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whats your favourite piece of fiction (hexbear.net)

submitted 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

I don't want to directly reply to the people who liked Kingkiller Chronicles because A.) they called out the bad stuff and B.) everyone's allowed to have problematic favs and I don't want to attack them for liking a book I don't because that's the pettiest nerd shit ever, but I am going to post thing complaining about it because I am also a weird pedantic loser.

Ugh, I hate those books. Mostly because I was promised "the best Fantasy since X GREAT BOOK" and then it was an overwritten piece of cringe, bad fanfic level plot and characters and story. I'll admit Rothfuss's prose is better than most fanfic by dint of complexity, but that same complexity is all flash with no substance. It's not great prose in the way of either Hemingway or Faulkner, more like it's interesting prose because most people are too self-conscious when writing to purposely do something so bad and so long-winded.

Also, like, I hate to admit it but I was in love with Name of the Wind for like a week. I tore through four-hundred pages while thinking "oh, it's his first book, everyone says it's great, I'm sure it'll get good just around the corner." I could see Rothfuss was setting up a grand deconstruction of a bunch of the great Fantasy books that came before him and I was there for it.

Then there's an especially cringe scene where the Main Character has his instrument broken by a rival during a performance, but he plays on anyway and makes everyone in the room, from young women to old jaded performers, cry their eyes out, and it was the most overwritten, silly scene in the book yet, and I realized it was never going to get better, that I'd been given a false bill of sale. So that week of goodwill turned to bitterness and I've never been able to let it go.

Also also, I watched a bunch of interviews and panels with Patrick Rothfuss, and based on those I do not like the man. He'll go on long rants about feminism and combating misogyny and how I think he headed some sort of feminist discussion group at the college he teached at, meanwhile the man's books are dripping with Ready Player One levels of nerd misogyny and I refuse to believe that's intentional on his part. He really strikes me as a false ally, he oozes that "guy who thinks he's a feminist but lacks the self-awareness to examine his own views or behavior" energy. I know some of the examples of misogyny in the book are intentional on his part, but it's too pervasive to be all of them. He's not Nabokov.

And he talked over Robin Hobb on a panel at some con. Robin fucking Hobb.

Anyway my favorite book is the A Song of Ice and Fire series by George Martin. Whaddya mean I'm a hypocrite? No, every bad thing in ASOIAF is intentional on Martin's part, he has no unconscious biases and is actually a perfect writer. Especially all the child rape. Definitely. (Actually I think Martin gets a lot of unfair criticism from performatively woke Twitter people, but he gets a lot of fair criticism too. Like, I think the criticism of there being too much rape is a bit rich when 1/6 of women in modern America are raped, but I agree with critics who say that if you're going to have women raped in the name of grittiness you shouldn't shy away from the fact that dudes have been raping dudes for all history as well. The sexual violence is gendered in a way that probably doesn't reflect the reality of a period of post-failed-state chaos)

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago* (last edited 4 years ago) (1 children)

And I forgot to mention that Martin's construction of highly racially divided societies is painfully outdated. Maybe you could find pseudo-ethnostates in the pre-modern world, but any major trade route or port city would have a much more diverse range of people. I suppose it's kinda convenient that Westeros, the place with all the white people, is the most powerful nation in that world, while the continent with all the brown people is mostly made up of disparate city-states and warlike savages. Fans argue that since we're seeing those cultures from the eyes of white people we aren't getting the full story, giving Martin the benefit of doubt, but if that's the case it probably should be made a little more explicit in the text. And in the War of the Roses time period Martin is most directly inspired by, Europe was a balkanized backwater while the Islamic world was a cultural powerhouse and China was already a thousand year-old empire and I'm sure other peoples were also very impressive compared to Europe but I'm unfamiliar with their histories. But, it could be argued that Martin is commenting on the modern White Supremacist state of the American Empire moreso than any obtuse point about Europe in the Middle Ages so I'm not sure how to feel about that particular point.

Fuck I'm such a nerd. Read theory you dumb bitch. GRRM literally doesn't matter.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 years ago (1 children)

My real favorite book is Caliban and the Witch. Which I haven't read, but seems like the sort of thing I ought to like.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It is a good book, but it is better to not have read it, as you can project more onto it from yourself and less experience what it is about.

In terms of Rothfuss / King Killer,

Also, like, I hate to admit it but I was in love with Name of the Wind for like a week. I tore through four-hundred pages while thinking "oh, it's his first book, everyone says it's great, I'm sure it'll get good just around the corner." I could see Rothfuss was setting up a grand deconstruction of a bunch of the great Fantasy books that came before him and I was there for it.

Is something that I shared, too. But then I gave up after the not ideal writing of women and power fantasy trips that are happening and enjoyed it as Isekai light anime in which I don't take stuff serious. Did help the vibe quite a bit. Of course the exterior - the tavern and such - are a different vibe. There are also slight elements of a weird early 2000s progressive homophobia or trans phobia to be found at some edges.

Some phrases of the books are quite nice though and the description of scenes does paint a picture and feels somewhat like an old TTRPG group you are sitting with on a table.