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Mel Mudkiper posted:
Is this a worthwhile distinction? Surely you have to accept some definition of what the novel is trying to achieve, no matter how nebulous, so you have some framework to engage with? Otherwise you'll end up complaining that the Chuckle Brothers lacks gravitas, or that Kazuo Ishigoro's visual comedy doesn't work. That's a strawman example, and there'll always be edge cases. But what's the problem in assigning broad categories to different types of novels?
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Sep 12, 2017 21:44
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Text is text So the chuckle brothers are bad? Edit: Also you clearly don't believe that text is text because you literally just said that how a book is marketed is relevant to its genre classification. Strom Cuzewon fucked around with this message at 22:42 on Sep 12, 2017 |
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Sep 12, 2017 22:03
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:The criticism of the Culture that Banks offers strikes me as Operation Margarine -like. Like I said, he presents an infinite sci-fi universe where practically anything is possible, but the only real choice is between liberal banality as represented by Culture, some form of barbarism/parochialism, and an inscrutable ancient power. That's in itself a questionable ideological statement. I think that's a bit of an over-simplification. The series as a whole presents a bunch of different alternatives to the Culture - the Gzilt, the Morthanveld, the Chelgrians - all are doing their own thing while being neither barbaric nor bourgeois. I'd also say you're over-stating the banality of the Culture by focusing on the humans. Yeah, these guys are champagne socialist as gently caress, and you're spot-on with your eccentricity vs perversion idea. But the "real" Culture are the Minds and ships. The "real" Culture is the massively interventionist military power that will happily gently caress with your small-c culture just because they think they're in the right. And as Use of Weapons and Look to Windward strongly demonstrate, this approach is monstrous, no matter how appealing their moral calculus. Take Player of Games as an example. The bulk of the novel is a disaffected member of the bourgeoisie learning to buck up his ideas and fight for the moral supremacy of his liberal utopia. Then the ending reveals that this is absolute bollocks, and he's just been a pawn (game metaphor!) of higher powers. The Minds are not good Apart from Anticipation of a New Lovers Arrival, The that ship's a saint.
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Sep 25, 2017 22:38
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Why is this a failure? He set out to write a series about a benevolent yet hypocritical militarily interventionist hippy commune in space, and that's exactly what we got.
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Sep 26, 2017 09:15
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Atlas Hugged posted:It's artistically bad if the author doesn't paint the false dichotomy as satirical. An outsider has to see that the two choices aren't the only two possibilities, reject both extremes, and strive for something different. I don't think there's much of a dichotomy - there's an array of civilisations that aren't barbaric or interventionist hippies, and the books often deal with cultures that are happily doing their own thing. The dancing insect spaceship one from Hydrogen Sonata is my favourite, if only because they manage to have a sense of humour about how backwards and silly the Culture thinks they are. Atlas Hugged posted:It's all about layering or paralleling something real. If the false choice and the cynicism was supposed to be reflective of modern culture, sure. "Yes, American capitalism is a monstrous system that destroys the fabric of society, but it's that or communism and we know communism never works!" But I don't think that's what's going on here. I think a lot of what drives the Culture novels is liberal guilt. Banks wants a wonderful happy future where everyone can indulge in whatever silly pursuits they like, and that benevolently guides lesser civilisations towards enlightenment. So in a sense it definitely draws upon modern western liberal thought. But a benevolent colonial power is an impossibility - even a pure ideologically colonialist one like the Culture, which doesn't give a poo poo about territory or resources or any of the typical drivers for colonialism, and just wants everyone to think kind of like they do, because the way the think is the best way and they can prove it with maths. So Banks sets up all these jolly adventure stories and then constantly undercuts them with the violent reality of what the Culture does. The novels aren't especially interested in resolving all these moral complexities, and instead gives us a range of characters who themselves struggle to resolve them, and never come up with entirely satisfactory answers. It's part of what makes Hydrogen Sonata (especially as his final Culture novel before his death) such an emotional gutpunch - nothing is resolved, some evil is uncovered, some evil goes unpunished, but the bulk of the conspiracy is covered up (for the "greater good") and everyone goes back to just muddling along.
