[lord of tragedy]

Cougar, on Oct 23 2008, 10:43 AM, said:

By the beard of Zeus guys could we please write in English not in text speak, it's immensely frustrating and makes it look like there is a 10 year old chav writting. We aren't asking it to be spellchecked or even have decent grammar just sentences with real words.

so chavs are excluded from the website? About time too. dirty working class bastards. how dare they read books. next thing you know they will want universal surfferage. scum.

[Astra]

lord of tragedy, on Oct 23 2008, 01:19 PM, said:

Cougar, on Oct 23 2008, 10:43 AM, said:

By the beard of Zeus guys could we please write in English not in text speak, it's immensely frustrating and makes it look like there is a 10 year old chav writting. We aren't asking it to be spellchecked or even have decent grammar just sentences with real words.

so chavs are excluded from the website? About time too. dirty working class bastards. how dare they read books. next thing you know they will want universal surfferage. scum.

One is not born into chavs. One builds himself/herself into the status, Innit?

[Cougar]

I'm just trying to keep the 1 forum I mod intelligible I don't want it to descend into anarchy.

Now I know this little deviation is my fault so lets get back on topic guys.

[lord of tragedy]

Cougar, on Oct 23 2008, 01:53 PM, said:

I'm just trying to keep the 1 forum I mod intelligible I don't want it to descend into anarchy.

Now I know this little deviation is my fault so lets get back on topic guys.

cougar please don't edit text speak. the mans obviously a genius. he's paying homage in a meta literal sense to the possibilities that spam opens up to us, language devoid of context. the god gone astray in the flesh, new life to old wombs. you'd be like the fella who told warhol it was just a tin of soup :Surprise: :Surprise:

now back on thread. jordan's work is haunted by his own repressed sexuality. notice how uber succesful his men are with women, no homosexual tendencies in sight, uber males totally secure in their sexual success. even loial has to end up with a beautiful ogre women. yet rand obviously has issues, he flits between 3 different women yet can't commit to any of them. each one of them however is secretly bewildered by their respective sexual relations, and sees the others as having answers to some great mysery they can't even begin to comprehend. again it seems the most evil thing the dark lord can do is to place a man in a womans body, asan gar or aran gar?. subtext? deeply repressed author creates fantasy world of butch village people type men as a space where he is undisturbed by yearnings for "a love that dare not speak its name". said yearning's begin to surface in fantasy writing, constant references to sexual confusion and bewilderment. in an unconcious effort to break the thralldom to his own repressed femininity writer creates a shocking character by recycling male foresaken into female body. attempt at exorcism flounders, writer becomes uncomfortable with certain aspects of his series but can't explain why. dubious quality begins to really suffer, turns into mis mash of childish and silly cliches with blatant double entendres, tug my braid, tug my braid. said writer dies miserable but never knows why.

[MecnunK]

txt speak is so english ask the, on Oct 22 2008, 02:10 AM, said:

my impression is that lots of ppl find wot chars more likeable? like would kick it with two rivers crew for sure. in part because they are knowable? explicable? even rand's motivations are made pretty clear he has issues, sure, but he still seems like a bro. erikson chars motivations are more complex they are often more damaged and conflicted i think. this actually ties into wat i meant by moral there's a surety that runs through wot the good vs. evil its a series about ppl doing the right thing. often times erikson is about ppl doing the least worst thing.

i think that moral clarity plays as much if not more a part in making wot more popular than malaz than language or even the chars, plots &c.

Umm I not sure that is moral clarity...that's a simplistic view of good & evil i.e. black and white vs Eriksons shades of grey. Both can work well in a fantasy series..depends on the story and where the writer takes it...and how long he takes getting there.. which is pertinent to Jordan.. He just started waffling after book5/6.. The beast he created ran away from him. I love the first few books but just got more and more depressed reading the rest...I do kind of agree though part of the appeal to the masses where WOT is concerned is easy to understand storyline, written in simple enough language with stereotype characters and themes people can identify from countless other fantasy works...

[globish rip]

you'd be like the fella who told warhol it was just a tin of soup

more like urinal.jpg amirite? lol britishes

Umm I not sure that is moral clarity...that's a simplistic view of good & evil i.e. black and white

haha wat could b more clear than black and white? well i guess translucent is more clear but that's not really a challenging opinion

The beast he created ran away from him. AND this quickly exploded in the way fantasy tends to

someone (the spider?) had a couple of really good posts about how deeply connected all the books are the accusations of sprawl seem like yr not looking close enough. i mean surely youll grant that one of the big themes in wot is how much choices matter about the pull between desire and duty, fate and free will. one of the best things about a long series is that jordan could really illustrate this. e.g. how sparing a df's life in book one goes on to effect morgase's escape from amadia.

