Jump to content

Kyll.Ing.

Members
  • Posts

    884
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Profile Information

  • Location
    The Land of Always Winter

Recent Profile Visitors

3,203 profile views

Kyll.Ing.'s Achievements

Council Member

Council Member (8/8)

  1. Keep in mind that they are comparing what Sanderson and GRRM have written since A Dance with Dragons. Nothing of ASoIaF goes under that definition, although some minor spin-off stories do. By the way, one more week now (March 16, to be precise), and The Winds of Winter will have taken longer to write than A Clash of Kings, A Feast for Crows, and A Dance with Dragons combined. Just mentioning it here because there doesn't seem to be any other active discussions on the matter at the moment. On the official ASoIaF boards themselves, nobody has made a substantial post in the TWoW forum for almost two months. That shows how dispirited the fans have become at this point. I mainly come here to check the news about other series now.
  2. Illustrating how badly the hope for TWoW seems to have died in here: this two-word post that could just as effectively have conveyed its message by reacting to the post to which it responded instead of quoting it, was the only post in the TWoW forum made in the past month. EDIT: Now it turns out that my post pointing this out was the only post made in the TWoW forum for the whole of the next month too. Oh well, at least there's a milestone coming up soon. On March 16, 2024, the wait between books 5 and 6 of this saga will officially have been longer than the wait between books 2 and 5.
  3. This is partially why I'd be perfectly fine with discarding the idea that "the real conflict" is that with the Others. To be blunt and frank, if they haven't been important until this point of the series, they don't really need to be important as we go forward either. There's that famous GRRM quote along the lines of "the only conflict worth reading about is that of the human heart struggling with itself" or something to that effect, and having the series ultimately be about a war against the inhuman ice zombies runs quite contrary to that. So far, the most captivating moments of the series have been those where people have fought other people for the Iron Throne. The Others, and everything associated with them, has been lurking in the background. For all I care, it can stay there. It doesn't need to suddenly become the focus point of the series. As it were, this was always about the Game of Thrones. Sure, it might be underwhelming if the Others mainly turned out to be a rather localized problem for the northern half of The North, and that most of the characters in the series had their thoughts on other problems without ever being bothered by them. But if there's no way to write the series into an "everyone vs. the zombies" showdown, then let it stay that way and focus on what is actually working. Then again, I've always held that Daenerys' story really should end with her letting go of Westeros, where she has never set foot, where her army can't fight and where she has no extant character relations, and focus instead on the continent where she has actually built an empire of her very own. Sometimes, the short way to finish the story may simply be the best one. There's no need to cram the entire expansive saga into a dime-a-dozen-fantasy war of Humanity against The Evil Monsters, when the depiction of very human politics has always been the series' strongest suit.
  4. Smeared ink? Ink? Oh, you sweet summer child ... don't touch that!
  5. It just has to exist, really. Just something to show that 1) at least snippets of the book have been drafted, and 2) that Rothfuss can keep to his word. Failure to deliver would instantly make a lot of people suspect that neither were true, so it should have been a top priority to sort it out very quickly once it had been promised. I mean, nobody obliged Rothfuss to publish a chapter before he told us he would. He could have said nothing, then done nothing, and status quo would have been comfortably maintained (some would have continued to low-key curse the prolonged silence, but at least it would only be because of the prolonged silence). But as soon as that promise was made, expectations were raised, and the failure to deliver became vastly more prominent. And the baffling thing is, there's no way he didn't see it coming. Promising a chapter was a power move. It raised the stakes. Created expectations. He must have known that he needed to follow it up, or there'd be a great backlash. And there was. Backlash that previously had no reason to exist. There's a very straightforward cause-and-effect thing going on, and it seems to have been set up on Rothfuss' own initiative. So now we've got the worst outcome for the worst reason, as it were.
  6. Conversely, promising it and then not delivering it was pretty much the worst thing he could have done. I mean, when a rather substantial part of the follower base had doubts that even an outline of the third book ever existed, it seems like a monumentally bad idea to seemingly substantiate their claims by failing to deliver even one chapter after promising it. At the very least, it gave the naysayers a whole lot of traction. He should not have made that promise without having a sample chapter ready, or at the very least he should have cobbled together something and written disclaimers all over it.
  7. Ah, Jon Fosse. Scourge of any high school class of Norwegian literature. Let's just say his writing style is a bit peculiar. Like modernist gray-box architecture or foul-smelling cheeses, it's probably genial if you're into that sort of stuff, but from the outside perspective, it stands out as monumentally boring. The average high schooler would find more entertaining reading on the nutrition label of a packet of peanuts than a play by Jon Fosse. We had to read and discuss one of them in, I believe, 12th grade. It was like watching paint dry. Monotonous, un-engaging, and endlessly repeating to stretch a five-minute story into a two-hour play. The high school curriculum is never going to get rid of him now.
  8. Kyll.Ing.

