CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

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Mongrel
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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby Mongrel » Thu Mar 29, 2018 11:01 am

Lord of the Rings or Games of Cones?
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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby Friday » Thu Mar 29, 2018 12:18 pm

Silversong wrote:I really, really enjoyed the books, when I read them 13 years ago. It sounds like your problem is that you Read the Comments.


Oh, you're 100% correct. I love both series. There's nothing wrong with either style. Tolkien spends a lot of time writing about trees and Martin spends a lot of time writing about food.

(Seriously, so much time writing about food.)

("The juice/grease/oil ran down his/her chin" is written like 10 times per book)

(Also he overuses "there was a sickening crunch" whenever anyone gets hit in the head/face)

(I'd say Martin has a better grasp on dialog and a worse grasp on non-dialog writing, and Tolkien the reverse)

(I'd also say that Martin has a better grasp on that leg of juicy mutton heyoooooooooooooooooooooooo)
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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby Friday » Thu Mar 29, 2018 12:31 pm

<@Silversong> I swear I never ran around breaking stuff when I was little
<@Silversong> I just walked up to strangers and demanded they pick me up
<@Cait> Or else you'd break things
<Sede> my bro's little boys are always asking me to pick them up. but i'm like nah, cuz, find someone else to drop you
<@Silversong> "hold me hold me" I would say, to whoever was behind us in line at the grocery
<@Romosome> silversong do you still do this
* @Romosome offers shoulder ride
<@Silversong> I haven't in a long time, but I guess I would?
<@Silversong> I knew a guy in college with broad shoulders, and I would sit on just one of them, like Vampire Princess Miyu, and he'd walk me across campus
<@Romosome> running around going "hold me hold me!" is super cute
<@Romosome> wait
<@Romosome> I just realized that either makes you an adorable little moffet, or Sheer Heart Attack
<@Silversong> it's probably cute for everybody except the parents, yeah
<@Friday> that is super adorbs silver
<JD> I would drop you
<@Romosome> see
<@Friday> when i was tiny child i would walk up to strangers at the market and ask them what they were buying
<@Friday> my mom talks about it
<@Friday> i'd point to things in their cart and ask what it is
<@Romosome> Friday that is super cute omg
<@Romosome> I would scream in horror at people who were smoking
<@Romosome> like when I was in kindergarten
<@Romosome> like
<@Friday> maybe you got someone to quit romo
<@Romosome> maybe!
<@Romosome> but get this
* @Friday gets romo
<@Romosome> okay so we like went to the donut shop
<@Friday> donut shop
<@Romosome> and there was a guy smoking in the donut shop
<@Friday> gross
<@Romosome> because a few decades ago people just fucking smoked everywhere even in COMMIEFORNIA
<@Friday> COMMIEFORNIA
<@Romosome> you know the commie state full of commies that started Ronald Reagan's fucking political career
<@Romosome> anyway
<@Romosome> so he's smoking in the donut shop
<@Romosome> and I see him and just immediately start screaming
<@Romosome> "STOP SMOKING! YOU'RE GONNA DIE!"
<@Romosome> at this total stranger
<@Romosome> like can you imagine
<@Romosome> you're just at the donut shop, having a smoke
<@Romosome> and this kid starts screaming at you that you're gonna die
<@Silversong> he had it coming
<JD> But it was the 80s so people were like, "heh smoking doesn't kill you"
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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby Mongrel » Thu Mar 29, 2018 12:43 pm

I thought they were saying that by the 80s?
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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby nosimpleway » Thu Mar 29, 2018 2:01 pm

When I was working at the preschool I ran into one of the kids attending said preschool, and she asked me to pick her up. Because I'd do that, at work.

I walked her back to her mother, whose face by this time had turned from Oh Shit My Daughter Ran Off to a mask of Who The Fuck I Will Cut You

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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby beatbandito » Thu Mar 29, 2018 3:11 pm

Actual footage of Silver as a child:


Instagram videos are way more frustrating to rip the webm URL from than tumblr.
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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby Büge » Thu Mar 29, 2018 6:07 pm

nosimpleway wrote:I walked her back to her mother, whose face by this time had turned from Oh Shit My Daughter Ran Off to a mask of Who The Fuck I Will Cut You


"Ma'am, I think you dropped this."
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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby Thad » Fri Mar 30, 2018 12:31 am

Friday wrote:<@Romosome> built up as a good guy, who we knew and trusted
<@Romosome> decided to betray them
<@Romosome> and then was fucking murdered like right there

wait are you comparing Boromir to a guy in Game of Thrones

i don't get it

Mongrel wrote:...I could probably rant for a long time about how Boomer and Gen X writers decided that what really made a story serious n' grown up n' stuff was lots and lots of indiscriminate killing and death, JUST LIKE REAL LIFE, MAN.

