Let's Read the Sword of Truth books! (Or not. Can we not?)

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Let's Read the Sword of Truth books! (Or not. Can we not?)

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

I'm still mad at my friends from college who talked me into reading these. After I started, they told me that the first three were great but then it went downhill for a bit but the latest one was great again!

And I'm sitting there going, the first three were awful slogs and they're the good part?

Looking back, I'm not sure I had great friends in college.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2014 15:48

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 06:29

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

PeterWeller posted:

Haha. I wonder if the other guy had made that association, would he have got the satire?

Also, you poor fucks who are just experiencing this mess for the first time are in for the biggest of your lives when you learn the reason behind Dick's last name being Cipher.

I saw it coming and I still couldn't believe it when I read it.

# ¿ Oct 5, 2014 23:34

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Gazetteer posted:

300 hours, and it's all downhill from here.

I think we started at the bottom of the hill and have begun tunneling into to it.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 02:22

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Night10194 posted:

What is it about Objectivists that makes them write these giant loving tomes whenever they write? Do they think it makes them look smarter?

Yes.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 02:26

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Goodkind's head is so far up his own rear end he can see daylight again.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 02:59

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Ixjuvin posted:

Look, if we talk about all of the dumb things right off the bat then what's the point of having this poor idiot slog through this refuse pile chapter by chapter?

Let's be honest - even now we've barely begun to scrape the surface of that pit mine of idiocy. There's plenty left for the poor bastard to unearth.

# ¿ Oct 7, 2014 05:29

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Strong Mouse posted:

I have this problem with a lot of forms of media. Not talking about something is a great way to add drama, but when it starts being the only way you know to create drama and you use it every time, you are a bad writer.

There is so much from these books that I don't remember, but it is great when somebody says something and it triggers me. I can't wait to get to those later books after we finish this one.

It works if the character withholding information has a motivation for doing so. Otherwise, it's just laziness.

Edit: For example, I just re-read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Almost all of the drama in that book arises directly from the characters withholding critical information from each other, but the tension is believable and effective because everyone has a reason to do so. They're all navigating a maze of conflicting loyalties, and if you guess wrong about someone else, the stakes are literally life and death. That's good drama and good writing.

Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 02:30 on Nov 11, 2014

# ¿ Nov 11, 2014 02:22

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Spoilers Below posted:

Touch�. I love that story.

This thread got me thinking about the bloat of fantasy novels last night. DDP noted a couple posts back that he was only about 125 pages in, and given that we're a few more chapters, I'm guess-timating we're at perhaps 200 now? (Perhaps I'm being a bit unfair by comparing the page count of the 2nd novel in SoT to the first novels in other series, rather than an aggregate total, but the reason will soon become apparent)

Even for bloated fantasy doorstoppers, this series doesn't do too well.

Two hundred pages into Game of Thrones, Ned is already King's Landing and Daenerys has wed Drogo, and this is a series with a half-dozen different plot threads going at once AND what amounts to an intro short story that took 20 pages before we even meet anyone who's actually important.

Wheel of Time is pretty slow moving itself, but two hundred pages into Eye of the World, Rand et al have fled their home village and are about to end up in Shadar Logoth.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2014 22:54

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

neongrey posted:

It's got issues. It's got a lot of issues. If you're not sure it's worth picking it up, don't bother, but if you think you'd like it you probably will.

The first novel is sort of self-contained, the way the pilot episode of a TV show is. Which means that if you read that and stop, you won't feel like you've completely wasted your time. And you'll know if you should stop, because the first book book is the whole series in microcosm - pretty well everything that's bad will continue to be bad for the rest of the series, and everything that's good will be the good bits going forward.

By the end of Eye of the World you'll know if you want any more of what Jordan offers.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2014 07:41

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Spoilers Below posted:

His one downside is that his fight scenes read like someone who's never been in a fight before, and is only describing what he's seen on TV, as opposed to Vietnam veteran Robert Jordan, or WWI Veteran JRR Tolkien, or even fencer Michael Moorcock, but he's hardly the only fantasy writer that accusation could be laid on *cough Goodkind cough*, and really, it only stands out when in direct comparison, as he's literally finishing another person's work.

