Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE
Comments
Yeah, Francis Drake by and by was pretty groovy by pirate standards, being a patriot and essentially a soldier.
Then you get dudes like Blackbeard and Captain L'Ollonnais the later of which would torture dudes for fun and actually ate the hearts of dudes he killed. Like I said, really terrible but honestly? Pretty damn cool.
There was also the German pirate Captain Stortebeker who upon his execution struck a deal for his execution. He asked for his men to line up across away from his chopping block and as many men as his head rolled past would be spared. Saved nine crewmen that way.
If that wouldn't make a great doom metal song I don't know what would.
^That's the closest thing I've seen to a convincing endorsement to reread that book.
Not that I found it bad, but it wasn't anywhere the experience I expected and the storytelling style was rather... pretentious.
I don't think that's very sueish.
Oh yeah, I was going to read that book.
I think 'Sue' is less about arbitrary qualities to a character so much as how they're delivered.
See also: James Bond, Batman
NoTW is a good book, mind, but it's not without it's problem.
And honestly it's too long.
I'd say Kvothe dodges being sueish. First of all, despite being very talented, he occasionally fucks up. Early on he usually recovers, but over the course of the second book that's starting to slip, and the framing device guarantees that by the end of the third book, he will be utterly broken.
The only really sueish thing is the amount of sex in the second book.
I definitely agree here; with the exception of the aforementioned sex scenes in the second book, I can't think of much that could be cut without harming the narrative.
I guess this is the post that's stuck with me about Kvothe (hopefully this isn't one of the sections of the forum that's inaccessible to non-registered viewers, I don't actually remember which are which), and it's all just in reference to the first book. As well as the post that shows a picture of Patrick Rothfuss looking very "goony" and making the goons wonder if he's projecting at all. Don't mean to trash a series I haven't read, but I sort of want to hear what my friends here who've read it and really enjoyed it have to say about such a contrasted opinion.
Honestly, that post feels very textbook and is poor analysis. The whole 'characters have to have flaws, maaan' sort of nonsense.
Yeah, that post is just plain wrong. The time he spends learning stuff is probably the shortest part of the book pagecount-wise, but if you lay it out chronologically it's longer than the events he actually recounts. He just glosses over most of the details of his education because they aren't important.
He is a fast learner, but not impossibly so.
Come to think of it, I remember Kvothe at the very least being very credulous, like when he gets swindled out of money and takes a goddamn open flame into the book archives.
Yeah. He's book-smart, but he's really bad with people. That comes back to bite him a lot at the University and at the end of book two especially.
Hmm. Well, thanks! I guess that's one book I'll keep on my reading list.
Also, the idea of trashing a book because of the series author's looks... well, I mean look at Alan Moore and Warren Ellis and tell me they don't look goony.
Also, showing up a bully isn't personal masturbation so much as it is a desire we all have.
The funniest part about that bit is that Kvothe tries to do that several times, and every time he fails and it turns out to be one of the worst decisions he's ever made.
Yeah, I haven't read the sequel but I'm expecting that dude to come back as a bigger villain with lots of political clout.
On the other hand, their beards somehow manage to cross the unattractive line so much that they become iconic and fuckawesome.
Anyway, from what I've seen of SA, they kinda fail at analysing and pretend that everything must be measured by this nebulous* standard of "How deeeeeeep and how is this story like every single good story I've read?"
Of course, it's a forum and not a hive mind, but most of it's dipped into that thinking.
*Not nebulous per se. It's just that it seems really arbitrary and based on the idea that good stories need to follow this or that pattern or this or that concept that a lot of good stories have, but they don't understand that there's nothing that can determine how good a story is. It's not how deep it is, it's not how flawed the characters are or how complex the plot is. Any story can not have these things are be still resonant and meaningful. All a story has to do is do its thing and do it well.
^^That's probably going to happen in book three, though he is much more of a problem in the second than in the first.
^^I think in the case of the specific poster it's the whole 'characters need to be relatable' codswallop you keep hearing. Because Charles Foster Kane sure was relatable wasn't he?
I can't help but feel that Juan's doing the forum, as a whole, a bit of a disservice, but I haven't really seen that much of it myself. I don't think I've seen anyone there say anything about having to relate to the characters, either, and Penfold's posts weren't getting at that. The flaw in his posts about literary quality in general was that he didn't acknowledge subjectivity in his assessment of what makes characters interesting. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for main characters to be interesting, but that will definitely vary from person to person, and a lot of the people in the thread actually do get that.
Yes, but his statements of what makes a character interesting certainly delves into the ideas of 'relatable', which in this particular case regards to flaws.
I'm not speaking of the forum, just of the particular poster.
I was more responding to Juan with that last part of the sentence, sorry.
But to still address you, I think that's reading a little too far into his post; I kinda figured he just didn't want to read about someone who's really good at everything. And as for the necessity of flaws, I don't think that's directly related to, well, being relatable, so much as having them still be human (or, in the case of non-humans and some humans, to keep them from hogging the spotlight with their inexplicable ability to do everything). The comparison that springs to mind is party formation in tabletop RPG's: in a hypothetical good RPG, no one character should be good at everything, as that isn't conducive to a fun group experience. This mostly relates to teams of characters against rough odds in authored fiction, I guess, but I think it's that sort of thing. And one of the chief issues with 3.5e D&D is that it's stupidly easy to make a character who can do everything and remove the need for other party members, which is the biggest reason why I like 4e better, overall. 4e also doesn't break into nearly as many pieces at higher-level play; combat just takes a lot longer, and it's still fun.
