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Lev Grossman: 'Magicians' trilogy, Post-Camelot Novel 'The Bright Sword'


AncalagonTheBlack

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

Bestiality?

Jayne Poole? 

Anyways, I'm interested in reading a Grossman take on Arthurian legend. I find it weird that people seem to criticize his Fillory stuff as being too derivative like it's a completely worthless piece of pastiche like 'Ready Player One'. We shall see. 

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2 hours ago, polishgenius said:

The problem isn't with depicting rape per se- although some of GRRM's moments at least are skeevy as fuck, are you under the impression that people here don't criticise Martin?- but with the cliche of needing a bit of character development and dark moments for a female character to overcome, so insert a rape.

I'm not sure why you object to the usage of this trope. There's a pretty wide variety of dark moments for characters both female and male and this is just one of them. Furthermore, it's not even used in its purest form as the action in question is mostly about a summoned evil entity taking the soul of one of the summoners.

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29 minutes ago, Altherion said:

I'm not sure why you object to the usage of this trope. There's a pretty wide variety of dark moments for characters both female and male and this is just one of them. Furthermore, it's not even used in its purest form as the action in question is mostly about a summoned evil entity taking the soul of one of the summoners.


My problem with the trope is that it's so often used when it doesn't need to be as the prime way to damage the woman (or worse, to damage the man who likes her, although in this case Grossman does avoid that) and in this one the fact that the entity in question took her soul made the rape bit less necessary, in fact, completely unnecessary, in a narrative sense. It felt like Grossman just thought we wouldn't feel bad enough for her if she was just metaphorically, rather than actually, raped.

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9 minutes ago, polishgenius said:


My problem with the trope is that it's so often used when it doesn't need to be as the prime way to damage the woman (or worse, to damage the man who likes her, although in this case Grossman does avoid that) and in this one the fact that the entity in question took her soul made the rape bit less necessary, in fact, completely unnecessary, in a narrative sense. It felt like Grossman just thought we wouldn't feel bad enough for her if she was just metaphorically, rather than actually, raped.

It's overused precisely because unlike, say, losing one's soul, it's something that human beings from our world can relate to. A grandmaster of the genre would ideally avoid such tropes, but I don't think anyone is arguing Grossman is at that level. It's not the greatest portrayal possible, but I don't see why it is worthy of censure.

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I think that's being a bit literal for the sake of a point, tbh. Sure, we can't actually imagine having our humanity literally taken from us by an evil godling, but we can sure imagine being abused and dehumanised and traumatised without it needing to be rape. Heck, she's already seen him waltz in and murder her friends, that's not traumatic enough by itself?

The thing is, if it existed entirely in a vaccuum then the scene in the book wouldn't stand out that much but a big part of why the trope is so problematic is that it's used so often that it feels like a lazy shortcut to add 'grit' to the life of a woman. And because it didn't add anything to the plot for me, it felt like that here.

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On the Hogwarts/Narnia criticism:

 

The Magicians is fantasy’s The Catcher in the Rye; if it doesn’t strike the right person at the precise right moment in their life, it’s a laughable mess. To those it does reach at that kairos, though, it’s a rare find.

The Magicians is written for the children who grew up alone or without direction. The ones lost in fantasy, those who convinced themselves, “My life would be perfect, if only… if only that Hogwarts letter had arrived… if only that wardrobe had opened. Then I could be happy.”

But that child wouldn’t be happy. And in The Magicians, that child is Quentin. He gets the magic school, the girl, the crown. Every fantasy those children lusted after. And one by one, he throws them away, hunting his next “if only…" Just as they would have.

As I wrote elsewhere:

Quote

“…I found [Quentin’s] corruption and his inevitable tendency for self-sabotage compelling. Quentin is always looking for the "next thing" that will save him from his depression. But the moment it falls into his hands, his eyes are already on his next futile hope for salvation.

The Magicians is a portrait of the eternally dissatisfied and their self-inflicted misery.”

It's a delusion held by so many young men and women that their unhappiness is an artifact of circumstance rather than outlook. Whether they dream of Hogwarts or (as I imagine it was in the case of young Lev) Narnia, they're wrong. And that's the message behind the first novel of The Magicians Trilogy.

Criticizing Grossman for sending Quentin to Corrupted Hogwarts/Narnia is a bit like denouncing Abercrombie for dispatching his Corrupted Fellowship on their quest in The First Law; a deconstruction takes the coin and shows us its other face.

Grossman must send Quentin to Hogwarts to prove his thesis; happiness isn’t something that arrives in your mailbox. 

  

 

 

Post-script: there are just so many places one could legitimately criticize Grossman (e.g. Elliot's horrid first POV in TML, the rushed ending of TML, the rape you mentioned) that to submit Brakebills/Fillory as examples of his inadequacy is... odd, in my opinion. Let me add the disclaimer that I generally very much enjoy reading your reviews, Werthead.

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3 hours ago, Darth Richard II said:

Yeah Harry Potter had such a wonderful time at Hogwarts too. :rolleyes:

Harry Potter's most serious problems at Hogwarts stem from the existence of a Dark Lord who is interested in doing harm to the world in general and to Harry in particular. Quentin's most serious problems at Brakebills (as well as for the rest of the first book) stem from the fact that Quentin is an egoist who is incapable of appreciating all of the things being handed to him on a silver platter or perceiving the extent to which he is hurting people. Things don't get better for him until he becomes a better person and even then it takes a while.

