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Tears of Lys

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I'd say rather that its oversensitivity and overprotectedness of things that people like that lead to long responses. Its a discussion; people are allowed to get into it. They're allowed to make jokes, to not say "but thats just my opinion" everytime they say something, to be harsh. Thats what a discussion is. If everytime my friends told me a band or book I liked sucked I went on about how rude they were being and how just because they think so doesn't make it so, well then, I wouldn't have many friends. I mean, besides this board, I mainly post on metal boards, and things here are pretty tame in comparison.

Bram_K you have a point but I'd like to point out in return that metal bands and literature are different mediums with perhaps different standards of conduct that's expected.

And what if your friends didn't stop at telling you that something you read or listened to sucked but also went on to say that YOU must be a retard or asswipe for enjoying that particular novel or music and MEANT it seriously.

Ummmm, all of a sudden, it's not just an opinion, it's gotten personal.

And it's crossing the line when people start saying that the only reason the books are so long is Jordan wants to make money. He's already many times a millionaire and the implied rational that Jordan would tarnish his reputation and a magnum opus that's so important and personal to him that he'd been thinking about it most of his adult life and written for over two decades is mind-blowing in its arrogance and condescension.

Dennis

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That was Crossroads of Twilight, not Winters heart. Unless it was both of them?

In the same vein, at around the same time as that tEotW was rereleased as 2 books, 'from the two rivers', and 'too the blight'. The first of which contained an extra prologue 'Ravens' the second an extended glossary.

While i wont actually call RJ a sell out, i think that all is rather suggestive in its way.

Snow the Prologue to Winter's Heart was the first e-book to be sold.

The reissue of tEotW was for young readers, hopefully tapping into a market that had previously not been properly addressed.

It was split into two books to make it more palatable to younger readers who may rightfully have been frightened off by a larger volume.

This issue is all but moot with the success of Harry Potter which illustrates that if you write a kick ass story, youngsters will read the thing 800 pages plus be damned.

The extras were in no way meant as enticement for people who already owned Eye of the World previously.

Using this reasoning, how would you explain George RR Martin republishing a short story he wrote 30 years ago with some pretty pictures and an edit that removed a rather violent rape scene as a "chlildren's novel" and then having the gall to actually go on tour promoting and signing it?

This guy is peddling and republishing stuff he'd written decades ago to make a buck off his Song of Ice and Fire gained recognition. And let me tell you, he's far from done.

So please, let's get real with this sell-out thing.

Authors aren't doctors or lawyers. They make a living by WRITING and there's nothing wrong with maximizing their profit. Publishing a good book isn't exactly like a nosejob and I can see why they'd want to do whatever they can to make as much as they can with what they've got.

Dennis

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This issue is all but moot with the success of Harry Potter which illustrates that if you write a kick ass story, youngsters will read the thing 800 pages plus be damned.

Sword, I think that's a moot point in itself! It has always amused me that whether subconsciously or consciously, Rowling took the name of her main protagonist from a female character in Carry On Camping. In the cast list she is 'Harriet Potter' but introduces herself as 'Harry Potter' in the film itself. It is an ironic and symbolic example of the trite content behind the ludicrously, ludicrously out of proportion hype for an unremarkable work of children's fiction. Millions of people can be wrong. One only has to look at many world religions. A vast amount of HP's success is viral and memetic in an age of rolling news and instant information. We feel the pull to be a part of the phenomenon. To be in on it. It is an end in itself and the source becomes secondary. But I digress.

I do take on board what you say about milking, but in an age when grunts barely out of their teens will get $25,000,000+ a year for nothing more than chasing around an odd shaped ball or a round one on some grass, an author who has been grafting for over a quarter of a century, as undervalued as a writer as most writers are, and at the top of his game in the field, I reckon George has a right to cash in with the success of ASoIaF! I don't have problem with Jordan doing so, either, as with Martin, as long as the content has substance. It is (again an irony) a shame that the most successful author in terms of earnings of all time is in money earned in direct inverse proportion to the talent and the quality of the content on display. However, no one should expect this world of ours to be either perfect, or fair.

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Well I didn't know you were only half way through Fires of Heaven. Stick with it if you can and there will be more detail than you could POSSIBLY wish on how Aes Sedai rank themselves.

I'll take your word for it that there will be more info on that, but as it is, it just seems incredulous to me.

But my point is and remains that the suspension of disbelief that are asked of us as readers are not much more than what Martin is doing as the main action of the first 3 books are essentially being carried by protagonists hardly in their TEEN years and barely pubescent.

But what do those teens do? Only Robb and Jon get to do any real adult stuff, and they have been groomed and trained their entire lives. Robb recalls his father's teachings before anything he ever does.

