Moments when a piece of entertainment completely lost you.

[Username17]

Blade Runner 2049 is ridiculously self indulgent. While I'm not sure what I would want to cut and all the scenes I can think of are appropriately noir, the movie is simply too long by a substantial margin. The movie is a beautiful piece of work, but someone needed to callously slash beautiful things out of it until it got down to two hours. There just isn't enough story to justify a 2 hour and 44 minute runtime.

-Username17

[angelfromanotherpin]

I am in a place of deep frustration when it comes to finding new fantasy books to read. In particular, when I go looking for recommendations, I get lists of things that are bad.

Every list has The Name of the Wind on it, usually highly ranked. I have no fucking clue why anyone thinks that book is better than mediocre. It does some limited exploration of how legends grow out of events that were mostly accidents and fuck-ups, which is kind of interesting. Otherwise it spends five hundred pages to retread the first fifty pages of A Wizard of Earthsea, and it does so in prose that is embarrassing to read. The sequel is substantially worse.

Most lists also include The Way of Kings. This is the best example of a recurring problem where authors somehow forget to include a story. I have a rule: if I get a hundred pages into a book and have no idea what the plot even is, that book is a piece of shit. I have this rule because of The Way of Kings, which I read for 300 pages before I quit. I have been told that it comes together on about page 750, but I will never find out if that's true. If it takes someone longer than the Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers put together before they explain the whole Sauron problem, I have no faith that they won't commit other baffling failures of basic shit.

Other ubiquitous recommendations that failed the hundred-page test include The Lies of Locke Lamora and The Gardens of the Moon.

Storm Front, first book of the Dresden Files, was at least competently structured and relatively compact, but was also just relentlessly misogynistic. I finished it, but I regret doing so.

[Kaelik]

I mean, I guess it's time to admit that you hate every single thing about the structure of fantasy writing as it is written?

I mean, I can't think of any fantasy books written recently that don't involve setting up the world and characters for many many chapters without revealing a the major final plot twist. I guess if you want the Act III twist in the first 100 pages you are going to have a hard time reading fantasy books longer than 150 pages because fantasy is pretty formulaic on story structure, focusing on using the world to present novel things to characters.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I'm amazed you're willing to pretend to be that dense. The actual thing I used as an example of what I wanted was 'explain the Sauron problem,' a thing that happens in the first 60 pages of Fellowship and is not the Act III twist but simply establishing the premise. That those two things appear to be the same thing in The Way of Kings is bullshit. Expecting people to read a prologue that is two fucking novels long is insane.

[SlyJohnny]

Name of the Wind was good. Kind of unlikeable protagonist based on/named after the author's teenage D&D character, but pretty readable despite that. The sequel seems to have a really irregular format rather than a narrative progression, is long in places, but mostly just feels so cringe the whole time, with the lesbian ninjas et al.

[Kaelik]

I'm amazed you're willing to pretend to be that dense. The actual thing I used as an example of what I wanted was 'explain the Sauron problem,' a thing that happens in the first 60 pages of Fellowship and is not the Act III twist but simply establishing the premise. That those two things appear to be the same thing in The Way of Kings is bullshit. Expecting people to read a prologue that is two fucking novels long is insane.

I mean, it's clear that you just aren't okay with there being a character focused plot that leads to some late stage reveal. Hey, sorry, sucks for you that you can't enjoy books which build a world while focusing on a characters immediate motivations until they discover a plot twist later on. But that's what fantasy books LOOK like.

When you read N.K Jemison you are going to find that there will be a prologue with a vague allusion to a monumental event and past you won't understand until much later, then the main character is going to be placed in a new situation they aren't used to so they can investigate it with the reader, and then you are going to get some flash backs that reveal more information, then you are going to 2/3rds of the way into the book you are going to discover at the same time as the main character the plot twist that produces a big change in the protagonists goals which used to be focused on something completely different, but are now changed because of this new information. And you aren't going to get that early info in the first 60 pages, because N.K. Jeminson is a fantasy author who has written books in the last 20 years and all fantasy books follow this pattern.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I mean, it's clear that you just aren't okay with there being a character focused plot that leads to some late stage reveal. Hey, sorry, sucks for you that you can't enjoy books which build a world while focusing on a characters immediate motivations until they discover a plot twist later on. But that's what fantasy books LOOK like.

