Goodkind XVI: Edgy Dork in Tor

[Stubby]

Chelsea fans read Tairy

Chelsea have banned three of their fans after they were caught throwing celery during the team's FA Cup win at Tottenham Hotspur

:smash:

[Deornoth]

These threads have to be my favourites (from anywhere on the web), if I ever feel like I need a laugh then I just come here straight away I've got a problem though, I'm laughing so much at this stuff that I keep thinking maybe I should try one of his books...

Help?

[Myshkin]

These threads have to be my favourites (from anywhere on the web), if I ever feel like I need a laugh then I just come here straight away I've got a problem though, I'm laughing so much at this stuff that I keep thinking maybe I should try one of his books...

Help?

I will not be enslaved by your cries for help! You obviously lack a strong moral center. I suggest you grow a yeard and slaughter some centipedes.

[Mme Erzulie]

Following that last link, I was happy to find out that Goodkind has an anagram of "Dodo King". Brilliant.

Terry Goodkind:

Dried Orgy Knot

Moral Clarity:

Tarry, Call Moi!

Weirdo Cultural Diversity:

A Reduced Virility Slut Row

[MinDonner]

Ban fire now! = few on brain

[The Wolf Maid]

P.S. Wolf Maid: 'It's not over until Kahlan gets laid' is an awesome title. You and I will have to make a concerted effort to get it published in Goodkind XVII.

Thanks, Myshkin.

The anagrams are hilarious.

Terry Goodkind:

Dried Orgy Knot

One of the best so far.

[Zap Rowsdower]

Just how crazy is Terry Goodkind? I’m still progressing through Soul of the Fire at a snails pace, and I just arrived at page 492 and I found something I just had to share with all of you.

OK, let me set the scene: Ann, prelate of the Sisters of Light has infiltrated Jagang’s warcamp. Ann is looking for the other sisters of the light who have been enslaved by Jagang’s magic. The Chimes has been loosed on the world they are devouring all magic, so that means that Jagang’s power over the Sisters of Light should end. Ann is there to inform the Sisters of this recent development and to help them excape from Jagang’s clutches.

In order to effect her plan, Ann has disguised herself as a beggar so she could wander around Jagang’s massive encampment without being noticed. Ann isn’t very good at begging so some of the other beggars try to offer her advice on how to beg money and food off of the soldiers. While this is going on, I think Terry Goodkind treats us to a dose of his patented Objectivist philosophy:

[Ann] knew that by cruel fate people were occasionally thrust, against their wishes, into helpless begging. She also knew from hundreds of years of experience trying to give them help that most beggars clung tenaciously to the life.

Ann trusted no one in the camp, but of all the people there, she trusted beggars least. They were more dangerous than the soldiers. Soldiers were what they were and made no pretense. If they didn’t want you around, they would order you away or give you the boot. Some would simply show her a blade in warning. If they indented you harm, or murder, they made their intent clear.

Beggars, on the other hand, lived lives of lies. They lied from the time they opened their eyes in the morning until they told the Creator a lie in their bedtime prayers.

Of all the Creator’s miserable creations, Ann most disliked liars- and those who repeatedly placed their trust and security in the hands of such liars. Liars were Creation’s jackals. Deception to a noble end, though regrettable, was sometimes necessary for a greater good. Lying for selfish reasons was the fertile dirt of immorality, from which sprouted the tendrils of evil.

Trusting men who demonstrated a proclivity to lie proved you a fool, and such fools were nothing more to the liar than the dust beneath their boots- there to be trod upon.

Ann knew liars were the Creator’s children, the same as she, and that she was duty bound to view them with patience and forgiveness, but she couldn’t. She simply couldn’t abide liars and that was that. She was resigned to the fact that in the afterlife she would have to take her lumps for it.

Terry Goodkind, Soul of the Fire

So, soldiers are better than beggars? What I find hilarious about this is that Ann is thinking these thoughts while in the middle of the Imperial Order warcamp. These soldiers Ann has just dubbed morally superior to the beggars are the same ones who have razed whole cities to the ground, raped the women, and forced the survivors into neverending servitude, and ate the testicles off the dead bodies of their fallen enemeis. I'll even bet that some of those beggars are some of the few survivors from the cities the IO has attacked- they've had their parents, or children killed, their homes burned to the ground and their country turned into one giant wasteland so that they only means they have to survive is to become camp followers and beg food off Jagang's troops.

So, in Terry Goodkind Land, Beggers= Liars. Liars < Bloodthirsty barbarians. Got that?

