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Something must be said for Rothfuss' ability to write metaphors that seem really deep and introspective but are actually meaningless and unmemorable. This lets him fool enough people into letting him write poo poo like "The Slow Regard of Silent Things".
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Oct 10, 2017 06:48
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 01:03 |
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I just enjoy how the plot is supposedly the Amyr and Chandrian, but there's so little of that. Like we ALMOST could have got something with the Mayor in book 2 before Kvothe is too dumb to figure out Meluan's his aunt.
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Oct 21, 2017 00:30
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They were part of the trial, which sounded more interesting than anything to do with Denna, ever.
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Oct 21, 2017 19:50
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Eh, Hamilton was pretty clever and different so I'll give it a pass. What we should be taking away from the Kingkiller adaptation is that it's entirely new material designed to cash off the franchise and not the actual books, which makes me suspect someone on that team figured out the books were poo poo flavored poo poo in a poo poo sandwich with extra poo poo on the side.
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Oct 30, 2017 06:45
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Srice posted:That's wishful thinking, it's actually because there are still plans for a movie series that's a direct adaption. What the hell is movie-worthy about this series? It would have to be like the Hunger Games where you could tell whoever was writing the movie was desperately trying to de-stupidify the books.
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Oct 31, 2017 05:13
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That was painful to read. "How dare you want the third book of this incredibly hyped up trilogy? You DARE question the awkward metaphor lord? You will be cast into the lake of fire!"
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Nov 2, 2017 02:41
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You guys are reminding me that I have the first two Eragon books signed before I realized what a poo poo pile they were. In my defense, i was like 13.
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Nov 3, 2017 05:52
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I mean aside from Gandalf's mastery of fire, force fields, and self-resurrection he totally sucked as a wizard, right?  The ring is adapted from, among other things, the ring of Gyges - which is in itself a blatant allegory on the corruption of power. Hell, Plato, Tolkien, and Wagner all use the ring as a symbol of worldly power that corrupts the user. I also question Gygax's commitment to high-powered magic considering that he included level draining monsters for the purpose of preventing high level D&D characters from running around, but what do I know?
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Nov 13, 2017 05:30
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What's wrong with Prydain?
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Nov 19, 2017 22:50
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eXXon posted:I just finished The Name of the Wind and was wondering if anyone has written an exhaustively researched essay explaining why the gently caress it's such a popular book and one of if not the highest rates fantasy novels on goodreads? Look he is a feminist because he said he is, and because Kvothe got magically drunk but wasn't a rapist while drunk. Or drugged, or whatever. I'm guessing you read BotL's walkthrough? I can try to find it if you haven't.
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Jan 1, 2018 18:56
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https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3365216&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=122 Second post.
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Jan 1, 2018 23:25
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Wow, the Pat Rothfuss facebook page is having a crusade against anyone who asks where the third installment is, it's kind of great.
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Jan 3, 2018 21:36
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Well if it makes you feel better, https://www.facebook.com/Patrick.Rothfuss/ has pretty much turned into a war between Rothfuss defenders and people asking about the third book. To the person asking "link some posts", literally every lovely webcomic post, clickhole link, or whatever is turned into a "but where's the third book?" war.
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Jan 24, 2018 03:10
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Errant Gin Monks posted:This was me. It was highly recommended by a lot of people so I read it. Pretty much. I can count the number of books I've put down unfinished on one hand, but as I stopped being a teenager I realized just how bad Rothfuss actually was. Has anyone called him out on the long section about how Kvothe's parents not being married made it a purer, truer love which was in no way justifying him having a kid out of wedlock?
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Jan 27, 2018 05:15
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PJOmega posted:No one has called him out on anything. Not in a way he's actually addressed or at risk of addressing. The man has his cult that will continue to praise him ceaselessly. They're nerds. They're defined by their consumption. If they acknowledge something they have defended is bad it would cause so much dissonance that they simply might cease to exist. The cult is falling apart screaming at him on facebook because they want the third book. He is acting like they are making him do the Bataan Death March and why didn't they like the Auri book? I am sitting in the corner laughing.
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Jan 28, 2018 08:56
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I'd say it's about 50-50 between cultists and haters on that FB page.
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Jan 28, 2018 21:11
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Real alternative ending: Brandon Sanderson is hired to finish the series.
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Feb 2, 2018 07:21
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I enjoyed his critique of Rothfuss, even though I got into an argument at the D&D table with a guy wearing an Eolian T-shirt. People were explaining to me that Felurian stuff wasn't that bad because it was only 50 pages. Maybe if we cut those 50 pages we could have had 50 pages about the actual plot and the Chandrian.