It's what a lot of non-fantasy books look like too. And because I apparently have to repeat myself: I don't have a problem with that structure. I have a problem with stories that either don't have a premise, or withhold the premise like it was meant to be a twist.

If you don't know the difference between a premise and a twist, there's still time to learn.

When you read N.K Jemison...

Both N.K. Jemisin books I have read established their premises immediately and were quite enjoyable. And the same is true for most of the fantasy books I've read that were written in the last 20 years. Because it's basic shit and most writers do it without even meaning to.

[John Magnum]

The Stormlight Archive genuinely takes a tremendously long time to get rolling. Normally Brandon Sanderson is a lot better about being punchy, but with The Way of Kings he simply isn't. At all. Multiple kilopage bricks of prologue is basically accurate. I happened to end up liking it, but someone reacting to the completely accurate assessment that Way of Kings doesn't even begin to pick up for hundreds of pages by checking out immediately is super reasonable.

[Kaelik]

If you don't know the difference between a premise and a twist, there's still time to learn.

When you read N.K Jemison...

Both N.K. Jemisin books I have read established their premises immediately and were quite enjoyable. And the same is true for most of the fantasy books I've read that were written in the last 20 years. Because it's basic shit and most writers do it without even meaning to.

Then I guess the problem is you are full of shit? Because the premise of Lies of Lock Lamora is pretty fucking apparent right away, so I guess you are just dumb as bricks? I think you just have internal sort that causes you to discard any premise you don't like without acknowledging it.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Then I guess the problem is you are full of shit? Because the premise of Lies of Lock Lamora is pretty fucking apparent right away, so I guess you are just dumb as bricks? I think you just have internal sort that causes you to discard any premise you don't like without acknowledging it.

Tell me what you think the premise is.

[Whatever]

Tell me what you think the premise is.

Once you get past the 40 page prologue of not-so-tragic backstory, chapter one opens with this:

Locke Lamora's rule of thumb was this: a good confidence game took three months to plan, three weeks to rehearse, and three seconds to win or lose the victim's trust forever.

[angelfromanotherpin]

In general, the dramatic premise is the state of affairs that drives the central action of the story. Usually, it's the answer to the question 'what's this story about?' and you get an answer like 'kids are taken from their homes and forced to be fight to the death,' or 'there's an enslaved god who wants to die,' or 'two guys try to make the biggest possible broadway failure.'

The central action of the Lies of Locke Lamora appears to be the conflict between the Gentleman Bastards and the Grey King, and you don't even hear about the Grey King until after page 100, let alone have a conflict established with him.

The problem with 'we are con men' being the premise is that it doesn't drive anything. It is the GB's status quo comfort zone. The Salvara scam is apparently an act of choice, and the consequences for ghosting on it appear to be nil. If there was a sense of something like 'we need an unreasonably sized pile of cash by [some deadline] or [undesirable thing] will happen,' that would be an intriguing premise and I would have kept reading. But I'm not given any reason to care about the cons, the success or failure of which will impact the GB's lives very little because they're already sitting on a pile of cash they aren't spending.

The closest thing to a proper premise that shows up before page 100 is the death offering thing on page 89, but that also has no sense of urgency to it. That would actually do very well for a 'we need an unreasonably sized pile of cash...' conflict, like if Chains put in his will that Locke had until X years after Chains' death to finish his offerings or the death-mark would be called in. But 11 pages later, nothing like that had materialized, so away it went.

[Thaluikhain]

I am in a place of deep frustration when it comes to finding new fantasy books to read. In particular, when I go looking for recommendations, I get lists of things that are bad.

Well, what other fantasy books have you read, which did you like or not like and why?

I've been reading a lot of YA fantasy and/or urban fantasy recently, but don't know if that's your thing.