What makes this so surreal is if you image transplanting these moral values to the real world. That vagrant, selling newspapers on the sidewalk? Or that guy with one leg and crutches panhandling in the park? These people are worse than the Waffen SS!

Seriously, what person can think like that? I am of the opinion that Goodkind is probably in a category all his own. Off the top of my head, I can't really think of a conservative politician or writer other than Goodkind (with perhaps the exception of Ann Coulter) who would believe this.

[Moosicus]

Was just in Tairy forum......reading Q&A with Tairy.....so much sig material.....arrogant bastard......can't handle it....unbelievable bullshit....*The Mad Moose has just had a stroke*

[The Wolf Maid]

Just how crazy is Terry Goodkind? I’m still progressing through Soul of the Fire at a snails pace, and I just arrived at page 492 and I found something I just had to share with all of you.

In order to effect her plan, Ann has disguised herself as a beggar so she could wander around Jagang’s massive encampment without being noticed. Ann isn’t very good at begging so some of the other beggars try to offer her advice on how to beg money and food off of the soldiers.

And she thinks this after beggars help her out. Wow. Gratitude is really for the dogs, eh?

And Moose, can we have a link of that...Q and A? That is, if you're feeling better now.

[Moosicus]

Okay, you asked for it, here's the link. It gives me a new idea for a SoT drinking game. Read the Q&A and toss one back every time he mentions "human themes".

[一方通行]

Okay, you asked for it, here's the link. It gives me a new idea for a SoT drinking game. Read the Q&A and toss one back every time he mentions "human themes".

sounds fun/horrifying but i don't think i could afford that many drinks.

[The Wolf Maid]

Well, just some choice quotes. I think I need to get a drink after this.

TG:

After I finished WIZARD’S FIRST RULE I wrote to the best agent in the country. My query letter aroused his curiosity and he asked to see the manuscript. He thought it was the most remarkable manuscript of the decade and at once accepted me as a client. He showed the manuscript to three publishers. They all wanted the book. WIZARD’S FIRST RULE sold at auction to Tor for a record price that still stands. That was ten weeks after I had written “the end.â€

Please God, let this not be true. If it is....

In that book Richard learned that democracy does not make something right. People use democracy as a free-floating abstraction disconnected from reality. Democracy in and of itself is not necessarily good. Gang rape, after all, is democracy in action.

Yep. You heard it here first. Gang rape is democracy in action.

And on the Jordan and Goodkind similarities, TG says this:

As for the Stone of Tears name, I found out after I’d written the book that Robert Jordan has a place in his books called the Stone of Tear. I don’t really know the meaning of the name in his books other than I think I recall that someone told me it was a building. The Stone of Tears in my book is a small stone from the underworld. The name is in some ways meant to embody all the tears for all those who have died. Other than a meaningless superficial similarity, there is no connection.

I don't think I could quote anymore. I can't bear reading through it all.

[Myshkin]

Was just in Tairy forum......reading Q&A with Tairy.....so much sig material.....arrogant bastard......can't handle it....unbelievable bullshit....*The Mad Moose has just had a stroke*

Moose, you know better than to enter that cesspit of moral celery. I only go there to see that shitting bunny they gave you.

[Larry.]

Oh, because you poor long-suffering Tairy "fans" might need this, there's some mention here of Tairy being up for the Nobel Prize for Literature

[Maltaran]

I was almost inclined to believe that (despite you quoting mystar on the nobility of goats) until I saw the story below about Dance with Dragons being done. However, you managed a neat twist to that old favourite.

[Larry.]

Thanks! I've been planning this one for about a week now and I thought I'd alter a bit of what Locus Online usually does on AFD and make it a bit more of an in-joke thing for regulars here. Now I'm just waiting for Stego, Wert, Pat, and the Shrimp to read the post, as I suspect I might be the target of some retaliation later!

But now I need to try to sleep again. Ciao.

[Daralys]

WIZARD'S FIRST RULE sold at auction to Tor for a record price that still stands.

I thought I heard somewhere that the guy who wrote that Swan something series broke this record . . .? If it's true, it's not saying much; both series are horrendous, but at least Tairy's is unintentionally amusing whereas the other one . . . I *know* I read the first book, but for the life of me, I can't remember a single thing from it. I can't even remember the series' name.

And I was under the impression that the record was for a debut novel, not a novel in general. For a novel, I thought Rowling now holds the record for when her US publisher bought the US rights.