It also reads better in his more recent works - partly from general improvement in his writing, and partly because he's no longer trying to make them realistic at all and is clearly doing action movie/wuxia fight scenes on purpose.

Sanderson's own monstrous fantasy doorstopper series - Stormlight Chronicles - is worth checking out if you're already in the market for that kind of thing. There's some really interesting world building going on there, though there's a shared universe thing going on with his other works I don't personally care for.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2014 23:31

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Sindai posted:

I don't think so. We just know it's super huge compared to the setting of the books and yet somehow all the fate-of-the-world stuff is concentrated in this little shithole corner.

A fantasy world only Rudyard Kipling could love.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2014 03:21

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

DARKSEID DICK PICS posted:

You pretty much just hope he won't rape you as much if he wins.

I think that's the entire reason.

Once again, an idea that actually has some legs when put in the hands of a semi-competent author.

Charles Stross' Laundry series has this is a major motivation for some of the cultists who worship various Elder Things. Given that it's a Lovecraftian universe, even the good guys often suspect the best they can hope for is going down fighting. Cutting a deal with the devil makes almost makes sense under those conditions, and is a constant reason for security concerns. It's very appropriate for a horror-espionage series.

I remember it coming up in Wheel of Time as well and being handled better there too (though Jordan seemed to prefer the "seduced by promises of power" trope). Basically in both cases the main characters spend a lot more time actually worrying about and looking for fifth columnists, plus other characters actually have their own secret agendas they're pursuing that aren't directly part of the good vs evil dynamic, leading to lots of red herrings. So when darkfriends do pop up it feels less like an asspull.

It's still a get-out-of-jail card, but other writers at a minimum go back and try to justify it before the reveal.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 11:36

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

alarumklok posted:

Okay so we've narrowed it down to not about slutty Clintons, not about another of Dick Rahl's relatives, and not about racquetball. Anyone have any ideas what this book is actually about?

I remember that this was the last book in the series I read. The "friends" who recommended it to me said the first three or four were great, then it got kind of bad for a bit, but the new book - Chainfire, book flipping 9 - was good again!

After reading the first three, the idea that it got worse from here immediately cut off any interest I had in reading more.

But I honestly don't remember anything about the plot other than Cara being one of the two or three good characters who deserved a better series (I may be in the minority, but I don't like Zedd) and the Emperor first showing up. My recollection was that Stone of Tears was actually the third book, in fact. I cannot think of anything else I've read since getting out of highschool that has left less of an impression on me. Certainly nothing else that's this goddamn long.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2015 06:18

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

I know it's been repeated a dozen times now, but the fact that literally no one can remember what the gently caress happens in this book is probably the true magic of the whole series.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 05:15

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

DARKSEID DICK PICS posted:

I want to just point out: she was taught enough High D'Haran to instantly pick out violated, but could not decipher a number.

Doesn't surprise me at all that a language favored by wizards in this setting a) uses "violated" often enough for it to be one of the first words you'd learn and b) is hosed up enough that it's numbers and its ordinals don't share the same roots. Or has more than one set of ordinals! (Just like English :buddy:

)

Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Feb 13, 2015

# ¿ Feb 13, 2015 14:51

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

Yet another thing Goodkind lifted straight from Wheel of Time, then.

Not really - in most cases in WoT there's at least a reason why information isn't getting shared (spies for various factions all over the place, mixed loyalties, conflicting goals. and a semi-reasonable understanding of distances and travel times), and in most cases it doesn't have the same judgmental tone about it. Not sharing information causes a lot of the problems and drama in the series, but there's at least motivation for it. That it happens so often is poor storytelling as well, don't get me wrong, but it's a different sort of problem.

In this series, characters routinely fail to share information or explain themselves when there's literally no reason not to. And it's pretty much a constant that if someone does something dumb because information wasn't shared, then the person withholding the information will be super pissed at the other. Goodkind seems to think is justified behavior, instead of completely asinine.