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Sep 26, 2017 15:16
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Sanderson winds me up because he puts so much effort into a magic system and as far as I can tell it's X-Men. Some people can eat metals, some can store magic in metal, its an extensively categorised set of powers that seems just arbitrarily scattered across the characters. It is, as BotL would say, loving banal.
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Oct 2, 2017 20:44
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Were those views "comics suck"?
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Oct 20, 2017 10:11
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CestMoi posted:Oh, word? In the begining, yeah.
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Dec 14, 2017 10:39
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quote:This does not make the series a celebration of the meek. There is a definite class element to this fantasy: the lives of peasants are marginal to the narrative, and truly common people tend to be irrelevant except in the form of grumblers, ignorant gossips, victims, and occasional mobs. The reader is never forced to endure anything but an aristocratic viewpoint for long. A slave “revolt” in the third volume features slaves as an indistinct mass led into action by a queen motivated by noblesse oblige. A border guard elects its leaders, a great mass of antagonistic migrants do not recognize state authority (post-Trump, progressive fans of the series certainly seem more hypocritical than ever for enjoying a fantasy where a border wall keeps away barbarians and alien invaders), and a group of social bandits enacts justice – these elements do not make the text democratic or egalitarian because Martin cannot properly vocalize the experience of peoples and masses. His particular method of “immersing” the reader into a point-of-view precludes this, and the dull fantasy setting plays a part in it. The novels validate a sense of destiny played out by exceptional, elite figures. This is something that loads of fantasy does, and it's really loving creepy. Mistborn, for example, features a peasant uprising with essentially no peasant characters. The central cast might have humble beginnings, but by the time of the book they've completely donned the trappings of the nobility. The peasantry are too cowed and cowardly to look out for themselves, and instead have to be tricked and cajoled into revolting through a fabricated religion and literal mind-control.
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Feb 25, 2018 18:33
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Lyon posted:I think it's the same basic premise as to why people get upset that a movie or TV show is reset by a large sequence being a dream. If you've committed time and energy to the story, if you've had some sort of emotional response or connection to the characters, then that connection is now invalidated moving forward. Those characters might still exist but they'll be fundamentally different in all new works or they may no longer exist at all and will no longer be written professionally. So someone spent the last 20 years reading Star Wars EU and, while they can always read those books and enjoy them, there will never be a professional author writing new works about those characters that they loved. It has no bearing on the literary merit of the books (or whatever metric you're using to say the distinction has no merit) but there is still an emotional response. Only a small select few get truly upset but they're the only ones posting about it since no one else cares so they get attention. My favourite example of this was when Cracked tried to argue that the Ghostbusters remake occurs in the same canonicity as the original, but in a parallel universe. It's action figures all over again - who cares about actually doing anything with the work, its important to categorise them and keep them in nice tidy little boxes.
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Mar 26, 2018 20:00
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Seldom Posts posted:Indeed, the marketing department at the publisher is the arbiter of merit. Marketing departments are a plague on the face of the earth, but while I agree that trying to pigeonhole books into neat little genres has probably done immense harm to literature, surely you need some idea of what a work is trying to do before criticising it? Otherwise, what's to stop you criticising the Chuckle Brothers for their lack of gravitas? Yeah, it'd be an accurate description, but what would be the point?
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Jun 1, 2018 17:25
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Ccs posted:Why is that a bad line? Do you not like the use of scintillate and coruscate? Do you not like the gendering of Urth and the sun? Do you not like the explanation of the Claw? The line is also saying "i heard metal scrape on metal, with the sound of metal scraping on metal" A good analogy is like a good analogy - it's a good analogy.
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Jul 21, 2018 21:41
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I am giving my thoughts as I read. If you want to wait until I have finished, you can read my thoughts when I am finished. I am telling you guys whats going through my mind as I work through the story. I really liked your break down of the prose Mel, and it's nice to have it presented in terms of what works/doesn't work and why, rather than BotLs "it self-evidently sucks because its fantasy". Sucks that Neurosis is being kind of a dick.