[Chamomile]

A properly paced story should not take more than 10% or so of its length to reach its inciting incident, the thing which sets the central conflict into motion. There are occasionally stories that buck these kinds of guidelines and make it work, but odds are the entire fantasy genre is not incessantly pumping out No Country For Old Men style stories that rely on defiance of convention to work.

[Whatever]

But I'm not given any reason to care about the cons, the success or failure of which will impact the GB's lives very little because they're already sitting on a pile of cash they aren't spending.

Them not needing the money is the whole point. It's that stupid batman quote, word for word.

In a city where there's a covert agreement between the criminal underworld and the nobility to leave each other alone and focus on taking money from the common people, they're deliberately scamming nobles. That would get them killed not only by the people they're targeting, but also by the crime boss they answer to. That's the obligation Chains put on them when he died, not some silly "steal X gold pieces in Y months" artificial deadline.

[angelfromanotherpin]

In a city where there's a covert agreement between the criminal underworld and the nobility to leave each other alone and focus on taking money from the common people, they're deliberately scamming nobles. That would get them killed not only by the people they're targeting, but also by the crime boss they answer to. That's the obligation Chains put on them when he died, not some silly "steal X gold pieces in Y months" artificial deadline.

Sure, but if nothing happens if they don't do the scam, and nothing happens if they call off the scam before the mark figures it out, then there's nothing driving the action. If the scam cold failed and they were then being hunted by every watchman and bounty-chaser in the city and had to figure out how to get the heat off, that would count. I'd stick around for that story if it was set up in 100 pages or less.

[Kaelik]

In a city where there's a covert agreement between the criminal underworld and the nobility to leave each other alone and focus on taking money from the common people, they're deliberately scamming nobles. That would get them killed not only by the people they're targeting, but also by the crime boss they answer to. That's the obligation Chains put on them when he died, not some silly "steal X gold pieces in Y months" artificial deadline.

Sure, but if nothing happens if they don't do the scam, and nothing happens if they call off the scam before the mark figures it out, then there's nothing driving the action. If the scam cold failed and they were then being hunted by every watchman and bounty-chaser in the city and had to figure out how to get the heat off, that would count. I'd stick around for that story if it was set up in 100 pages or less.

So basically if the character has a motivation and a goal, that doesn't count and is stupid, but if the Character has a motivation and goal that you personally think is sufficiently important, that counts and is good.

[angelfromanotherpin]

So basically if the character has a motivation and a goal, that doesn't count and is stupid, but if the Character has a motivation and goal that you personally think is sufficiently important, that counts and is good.

Yes, all the things I said about conflict and external pressure and consequences and such were just meaningless window dressing. Well-read and well-comprehended, and not at all your usual disingenuous deliberate misrepresentation of other people's positions.

Also, I'm putting you on ignore for no reason.

[Kaelik]

So basically if the character has a motivation and a goal, that doesn't count and is stupid, but if the Character has a motivation and goal that you personally think is sufficiently important, that counts and is good.

Yes, all the things I said about conflict and external pressure and consequences and such were just meaningless window dressing. Well-read and well-comprehended, and not at all your usual disingenuous deliberate misrepresentation of other people's positions.

In a city where there's a covert agreement between the criminal underworld and the nobility to leave each other alone and focus on taking money from the common people, they're deliberately scamming nobles. That would get them killed not only by the people they're targeting, but also by the crime boss they answer to. That's the obligation Chains put on them when he died, not some silly "steal X gold pieces in Y months" artificial deadline.

Hmmm, sounds pretty conflict external pressure and consequences to me.

I'm glad you still haven't realized that your dismissing premises because you don't like them not because they don't exist. It definitely makes this less boring to see you digging that grave.

[SeekritLurker]

I am in a place of deep frustration when it comes to finding new fantasy books to read. In particular, when I go looking for recommendations, I get lists of things that are bad.

Every list has The Name of the Wind on it, usually highly ranked. I have no fucking clue why anyone thinks that book is better than mediocre. It does some limited exploration of how legends grow out of events that were mostly accidents and fuck-ups, which is kind of interesting. Otherwise it spends five hundred pages to retread the first fifty pages of A Wizard of Earthsea, and it does so in prose that is embarrassing to read. The sequel is substantially worse.