It's more that, once again, Goodkind steals an idea that he doesn't actually understand and manages to gently caress it up.

Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Feb 13, 2015

# ¿ Feb 13, 2015 23:55

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Honestly, if all Subtractive vs Additive magic boiled down to was a difference in the approach of the wizard, that would actually have been interesting. A lot of power in the story already hinges on personal belief and perception; having the personal worldview of the wizard drive how their magic functions would not only fit the world, it would be a unique take.

But its Goodkind so it goes without saying that he squanders the opportunity.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2016 02:32

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Kaza42 posted:

"No, don't you see that's the Stone of Tear, his book is the Stone of TearS completely different and he isn't just ripping off the wheel of time. Also his books are way better and not terrible" -Terry Goodkind

Goodkind adamantly maintains that he doesn't read any other fantasy works (in fact, that his stuff isn't fantasy because ew genre fiction).

It's a patently hilarious claim, made all the more asinine given how derivative fantasy is in general. There's a pretty long history of authors going "I read <other author> and decided, I want to do that but with x instead of y" and everyone being pretty much okay with it.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2016 16:50

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Kaza42 posted:

Isn't that also about where magic starts being referred to as "weaves" and there's a reclusive yet politically important enclave of female magic users with extended lifespans who are ruled by a single powerful matron and there's also evil pale men in magic black cloaks stronger than nearly any single warrior?

Yep.

I remember bringing this up to the people who introduced me to the series, and the amount of bending over backwards they did to claim it wasn't ripping off WoT was nearly as hilarious as it was infuriating.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2016 20:05

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Paragon8 posted:

Basically its all super dumb and lovely.

swordoftruth.txt

# ¿ Jul 11, 2016 23:38

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

malkav11 posted:

Frankly, if Sword of Truth were a direct ripoff of Wheel of Time instead of just cribbing a few bits here and there it would be a much better series.

Thinking of how Shannara compares to LotR... Yes, I agree.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2016 01:40

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

the_steve posted:

This served to remind me that I still like Dalton as a villain.
And sets me up for future confusion If his wife is THAT smart, like she's played out to be, how is it she's gullible enough to gently caress Bill Clinton just because he's the Sovereign later on? Being with Dalton as long as she has, seeing and being involved in the machinations of Anderith politics, and somehow she's STILL drinking the Kool-Aid on the Sovereign actually being divine?

Even smart people believe weird poo poo and do not smart things because of it.

But yeah, in this case its mostly because Goodkind is a terrible writer.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2016 18:19

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

dscruffy1 posted:

I thought Confessor was the last book he wrote.

It was supposed to be. Then the one non-SoT book he did was an unmitigated disaster (that is, had all the issues SoT does but also didn't make any money).

So of course he went back to SoT with a quickness.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2016 08:55

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

there wolf posted:

Limited tools being an incomplete understanding of magic and it's workings. Richard could be the fool who knows nothing but isn't limited by what's possible as a result. Instead he learns magic via infordumps and osmosis which is all a million times more boring than seeing some fuckups follow by spectacular success when it really counts.

As a contrast, this is pretty much how the protagonist of Kill Six Billion Demons gets through things. In the hands of a good writer the concept works because it's a double edged sword - she gets out of impossible situations because she doesn't know enough to recognize them as impossible plus has access to a the same sort of immense arbitrary power as Dick Rahl.

Except, unlike with Dick's perfect solution rear end pulls, Allison's solutions typically lead to more problems later, and the balance is better. Dick is always right and conventional wisdom is always wrong. Allison is often right and conventional wisdom often flawed... but not always, and often BOTH are partly correct and partly wrong.

That kind of complexity is needed to make it work, or it just becomes... well, it becomes the black and white authorial sermonizing Sword of Truth is.

# ¿ Apr 14, 2017 06:22

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

I'm a little late on the fantasy worlds with reasonable logistics, but Django Wexler's Shadow Campaigns have a lot of reasonable Napoleonic warfare going on. It's also actually fun to read, for a bonus.

