Goodkind XX: Pitying the Guilty

[The Wolf Maid]

Damn it! I lack sleep, I'm trying to doze off and I'm near my computer. Will Richard appear?

Oh, shit.

[The Pita]

The Rahl is hunting you.

He's planning to feed Darth Yeard

[The Wolf Maid]

Nuuuuuuuuuuuu!

...and did I mention I'm the only one awake at the house?

[The Pita]

You will be killed at the hand of Lord Rahl.

...

Are you his half-brother/sister?

[Jaxom 1974]

Somehow I now have an image of Richard Rahl playing the part of the Santa robot in Futurama...

[The Pita]

I see him as a more macho Chuck Norris.

[Jaxom 1974]

Does Chuch Norris see you when you're sleeping though? Or does Santa, the killer robot?

[The Pita]

No....

You people are screwed. Chuck Norris as santa would be the most terrifying thing ever.

It's a good thing I'm not... AGH MY BRAIN! I'M PICTURING IT!

[The Real Will]

first thing I noticed is in chapter 2:

"Prophecy was always ambiguous and usually cryptic, no matter how clear

it seemed on the surface. The untrained were easily misled by its

superficially simplistic construction. Unthinking adherence to a literal

interpretation of prophecy had in the past caused great turmoil, everything

from murder to war."

I've always thought that Goodkind didn't start out with quite as much moral celery as he developed toward the end, and so he's constantly having to retcon his earlier ideas to make them more celerious. Now, I know he denies this, but hear me out.

Take the prophecy thing for example. In a book which claims to make choice paramount to morality, prophecy seems to be slightly at odds to the central theme of the whozamawhatsit, doesn't it? I mean Richard spent the whole of Stone of Tears worrying about that stupid prophecy that was going to kill Kahlan. Ideologically it would have made more sense if Richard or Kahlan had made some other choice, showed that prophecy has no effect on freewill and so neatly avoided the whole mess, but no, instead the prophecy is fulfilled albeit in a rather half assed way. I think Goodkind realised three books later that prophecy didn't really fit with his message and started trying to water it down a bit, and I know it's all terribly complex with dead prophecies and prophecy forks and so forth, but with all this still I don't recall there ever being a prophecy turn up on the page without it coming true in some way.

Same thing with the moratorium on meat, only more so. He made meat bad because Ricahrd balancing out his killing seemed cool and real, but then he realised that it didn't really gel with Yeardian ethics, retconned, and so gave the fans a mistake they can claim that Richard made, and mistakes make for super three dimensional characters don't you know. Especially the contrive, plot-hole filler type that aren't actually mistakes when you make them - in fact when you do the damn thing in the first place it's ingenious and solves a lot of problems - but which become mistakes only once your author realises they are ideologically unsound.

Anyhow, welcome to the board kve. You chose a precipitous book to begin your forays into Goodkind, it was in Faith of the Fallen that I really noticed the wheels coming of the wagon. That book made everything that came before it seem light and innocent by comparison.

[kve]

Well i did read WFR some 10 years ago, don't remember much about it. Wasn't realy special, but that's because I read it as fantasy.

Now I'm looking for the deeper meaning GK brags about. I gathered that this was the first book it really became important. Or more apparant.

Or it's that I don't do drugs and just want to experience a bad trip for once

[PhelanArcetus]

Faith is the first book where the "deeper meaning" really gets pushed blatantly. It seems that if you look closely, you can find elements of all that in even WFR, but it doesn't become a serious and obvious element until Faith. That's where half the story is an essay on Tairy's philosophy (which I gather is notably ripped off from multiple Ayn Rand books; the essay itself, not so much the philosophy).

[rado907]

The use of prophesies is just one more of the concept that Yeardy lifted right out of the Wheel of Time to write the Stone of Tears.

[WLU]

I've always thought that Goodkind didn't start out with quite as much moral celery as he developed toward the end, and so he's constantly having to retcon his earlier ideas to make them more celerious. Now, I know he denies this, but hear me out [snip] Ideologically it would have made more sense if Richard or Kahlan had made some other choice, showed that prophecy has no effect on freewill and so neatly avoided the whole mess, but no, instead the prophecy is fulfilled albeit in a rather half assed way. I think Goodkind realised three books later that prophecy didn't really fit with his message and started trying to water it down a bit [snip] in fact when you do the damn thing in the first place it's ingenious and solves a lot of problems - but which become mistakes only once your author realises they are ideologically unsound.

Goodkind very obviously started off writing a plain old action-adventure book, but tried to inject some of his own ideas into it (think the scene where Violet's mom the queen has some hard-working farmer brought out to be strawmanned into objecting to taxation). Then he tried to keep writing simple fantasy with Stone of Tears, but it got shit on for ripping off other authors so blatantly, plus he ran out of the creativity and writing ability to connect his 'neat ideas' (of which he has some, though generally they're either gruesome voyeurism like the namble/slide/Mord-Sith, him attempting to be innovative like the forked prophesies, or wish fulfilment like the nut-eating/Confessor power/Mord-Sith) into a coherent story. Instead, he started focussing on something he could rip off a bit more easily (Ayn Rand), kept it in the fantasy universe so he could keep his neat ideas and naughty bits, but started preaching a 'great message' and thus on the surface of things escape culpability for sloppy world building and incoherent plotting. In short, he's a douche.

His simplistic message has always been there, but when it got hard to write plot, it became easier to let it take over and start to regurgitate. I'm wondering what the reaction of an Objectivist would be in reading his books - does he develop the ideas further, or does he just repeat them? Are there newer, more sophisticated arguments added? Does he explore their implications further? Or is he just uncreatively plagiarising a dead author?

I know where my bets are.

[rado907]

In short, he's a douche.

If Tairy wasn't such a good writer he would've made an awesome tv show host. Something along the lines of Dr. Phil.

[The Real Will]

Faith is the first book where the "deeper meaning" really gets pushed blatantly.

While I'd agree with this in essence there are some definite cracks showing in Soul of the Fire. Indeed that is probably the first book where Yeardian politics and ideals took centre stage. The ideas poke there snouts in all the way back, as WLU said, but yeah, Faith of the Fallen is the first true book of the Yeardian (secular) Bible. Naked Empire extended this grand tradition. I've seen a number of people lambast Pillars of Creation as the worst one of the lot, especially on the Worst Book thread, but at think it is really an altogether innocent book compared to Naked Empire. It is a quaint little waste of time nothing of a book, it has pretentions but it makes no serious effort to rise to them. It's useless, but it is not unremitingly offensive on every level in the way that, particularly Naked Empire was. I'm actually a little disappointed in Goodkind, it's like, after Naked Empire, he used up his quota of purile, infantile, talentless, preachy, malignant, repelent and slightly pathetic material.

Quite frankly, I think he's been phoning it in just recently.

The only persistant point of horror that he's really managed to maintain is the long-windedness.