    Board Issues 4

    Finding out that you need to exempt certain threads from the questionably justified "lock threads and start a new one after 20 pages" rule because it makes it a hassle for the moderators to stay up to date on them, is a pretty shining example of this in action. I would also have quoted Gorghan of Old Ghis, but that wouldn't be as family friendly. Same thing applies, though.
  9. Kyll.Ing.

    Board Issues 4

    As I once again missed five pages of discussion because the thread I was subscribed to was locked, and a new one opened to continue the exact same topic for no discernible reason, I have to ask ... ... why wasn't this thread locked sixty pages ago?
  10. Audible keeps bestowing upon me more tokens for audiobooks than I know what to do with, so I decided to give the new Discworld recordings a try. I've read all the books, some multiple times, but having them read to me is quite nice too (it's difficult to read a book properly while doing the dishes or vacuuming). So far I like them, mostly. I do wonder if the narrator for Guards! Guards! is overdoing it a bit on the growly voice, though. Sometimes he makes polite conversation between two relaxed, civil characters sound like Sauron and Ganondorf making threats to each other. For the longest time I was wondering whether they had Peter Serafinowicz, who voices Death in every book, do the whole narration (in the same voice), but apparently it's a different guy according to the credits. The book is still excellent, though.
  11. Classic Mormon morals and self-censorship, I've heard. There can be intricate descriptions of people being maimed and mutilated in the most horrible ways, the novels can delve into twisted minds that take gleeful pleasure in gruesomely depicted suffering and mass destruction, or feature blood-dripping scenes where soldiers and civilians are slaughtered like cattle (even by the good guys). But on the other hand, nobody speaks a single word more nasty than "darn", or even imagines doing anything more intimate with their loved ones than a little peck on the cheek, and that's only if the characters are like madly in love, alone, and destined for each other. Flaying the faces off characters while they are alive and conscious is a-OK, but the line is firmly drawn well ahead of acknowledging that some characters may have genitals.
  12. To be honest, that happened to me when I first picked it up. I liked the writing, but the episodic nature of the plot wasn't too appealing, and I ended up leaving the series for a couple of years before I bought the next book. As I said up above, the middle half of the book essentially goes nowhere. After leaving Ankh-Morpork, there's an interlude, our two heroes enter an ancient temple, meets Hrun, escapes temple, new interlude, nobody speaks of the temple again. Then they go to the dragon mountain, leaves Hrun there, new interlude, nobody speaks of the dragon mountain again. Then the story picks up when they hit the edge of the Disc and go to Krull, but even that is mostly an episodic adventure that gets resolved early in The Light Fantastic, and nobody speaks of Krull again after that. Still, the book gives the best introduction to the 'verse and setting. It has that going for it. But I wouldn't recommend starting with it unless you skip some parts then launch immediately into The Light Fantastic, which is much better structured.
  13. Just an addendum to this: Night Watch is very good, but I think it relies on the reader being familiar with the state of the Watch series up to that point, so it's not a book one should start with. Myself, I'm a fan of Wyrd Sisters, although it may not technically rank among the very best. Soul Music is a nice one too. And even as an early installment, The Light Fantastic is hugely enjoyable, although it relies heavily on the rather middling The Colour of Magic. Or, well, it's not middling, it's just that the middle half of the book goes absolutely nowhere, with two self-contained, "episodic" parts that don't move the plot forward at all. If you were to start anywhere with the series, I think I'd recommend reading the first quarter ofThe Colour of Magic (up until our heroes leave the burning Ankh-Morpork), then skip the next two quarters with Hrun the Barbarian, take it up again where Rincewind and Twoflower are adrift on the sea, then go immediately into The Light Fantastic.
  14. Not really, I think. Dany's story can be transformed into more of a parable on how one doesn't always have to follow one's "destiny". Daenerys has the ancestry going for her, she has built an army and is gaining experience as a ruler ... but she has literally never been in Westeros (knowingly, at least - lemon trees and all that). I wouldn't think any less of her story if she decided against invading Westeros, since Essos is where she has spent her life, where she has built a kingdom, and where the public adores her. Bran doesn't have to be king for his powers to be relevant. As long as he aids the battle against the Others - or help seal them away or something like that - his training would have had a purpose. He could basically end up as a sort of active defense mechanism for the realm, just as important as any king in a way, while someone else does the actual kingship. Sansa could end up ruling anywhere. As long as it's somewhere big and important it'd still be a worthy payoff. Winterfell is preferable, true, but she could also end up with Casterly Rock or Highgarden or a Free City or whatever and found her own house there. Arya is probably the one whose story is the most set down a specific path, but the others could plausibly end up with multiple outcomes that would all be a fitting end to their arc.
×
×
  • Create New...