[Angus Niven]

Well, after following these threads for a while, I finally broke down and borrowed Phantom from my local library (I console myself with the thought that: a) I did not add to Goodkind's sales figures, and so long as I have the book, I may have spared some poor innocent from exposure to the horror that is his writing).

Having now finished most of it, all I can say is... ye gods. It's like every book is a quantum leap in badness. You have:

- The infamous opening line in which "evil knocked on the door" (presumably evil's buddies Opposition to Richard and Lack of Morality Clarity were waiting behind and bitching about the rain).

- A six page chapter which consists solely of our heroes spouting magical technobabble (arcanobabble?) about the symbols involved in the drawing of a magic spell. I generally like stuff like that, but you have to at least try to do it well.

Also, we learn that in addition to his seemingly endless list of skills and abilities*, Richard has an unexplained "understanding of the jargon of emblems" that allows him to notice mistakes in the drawing of a spell that he knows absolutely nothing about, while the people who have actually been working their asses off to research it are utterly clueless. It's nice to know just how much The Yearded One respects trained experts...

- The endless monologues about how evil the Imperial Order is, delivered with Goodkind's typical sledgehammer subtlety, along with continual reminders of how the Order's troops deliberately make themselves look as savage and brutal as possible, in contrast to the noble D'Haran Empire forces.

(Fascinatingly, Richard goes on at some length about how his central purpose in life is to kill people that he considers evil, and his lovingly-detailed "outfit" bears symbols to this effect. Quite how this differs from the Order's troops is never explained.)

- And of course, there is the crowning glory of the novel thus far - Richard's long and rambling speech on how the only way to defeat an evil empire that massacres your civilians is to... abandon your civilians to the enemy while you run off and massacre theirs.

Apparently, Richard Rahl is now channelling Osama bin Laden, and if the SoT-verse had even a passing acquaintance to reality, his strategy would meet with about as much success.

Now, quite apart from the bizarre morality system that's supposed to justify the action (the Imperial Order is evil because they massacre civilians, so their claims to lofty ideals are irrelevant... but the D'Haran Empire is fighting for the liberty of mankind, so it's OK for them to massacre the other side's civilians?), it's not even going to work. It would be like Vietnam being invaded by China and responding by abandoning the field of battle and sending their troops to attack Chinese cities instead.

Actually, it would worse, because at least with air power they have some hope of damaging important areas. The D'Haran forces have to rely on horses, and pretty crappy horses at that - most of their army is infantry, so they're busy rounding up every horse they can find and pressing it into service. Thus, they have a bunch of soldiers with little or no cavalry training attempting to ride unsuitable horses, facing off against vast hordes of fanatical enemies enraged by the invasion of their homeland.

I wonder who's going to win?

I have yet to reach the scenes that made for such memorable QotDs as the Violet/Six catfight or Richard slaughtering an army of Order soldiers with the power of his individuality and then being rewarded with a place on a Ja'La team, but I can hardly wait.

* I made an attempt at a partial list - thus far, Richard is a:

- Skilled woodsman, tracker, hunter, etc.

- Master swordsman.

- Great orator.

- Brilliant philosopher.

- Genius tactician.

- Master stone-carver.

- Instinctive master of every form of magic known to man, and several that aren't.

- And, as of the last book, he's also an expert symbologist. Someone call Robert Langdon, his shtick is being ripped off!

Oh, and the book opens with the following admonition:

Those who have come here to hate should leave now, for in their hatred they only betray themselves.

- Translated from The Book of Life

Scary, eh? I'm shaking in my boots just thinking about it...

Anyway, you know someone's feeling defensive when an author decides to include a thinly-veiled rebuke to their critics in the text of the book itself.

(What is "The Book of Life", anyway? Is Richard going to add "Prophet of Objectivism" to his CV and set his teachings down in a holy book?)

And finally, I shall close with this little gem of a quote from WFR:

"Your sense of right has bounds; his has none. His is twisted into an all-consuming lust to torture all opposition into submission, and he considers any who don't rush to bow before him as opposition."

Remind you of anyone?

[Marcelo Rebelo Firqoralas]

Wow. That Q&A is just scary.

I sometimes feel, in moments of weakness, that we prehaps aren't entirely fair to Tairy, but then something like this shows up and fills med with enough moral celery to realize that one can never be unfair to His Yeardedness. He is actually worse than any sane person could ever imagine.

I tried to read the whole Q&A, but when I got to this nugget of gold I just had to stop:

Q: ...On to the question. As I have heard with the writing process, many drafts, corrections, and even complete rewriting of themes and events take place before the text can reach publication. Do you find these reviews helpful in “cleaning up†events so as to not leave any unnecessary loose ends?...