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Jul 23, 2018 09:03
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CountFosco posted:It's important to note that, while not mustachio twirling villains, the Ottomans were no saints either. They saw conquest as a legitimate means of empire expanding just as much as any Western power, and as inheritors of the Roman Empire, they saw themselves as having casus belli on pretty much all of their neighbors. Sure, the millet system gave local minorities in the empire more autonomy than was typical in other empires, but at the end of the day ultimate power and authority really did rest in the Sultan and his bureaucracy. The devsirme system, for example, isn't some historical fiction invented in order to blacken the name of the Turks. That said, I haven't read Abercrombie's books, so whether he crosses the line from legitimate critique into Orientalist racism is not for me to say. He doesn't delve deeply enough into Gurkish culture for anything like a proper critique - they're largely the faceless invading horde. I feel with both Bayaz and the Gurkish Abercrombie is motivated by nihilism rather than racism. The idea of a banking conspiracy secretly pulling an empires strings is undoubtedly antisemitic, but the central gag of the ending is that there isn't some sinister cabal running the show - it's just one rear end in a top hat wizard. It's a very TVTropes approach. He's seemingly identified that banking-conspiracies and swarthy-foreigners are a somewhat problematic feature of modern fantasy, and his oh-so-clever twist is to have it all be the result of a secret wizard feud. It "subverts" the trope instead of realising that you shouldn't have the drat trope to begin with. Edit: Abercrombie's prose is a lot like Rothfuss in it's performative cleverness. It's not enough to come up with a powerful metaphor or to find a nice rhythm, it has to dance back and forth in front of you telling you how very clever it is. The earthy dialect BotL quotes is obnoxiously over the top, like it's written to draw attention to how very earthy its dialect is. There's the occasional good snippet when he stops trying so drat hard. I really like the scene where Forley happily marches off to warn Bethod and probably get himself executed. Abercrombie strips out some (not nearly enough) of the forced dialogue and we actually get some of the underlying emotion coming through. Strom Cuzewon fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Aug 17, 2018 |
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Aug 17, 2018 16:16
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Or how Bakker just smashed together completely different words to come up with Padirajah. Or gave his Jesus figure two names that are both kind of like Jesus.
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Aug 17, 2018 23:36
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:The medium is the message, you dolt. Constantly repeating this doesn't make it true.
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Aug 26, 2018 23:18
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Mel Mudkiper posted:No but it being true makes it true My understanding of MM is that he says the form and arrangement of communication technology is more important sociologically than the transmitted information. I agree with this more in principle than in his specifics - he cites a lightbulb as an example of a medium devoid of message, which seems to ignore the most important function of a lightbulb, which is providing light. I can still take MM as a decent approach to media studies. But it is entirely unclear to me how we move from that to the idea that the quality and feel of the prose is the sole relevant measure of a works worth. It seems to me that "the medium is the message" would more apply to the form in which prose is packaged and delivered - say, discrete novels vs the serialisation of Dickens vs bloated fantasy septrilogies. It could just be I'm misunderstanding MM, or that I just have a different understanding of the term "medium". As to the Bakker thread - I never said that his prose is entirely irrelevant ( although I happen to like his tortuously overwrought apocalyptica). Instead I said that I enjoyed Bakker for his themes and characters - both how they embody and grapple his philosophical points - and also on a basic plot level. And this is why I feel a purely prose based analysis of genre fiction is the wrong approach (even BotL is less prose-supremicist in his reviews than he seems to believe we should be). Genre fiction is primarily driven by the plot and the character, and is enjoyed by people for those reasons. Take Agatha Christie - not much of interest on a sentence by sentence level, but holy crap she knew how to spin a mystery. So if we're going to criticise it entirely on the basis of lovely prose we also have to show that it can't/shouldn't be enjoyed on the basis of plot and character. This is a much harder position to defend.