Sansa and Arya are merely trying to stay alive, and their youth gets them into truoble often enough. Bran is much the same

At the risk of a significant deviation in subject matter, we are lead to believe that eventually:

Jon Snow will be a hardened, responsible, and capable Lord Commander of the Night's Watch.

Sansa will be a skilled player in the Game of Thrones

Arya will be some sort of Faceless Man assassin type

Bran will be some sort of Children of the Forest shaman

Dany will be a wise ruler capable of resurrecting the Targaren dynasty and reconquering Westeros

and her dragons will be large enough to fly on.

Dany is actually really learning some stuff, getting out from under Jorah's thumb, trying to rule with all it's ups and downs. For all the rest, I think you're jumping the gun. It seems that in general that is the direction the story will take, but I'll judge the credibility if and when I read it. I think it'd be somewhat unfortunate if the "kids" end up having to "save the world".

...how OLD these people are why Martin wanted to just skip ahead 5 years.

Apparently GRRM got into too much trouble to retain it. I would have preferred it, but there we go.

At least the Wheel of Time gang are in their late teens and early twenties and at least there is some sort of explanation for their mad, crazy skills (albeit smacking a bit of deus ex machina).

I dunno... I ASOAIF untrained and unprepared characters generally fail at what they want to do, while Elayne has no trouble performing cart-wheels on a tightrope without magic, because she did so a few times with magic. IMO it's not nearly on the same level.

Jordan does take some shortcuts but my point is that they are no less egregious than some of the things that Martin is considering or in the process of doing and I personally am bothered by the former a lot less than the latter.

I have not found many shortcuts in GRRM yet, I'm not going to criticize what I haven't read yet. Though I agree it may very well ge going into the direction you pointed out.

Or do you think it'll be easy finding an 11 year old to play Arya?? Or have some 13 yr old girl playing Sansa have her clothes ripped off by a 15 yr old Joff or getting in bed on her "wedding" night with a dwarf!

I'm sorry, what does this have to do with anything? Present day reality seldomly relates well to fantasy.

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Dennis: it's a little difficult to reconcile your (perfectly reasonable) call for 'civility, respect and care' in debating the merits of authors and their works with the fact that in your next posts, you call GRRM's decisions on the ages of his characters 'asinine', and accuse him of 'selling everything but the kitchen sink'.

And although it might not be fair to bring up the past, well, you haven't had the best record yourself here: you've made a number of claims about GRRM that are as bad as anything said here about RJ.

This is not a personal attack on you: I'm just pointing out that although, ideally, I'd like to see 'civility, respect and care' all round, I think your claim that standards and expectations are higher on this board than on (say) boards devoted to metal bands is not necessarily true (certainly not as true as I would like). Sometimes people get a little... robust here. Sometimes they do not say 'in my opinion' when they ought to. Sometimes they draw strong conclusions about authors that fans of that author find offensive. It happens.

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maybe Werthead drives a Camry

Actually, I don't drive at all.

On the subject of the Big White Book, I found the information to be very worthwhile. The detailed description of the War of the Second Dragon and Artur Hawkwing's rule, the background to the Age of Legends and so forth were all good stuff. There really wasn't anything of value on the countries that wasn't in the books and the art was poor throughout. The maps were also pretty weak, although they did show information and locations previously unrevealed.

The Strike at Shayol Ghul was a bit underwhelming. Previously another version of it had been available online as a 'taster' for the book and the version in the Big White Book wasn't as well written (I'm guessing as the original was written by RJ and the version in the book had been rewritten by Teresa Patterson).

When it comes to art, The Wheel of Time RPG from Wizards of the Coast and its companion book, Prophecies of the Dragon, were vastly superior, especially the superb maps (including the new ones of the capitals of Tear and Illian).

Finally, on the prologues: Snow was the prologue to Winter's Heart and was made available online by Simon and Schuster, who licensed it from Tor and sold it for a small amount of money. Glimmers was the prologue to Crossroads of Twilight and I think that Tor put that up directly for money as well, but much less than S&S (I think it was only a dollar or something). For Embers Falling on Dry Grass, the prologue to Knife of Dreams, Tor just gave up and put it online for free. I gather from statements at the time that RJ wasn't too keen on the whole idea but Tor thought it was great.

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Go to General and read the HBO adaptation thread and see what chaos Martin's assinine decision to have the kids be so young is doing.

Hmm...that's complete exaggeration. GRRM's original decision seemed fine for the first 3 books. Its only when he realised that he couldn't skip forward 5 years that he ran into a problem. So clearly it wasn't an obvious problem. I can't see how you could equate that to an assinine decision.

And really, would have been a lot weirder if he aged the characters so that they could easily be played in a TV version of the book. :P

then having the gall to actually go on tour promoting and signing it

That's what professional writers do. :)

As for the Guide to aSoIaF. There is not that big a rush it seems, so it isn't coming out until after the next book.

