Guest Posted December 28, 2007 Share Posted December 28, 2007 Can someone tell me WTF "human themes" are? TG seems to think that as he writes only about "human themes" he is quite unique and distinguised. Which is to say, there aren't a lot of writers out there today that write about "human themes." Seriously, is there any literature at all that isn't in some way about human themes whatever these are? I mean, even books like Watership Down that don't even involve humans are about human themes. What a dickhead. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Patrick Mallister Posted December 28, 2007 Share Posted December 28, 2007 ok so i started reading sword of truth when i was a freshman in highschool way back in 1999 and it was the first adult fantasy i read. since then i've read much more than the yeard, as well as the rest of his books. i got CONFESSOR for christmas and am about two hundred pages into it. Every paragraph says the same thing, as does each conversation: the bad guys are bad and want to have total control over you and dont value life. Each time a character has a revelation it is about something that they had a revelation about in a previous book. prior to CONFESSOR i've never really truly understood how much he sucked. thank you for helping become a lemming of discord. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Real Will Posted December 28, 2007 Share Posted December 28, 2007 Can someone tell me WTF "human themes" are? TG seems to think that as he writes only about "human themes" he is quite unique and distinguised. Which is to say, there aren't a lot of writers out there today that write about "human themes." Seriously, is there any literature at all that isn't in some way about human themes whatever these are? I mean, even books like Watership Down that don't even involve humans are about human themes. What a dickhead. Human themes are not, as one might suppose, themes dealing with what it means to be human, but rather themes which display in absolute clarity the greatness that is inherent in any human being... even human beings who are not Richard. These can be found quite easily in Goodkind's books and include such gems as, "people are stupid" and "you can lead horse to water but you can't make it stop raping every other horse that it meets a long the way and then claiming that the waterhole is the communal property of all horses and that only horses on the very brink of dehydration may drink from it, so you might as well kill all horses or, at the very least, seal them up in an alternate dimension where they can't hurt anyone else" (where "horses" are actually "people"). These are very different from the themes that you might find in a Martin or a Bakker or even an Erikson, authors who deal with people as complex beings who shuffle back and forth along the moral spectrum and are never really confined to any one place on it. Martonian characters fail to exalt the human condition as none of them are perfect and all they demonstrate is that people are inherently flawed. This compares starkly from the Yeardian vision in which most people are utterly beyond redemption but a few are perfect. You can see how this second idea demonstrates truly human themes. All of that says nothing about all the geography-huggers out there: the so called "world-builders". Let me quote you a passage from Erikson and I think you'll see what I'm getting at. The land was beautiful. The hills rolled nicely and not far away there was a large river. This made sense as the land here was a wide plain with mountains in the west and an ocean away to the east. It was a temperate region with an above average rainfall and so the water which gathered in the mountains needed some egress to the sea. This river was that very passage. And thus the was land logical and thus was the geography consistent with known scientific principles. Four figures walked across this land. They were indistinct and resembled nothing so much as squares of cardboard glued onto popsicle sticks. Crude stick figures had been drawn on the cardboard in black crayon. The figures stopped walking. "Let us build our mine on this very site," one of them declared, and when he spoke his mouth flapped up and down very much like the animated characters in Monty Python movies. "Nay," said the second, "for this is a plain and it is loam all the way down to the bedrock. It would be fine land for a farm but to build a mine here would not be consistent." The first figure nodded. His name was Person1 because his mother, seeing that she had given birth to a human being, had realised that it probably wasn't important enough to give it an actual name. The river had a name. It was call fer'delanyanim, meaning the long blue river in the language of older times, as fer was a suffix meaning "river" and delanat was the adjective "long" however it conjugated to delany in it's conjunctive form and thus it could be appended with the adjective anim which, of course meant "blue". The mountains had a name. It was san'pianyanim mean the tall blue mountains. And it this way it can be seen that the language of older