A: know that what you describe is a common belief and there is truth to it for many writers, but I personally find it horrifying to even contemplate such a writing process. It in no way describes the manner in which I work.

What you describe is an author creating action without cause, events without meaning. At its root, such a work is an expression of confusion and helplessness.

In a good novel the theme is the abstract, the plot the concretes that explain that abstract. They are inseparable.

That's right people. You heard it here first: rewriting is for communists. If you find a plot hole in your work, do NOT -- for the love Richard Rahl -- fix it! By doing so you would only promote altruism, which after all is just gang-rape at work and is just as bad as feeding the hungry or making someone eat their own testicles (and I don't mean that in the good way either).

[Angus Niven]

I think my favourite item in there was this gem concerning his treatment of magic:

TG: (This is henceforth to be known as my Definitive Statement on Magic):

I have not used this reader’s name because I don’t want anyone to think I am singling him/her out but, rather, I want to use this question as representative of all such questions about magic. I want to address this issue so that readers can once and for all understand my clear point of view on this subject.

While this question contains errors brought about by misreading the books, a failure to fully grasp and mentally integrate what has already been explained within the stories, misunderstandings, misinterpretations, leaps of logic, and erroneous assumptions that for the most part could be cleared up with a careful reading of the books in the series, I am not going to go into lengthy rehashing of trivial details I’ve spent years writing in the first place because in the end such an exposition is really irrelevant.

This question, and all questions like it about magic, betray a fatal flaw resulting from a fundamental failure to understand the nature of reality itself.

As I have said many times, I believe that fantasy is only valid when used to illustrate important human themes.

I am now going to tell you something that probably no other fantasy writer would ever tell you: I’m making it up.

One of the reasons people get so technically absorbed in the magic in my books is because (as I’ve said in the section on my philosophy — please go back and read it if you haven’t) I use magic very differently than most other authors. The magic in my books is treated as an existent — a thing that exists. Things that exist have their own identity and therefore behave according to the laws of that identity. That’s the way I make magic in my books behave — by the laws of its own identity. I treat it almost as a mathematical equation. People don’t close their eyes and grunt and wish to make it work, but rather they must discover the natural laws by which it functions, just as they must learn how to make a bow and arrow. Because of this, because magic is handled as an existent, the magic in my books has a very realistic feel to it. That realism pulls readers in, makes them feel that it is real.

However, because magic is not real, it can’t really exist. There is no way for it to exist in reality. If you begin to deconstruct it, to analyze it down to a subatomic level, as this reader has done, then at some point it will always fall apart. Always. It has to. It isn’t real. It can’t exist in the real world where there are electrons, etc.

When some readers want magic to exist, they simply leap to the assumption that it somehow can, and then become befuddled when the inconvenient facts of reality — the laws of identity — keep popping up. They pop up because that reasoning part of their consciousness — the part which deals with the laws of identity of those things that exist — keeps making its presence known. It keeps saying to them “But wait, that can’t work.†A baby cries when spaghetti pushed off its highchair won’t bounce the way a ball would. He cries because he wants the spaghetti to bounce. He cries because he wants his mother to fix it, to make the spaghetti bounce.

These readers want me to overrule their sense of reason — overrule reality — and make magic real, make it exist; make the spaghetti to bounce. I can’t.

No writer can ever create magic that would work in the real world. No matter the book, no matter the author, if it is extrapolated — examined with the laws of logic — it will at some point fall apart. It is impossible for it not to because magic can’t exist in reality. No author can create an existent that can do the things magic can do.

Technology can seem to do some of the things that magic does. For example e-mail can be viewed as much the same as the journey books so, on the surface, it makes magic seem almost plausible, seem in a reader’s mind as if it might be able to work. But magic touches everything in the world of the series whereas in reality technology must address specific, narrowly defined areas to accomplish explicit things and those narrowly directed technologies are tailored to use the unequivocal laws of identity of the existents involved. For example, airplanes can fly much like a dragon, and e-mail can seem to work like a journey book. In my novels such things are all driven by magic, but in the real world each thing must be a specific solution to a specific problem — they are not universal. Whereas magic makes a journey book work and also makes a dragon fly, an e-mail can’t fly you and your family to the Bahamas.

If magic can’t really exist, if it is impossible to write magic that can be dissected exterior to the novel and have it hold up, if it can’t be extrapolated into situations outside the plot of the book, then why in the world would an author use such fantasy elements?