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Aug 26, 2018 23:54
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Yeah your understanding of what McLuhan means by medium is pretty off. It has nothing to do with genre or style, for example. Then why is he relevant to discussions of genre and style?
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Aug 27, 2018 00:32
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Mel Mudkiper posted:to me it isn't and if you want to take that up with BotL go ahead I am just objecting to the fact you said it wasn't true Ahh fair enough. BotL keeps wheeling it out as justification for looking solely at the quality of the prose, which is what I was complaining about.
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Aug 27, 2018 00:44
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Because prose is the most important part of prose fiction. I don't struggle, I disagree, and instead of justifying your position you take the piss.
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Aug 27, 2018 11:02
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But what about narrative, plot, character, theme? These are all parts of novels, and the parts that genre readers are most interested in. Why are they wrong?
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Aug 27, 2018 11:17
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Why does it matter what "parts the genre readers are most interested in"? If they were just interested in narrative or characters, they would simply listen to people talk about their lives instead of going out of their way to read text. Because I don't know any wizards, or regency spinsters, or foul-mouthed detectives with nothing to lose and a city with everything to gain. Are you actually arguing that the story is a meaningless part of a book?
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Aug 27, 2018 11:31
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Yes, those. And all the other things I said about character and theme.Llamadeus posted:Imo the idea that prose can be a neutral or transparent container for the real "content" is a mistake that genre readers make. Or, worse, that "good" prose is something only decorative. Absolutely! It'd be a very grim book that did that, and a very grim person who read that way. But I'm not arguing for the complete rejection of prose, only that we can't ignore all the actual content of the book.
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Aug 27, 2018 11:48
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Pretend I said story.BravestOfTheLamps posted:Well then you're simply confused because you can't differentiate form and content, and thus will in all likelihood remain idiotically confused until you read, oh I don't know, Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan. Yes! I am confused! That's why I'm asking for clarification. Are you able to clarify?
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Aug 27, 2018 11:56
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A human heart posted:Those things are all and only conveyed through the 'medium' of prose. You can't access a character or a theme or whatever in any way except by reading it. Yes. But they are still things that exist within the novel, so why can't we use them when considering the novel?
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Aug 27, 2018 12:25
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A human heart posted:Who's dismissing them totally? The statement you took issue with was that the prose is the most important feature of a novel, which is true because everything else is conveyed through it. That's why people are talking about McLuhan, because the prose is the 'medium' for the 'message 'of things like plots or characters "The medium is the message" and the bits of McLuhan I've read seem to be very exclusionary of considering the events and characters of the novel. And BotL constantly dismisses these as irrelevant. And if I'm misunderstanding BotL then I really wish he said so like thirty posts ago and saved us all this bother.
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Aug 27, 2018 13:05
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Strom no offense but you are coming off as a dude who is checking wikipedia for info on McLuhan so you can respond. I would probably drop that whole angle before going further because both of you are kind of twisting his ideas to suit your purposes. I'm actually google-fuing articles and pdf extracts because the library is closed, but yeah, point taken. hackbunny posted:honestly. strom cuzewon, give non-fiction a try I've just started Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, but I might hit some biographies up afterwards. Derren Brown is a cock though, so I'm happy keeping my wizards fictional.
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Aug 27, 2018 14:02
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I wish I could do a find-replace on every irritating fantasy measurement. Strides, man-heights, armspans, a hundred heartbeats, tendays, twodays, tenyear. They always feel like a lazy affection. Its like said-bookism, but for the metric system.
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Oct 31, 2018 19:38
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Mel Mudkiper posted:my favorite poo poo is when they want to be all fantasy but just use really obvious replacements for our thing What do they have against saturdays?