times is as admirably consistent as the geography itself. "Let us go into the mountains, then, and build a mine," said Person1, "for the great blue city ji'tiatyanim is well provided for in sustenance, but there is a shortage of tin and if this land is to have a consistent and logical economy then the dictates of supply and demand require that someone go and dig for it. Besides some smart arse reader is bound to wonder, eventually, where the tin for all those wizardly tin hats that the wizards are always wearing comes from." And so they went to the mountains which exited the author greatly as he would now have the opportunity to explain the mountain culture of that land and to expound upon the many ways in which it was logical and consistent given it's history. And that's Erikson... or at least that how Goodkind imagines Erikson is, since he's never actually read him. Tell me, do you see the human themes in that lot? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jaxom 1974 Posted December 28, 2007 Share Posted December 28, 2007 Is this how Terry wrote Blood of the Fold...? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Wolf Maid Posted December 28, 2007 Share Posted December 28, 2007 Will, that was fantastic. Oh my, Erickson. Is this how Terry wrote Blood of the Fold...? Possibly. I wouldn't doubt it if someone said it so. XD And I almost forgot: Nice to see you around agin, 7th Pup. You were missed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jaxom 1974 Posted December 28, 2007 Share Posted December 28, 2007 Goodkind XXXIII: Maybe you can only beat a dead horse so long? Or: Damn it, Pat! Interview TG already! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Real Will Posted December 29, 2007 Share Posted December 29, 2007 Goodkind XXXIII: Maybe you can only beat a dead horse so long? Or: Damn it, Pat! Interview TG already! I prefer "How Long Can You Beat a Dead Horse?" It has a more positive air. It sounds like we're choosing life... over the carcase of a horse... Very symbolic, you see. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Larry. Posted December 29, 2007 Share Posted December 29, 2007 I think everyone needs to read the latest comment in Pat's Year-End Awards: Morals and the rights of human beings are but illusory if its only decided by the current whims of the populace. Democracy is rule of the majority at the price of the minority, you should study greecian democracy where the modern form originated, when a speaker at a public forum did hold the crowds interests they would forcibly remove him from the podium. This was anti free speech and a poisonous danger to a free thinking society where ideas should be exchanged freely. Rapists make a conscious decision to commit their act, while the US senate makes the same purposeful intent to declare war under troubling circumstances. Democracy is NOT interchangeable with freedom though the politcos and common use of the term would confuse most. As for not writing fantasy, He says he chose to write certain themes he wanted to get across with fantasy trappings if you will. Is see no problem, his books are a good read and do have intriguing musings that are rarely found in the pulp fantasy genre My main point was pat is burning bridges talks a lot of shit for an author without even one book in print Great, now I'm conflating Grecian Formula with gang rapes of public speakers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VigoTheCarpathian Posted December 29, 2007 Share Posted December 29, 2007 Thanks, Larry (and Pat) for re-introducing something I should have put out of my mind ages ago: democracy 1. I am no political science master. 2. I claim no special knowledge of "Greecian" democracy versus Jeffersonian democracy. 3. I have no valid sources on the issue of gang rape However: 1.) I believe that whatever Mr. Goodkind was trying to say was completely lost in the translation from idiot to normal person. 1.) A: Democracy is not gang rape. Even at its most base form, democracy is not the will of the majority being forced on a minority who chose not to be included in the decision. This is called "oligarchy". At best, what I believe Tairy meant to say is "Democracy in action is 100 dudes who all get together and agree to write down a system of butt sex laws. If 51 dudes agreed, the 49 losers would be subjected to butt sex. However, it is not rape because these 49 had already chosen to be part of the system, making it a sort of consensual sexual contest. They really should have walked away if they didn't want to get it in the ass." This would be my definition for "Greecian" democracy. 