Most lists also include The Way of Kings. This is the best example of a recurring problem where authors somehow forget to include a story. I have a rule: if I get a hundred pages into a book and have no idea what the plot even is, that book is a piece of shit. I have this rule because of The Way of Kings, which I read for 300 pages before I quit. I have been told that it comes together on about page 750, but I will never find out if that's true. If it takes someone longer than the Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers put together before they explain the whole Sauron problem, I have no faith that they won't commit other baffling failures of basic shit.

Other ubiquitous recommendations that failed the hundred-page test include The Lies of Locke Lamora and The Gardens of the Moon.

Storm Front, first book of the Dresden Files, was at least competently structured and relatively compact, but was also just relentlessly misogynistic. I finished it, but I regret doing so.

With you quite a bit on this. When I read Name of the Wind, it burned me on reading anything even vaguely in the fantasy genre for years, it was so bad. And Gardens of the Moon was one of those books I never even got close to finishing - the long chapter about the exacting measurements for the refrigerator that a random peasant girl was going to be put in for the purpose of creating some sort of terrible possessed monster was not to my taste at all.

Set out your premise early, even if you are going to throw a twist or subversion later. Consider, if you will, Mistborn. Yes, it changes, but it starts with "We are going to do a heist to kill the immortal emperor," which is a strong pitch and I was in for the long haul.

Consider also - the mainline Elric saga, huge and multiversal, runs shorter than a single volume in the Wheel of Time.

[DSMatticus]

Lord of the Rings is a goddamn tome and doesn't really stop introducing new developments/sub-conflicts at any point, but the opening is just straight up "this is the shire, this is Gandalf, Gandalf visits the shire and figures out that shit may be fucked." It does not dick around getting to the fact that you are dealing with an unlikely hero who has stumbled upon the dark lord's dread MacGuffin. And let's be real, Tolkein vomits words. He was not a man who concerned himself with brevity. If he felt like writing pages and pages about how elves arranged the silverware at their dinner tables, then fuck you he was going to write pages and pages about how elves arranged the silverware at their dinner tables also here's a poem about it yes that's right I wrote a poem about how elves arrange silverware at their dinner tables I'm fucking insane.

But you can write stories that just kind of piss about and do nothing for awhile. You can write stories that piss about the entire time. Honestly, you would be hard-pressed to draw a through line for many modern television shows that touched more than 10% of the content. The common elements are the characters and the setting, but almost every episode is a new conflict with its own stakes, and then you throw in a couple big episodes here and there that change those stakes and then promptly forget them (because you wrote yourself into a corner) or adjust direction as necessary. Things like Game of Thrones and Stranger things are the exception, not the rule. In the past we called shit like that a 'mini-series' and producers hated them because expecting the audience to catch every episode every week to stay on top of the story was absurd - television does not work that way.

Anyway, my point is you don't have to hate stories that piss about doing nothing. There's a fuckton of hugely popular and culturally significant stories that piss about doing nothing 90% of the time. It is actually super fucking weird to observe that a story pisses about doing nothing and declare that a "baffling failure of basic shit." You are either a space alien, a bitter curmudgeon, or perhaps you just haven't tested that thought against other mediums to see if it's a True Thing about storytelling or just a thing you're not used to seeing in book form specifically. But it's also super fucking weird to look at something like The Way of Kings and declare it gets to the point relatively quickly. Hahaha no it absolutely does not.

[Mord]

I am in a place of deep frustration when it comes to finding new fantasy books to read. In particular, when I go looking for recommendations, I get lists of things that are bad.

Every list has The Name of the Wind on it, usually highly ranked. I have no fucking clue why anyone thinks that book is better than mediocre. It does some limited exploration of how legends grow out of events that were mostly accidents and fuck-ups, which is kind of interesting. Otherwise it spends five hundred pages to retread the first fifty pages of A Wizard of Earthsea, and it does so in prose that is embarrassing to read. The sequel is substantially worse.