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Feb 14, 2018 05:02
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Can anyone explain the actual plot of Wise Man's Fear? Like, what happened and why do we care? As far as I remember: -Kvothe is super smart but too stupid to understand the concept of a subconscious mind -Kvothe pisses off Ambrose because he's an impulsive dumbass -He gets hired by the Mayor, mysteriously stops the poisoning, and that qualifies him to murder bandits in the woods -He murders all the bandits - who have a Chandrian with them, wtf? - and finds a sex faerie -He bangs her a lot -Now that he is a god of sex he bangs some ninjas -Then he returns to the university having evolved from loser-nerd to magic stud man Note that the original conflict of the Chandrian killing his parents is in no way resolved and they only appear as random bandits in the woods.
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Feb 14, 2018 07:36
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:Don't forget the way the audiences reactions were described with and they loved it and all felt sooo much emotion, but probably worse was the whole ohh I'm playing this super hard piece and then a string broke but I'm such a genius I made it work anyways. It doesn't work like that. A string breaking mid performance is a famous kind of issue, and when it happened I was like ohh good a great moment, but it was terrible because the Kvothe is just magically amazing. Ugh, I play violin (amateurly) but even I can tell you that if a string breaks in the middle of a major concerto you're hosed. I remember a story about Joshua Bell playing when a string broke and he had to swap instruments with an orchestra member. In theory, yes you can play the same notes on different strings but no way in hell do you have the muscle memory to do that and if your G or E breaks you are literally losing range. So loving dumb. But yea, as the rest of the thread noted, nothing actually happens in the Wise Mans Fear is my point. Who's ready for the third brick?
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Feb 15, 2018 03:44
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I was gonna mention the Evil Tree, yeah. That is the one legitimately cool idea out of Wise Man's Fear, so it gets a page and then it's back to Felurian's tits.
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Feb 16, 2018 02:34
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true leftist posted:as i entangle him in the jungle-floor tendrils of my pubes and drag him toward my ever-hungering mouth to be assimilated into my pulsating mass, i will be singing, "i said to hank williams, how lonely does it get? hank williams hasn't answered yet, but i hear him coughing all night long, one hundred floors above me in the tower of song" It was an entanglement in three parts.
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Feb 18, 2018 08:47
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"The Spanish Inquisition finally shut down the magic academy 3 blocks away".
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Mar 8, 2018 15:16
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Name of the Wind works if you shut your brain off and enjoy it as fantasy trash. It really only became widely hated in response to Rothfuss' pretentiousness and Wise Man's Fear.
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Mar 27, 2018 22:55
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ukonvasara posted:why do people keep saying stuff like this as if it's a good thing What makes you think I think its good?
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Mar 28, 2018 00:00
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You know Rothfuss would be the creepy DM who sticks sex poo poo all over his players, you just know it.
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Apr 14, 2018 16:10
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I read the City of Brass, and it wasn't that great? I just remember endless pages of discussing how our heroine as the last of the superduperawesome ruling birthright had a totally sweet powerset that she'd master someday and got a free magic boyfriend. Kinda surprised Daniel Abraham didn't make the list.
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Apr 18, 2018 06:06
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No need, my friend went to a signing event and apparently Rothfuss needs therapy from Trump.
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Jul 20, 2018 03:36
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Unrelated note, why do people like The Deed of Paksennarion? Even for genre fiction it's not very good, it's a straight adaption of a "not stupid" AD&D paladin into D&D land, except that the author has no idea how characterization works so the enemies are a god of torture and a god of...spiders and evil plans? Wheel of Time at least had the Eastern philosophy recursion thing that made it kinda fun, but the Paks/Kvothe quality comparisons would seem to fit perfectly.
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Jul 27, 2018 06:18
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But asking him to finish the third book is a persecution! Or something! Weehhh!
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Aug 12, 2018 08:08
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It's like a trainwreck, you can't look away, you gotta see how it ends.
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Aug 13, 2018 17:25
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He DID? I assumed that it was another instance of Mean, Unjustified Persecution.
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Aug 25, 2018 16:44
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Give me power, I am trustworthy and know that notes are not "sad".
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Sep 21, 2018 05:45
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Solice Kirsk posted:Pfft, looks like someone has green socks*! I demand satisfaction!
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Sep 22, 2018 06:34
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That sounds like a hilarious disaster.
