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Rothfuss XVI: Books? What books?


Kyll.Ing.

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1 hour ago, HelenaExMachina said:

:lol: After his many antics, you think Rothfuss cares about pissing off his fans?

I think he's less worried about pissing off his fans than he is about releasing a sub-standard final volume of the trilogy and turning out to not be as good of an author as many have made him out to be.

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18 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

think he’s afraid this twist will piss off many of his “fans”.  

He's already po-ed them, judging by this forum. He's lost his publisher.  So who would even publish that unicorn he has no reason now to write?

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Villains as protags almost decreed in these latter sf/f daze: D. Abrams's Lord Regent Geder Palliako for instance.

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14 minutes ago, Zorral said:

He's already po-ed them, judging by this forum. He's lost his publisher.  So who would even publish that unicorn he has no reason now to write?

He hasn't lost his publisher. They're standing by to publish the nanosecond the book is delivered. His editor just vented about it in public. The contract is still intact.

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3 hours ago, john said:

I don’t think any of these examples are the same as what Scot is talking about. Zakalwe is known to be bad from the start, he just turns out to be worse than the reader was expecting. Paul Atreides might be the villain from some perspectives but he still has the hero journey.

Scot’s saying, I believe, that Kvothe is purporting to have the hero journey, but in fact isn’t. I don’t really agree with that necessarily, but there is something going on with Denna mirroring Kvothe, Lanre possibly being a good guy, possibly a bad guy. Personally I think Rothfuss is more interested in how legends change in the telling and it’s more likely that Kvothe is just a greyer protagonist than we might have initially thought.

May I remind you Kvothe is a pissed off 19 year old. Who is cocky, arrogant, and incredibly booksmart but not so world smart. 

Everything he does is going to come off as smug.

Even if Kvothe was trying to act as a saint, he'd come off as an asshat.

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1 hour ago, Zorral said:

He's already po-ed them, judging by this forum. He's lost his publisher.  So who would even publish that unicorn he has no reason now to write?

~~~~~~~~

Villains as protags almost decreed in these latter sf/f daze: D. Abrams's Lord Regent Geder Palliako for instance.

Fair points both.  But, Geder is never (in my opinion) portrayed as someone to admire.  He’s sympathetic to geek tropes but never seen by the reader as the protagonist.

I do concede many Rothfuss fans are already pissed.

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4 hours ago, Werthead said:

He is the villain: he kills way more people than the Harkonnens, the Emperor and the Sardaukaur combined. He then shrinks back from doing the things that "justify" all the mayhem, death and murder and recants it, and it falls to his son to follow through. Leto II can also be argued to be the villain - he himself sets himself up as a villain to engineer his own downfall - but he argues that without his actions the human race would have been rendered extinct. Paul does all that murder and insanity in which billions die, but then abruptly reverses course and tries to undo his actions, which presumably would have ended in the human race extinct anyway, so his actions are doubly pointless.

It should also be noted that you can be the protagonist and a villain or antihero simultaneously, with antagonists who try to stop you still being horrendous people. There are no real good guys in Dune (although Duncan Idaho kinda of tries).

I’m more amenable to the idea that there are no protagonists in Dune than the idea that the Atredies are antagonists.

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Does “protagonist” have to equal “good guy?”

Or is it just that the protagonist is the face of the story and the forces against him are antagonistic?

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1 minute ago, Rhom said:

Does “protagonist” have to equal “good guy?”

Or is it just that the protagonist is the face of the story and the forces against him are antagonistic?

Not an English Lit major.  Not my field.  But I suspect “protagonist” is not a term coextensive with “good guy”.

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1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I’m more amenable to the idea that there are no protagonists in Dune than the idea that the Atredies are antagonists.

It's easier to come up with a definition of antagonist than a protagonist.  The former needs the latter whereas the latter doesn't, necessarily.  Iago is the antagonist of the play Othello even if we don't agree that Othello is the protagonist of the play (although we should notwithstanding he murders Desdemona)

And in the Dune saga the protagonist shifts across novels and some protagonists become antagonists (particularly Leto).  If you want a clear-cut protagonist in the story then you have Siona and Sheena. 

But whatever the definition I think Kvothe is definitely the protagonist of the story.  He's basically Rothfuss' id produced by his wishful longings.  There's nothing wrong with that - he is after all PR's teenage creation.  But as the story grew PR kinda sorta looked at his own teenage creation with a certain amount of skepticism and mutability. 

The older parts of the stories, like the story of the two kidnapped girls which was published way back in 2002, has Kvothe more unambiguously as a hero even if he is a hero willing to do terrible things.  

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1 hour ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

Like, he made something so fresh and new that it literally changed the genre.

You can see that he changed the genre because of the host of "like George R.R. Martin's A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE" that followed in his wake the last decade and change. 

1 hour ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

Its a medieval setting with magic. Patriarchal and nearly everyone is white. Unless they are “exotic” (see: Summer Islanders, Ghiscari). Hardly genre-redefining.

Setting is not everything that defines the genre. There's more to fantasy than world-building. 

1 hour ago, Chataya de Fleury said:

With the above, I’m not trying to criticize GRRM as an author - he is a great one - but not “redefining the genre”.

If you can say there's a period before a writer and then a period after a writer, I think you can say they redefined something

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7 hours ago, Werthead said:

It should also be noted that you can be the protagonist and a villain or antihero simultaneously, with antagonists who try to stop you still being horrendous people. There are no real good guys in Dune (although Duncan Idaho kinda of tries).

This. Most main characters are truly grey in Dune. And when it comes to acting the villain, Leto II is way worse than Paul, who ruled a very short time, shorter than he could have even. And then he kind of redeemed himself when coming back as a blind prophet.

 

21 hours ago, Werthead said:

The reverse is more often true: Jorg in the Broken Empire trilogy is presented as an antagonist that we just happen to be sitting in on the POV of, and then metamorphoses into a (somewhat) more positive role as the story continues. Very relative though.

I really liked how it played out in the 2nd book, King of Thorns. Chapters in current time were always repeating how Jorg didn't want to bow to the Prince of Arrow and fought hard to beat him, while chapters "5 years earlier" were always showing how the Prince of Arrow was a noble good guy and Europe's best hope, basically - as if Jorg's opposition to the Prince leading a united Holy Empire was just Jorg being stubbogn and an egotistical jerk (which wasn't too surprising, from what we had seen of him until then). It's only at the very end that the twist happens and I was like "Duh, I didn't pay enough attention when reading the chapters".

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I would say that ASOIAF did redefine the genre but I would have trouble articulating exactly how. It's fair to note that his killing of Ned and Robb and even Catelyn is a good fundamental shift away from the standard of "main character overcomes and accomplishes what he set out to do by defeating the big bad." At the same time, some of that is simple misdirection and hiding how Jon and Dany are the true heroes (theoretically). Certainly, the intrigue and the level of detail (depth and breadth) he puts into things are a factor. Even the early focus on politics before a stronger shift towards more standard fantasy elements is a style shift.

Some of the struggle I have here is that much of this has been done in one form or another by others. But they didn't succeed in the same way and so it didn't really serve to redefine things. Overall, I would say that popularity is a factor here but it's more than mere popularity. ASOIAF has a very different feel and focus than many alternatives in the genre. It's not just quality of working either. Without adding it up (and fully admitting that I may just be wrong were I to add it up) I'll say that where he spends his time and his word count is different than most popular series.

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GRRM didn't redefine anything, necessarily, but he did consolidate a whole bunch of ideas. We'd had "really long series" before (WoT), we'd have "fantasy with sex and swearing and morally ambiguous protagonists" before (Donaldson, Cook, Gemmell, Kearney), we had the whole "noble families clashing" thing (Dune, GRRM's historical inspirations) and so on, but GRRM rolled them all into one very accessible package. Tolkien did something similar, though his linguistic approach was more unique to him. A lot of the individual things GRRM gets credit for weren't really original to him, but he popularised them.

The "killing characters" thing is also merely an application of scale. From the POV of A Game of Thrones in isolation, killing Ned is a big deal. From the POV of ASoIaF as a whole, Ned is the father/mentor figure present at the start of the story who has to die for his children to take centre-stage. Nothing we haven't done before, but by making Ned a POV character and anchoring the book on him, it makes it a bit more surprising.

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14 minutes ago, Werthead said:

 Tolkien did something similar, though his linguistic approach was more unique to him. A lot of the individual things GRRM gets credit for weren't really original to him, but he popularised them.

I would say that Tolkein was more of an innovator in a bunch of ways, taking into account his time.  A consistent mythology, excellent battles, heroes who are physically unprepossessing, a touch of the eerie and the fae.  And a romantic vision.  

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6 minutes ago, Gaston de Foix said:

I would say that Tolkein was more of an innovator in a bunch of ways, taking into account his time.  A consistent mythology, excellent battles, heroes who are physically unprepossessing, a touch of the eerie and the fae.  And a romantic vision.  

A bunch of that stuff was in earlier books, like The Worm Ouroborus and The King of Elfland's Daughter (not to mention Conan), like the mapped kingdoms, the different cultures, the quest and the massive battles. Tolkien definitely did them more realistically and better than before, though.

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The Ned thing was clever because he framed Ned as the hero rather than the Obi-Wan. In hindsight like Wert says it's less revolutionary than it seemed but at the time killing what seemed to be the Aragorn in the first book was a fair old mind-blower.

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24 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

The Ned thing was clever because he framed Ned as the hero rather than the Obi-Wan. In hindsight like Wert says it's less revolutionary than it seemed but at the time killing what seemed to be the Aragorn in the first book was a fair old mind-blower.

Especially since at one point the story misdirects that Ned will get exiled to the Wall, where the reader assumes he’ll be positioned to fight the Others.

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I don't know that he redefined a genre, but he certainly had an effect.  Ned has been mentioned and I agree.  I also remember my reaction to the Red Wedding made my roommate at the time grab a copy of Game of Thrones.  I was shocked by that chapter.   

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2 hours ago, Inkdaub said:

I don't know that he redefined a genre, but he certainly had an effect.  Ned has been mentioned and I agree.  I also remember my reaction to the Red Wedding made my roommate at the time grab a copy of Game of Thrones.  I was shocked by that chapter.   

I threw my paperback across the dorm room, then an hour later tried very hard to take it out on my wonderful college girlfriend with a series of snide comments and bitter complaints. Once she realized I was acting like a toddler without his pacifier, she mercilessly mocked me for being a rotten shit due to a book chapter. But, but, she didn't understand!

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