Got lost in that comparison a bit, so I suppose it's lost some weight, but that's just what sprung to mind when he mentioned HP characters having flaws.
I'm talking about what I've seen in the film forums, with people practically asking why doesn't Joss Whedon just add 75% more Captain America angst to the movie or "Where's my character development?" and things that seem to come from people who expect for narrative to work in this way and this way alone.
^^Yeah, but that distaste has to come from somewhere. Granted it's assuming a bit on his part, but I'm using induction based on popular faux-analysis on the intertubes.
^To be fair, that's not isolated to SA.
So in any case, Blackbeard was a crazy scary dude. The fact that he had a 'reformation' for a few months and everyone bought it and he even married in this time tells me there's credence to the whole 'Lex Luthor elected president' thing.
Btw, sorry for editing so much back into my post. Not sure if that will change anything in your argument, but it just sort of sprang to mind.
But you said this standard applies to most of SA (unless you meant it as in, most of what I've seen, which you've now specified is the Film subforum). I can't imagine the Film subforum is a very large portion of the forum as a whole.
That is pretty scary. Though I guess I would be a little surprised to see people buy something like that from such an infamous figure.
I don't think the TTRPG comparison fits, mostly because in a TTRPG all players need to be equally important, and in a story generally we have one important character. I mean, no one's really that bothered that Storm's powers have far more applicability than Cyclops, because their skills only carry them so far as a character, it's their personality that does so.
And I mean, the whole issue of 'rough odds' seems like a double-edge sword because while a story can have tension if you really think the bad guy's going to win in the first volume of an epic fantasy story then you have no conception of how fiction works.
I've also seen it in the PYF threads that get to discuss media and at least one or two threads of the TV subforums but it's definetly much more blatant in the film subforums.
It isn't and I never meant to imply that's the case. It just bothers me because this is one of the so-called most erudite forums on the internet.
EDIT:
Also,
Yeah, I meant specifically the stuff I've seen.
But I think it's not wrong to assume that the rest of the forum operates under the tendencies you see in one place most of the time, unless you are on a place like FYAD, which is clearly an atypical board, even for SA. Like, if you entered a thread here, you'd see most of how this forum works and how the people act in it. Admittedly, it's really small, but to use a bigger example, you can see TvT, where you had quite a lot of people who tended to have problematic or just stupid mentalities everywhere. And that's because the environment that TvT created fostered and coddled this thinking, you know?
I don't think that SA as a whole is a particularly bad forum for analysis or anything. I'm just saying that it's just as bad as the internet when it comes to analysing things by virtue of having people that, just like us, are very fallible in a matter where even the smartest and cleverest amongst us are not even 100% sure they are right.
It's one of the largest, and probably has a better quality than most around its size overall due to weeding out the blatant trolls who'd make everything look shitty, but from what I've seen of people running around, some of its subforums are run in contradiction to each other, in terms of what's acceptable; in the fighting sports subforum, I see tons of low-content posts with no punctuation, but you'd get probated for posting like that in the other ones that I frequent (maybe because they were for PPV events and posting was rapid), and I still have yet to dig deep enough to see where it's apparently okay to toss around "gay" as an unironic insult (I'm guessing FYAD). Also, some of the practices there are pretty much bullying. So I guess I would agree with you that "erudite" doesn't apply to the whole forum, but that's also because I don't think that any single adjective could describe the whole community except for "human".
I realized halfway through the thought that it was a lousy comparison to apply to fiction in general, but I personally think it applies fairly well to works in which there's a group of people. The Storm-vs-Cyclops applicability thing, for instance, is actually something that does bother me and keep me from vesting interest in the X-Men, personalities aside; skill sets and relativity are important for that sort of thing. I could make a favorable comparison to One Piece, but I don't think anyone's interested. I guess it's me applying my own standards, which are known to run in pretty great contrast to those of others here, but I think this is more an issue of how characters work in relation to one another, and in that regard it kinda helps to keep them balanced.
Not really sure what you're getting at here.
Protagonists almost always win. Fiction in its majority is not about what will happen or what will the end be but how does the character earn the right to see the happy ending.
I got that from his post. I just don't see its relevance to what we were talking about, since it was based off something I was saying about a different aspect of this topic (namely, the idea of a team of main characters, their interactions, and the impact of their combined skills/mindsets/personalities/issues on a story as a whole).
I think I'm feeling a bit of frustration build up as a result of a returning fear that I'm apparently being contrarian/wrong again or something. I should probably call it a night. It's a little late anyway, considering how early I'm going to try to get up.
It's what he's saying. I don't entirely agree but that's for him to say.
Anyway, good night, I guess. For what is worth, I don't think you are really in the wrong here. As I said, literature and fiction is one of those matters where you can't be 100% right about anything except for the fact that it exists and people like it.