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Rothfuss XIV: The Slow Regard of Luna Lovegood


Darth Richard II

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19 minutes ago, Stego said:

I stopped in to see if there was any decent Rothfuss chatter.

What in the flying hell are you folks on about? 

Most of this thread and the last are versions of Rothfuss being an ass in some way or another. 

9 minutes ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

Too much?

YMMV :cheers:

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13 minutes ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

Essentially this thread has turned into "Rothfuss Watch," where people who claim to hate his writing carefully scan through every word that comes out of his bearded face to let us all know when he says something they consider stupid or offensive.

Well, for the last year or so that's been every time he opens his mouth. :P

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12 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

You're attempting to make a causal link.  I'll bet most of those shooters drank Milk too.  Is Milk responsible for their mass shootings?  Correlation does not equal causation and your correlation is really tenuous.

No quite a few of school shooters were influenced by school shooters. Wiki it. Not saying every depressed susceptible  person who watches the movie or reads a novel will go shoot up a school. 

Perhaps its best to say, if you want to shoot up a place, you are more than likely to read Novel A and watch Movie B.  Stephen King even said he didnt want to be affiliated with this. So put his novel out of print. 

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11 hours ago, Ran said:

He said Tolkien has killed tens of thousands, he said Disney hospitalized 50 children, so it seems to me he is perfectly willing to believe that he can attribute some direct effect from the Punisher.

He'd have to show that it had such an effect on anyone, and that that actually had some real world effect, for it to matter. It's not irresponsible if it does nothing either way. Just as Tolkien making a three year old think smoking a pipe is fun is harmful, because that kid is not going to grow up smoking a pipe, or at least not because of Tolkien.

What I find especially absurd is that there's a chapter in TWF that romanticizes teenagers abusing alcohol ("The three boys, one dark, one light, and one-for lack of a better word-fiery, do not notice the night. Perhaps some part of them does, but they are young, and drunk, and busy knowing deep in their hearts that they will never grow old or die. They also know that they are friends, and they share a certain love that will never leave them. The boys know many other things, but none of them seem as important as this. Perhaps they are right.") , and yet here he is going on about a writer's social responsibility, alleging absurd real-world impacts from Tolkien having smoking or Disney having frog-kissing; far more people are going to die from alcohol than from kissing frogs or at the hands of mass murderers and serial killers.

Is he a hypocrite? Maybe that's what we should be talking about, because for certain tens of thousands of impressionable young people have read his books, and god knows if one of them kills someone or themselves drinking and driving, we know who to blame... :P

It's simply ill thought out, what he said. Maybe he was just noodling out loud, but his noodling is not persuasive. It has a kernel of truth that is self-evident and he spins it into a mountain of bullshit based on unsupportable assertions.

You know lets start a fake movement against his Novels. Do a few Youtube videos about the heroin overdoses and alcohol abuse in America. Then bring in his books and proclaim he is promoting dangerous levels of drinking and antisocial behavior. We'll then go into how Denna may have taken heroin to be a little bit looser around Kvothe and that this will encourage heroin use amongst teenagers for social anxiety and this will lead to unconsensual sex. 

"Looking at the statistics from 2000-2020, There was a sudden jump of 50 rapes per year on college campuses at 2011 just after the Wiseman's Fear was released."

 

If this prank is done subtle enough, Rothfuss will believe and completely lose his shit. 

 

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2 hours ago, lysmonger said:

No quite a few of school shooters were influenced by school shooters. Wiki it. Not saying every depressed susceptible  person who watches the movie or reads a novel will go shoot up a school. 

Perhaps its best to say, if you want to shoot up a place, you are more than likely to read Novel A and watch Movie B.  Stephen King even said he didnt want to be affiliated with this. So put his novel out of print. 

How many of those school shooters ate hamburgers?  Is hamburger consumption responsible for school shootings?

You keep pointing to correlations but you never explain how those correlations have  any causal connection to the violence offered.  People see violence every day in person and on various media platorms.  Violence is dramatic and has always been an element in various forms of drama.  

Please explain why the violence portrayed in “Natural Born Killers” caused other violence that occured in real life.  Until you make this connection the correlation you describe is no more relevant than school shooters eating burgers and drinking milk.

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2 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

How many of those school shooters ate hamburgers?  Is hamburger consumption responsible for school shootings?

You keep pointing to correlations but you never explain how those correlations have  any causal connection to the violence offered.  People see violence every day in person and on various media platorms.  Violence is dramatic and has always been an element in various forms of drama.  