i feel lame for going into this tbh and theres a tendency to overstate things to talk about The Unstyle of Robert Jordan or something grad school-ish like that. but i guess on a "worst fantasy books ever!" thread its worth stating.

i get distressed when ppl make offhand comments about the masses or simple language and simple themes. for anyone that cares about genre fiction that writes it or reads it that discusses it and debates it u have to do better than just coopting played critical structures. why is simple bad or good? what does popularity say about a book, if anything? not just on steven johnson tip altho abyss is otm about internet/wot relationship or some cut-rate lacanian but what can the reader do? thinking.

lol this is so tl;dr. for the sport's fans did u know that marie corelli wrote a book called ardath? food for thought

[lord of tragedy]

cougar i take it back. edit the fuck out of it. i can't respond to something i can't read.

"not just on steven johnson tip altho abyss is otm about internet/wot relationship or some cut-rate lacanian but what can the reader do? thinking.

lol this is so tl;dr. for the sport's fans did u know that marie corelli wrote a book called ardath? food for thought"

what the fuck does that mean?

[globish rip]

yah sorry corelli is obscure. shes an author from like mid-1800s that wrote fantasy/romances that were popular but either reviled or ignored by critics. parallels seemed obv and not worth elaborating. i thought of her because she was a populist critic i remembered reading something she wrote about kipling that seemed relevant at the time of my post. it seemed a funny coincidence that ardath was one of the names of some elder goddess and that ardath is forgotten and unread now.

basically from now on all my posts will be in the form of cryptic crossword clues:

Strong medicine binds novel (2,6)

This post has been edited by 2PISTOLSWRITTING: 24 October 2008 - 09:10 AM

[lord of tragedy]

wilfully obtuse, seeking acceptance? (6)

[Astra]

Despite me liking WoT I gave up on this troll.
Requires too much effort on my part to read his gibberish.

[Cougar]

Alright cut it out now or I'll wield my mod-hammer, stay on topic.

If you want to bitch at each other do it via PM or in the Inn.

[MecnunK]

2PISTOLSWRITTING, on Oct 24 2008, 04:21 AM, said:

you'd be like the fella who told warhol it was just a tin of soup

more like urinal.jpg amirite? lol britishes

Umm I not sure that is moral clarity...that's a simplistic view of good & evil i.e. black and white

haha wat could b more clear than black and white? well i guess translucent is more clear but that's not really a challenging opinion

The beast he created ran away from him. AND this quickly exploded in the way fantasy tends to

someone (the spider?) had a couple of really good posts about how deeply connected all the books are the accusations of sprawl seem like yr not looking close enough. i mean surely youll grant that one of the big themes in wot is how much choices matter about the pull between desire and duty, fate and free will. one of the best things about a long series is that jordan could really illustrate this. e.g. how sparing a df's life in book one goes on to effect morgase's escape from amadia.

i feel lame for going into this tbh and theres a tendency to overstate things to talk about The Unstyle of Robert Jordan or something grad school-ish like that. but i guess on a "worst fantasy books ever!" thread its worth stating.

i get distressed when ppl make offhand comments about the masses or simple language and simple themes. for anyone that cares about genre fiction that writes it or reads it that discusses it and debates it u have to do better than just coopting played critical structures. why is simple bad or good? what does popularity say about a book, if anything? not just on steven johnson tip altho abyss is otm about internet/wot relationship or some cut-rate lacanian but what can the reader do? thinking.

lol this is so tl;dr. for the sport's fans did u know that marie corelli wrote a book called ardath? food for thought

Ummm i wasnt saying it is not clear. Good vs Evil in the traditional tolkienesque sense is fine as long as it is done well. I just cant dig made up phrases like moral clarity used by politicians to further their cause just to sound good applied to fantasy. Not all things wot heroes do lends itself to what you refer to as moral clarity. I dont quite get your next point on choices mattering but whatever.. if anything one of the major themes in WOT seems to be pre-destination as opposed to choice... I dont recall the DF in first book and the relation to escape from Amadicia..sorry. I will stress again, simple themes and simple language , simple characters and simple aspirations (read cardboard) can all work well and be used for a good story...waffling and filling pages up with descriptions of trees, branches, wildlife, skirts,dresses, necklines sniffs, tugs, Lan's stony face again and again does little to further the cause of a good story , infact it can get quite infuriating that the author feels his target audience is so dumb that they cannot even retain basic knowledge of characters , what they look like and their habits. I will leave aside other glaring holes in the storyline as this is not the forum for it..some peopel just find it difficult to understand that the series could easily do without at least 3 books so far if it had been edited properly without detracting from any of the major plot lines...I wont even go into things like Fail's anti-climatic built up for nothing and stretched beyond belief kidnapping and rescue, mat's extended courtship of Tuon which had just got annoying and predictable, Egwene's war etc etc..RJ did it for the $$$ but that is just my take on it