Preach. I read a library copy of Name of the Wind and bought my own copy of Wise Man's Fear at a signing, but I never actually read WMF because it's such a goddamn shelfbreaker that just looking at it makes me tired. Compounding the issue is that within a year or two of WMF coming out, it became clear to me that Rothfuss is never ever ever going to finish the series, so there is no point to continuing.

I heard about the sexy ninjas later through Penny Arcade and I was kind of stunned that something so puerile would be part of the story. NOTW seemed like it was telling a story that was a little more mature than that, or if not mature, at least more tasteful. Maybe I'm not giving Rothfuss enough credit and they're really well-realized sex ninjas?

Most lists also include The Way of Kings. This is the best example of a recurring problem where authors somehow forget to include a story. I have a rule: if I get a hundred pages into a book and have no idea what the plot even is, that book is a piece of shit. I have this rule because of The Way of Kings, which I read for 300 pages before I quit. I have been told that it comes together on about page 750, but I will never find out if that's true. If it takes someone longer than the Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers put together before they explain the whole Sauron problem, I have no faith that they won't commit other baffling failures of basic shit.

Other ubiquitous recommendations that failed the hundred-page test include The Lies of Locke Lamora and The Gardens of the Moon.

Funny you should mention Malazan as well. A friend of mine fell into Malazan in a big way and became an absolute devotee; after over a year of reading he recently finished the main series, which is ~3,325,000 words (11,216 pages) long. By way of comparison, Tolkien did Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in 576,459 words. I don't think it's possible to justify a level of long-winded extravagance that beats LOTR six times over. Basically, if you can't say what you have to say in less than 2,000 pages, I don't fucking care what you have to say.

Storm Front, first book of the Dresden Files, was at least competently structured and relatively compact, but was also just relentlessly misogynistic. I finished it, but I regret doing so.

Oh my god it gets so much worse. For the first couple of books I was able to ignore the misogyny (partially accepting it as genre convention, partially deliberately ignoring it until it faded into the background radiation), but there's a particular tipping point at the end of Proven Guilty at which I was absolutely dumbstruck by how fucking creepy Jim Butcher must have been as a human being to write the stuff he did and frankly mortified to be reading it. Full disclosure, I did keep on with the series, because: 1) I was already 8 books in, 2) the creepiness factor never again reached those same heights and declined quite a bit as the series progressed, and 3) it's pretty good as pulpy urban fantasy.

Butcher himself has sort of acknowledged the issue in interviews; I recall that he has stated that the fact that Harry Dresden ogles every woman he meets and universally describes all of them as bombshell sex objects is actually a character flaw on Harry's part that is setup for an eventual payoff. Harry is definitely an unreliable narrator whose perspective colors the exposition he delivers, sure, but I still think that's a weasel excuse because Butcher still wrote his female characters as behaving in an exaggerated and unrealistically sexualized manner that can't be explained as "Harry's boner doing the typing." In fairness, I think Butcher has actually learned from the criticisms he's received, because as the series goes on Harry's narration becomes much more self-aware and he dials the sexism down considerably, while at the same time, the women being narrated get written more like people.

[Maj]

I'm putting this in the rocks thread because it is better than it sucks...

The Discovery Channel has a reality show called "Undercover Billionaire." The premise of the show is interesting: billionaire goes undercover as a newb in order to start a million dollar business with nothing in 90 days. The premise actually says dude will start with $100.

I don't know how much help the guy is getting behind the scenes. And the premise has already been shown to be false because dude has started with privileges that aren't mentioned, but are included. He has a pick-up truck. He has a warm coat. He has a smart phone. He has clean clothes. Dude has a camera crew that follows him around. Those things are worth more than the initial premise of $100.

I'm hoping to learn some stuff, though. And it's nice to see a rich dude getting some empathy for people in a soup kitchen.

Yeah. I didn't make it through the second episode. Dude seriously thought that he could mimic the broke life by having a camera crew follow him around. And he gets sick, so he just waltzes off to the ER. Yeah. No.

I felt like he was conning people in the second episode, so I never finished it. And if that means I can't ever be a millionaire, so be it.

[Kaelik]

I'm putting this in the rocks thread because it is better than it sucks...