1.) B: In Jeffersonian democracy, it's not just a bunch of dudes having butt sex based on votes. There is a system in place that makes sure that said butt sex is fair to both parties (based on a panel of 9 butt sex judges), and that everyone involved is not being violated by the pre-agreed-upon rules. If someone feels violated, it is voted "unbuttsextuiable", and is written into presidence. I'm taking this opportunity to let Tairy know that pure communism is "gang rape in action" (the will of the many enforced on the will of the few), dictatorship is reverse gang-rape (the will of one forced on the many), and that democracy is none of these, as people are still free to choose what system they live under. My nomination for the new title is: Goodkind XXXIII: Democracy is a Consensual Gay Orgy (sub: unless you're freaked out by gays, in which case it's a conditional dictatorship) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VigoTheCarpathian Posted December 29, 2007 Share Posted December 29, 2007 BTW: I only meant to imply that Mr. Badunkinds use of rape as an example is wholly inaccurate. Rape implies a victim whose will isn't taken into consideration, which I think may be a fine point he missed. Also, the "gay democracy" means nothing more than a bunch of homogenized whte dudes making the decisions. It could easily be a bunch of lipstick lesbians deciding on where to hold their vote/orgy. Which would be infinitely more hot.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Agulla Posted December 29, 2007 Share Posted December 29, 2007 I would like to propose: Goodkind XXXIII: Grecian Democracy Rules! With the subtitle: You can't remove the Yeard from the podium. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mme Erzulie Posted December 29, 2007 Share Posted December 29, 2007 Lemmings, fickle is thy name(s)! What happened to my seasonally inspired thread names? All forgotten a few pages later? It seem the holidays are slowing down the thread. Well, I do my christmas stuff tomorrow so I've had some time to do some reading today and I just hammered through the first 100 pages of Wizard's First Rule. Wow, it's worse than I expected. What is really striking me is how bad the writing is. Forget the story for a second. I just mean his prose. My two go-to fantasy series have been ASOIAF which most everyone here loves and Prince of Nothing which is a little less accessable, but whether you like it or not, Martin and Bakker crush this guy as writers. I agree wholeheartedly. I simply do not understand people who say that the series started to decline at book 4 or 6 or whatever. It is horrendously horrid from the start. The sheer quality (or lack thereof) of the prose is appalling enough that this should never, ever have been published, even if it was only for the purpose of torturing suspected Al-Qaeda-members. Well, so far, I've only been subjected to one speech, Michael's. It was fucking awful. And then the Yeard goes on to describe some of the audience being moved to tears? It was so poorly written. The fire speech, right? Or as I like to call it, the NRA speech. So fucking awful, indeed. And then Tairy controversially again go for the show, not tell approach. Fucking douche. This will probably be the last you hear from me in a while (if any of you even care or remember me), so Happy New Years! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jaxom 1974 Posted December 30, 2007 Share Posted December 30, 2007 I think everyone needs to read the latest comment in Pat's Year-End Awards: Great, now I'm conflating Grecian Formula with gang rapes of public speakers One would think that a certain individual of Tairy fanaticism had written that defense, but in fairness, he'd've actually signed the missive... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Larry. Posted December 30, 2007 Share Posted December 30, 2007 Regardless of who wrote that in Tairy's "defense," I think he/she will not care too much for my response, which is quite a bit harsher than what I think I would be allowed to say here Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Pita Posted December 30, 2007 Share Posted December 30, 2007 Yeah, your response is not a very kind one. I, however, would've written something worse. Or maybe impersonated this "Anonymous", if that is his real name. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Wolf Maid Posted December 30, 2007 Share Posted December 30, 2007 Just here to nominate the thread title: Goodkind XXXIII: Grecian Democracy for a Happy New Yeard Damn it, Pat! Interview TG already! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Seventh Pup Posted December 30, 2007 Share Posted December 30, 2007 Goodkind XXXIII: Year of the Yeard: Yeard mandatory for posting! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Foreverlad Posted December 31, 2007 Share Posted December 31, 2007 Goodkind XXXIII: Goodkind, afterall is crap in action democracy beware Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pat5150 Posted December 31, 2007 Share Posted December 31, 2007 I'm fairly certain that the anonymous poster is Mystar. The typos and his fanaticism sort of gave it away... As for interviewing TG, I sincerely doubt that it will ever happen... I might not be Public Enemy number 1 among Yeard fans, but I'm up there! Patrick Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Myshkin Posted December 31, 2007 Share Posted December 31, 2007 Goodkind XXXIII: Goodkind, afterall is crap in action democracy beware I like this one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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