I think that's pretty fucking unfair to Martin.

While it's true that there's plenty of gratuitous sex and violence in ASoIaF*, it's the morality that sets it apart from Tolkien. Tolkien was writing both from a background of traditional mythology and a perspective that still believed there is such a thing as a just war. Martin put some dragons in the War of the Roses and then filtered it through the perspective of a guy who grew up watching body bags come back from Vietnam.

It's not that everybody is terrible. It's more that everybody is complicated. People can do horrifying things in one moment and heroic things in the next. Some people try to be better; some don't; most are the heroes of their own stories, and most have some kind of history that explains, at least somewhat, why they are the way they are. If Jaime Lannister seems irredeemable the first time you meet him, well, he probably is -- but that's because the notion of redemption is, itself, an absurd rationalization; doing good things doesn't make up for doing bad things.

I'll grant that there are fans and imitators who don't get all that nuance, who just see the sex and the violence. There are people who only get that part of Watchmen, too. There are people who see the dumb comedy in Beavis and Butt-Head and miss the sharp satire underneath it, and people who watch Rick and Morty and don't get that Rick is the bad guy.

But a shallow fanbase (or, in this case, a couple of pages of shallow critical blurbs) doesn't mean the work is shallow.

* totally a Boomer thing; you certainly wouldn't see anything like that from a fantasy author born in 1906 or 1939

beatbandito wrote:Tolkien? More like Keeps Talkin', where dem tiddies at? What does the R.R. stand for? That's right. George Tiddies Tiddies Martin.


wait but then what does the RR stand for in JRR Tolkien?

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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby Mongrel » Fri Mar 30, 2018 1:04 am

Nah, it's not really about gratuitous sex and violence; that's eternal and almost seems hardly worth noting unless the author actually seems to be entertaining some personal fetish of theirs.

I'm speaking of the more specific idea that the audience should be punished for getting attached to or even interested in characters, about authors with a compulsion to show that not only do heroes often fail and die (which is of course true and can often make for a great story or at least an interesting one) but that the world is such a horrible place where the just NEVER win, demonstrated by the author simply butchering anyone and everything willy-nilly.

It's this quasi-nihilistic overreaction to genre fiction supposedly having too many "happy endings" that I find irritating and immature.

Even most people I know who consider themselves big fans of GRRM's saga eventually reach a point where they're simply weary and numb to the whole thing "Okay George, we get it." and the end result is that they simply cease being attached to pretty much ANY of the characters.
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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby Friday » Fri Mar 30, 2018 11:00 am

Boromir isn't really like a typical "morally complex" GoT character. He's a proud dude who tries to do the right thing as he sees it (saving his city at any cost) and is tempted by power briefly, falls to it, then recovers and dies nobly.

Romo was incorrect to bring up the comparison in my opinion. Denethor and Gollum are better examples of morally complex characters in LotR.

Now, if you go into the Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin (incest!) and shit, Tolkien gets a lot darker, almost as dark as Martin. But the blurbs I was reading were only talking about LotR, so I didn't bring it up.

In any case, Tolkien is certainly a lot "cleaner" than Martin, and you'd have to be an idiot to think otherwise. But it has always annoyed me when people say that Tolkien is bereft of morality beyond Always Good and Always Evil.

RE: Martin butchery

This has also always annoyed me. People act like Martin kills every single good guy character, which is absurd. Brienne, Arya (as much as she's a "good guy" but she's loved by the fanbase), Tyrion, Jon Snow, Bran, Sansa, Dany.

Yeah, those people are all dead and don't have plot armor.

I will however immediately change my tune and hate Martin as a senseless butcher forever if Podrick dies
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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby beatbandito » Fri Mar 30, 2018 11:18 am

Thad wrote:
beatbandito wrote:Tolkien? More like Keeps Talkin', where dem tiddies at? What does the R.R. stand for? That's right. George Tiddies Tiddies Martin.


wait but then what does the RR stand for in JRR Tolkien?

It's not actually J R.R. it's Jr. Tiddies. He tries, but, well...
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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby Thad » Fri Mar 30, 2018 11:21 am

There is something to the point that after awhile you stop getting attached to new characters -- I'm still reading Walking Dead, but I haven't really grown attached to any character who's been introduced in the past 100 issues or so. I'd be bummed if Jesus died, but really nobody who's been introduced since; Negan has become a really interesting character, and Duchess is fun, but if they die next month I'll shrug.

There are plenty of late introductions in Ice and Fire who make no impact and then die.

On the other hand, the Sand Snakes are introduced pretty late, and they're pretty popular characters, so it's not really accurate to say that nobody cares about new characters after awhile.