The Discovery Channel has a reality show called "Undercover Billionaire." The premise of the show is interesting: billionaire goes undercover as a newb in order to start a million dollar business with nothing in 90 days. The premise actually says dude will start with $100.

I don't know how much help the guy is getting behind the scenes. And the premise has already been shown to be false because dude has started with privileges that aren't mentioned, but are included. He has a pick-up truck. He has a warm coat. He has a smart phone. He has clean clothes. Dude has a camera crew that follows him around. Those things are worth more than the initial premise of $100.

I'm hoping to learn some stuff, though. And it's nice to see a rich dude getting some empathy for people in a soup kitchen.

Yeah. I didn't make it through the second episode. Dude seriously thought that he could mimic the broke life by having a camera crew follow him around. And he gets sick, so he just waltzes off to the ER. Yeah. No.

I felt like he was conning people in the second episode, so I never finished it. And if that means I can't ever be a millionaire, so be it.

Here's a summary of the entire show and how he starts a "million dollar" business:

1) Spends a few days doing weird shit like flipping St. Patricks Day merchandise just to get the basic money to live.
2) On his second day searching junkyards suddenly mysteriously stumbles across a bunch of tractor tires just lying around which he sells for 2k, boy this sure is a sustainable strategy to escape poverty that everyone can use.
3) Buys a car from a used car dealer and flips it.
4) Does that again.
5) Takes 5k and uses it as a DOWN PAYMENT on a house which he buys with the intention of flipping. HOW DOES HE GET A LOAN WITH NO INCOME? (he obviously gives them his real actual assets not his fake poor person persona assets so this is the first step where there is a 100% that if you are actually poor and not just pretending you can't do this).

This part cannot be emphasized enough, if you try to get a mortgage to buy a house based on your "income" of finding tractor tires and flipping cars you will be told to get the FUCK out of the bank right the FUCK now.

6) Convinces a woman with Interior Design experience to work for him for free to fix the house and flip it with no commission and no payment for her labor of any kind. She also does all the actual work of fixing it, and also all the work of marketing and SELLING it because he is too busy on step 7.
7) Convinces her and SEVERAL OTHER PEOPLE, I'm not kidding, there are like 10 fucking people here, to start working for him for zero dollars in pay and no ownership stake in the business while he opens a restaurant.
8) Uses the proceeds from the house sale to rent a location and start setting it up for the restaurant. The person who does interior design continues to volunteer her time to make the restuarant look nice, a welder is making custom grill shit for him FOR FREE. A bunch of other people cooks and stuff, volunteer to again, without pay, operate a booth at RibFest in order to promote the newly opening restaurant.
9) The restaurant opens, again, I cannot stress this enough, literally zero employees are being paid a WAGE and none of them are being given an ownership stake either.
10) Some assessor comes in and says "well based on your opening day profits I apply a multiplier and decide this business is worth between half a million and a million dollars."

Epilogue: He offers COMICALLY small ownership shares to the people who did all the actual work while he stood around and he maintains an 80% share. He offers the manager position to the interior design lady who says "nah, I literally could have that job at a restaurant before I left restaurants and took up interior design because I don't WANT that job."

To be fair, he also tosses around huge piles of cash because he can because he is a BILLIONAIRE but that comes from his like, fucking oil ownership shit or whatever.

Postscript: Even if they didn't cheat with the tractor tires, they DEFINITELY cheated with selling a house to get from 5k to 30k. And even without cheating by using his previous billions which he definitely did do, in the end his great capitalist genius idea is the same one all capitalists always use, exploit a bunch of workers who do all the work and who you don't pay enough, the only difference is he skipped the step of being Rich so you have the money so you can pay them 1/10th of what they are worth and just paid them ZERO FUCKING DOLLARS for their work instead.

[Maj]

Thank you for that summation. I appreciate knowing that he was just conning people.

Side Note: When I went to look up the ratings for this show to see how it did, I found an article on Forbes discussing how the show wasn't real... Because the dude isn't actually a billionaire.

*sigh*

Glad I didn't stick with it.