Please explain why the violence portrayed in “Natural Born Killers” caused other violence that occured in real life.  Until you make this connection the correlation you describe is no more relevant than school shooters eating burgers and drinking milk.

Google Natural Born Killers Copycat and you’ll see a bunch of articles. Most famous was the two people that killed John Grisham’s friend. Now life is complicated and multi-faceted and causation is a tricky thing. I quite doubt that NBK was either necessary or sufficient to cause any of the copycat killing sprees, but I find it hard to doubt its in the causal chain of events. 

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I remember people blaming The Matrix for Columbine, except they were planning the attack and wearing black trenches way before the movie came out. Coincidence, yes. Cause and effect? Not so much. 

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26 minutes ago, Myrddin said:

I remember people blaming The Matrix for Columbine, except they were planning the attack and wearing black trenches way before the movie came out. Coincidence, yes. Cause and effect? Not so much. 

Are you suggesting a causal link here where because “people” incorrectly identified a casual link in one instance, then all other instances of identifying casual links are invalid?

I find your ideas intriguing. I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter. 

:drool:

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The upside of the conniptions that occur around this topic is some interesting conversation. :P

In all seriousness though, I think the couple of minutes of preamble before he discusses Tolkien is pretty illuminating as to where he's coming from. It is a discussion of art and its effects upon the culture at large, and an argument for writers to be conscious about this and use their greater power to promulgate information and meaning within our culture for good. The sticking point is the word "responsible", which I think he throws around a bit too lightly. But, as was stated earlier, these remarks were off the cuff, so I think a bit of semantic sloppiness is not particularly surprising. I mean, he ends it with the message that we should be critical in how we consume our media, which I feel is the ultimate point he is trying to make, and that's a valuable message full stop. Are we arguing we shouldn't be?

I think re-watching the bit where he is talking about a responsibility to provide examples of girls being good maths or not being weak and that kind of stuff made me re-evaluate the problem with women in his books. There's always the possibility that he is going to reveal Kvothe to be way more of an unreliable narrator than I think will happen, which could somewhat salvage the problem with women, but would also probably do a lot of damage to the structural integrity of the series. But I think the more likely reason is that Rothfuss sees the way to provide good representation of women and interaction with feminist themes is to create characters who, by their biography, the description of who they are, refute such assumptions. We do see women who can fight and we do see women who are good at science-y stuff (I can't remember if maths gets a specific look-in). But he doesn't recognise or write with the recognition that the web of our interactions and the way we interact really serve define us. So, while we see women who are defined by the author describing who they are for us, we also see the same women defined by, for example, being attracted to Kvothe, or by less obvious but similarly problematic tropes, and that contradiction weakens their character and their representation, and thus any kind of feminist credentials.

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55 minutes ago, unJon said:

Are you suggesting a causal link here where because “people” incorrectly identified a casual link in one instance, then all other instances of identifying casual links are invalid?

I find your ideas intriguing. I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter. 

:drool:

:lol:

Only that weak sensational links between movies and real events should be avoided without evidence to the contrary. No more, no less. 

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17 minutes ago, Mazzack said:

In all seriousness though, I think the couple of minutes of preamble before he discusses Tolkien is pretty illuminating as to where he's coming from. It is a discussion of art and its effects upon the culture at large, and an argument for writers to be conscious about this and use their greater power to promulgate information and meaning within our culture for good. The sticking point is the word "responsible", which I think he throws around a bit too lightly. But, as was stated earlier, these remarks were off the cuff, so I think a bit of semantic sloppiness is not particularly surprising. I mean, he ends it with the message that we should be critical in how we consume our media, which I feel is the ultimate point he is trying to make, and that's a valuable message full stop. Are we arguing we shouldn't be?

Well, there are a few things going on. There is his message in general, his specific examples and his hypocrisy. I get the gist of what he was trying to get across. People, and children in particular, are impressionable and the media they consume may influence their preferences or actions, but this isn't a case of Roald Dahl's crude humour, where he might have had more of a point.

 

Also, I'm amazed at the lengths people will go to to disassociate access to guns for gun violence.  :rolleyes:

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5 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

Makes me wanna send him a copy of Prince of Thorns.

That book is hot garbage. Everything from the psychology to the physical strength/maturity is impossible for a what -- 12yr old? 10? Something absurd. 

Sending a Lawrence book in protest to Rothfuss would be like sending a Goodkind book in protest to GRRM. (Except that Goodkind has given me SOME enjoyment.)

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