There is an element of shock value to Ned's death and the Red Wedding. These things are plot twists. If you're not surprising your readers, you're probably not writing a very good novel.

(Not for nothin', there's an element of housecleaning in some of the mass deaths, too. Stephen King noted that the crucial moment in writing The Stand was when he realized he could resolve a lot of its complexity by simply killing off a good big chunk of the cast simultaneously.)

There are times when the books get pretty rough and hard to endure. But there's always a point to them. The Red Wedding isn't just shock value and housecleaning; it's a turning point in the war. And the chapters told from Reek's perspective are among the hardest to endure, but they serve a purpose too; they change how you feel about a character who's been pretty odious.

And, as Friday notes, there is plenty of plot armor to go 'round, and to pretend otherwise is just silly.

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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby beatbandito » Fri Mar 30, 2018 11:30 am

Friday wrote:This has also always annoyed me. People act like Martin kills every single good guy character, which is absurd. Brienne, Arya (as much as she's a "good guy" but she's loved by the fanbase), Tyrion, Jon Snow, Bran, Sansa, Dany.

The thing is, he doesn't let the Tolkien (get it? GET IT?) good guy characters live, they do go Boromir to survive.

Brienne: kills a morally ambiguous good guy we like, abandons knightly duties and a morally ambiguous bad guy we kind of like.

Arya: Literally becomes a trained killer then betrays and abandons her teachers to go on an assassination spree of pure vanity.

Tyrion: At his best, depending on your definition, is either doing things to help people, but most of those people are bad guys, or does very little except ask about castrated junk for the good guys.

Bran: Loses himself, becomes a plot point so it's hard to keep thinking of him as a character with morals.

Sansa: Gets herself lost in the game and starts making deals and betraying people, even if it is ultimately for what we consider the greater good.

Danny: Has never not killed and tortured pretty much indiscriminately in order to achieve her goals even if her stated goals, if not always the actual means or results, are probably the most pure of the series.

Jon Snow: Is a pure good guy, gets killed. New Jon Snow immediately hangs a child and learns to sacrifice (others) for his greater good. Also just generally makes bad decisions that lead to innocent deaths, but I don't think that's a moral choice.

So while I don't feel I necessarily know or care enough about details (especially Tolkien) to compare most of this, I do not believe Martin lets purely good characters live.

Edit: I didn't read Thad post before posting.
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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby Friday » Fri Mar 30, 2018 11:37 am

I agree that Martin murders naivete out of pretty much everyone, Sansa most of all.
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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby beatbandito » Fri Mar 30, 2018 12:20 pm

I think that's where people make the distinction between Martin and the fantasy they're used to. You might expect the little girl born of the most noble of the lords who decides she wants to train for combat and gets a charismatic, friendly and surprisingly capable tutor would come back from Braavos as the respected captain of a troop of righteous knights. Instead we see her shit life learning to be an assassin.

It's a little bit the lack of romanticism, and a little bit thinking bad things are more real because real life sucks so much, right? shut up mom! But "moral ambiguity" it is not.
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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby Mongrel » Fri Mar 30, 2018 2:49 pm

That's the thing. I know enough about the series to know what beat posted; that being "good" is some kind of punishable offence in Westeros. That even the few characters with plot armour out of a *very* large cast end up as either functional villains or at least rationalizing consequentialists. While I can stay attached to SOME characters like that (Tyrion is the easiest, really), but if you do it to every single one, it's clear that there's no point in investing anything into those characters.

I think that's an absolutely horrifying message for our age. Or any age, really. Of course lots of people contain a mixture of good and evil which many of us find hard to process, most people, really. But not EVERYONE.

It reminds me of an argument I had with a fellow over Blood Meridian. While I can concede the book is impressive in a purely prose sense, it's just so repellent there's no way I could ever enjoy it. People keep telling me that this is intentional and that the book is mean to bring the horror and hopelessness of "reality" to the reader, but I'm always screaming internally "DO YOU NOT READ THE NEWS?! HAVE YOU NEVER PICKED UP A HISTORY BOOK?! HAVE YOU NEVER LISTENED TO PEOPLE WHO'VE FLED REAL HORROR?! DO YOU EVEN GO OUTSIDE OR TALK TO ACTUAL HUMANS?!?!?!?".

I do not and will never need a book of fiction to tell me people are awful or conflicted or that the world is a terrible place, or - worse in my mind - that we should not grow attached to innocents or anyone who could be broadly defined as "genuinely good people", because they don't really exist.

"Evil always wins because good is dumb" is a joke, people. You're not actually supposed to take it at face value.

