be the better term for this sort of thing (Haven't read anything with Harry Dresden), where a character is obviously carrying a lot of author's own baggage + gets to be the hero. Mary Sueism, apart from the fan-fiction side, is that Author Projection/Stand-in issue taken to extremes. Pimpmust fucked around with this message at 18:34 on Oct 13, 2014 |
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Oct 13, 2014 18:31
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Literally The Worst posted:People calling Harry Dresden a Mary Sue don't actually know what that word means. There's seriously nine straight books about Harry being miserable and getting into worse and worse situations and barely coming out of them thanks to some bullshit plan he came up with at the last second. I'm only on the first one (finally reading after years of procrastination) and Mary Sue might not be the right term, but he does seem like the type that yeah, gets to be the hero and has the answer to everything, which I guess is kinda built into the type of story where there's very few [insert special type of person] among billions of normal people. It's hard to explain the sense I got off Harry from the first book, but I'm more than willing to give him a chance, it seems like a pretty good series.
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Oct 13, 2014 19:10
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TheKennedys posted:I'd never read Sword of Truth because I couldn't even get into the first book when I was twelve, but I'd always thought either Kvothe or Harry Dresden was the biggest Mary Sue to ever describe themselves, but I was wrong. I was so wrong. Jack Ryan beats Kvothe any day. Can't speak to Dresden.
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Oct 13, 2014 20:10
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