[Cougar]

I doubt Jordan extended the series for the cash. I think that he just lost his way once he realised he didn't really need to keep people interested to sell the books, at the point where he realised 100s of 1000s of people would buy anything he put out then I think he started to indulge himself a little too much. As for the charge of repetition I'd agree to a certain extent; Jordan started to remind me a bit of Paul McCartney playing bass, bare with me. As a bassist McCartney came up with several good riffs, runs and styles which he used succesfully in the Beatles early music, spurred on by the praise and success he then recycled these runs and techniques ad naeseum for the next 30 years, Jordan is a bit like this, he found things he was good at and then overused them. As a storyteller he is brilliant, as acharacter builder merely adequate but his writting is stylistically limited. I still love his stuff though.

[teholbeddict]

I thought The Wanderer's Tale by David Bilsborouhg was particularly awful. I would also add Eddings to my list and some of the later books of the WoT series.

[frookenhauer]

Cougar, on Oct 24 2008, 07:47 PM, said:

I doubt Jordan extended the series for the cash. I think that he just lost his way once he realised he didn't really need to keep people interested to sell the books, at the point where he realised 100s of 1000s of people would buy anything he put out then I think he started to indulge himself a little too much. As for the charge of repetition I'd agree to a certain extent; Jordan started to remind me a bit of Paul McCartney playing bass, bare with me. As a bassist McCartney came up with several good riffs, runs and styles which he used succesfully in the Beatles early music, spurred on by the praise and success he then recycled these runs and techniques ad naeseum for the next 30 years, Jordan is a bit like this, he found things he was good at and then overused them. As a storyteller he is brilliant, as acharacter builder merely adequate but his writting is stylistically limited. I still love his stuff though.

That's a very cynical statement and I'm not sure I agree Coog. I don't think he just banged em out just because he could and just because we'd lap them up...via second hand bookshops in my case, but thats beside the point. I think that the series was his Magnum Opus and he loved it and kept adding to it and eventually the story took control, well something did, cos there were too many threads that needed nailing down. I started to get worried after Lord of Chaos and thought, flipping heck 10 books just aint going to be enough and he's going to need more than banefire and a couple of sangreal to rub together. And the last major thing I could remember is somebody trying to get Matt to figure out cannons. I swear I must have torn out hair or something...Shortly after that point I put his books down and swore not to read em until he finished the sodding things. Anyway, I don't reckon it was him not giving a shit, its more likely a simple case of the story got too big for him...possibly.

This post has been edited by frookenhauer: 25 October 2008 - 01:58 AM

[Werthead]

iscariot, on Oct 21 2008, 10:28 PM, said:

Jordan's a much easier read though, which would account for the larger fan-base..nand there is an argument (not one I would consider valid, mind) that espouses simple English as superior to more complex locutions. Readibiliy does presuppose greater popularity - I've never actually seen a <15 teenager reading Erikson, which is Fantasy's entry point...

This is a good point. If you want your series to be a huge success, you need to capture the reader within, say, the first 100 pages of Book 1 at the most, and RJ successfully pulled that off. Erikson didn't.

What is quite interesting is Erikson's reaction to that. In some interviews he seems to sigh and suggest he'd totally restructure the opening of GotM to make it easier on the new reader if he could, but then in the next interview he'll be saying, "BRING IT ON!" and suggest that he only wants totally hardcore fans anyway. I put this down to the typical indecision of someone who wants to make a living off their writing but simultaneously feels they don't want to be dumbing anything down to appeal to Mr. L. Com. Denominator of Hicksville, Alabama.

I've seen it suggested that Erikson only works if you have a pre-existing knowledge of the fantasy genre, and broadly speaking teenagers new to the genre wouldn't quite pick up on things as fast as those already grounded in the genre, which by definition would limit his audience. Of course, I know of so many exceptions to this that I'm not sure it holds up at all.

[Shadowthrone]

Honestly out of all the fantasy I have ready I would have to say the first book in the WOT series (Eye of the World) was without a doubt the most unoriginal, boring book I have ever read. I can't speak of the rest of the series cause I haven't read them but that first book was bloody awful.

[Scifreak]

Nah I liked the WOT stuff, and was gutted when Jordan died. I just pray that they don't bring some hack like Kevin J Anderson in to finish it off

[Werthead]

It's being finished by Brandon Sanderson, who's just finished his Mistborn Trilogy, which has been very well-received. The book is due out in October 2009.

[Coin Bearer]

Where is that information? At the time Jordan died it was reported that the series would be finished by Piers Anthony, who claimed that Jordan had been preparing him for two years through daily discussions. Did Harriet (Mrs Jordan) make a switch or what?