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Oct 16, 2018 16:15
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Solice Kirsk posted:His reviews got me to read Baudolino and it really does do what King Killer is trying and failing to do. I wasn't aware the purpose of Kingkiller was anything besides "make Pat Rothfuss money so he can be pretentious and not get a real job,"
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Nov 10, 2018 21:16
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I mean there's what, Sword of Shannara and other garbage?
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Nov 15, 2018 08:18
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More really isn't better though. Half the poo poo in an epic fantasy novel is just pointless padding for crap like character descriptions, elven culture that goes into detail about how they worship trees, defining bullshit made-up words (because Tolkien did it), and thesaurus abuse. Ok, fine, don't believe me? Let's open up some Robert Jordan, specifically, the prologue of The Eye of the World. There's a LOT of repetitive cruft, unnecessary character description, and generally not great prose that could probably be made shorter - and I would consider this some of Jordan's more concise writing. Robert Jordan posted:The palace still shook occasionally as the earth rumbled in memory, groaned as if it would deny what had happened. Bars of sunlight cast through rents in the walls made motes of dust glitter where they yet hung in the air. Scorch-marks marred the walls, the floors, the ceilings. Broad black smears crossed the blistered paints and gild of once-bright murals, soot overlaying crumbling friezes of men and animals which seemed to have attempted to walk before the madness grew quiet. The dead lay everywhere, men and women and children, struck down in attempted flight by the lightnings that had flashed down every corridor, or seized by the fires that had stalked them, or sunken into stone of the palace, the stones that had flowed and sought, almost alive, before stillness came again. In odd counterpoint, colorful tapestries and paintings, masterworks all, hung undisturbed except where bulging walls had pushed them awry. Finely carved furnishings, inlaid with ivory and gold, stood untouched except where rippling floors had toppled them. The mind-twisting had struck at the core, ignoring peripheral things. Look at all the redundancy and unnecessary detail. We need to convey that this is a wrecked palace covered in corpses slain by a mad wizard who left his expensive bling untouched, fine. We dedicate two sentences to everything being covered in scorch marks when one would have sufficed. It's not enough to have colorful paintings and tapestries, they must be "masterworks all" which conveys literally nothing to the reader except a vague sense of goodness. We know they're presumably valuable because they're in a goddamn palace, We also have a few instances of Jordan literally beating the obvious contrast into the reader, "in odd counterpoint" and "The mind-twisting had struck at the core, ignoring peripheral things" add literally nothing to the message being conveyed. Now, people are going to rightly point out that prose isn't just a technical manual to convey information, but the prose here doesn't really build to anything or convey any sort of emotion or color. Are we supposed to be horrified at the field of corpses? They get a sentence. Are we going for a clinical detachment? I don't think so, because of that opening shaking, denial, and madness, nor the visceral struck. Let's look at another passage from the intro, shall we? Here Jordan introduces an evil dark wizard. Robert Jordan posted:Behind him the air rippled, shimmered, solidified into a man who looked around, his mouth twisting briefly with distaste. Not so tall as Lews Therin, [the insane wizard who caused the prior scene], he was clothed in all black, save for the snow-white lace at his throat and the silverwork on the turned-down tops of his thigh-high boots. He stepped carefully, handling his cloak fastidiously to avoid brushing the dead. The floor trembled with aftershocks, but his attention was fixed on the man staring into the mirror and laughing. Look at this. "Rippled, shimmered, solidified" is just awful, it doesn't flow at all. The description of the clothing adds literally nothing - he's clad in black, ok, we know that's bad, but why focus on the lace and silverwork? I'm going to spoil it for you readers and straight up reveal this character is pure evil. Heck, he's referred to as "the black-clad man" throughout the remainder of the introduction. Contrast this with the act of keeping his cloak clean - this tells us more about the character than the descriptions of his height and his odd boot selection. It's also telling that this man literally appears out of thin air, and the narrative chooses not to comment on that but to focus on his drat clothes. I skipped a similar description of Lews Therin earlier, and the next character we're introduced to gets a similar bullshit description slotted in. This isn't done to show that this guy is a fop, but is SOP for introducing characters in fantasy word piles. Again, the problem isn't that the author is using too many words per se, it's that so much of this is wasted words that accomplish nothing. Fantasy paperweights being so drat long is not because their stories are so long and intricate that they demand hundreds of thousands of words, but because their authors are padding out books with extra garbage that doesn't add anything.
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Nov 18, 2018 08:51
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Not sure why you typed all those words instead of just linking to this. Did not know that was a thing, but I feel like I found something missing in my life.
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Nov 18, 2018 09:16
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We're supposed to feel tension? I remember just wondering when the gently caress the Chandrian were going to come back.
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Nov 19, 2018 00:52
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