Edit: The Mongols used to pull that "kill thousands of helpless people in an afternoon" stuff but there was a whole system to it, with quotas. The Mongols were pretty loving scary.

Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 03:57 on Aug 7, 2017

# ¿ Aug 7, 2017 03:53

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

gschmidl posted:

Just HAD to have more than Jordan.

I had a friend in college who actually believed Goodkind's claim that he didn't know anything about Wheel of Time, nope hadn't heard of it, it's all just coincidence. She even went so far at one point to claim Jordan had copied Goodkind, and her example came from a WoT book that had come out four years before the SoT novel it had supposedly copied did. The backpedaling was pretty epic when I was able to prove that, no, this was not me confusing the hardcover vs paperback reprint dates. Not that even that was enough to convince her that maybe Terry was taking a teensy bit of inspiration from something other than his own genius.

# ¿ Oct 10, 2017 19:53

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Nihilarian posted:

Plus I think we already speculated about Verin->Verna at some point anyway.

EDIT: and by "we" I mean "me" apparently, because it was me who brought it up, 3 years ago, I've been reading this for 3 years aaaaaahhhhhh

Terry Goodkind is exactly the kind of hack to not only copy a character from a better work, but to copy the same character on two separate occasions.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2017 06:25

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

PJOmega posted:

Ah yes, Mike Rowe. He jumps in and does a "dirty job" for maybe five hours under heavy supervision all while getting paid ten to hundreds of times what any worker is paid. He then extolls to the camera how wonderfully rewarding it is, all while ignoring that these workers are going to spend 30-40 years doing that job. For a sliver of what he was paid. Without the supervision and safety.

Then he has the gall to triple down on the authoritarian cocksucking with statements like "if you didn't want to get assaulted by police on a plane that you paid for a seat on maybe you should've just surrendered your seat like you were told."

Wrap it all up in some folksy Protestant work ethic and you have the two-faced Judas of the working class.

He loves to wrap himself in the cloak of anti-elitism too, with all the mealy mouthed platitudes that people doing these jobs should be respected. Of course, that respect doesn't extend to paying them properly or providing real benefits or support for unions. And of course that doesn't apply to service industries - people in those jobs are just lazy and entitled. Work in at a fast food joint or in a call center? That's not ~skilled labor~ so get hosed.

# ¿ Oct 11, 2017 16:50

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Deceitful Penguin posted:

The Wheel of time was extremely my poo poo because the fucker clearly wanted to write exactly what he wanted and at some point must have threatened his publishers and editors with something sharp to get that many words.

I mean, I also agree with Tolkien the only problem with his book was that it was too short, so there is that. But it's drat fine reading, all about the characters and the journey, which is such a breath of fresh air when so much poo poo is desperately rushing from one plot point to another like it thinks it will run out of time or something

meanwhile i never finished the series because whoever that dude was afterwards wrote poo poo way too quickly and the copy I had was horribly transcribed

# ¿ Oct 19, 2017 03:37

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

The lardo detour reads like Terry hadn't heard of the stuff before, tried it, loved it, and decided EVERYONE MUST KNOW OF THIS, THIS IS AMAZING. Except everyone did know, he's just an oblivious idiot. He's exactly the kind of self-centered to think that because something is to new to him, it's new to everyone else.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2017 16:10

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

The remake actually had China as the invader, until a real distributor came on board, laughed at the producers, and order them to CGI and dub over everything because there was no way in hell anyone was releasing a movie that was going to be unsellable to a billion person market.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2018 06:40

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

gschmidl posted:

....oh yeah. Almost like Goodkind is an awful, unedited ~~writer~~ person.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2018 21:56

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 06:29

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

It's also worth noting that David is loving gigantic. It's 17 feet tall and weighs around six tons (it's never been formally weighed but that's the rough estimate). Even if the design and pose were as simple as they first appear, just working at that scale is astonishing.

# ¿ Apr 13, 2018 21:13

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Let's Read the Sword of Truth books! (Or not. Can we not?)