Remember what I keep telling you? Fantasy is only valid when used to illustrate important human themes.

It is those themes that are the central issue of story, not how electrons behave in a variety of magic circumstances. The magic is only there to help tell a story in a unique way. It is often used to shine a new light on common issues. For example, the scene with Denna in WIZARD’S FIRST RULE is about the nature of abuse, the true terror of abuse: helplessness, having your individual identity and liberty taken away. It’s about what it means to be human. The magic is used to add a different twist, making it unlike any story of abuse you’ve ever come across before. If you start in trying to extrapolate how an Agiel would work in various other circumstances you are missing the whole point of the scene. You are missing the humanity of it. You are missing the driving theme, the conflict, the struggle, the plot, what Richard learned . . . what Denna learned.

The Agiel is not important in and of itself any more than the molecular workings of a Glock model 19 and its 9mm ammunition are to the story of a kidnapping. That Richard is placed in danger through the use of Denna’s Agiel is what matters. It matters that the Agiel and its magic was Denna’s means to capture him, to break him, to reveal his deepest feelings for Kahlan.

If you are obsessed with how the magic of an Agiel could function, then you are missing the human theme of the story. You are missing out on life. You are failing to use your consciousness to understand the true nature of reality. You are missing what it means for you to be human.

In part this is a monster of my own making because I’ve gone to such lengths to make the magic seem real, by making it an existent, that it tempts some people to become distracted by it. In a way it’s a testament to how realistic the characters are and the magic they use seems to be, so in that sense I sympathize with readers who want to understand it more completely. Still, they are going off track.

An author who makes magic a function of Primacy of Consciousness has only to shrug it off as “the wizard wished it and it worked because he’s a wizard.†That actually makes far less sense than what I do, but people have been lulled into blindly accepting such consciously controlled events. These authors are, in the minds of many, exempt from having to make sense. Their magic is never examined or questioned because it is a function of wishing, not reality. Yet this kind of hocus pocus actually makes the least amount of sense in a story and only erodes the validity of the book because it destroys a fantasy’s purpose: to illustrate important human themes. You can’t use the dead-end philosophy of wishing for results to drive human themes unless you are trying to portray ineffective secondary characters — to show their faulty thinking process which causes them to fail. If they are the protagonist, then you have real problems because the story is constructed on quicksand.

Most adult readers view such sloppy tricks as saying that the wizard simply wished it and it worked as an author’s cheap device, much the way any intelligent reader would have (properly) felt cheated if, when they got to the end of CHAINFIRE, I would have said “Richard was only dreaming of Kahlan all along through the previous books.â€

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that I don’t occasionally make mistakes, because like anyone else I do, but I take very seriously my responsibility as a novelist to get the details as right as possible so that there are no contradictions within the story, so that it flows smoothly, and that it makes sense. The magic in the stories is very complex because of my desire to make it seem as real as possible. I am convinced that with a careful reading of the books it will make sense, that questions will be answered, and that the magic will contain no contradictions within the context of the story.

But it’s not real. Magic can’t be real. No amount of double-talk will make it real. Any author who explains away the magic he writes about with an incomprehensible labyrinth of impenetrable concepts and pompous rationalizations that make you feel as if he is so gosh darn smart that you could never understand his lofty genius, is really doing nothing more than trying to lay down a smoke screen. He’s trying to intimidate you into believing that you are too stupid to understand him so that he can deceive you into thinking he really can do the impossible and make magic work.

He can’t.

I hope that some of you will come to understand in a new light what I mean when I say that the only valid use of fantasy is to illustrate important human themes. I hope that you will come to see that the magic in the books is a tool for telling a story and nothing more. Ultimately, it is not magic that is important, but what people do with that magic, how they use their unique abilities to meet challenges.

Translation: "I can't be bothered trying to keep the use of magic in my books consistent or follow my own rules, so I'm going to play the dreaded 'It's only fiction, anyway!' card and pretend this makes me better than authors who actually try to keep their work consistent. Also, if you'd rather that I be consistent in my use of magic, you are an evil communist who needs a thorough jaw-kicking."

This bit is especially brilliant:

Any author who explains away the magic he writes about with an incomprehensible labyrinth of impenetrable concepts and pompous rationalizations that make you feel as if he is so gosh darn smart that you could never understand his lofty genius, is really doing nothing more than trying to lay down a smoke screen. He’s trying to intimidate you into believing that you are too stupid to understand him so that he can deceive you into thinking he really can do the impossible and make magic work.

...I think I'll let it speak for itself.