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Glimmers was the prologue to Crossroads of Twilight and I think that Tor put that up directly for money as well, but much less than S&S (I think it was only a dollar or something).

It was 5$ canadian, yes i bought it :leaving:

As far as the cut up of EotW, that only bothered me because i wanted to buy the whole book. But that was not possible at the time it was cut up. It was sold out at amazon.ca and not available anywhere i looked locally, so I ended up buying 2 books when i wanted one(and the add ons sucked).

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Go to General and read the HBO adaptation thread and see what chaos Martin's assinine decision to have the kids be so young is doing. Or do you think it'll be easy finding an 11 year old to play Arya?? Or have some 13 yr old girl playing Sansa have her clothes ripped off by a 15 yr old Joff or getting in bed on her "wedding" night with a dwarf!

Dennis

I don't generally involve myself in WoT threads anymore, and I actually agree with some of what you're saying, Sword. However, I have to take exception to the passage I've quoted above.

"Assinine" decision to have the kids so young? I very much doubt Martin had any idea his series might end up being on television when he wrote AGoT. Are you actually suggesting that Martin should have considered the possibility of ASOIAF someday being picked up for tv adaptation when he wrote it?

And not only that, but having children of that age as protagonists is IMO quite reasonable given the time period ASOIAF is based on.

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"Assinine" decision to have the kids so young? I very much doubt Martin had any idea his series might end up being on television when he wrote AGoT. Are you actually suggesting that Martin should have considered the possibility of ASOIAF someday being picked up for tv adaptation when he wrote it?

And he hasn't considered that because he's well aware that an adaptation would change the ages to fit the updated storylines/characters anyway.

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I thought I wasn't going to come back to this thread, but it seems I can't help myself. It's funny to read some of these comment about "mud slinging" when this thread has been very mild in totality. I even apologized for making a dubious comparison of the defenders to the SoT shill and the subjective-hound from threads past.

As for the sell-out comment: I wouldn't call Martin a sell-out because it appears that he has great concern with the product being issued under his name. One of his latest blogs has said as much. Moreover, that which has come out is of acceptable quality in accordance to the core canon.

RJ became a "sell out" when the product he was releasing under his name -- the core novels and the tie-ins -- were all too obviously substandard.

Fantasy books are a business like any other media. I've heard the publishers in Scandinavia split RJ's books into three. Yet despite his millions, RJ was either a) too blind or stupid or arrogant or all of the above, or B) simple not concerned -- with the strange sad decline of the Wheel of Time. I hope it's the former, despite his speed-reading skills, South Carolina mansion, Vietnam-related martial acumen and physicist work (select whichever character-defense you wish). No one on here seems to be seriously defending the later books, the consensus seems fairly common, the decline "moot." OS is the only person I've ever read who openly declares he likes the later books better than the beginning or middle volumes.

All IMO of course :smoking:

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Admittedly, I'm no in-depth analyzer of books. My interest is not in dissecting them and defending/attacking them. I'd rather read books. All I can offer is my purely subjective opinion, and in my opinion, "Crown of Swords" isn't bad. I've made it half way through at this point. I like Rand a bit less and Mat a lot more; I can stand Nynaeve and Elayne and rather like Egwene and Aviendha. I still can't keep the Aes Sedai straight, but I'll print out a guide and give it the old college try.

I still don't think it's on a par with aSoIaF. I can read the horrific scenes in WoT with barely a grimace, whereas aSoIaF affects me viscerally - sometimes not a good thing; but all in all, it's a pleasant way to kill my spare time while waiting for DwD. I may move on to Erikkson. This scifi isn't bad! :thumbsup:

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And that, Tears, is the other side- it's still good fantasy at its worst. However, people have this "Jordan betrayed us" attitude- what? It's not like it's horrible. Crossroads isn't even that bad unless you try reading it as a stand alone. It's not great, but it's not bad, looking at the rest of the fantasy genre. And at its best, it's excellent.

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And that, Tears, is the other side- it's still good fantasy at its worst. However, people have this "Jordan betrayed us" attitude- what? It's not like it's horrible. Crossroads isn't even that bad unless you try reading it as a stand alone.

Yes, it is. That pile of garbage is one of the worst books I have ever read.

It's not great, but it's not bad, looking at the rest of the fantasy genre. And at its best, it's excellent.

The Fantasy genre has really earned its bad reputation then.

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And that, Tears, is the other side- it's still good fantasy at its worst. However, people have this "Jordan betrayed us" attitude- what? It's not like it's horrible. Crossroads isn't even that bad unless you try reading it as a stand alone. It's not great, but it's not bad, looking at the rest of the fantasy genre. And at its best, it's excellent.

Crossroads was one of the most excruciating reading experiences of all time for myself.

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