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Oct 31, 2018 21:27
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If you're going to force your reader to figure out your fantasy calendar you'd better have a drat good reason for it. Morndas and Loredas doesn't tell me anything about the people I'm reading about beyond "they call some days Morndas and some Loredas". Sticking with videogames for a moment, Dishonored has stuff like "The Month of Rain" or "The Month of Harvest" which are at least tonally appropriate to a setting with a massively centralised and rigid government. It's like fantasy exchange rates. Harry Potter's convoluted coins demonstrate how stodgy and archaic the wizarding world is, and is a (faintly) amusing gag about pre-decimal currency. But Name of the Wind spends even longer on it's utterly forgettable currency, because apparently it's really very important that we know how much lose change Kvothe has at any given time.
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Nov 2, 2018 15:14
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The only thing dumber than plot nitpicking masquerading as criticism is inaccurate plot nitpicking masquerading as criticism.
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Nov 8, 2018 18:19
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I am intrigued by how someone can so aggressively not understand what people are talking about while simultaneously being so sure they have made a devastating critique This thread is a lot more balanced, but BotL has dropped into a bunch of threads saying that we should judge books solely and only on the prose at a sentence level. And it's absurd to reduce literature like that, especially on something polemical like Dickens, so I'm not gonna begrudge people their overreactions.
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Nov 11, 2018 00:17
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I feel like I just have an erroneously narrow idea of what "prose" means then. If I were to do an analysis of Dickens I'd say I'd find the most useful stuff by looking at his portrayal of the impoverished classes. And while that might be conveyed by prose (and strengthened by good prose, or weakened by lovely prose) I wouldn't call it the same as the prose. But you would group that into prose, right? I'm just being too reductionist?
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Nov 11, 2018 00:40
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Mel Mudkiper posted:The mistake you are making is believing that these elements are separable from prose. A message has just as much significance in how it is told as in what it says. And its not a matter of simply separating the message from the telling, because they are fundamentally inseparable. Yeah that seems reasonable. Is it not still worthwhile to break it down into say, prose and narrative. Take Le Guin, a very straightforward narrative but with wonderful prose and earnest musings on human nature, vs Agatha Christie, pretty bland on a sentence level, but an absolute master at carefully introducing plot elements to build a mystery. I'd definitely label both of them as craft, but are they not different parts of the craft? If we go too broad on our definition of prose doesn't it make it harder to compare their relative strengths? I'm coming at this from a hard stemlord perspective, so these are probably questions that have already been answered in the field of criticism. I'm halfway through McCluhan, but if there's a primer on criticism you'd recommend I'd definitely give it a go.
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Nov 11, 2018 01:14
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A human heart posted:all the le guin prose i've seen has been extremely dull I was just using her as an example, feel free to mentally substitute a better author or append "by strom's low standards"
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Nov 11, 2018 01:43
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Hang on, Dick Swiveller?
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Nov 11, 2018 22:16
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Mel Mudkiper posted:note: Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe Even The Magician's Nephew? I've yet to read any grimdark that manages to match the bleakness of the decrepit kings of Charn and the Deplorable Word.
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Nov 13, 2018 23:09
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I think there's a serious point to be made about how kid's fantasy is so much more willing to be fantastical than adult fantasy, which is always 13th century Europe smashed into 17th century Europe. As a kid I loved Mortal Engines (steampunk taken to it's logical conclusion - giant cities roaming the plains eating up smaller towns and hamlets) and the Edge Chronicles (floating rocks! sky-pirates! crystalised lightning that weighs more in the dark!) just because they actually felt strange and otherworldly. Strom Cuzewon fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Nov 13, 2018 |
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Nov 13, 2018 23:12
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Mel Mudkiper posted:not to open a second can of worms while we are still enjoying the first, but I was serious when I said that contemporary fantasy is dangerously fascist adjacent. You mean there's something dodgy about the dude in Mistborn who becomes king through political back-dealing, implements a sham democracy and then suspends parliament and installs himself as unquestioned leader "just while we sort out this war thingy"?
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Nov 13, 2018 23:24
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Wheat Loaf posted:I like the pictures. I get sad whenever I see Chris Riddell in the politoons thread, because every lovely overlabelled cartoon he does is time he could have spent doing more Edge Chronicles pictures. He'd also be pretty great for Gormenghast.
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Nov 14, 2018 12:39
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