It's also why I appreciate Tolkien more. Because the core of the story, which is often overlooked, is that the heroes are profoundly ordinary people who learn through adversity to become heroes. They're not born as selfless paragons of virtue, or "chosen ones" (Bilbo is arguable there, but that's the Hobbit and not LotR) they're fat little ignorant bumpkins living a coddled life, who have to learn a lot, and quickly.
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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby Büge » Fri Mar 30, 2018 5:26 pm

I think that's why I found The Deed of Paksenarrion to be such a good fantasy series. It doesn't romanticize war or battle, and the world and characters feel real, but it's also got a core of nobility to it. The main character is idealistic, but also pragmatic. She does the work to achieve grace and become a hero.
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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby Thad » Fri Mar 30, 2018 7:55 pm

beatbandito wrote:
Friday wrote:This has also always annoyed me. People act like Martin kills every single good guy character, which is absurd. Brienne, Arya (as much as she's a "good guy" but she's loved by the fanbase), Tyrion, Jon Snow, Bran, Sansa, Dany.

The thing is, he doesn't let the Tolkien (get it? GET IT?) good guy characters live, they do go Boromir to survive.

Brienne: kills a morally ambiguous good guy we like, abandons knightly duties and a morally ambiguous bad guy we kind of like.

Arya: Literally becomes a trained killer then betrays and abandons her teachers to go on an assassination spree of pure vanity.

Tyrion: At his best, depending on your definition, is either doing things to help people, but most of those people are bad guys, or does very little except ask about castrated junk for the good guys.

Bran: Loses himself, becomes a plot point so it's hard to keep thinking of him as a character with morals.

Sansa: Gets herself lost in the game and starts making deals and betraying people, even if it is ultimately for what we consider the greater good.

Danny: Has never not killed and tortured pretty much indiscriminately in order to achieve her goals even if her stated goals, if not always the actual means or results, are probably the most pure of the series.

Jon Snow: Is a pure good guy, gets killed. New Jon Snow immediately hangs a child and learns to sacrifice (others) for his greater good. Also just generally makes bad decisions that lead to innocent deaths, but I don't think that's a moral choice.

So while I don't feel I necessarily know or care enough about details (especially Tolkien) to compare most of this, I do not believe Martin lets purely good characters live.

Edit: I didn't read Thad post before posting.

Nearly all of these examples are from the show and do not happen in the books.

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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby Thad » Fri Mar 30, 2018 8:07 pm

Mongrel wrote:That's the thing. I know enough about the series to know what beat posted; that being "good" is some kind of punishable offence in Westeros. That even the few characters with plot armour out of a *very* large cast end up as either functional villains or at least rationalizing consequentialists. While I can stay attached to SOME characters like that (Tyrion is the easiest, really), but if you do it to every single one, it's clear that there's no point in investing anything into those characters.

I think that's an absolutely horrifying message for our age. Or any age, really. Of course lots of people contain a mixture of good and evil which many of us find hard to process, most people, really. But not EVERYONE.

It reminds me of an argument I had with a fellow over Blood Meridian. While I can concede the book is impressive in a purely prose sense, it's just so repellent there's no way I could ever enjoy it. People keep telling me that this is intentional and that the book is mean to bring the horror and hopelessness of "reality" to the reader, but I'm always screaming internally "DO YOU NOT READ THE NEWS?! HAVE YOU NEVER PICKED UP A HISTORY BOOK?! HAVE YOU NEVER LISTENED TO PEOPLE WHO'VE FLED REAL HORROR?! DO YOU EVEN GO OUTSIDE OR TALK TO ACTUAL HUMANS?!?!?!?".

I do not and will never need a book of fiction to tell me people are awful or conflicted or that the world is a terrible place, or - worse in my mind - that we should not grow attached to innocents or anyone who could be broadly defined as "genuinely good people", because they don't really exist.

"Evil always wins because good is dumb" is a joke, people. You're not actually supposed to take it at face value.

It's also why I appreciate Tolkien more. Because the core of the story, which is often overlooked, is that the heroes are profoundly ordinary people who learn through adversity to become heroes. They're not born as selfless paragons of virtue, or "chosen ones" (Bilbo is arguable there, but that's the Hobbit and not LotR) they're fat little ignorant bumpkins living a coddled life, who have to learn a lot, and quickly.

You...DO realize that you were just scoffing about how "most Tolkien haters got about a chapter in (if that), complained that Hobbits were gay, and stopped there," and then immediately turned around and wrote an essay about the themes and messages of a series of books you've never read, right?

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Re: CHAT DUMP (and Quotes)

Postby beatbandito » Fri Mar 30, 2018 8:38 pm

Thad wrote:Nearly all of these examples are from the show and do not happen in the books.

Yeah we're talking about why most people say they like Martin's writing, and it's usually because of the show.
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