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I'm kind of amused at people on the one hand complaining about Grossman artlessly taking a dump on Narnia/Harry Potter, while at the same time lauding Cornwell, considering what he does to some of the arthurian mythos :P

I mean, I'm not huge Grossman fan, and there is plenty of things to complain about his writing, but Cornwell isn't exactly having any moral high ground here. 

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On 07/01/2018 at 1:52 AM, Galactus said:

I'm kind of amused at people on the one hand complaining about Grossman artlessly taking a dump on Narnia/Harry Potter, while at the same time lauding Cornwell, considering what he does to some of the arthurian mythos :P

I mean, I'm not huge Grossman fan, and there is plenty of things to complain about his writing, but Cornwell isn't exactly having any moral high ground here. 

The Arthurian Mythos - in the sense there is even a unified mythos, which is debatable, or that there is definitive version, which there is not - are a bit of a mess. The biggest problem with them, and is down to Monmouth and Malory (the former of whom was a bit of a 12th Century hack, shoehorning in his other popular character Merlin into the story because he'd been in an earlier, popular work, not because he was in any of the pre-existing stories), is that they are explicitly set in the Dark Ages but have ahistorical elements in them such as massive stone castles and knights in full plate armour, when such things did not exist in the late 5th/early 6th century (where the Arthur period roughly has to lie, otherwise it doesn't work as the later historical period is too well-defined). Malory should also be castigated for giving in to the French fanfiction writers who wanted to put in a French character and have him seduce Arthur's wife (getting one over on the English in a story when they couldn't on the battlefield) and including Lancelot when he wasn't present in Monmouth.

Cornwell's position was to take the legend back to the historical reality of that time period, so wooden ringforts and shield walls are the cutting edge of technology and the Roman influence is still strong, since the collapse of Roman rule in England is still within living memory.

The very point of The Warlord Chronicles is to take a revisionist, realistic, non-magical (arguably) and actual-historical view of the legends and work out how they could work in the real world. In that sense adherence to the letter of the legends is neither possible nor desirable.

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

The Arthurian Mythos - in the sense there is even a unified mythos, which is debatable, or that there is definitive version, which there is not - are a bit of a mess. The biggest problem with them, and is down to Monmouth and Malory (the former of whom was a bit of a 12th Century hack, shoehorning in his other popular character Merlin into the story because he'd been in an earlier, popular work, not because he was in any of the pre-existing stories), is that they are explicitly set in the Dark Ages but have ahistorical elements in them such as massive stone castles and knights in full plate armour, when such things did not exist in the late 5th/early 6th century (where the Arthur period roughly has to lie, otherwise it doesn't work as the later historical period is too well-defined). Malory should also be castigated for giving in to the French fanfiction writers who wanted to put in a French character and have him seduce Arthur's wife (getting one over on the English in a story when they couldn't on the battlefield) and including Lancelot when he wasn't present in Monmouth.

Cornwell's position was to take the legend back to the historical reality of that time period, so wooden ringforts and shield walls are the cutting edge of technology and the Roman influence is still strong, since the collapse of Roman rule in England is still within living memory.

The very point of The Warlord Chronicles is to take a revisionist, realistic, non-magical (arguably) and actual-historical view of the legends and work out how they could work in the real world. In that sense adherence to the letter of the legends is neither possible nor desirable.

Yep, and Grossman's point is something similar. I mean, I don't really mind either of these things, but clamping donw on Grossman for doing something and then lauding Cornwell for doing the exact same thing to a different set of stories is kind of silly.

Also, your timeline is all wrong: Lancelot was created by Chretien de Troyes in the late 12th century: At this point the "english" were about to lose their territories in a series of humiliating defeats. (they'd come back, but not until about a hundred years later) 

More importantly, the arthurian mythos as we know it *is* a set of works of chivalric romance: Even the welsh stuff that we have (eg. Culhwch and Olwen) are heavily influenced by that kind of romance. (insofar as they even are older than Chretien's work, which is debatable) 

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53 minutes ago, Galactus said:

Yep, and Grossman's point is something similar. I mean, I don't really mind either of these things, but clamping donw on Grossman for doing something and then lauding Cornwell for doing the exact same thing to a different set of stories is kind of silly.

I wasn't doing that. I was just noting that Grossman is an overrated hack of a writer.

It's not just Cornwell, but obviously TH White, Bradley (although reading her is now impossible without the RL stuff intruding), the Arthurian elements of Holdstock, the influence on Kay's Fionavar Tapestry, Stewart. There's rooms for lots and lots of radically different interpretations of the story. I even have a soft spot for the BBC Merlin series. I just doubt Grossman can bring anything to the table due to his overrated hacky shittiness.

But maybe he can. Authors do improve over time, in some cases.

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17 minutes ago, Takiedevushkikakzvezdy said:

GRRM seems to like him well enough.

GRRM has spent thirteen years on that "American Tolkien" label and it helped drive a lot of sales between AFFC  and the TV show being announced, so I'm not surprised.

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