BioWare - The Greatest Shame of All

booboo said:

Ah, and there we have the usual defense of Eragon: "but he was a teenager when he wrote it". Sorry, that doesn't work for me - either a book is good (interesting, novel concepts/exposition, clever writing style - and you mentioned many of those) or it's not. Age is irrelevant. Eragon is the kind of book I would expect a 16 year old to write, if they had a decent command of english and the benefit of a good education (and wanted to have a pet dragon). If he had written a book like Joe Abercrombie's "The Blade Itself" *then* I would have been mightily impressed. Now, somone just needs to mention how wonderful Eragon is in my presence and a tic starts in my one eye...!

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Joe Abercrombie was a sight older than sixteen when he wrote it.

I dunno; I guess sniping at Paolini for Eragon just strikes me as too much like kicking a puppy. Sure, it wasn't a fantasy classic, but then what would you expect a sixteen-year-old homeschooler to write? There are some brilliant, exciting teenage musicians, and a few poets, but I honestly can't think of very many exciting, brilliant, teenage novelists. I've read a couple of novels written by people when they were about eighteen that weren't complete rubbish, but they were mostly novels about being a teenager. That's a bit different.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

I was taught that even "children books" can bind me to them meanwhile reading.

From then on, I've given up my bias and now look at "children books" differently.

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I've always loved good children's books. GOOD children's books. The trick with good children's books is that they're good enough to also appeal to adults, who will very likely find some twists in them that kids would miss. Take the Moomin books by Tove Jansson, for example. If you're a kid, they're funny and colorful and exciting fantasy stories and fairy tales; if you're an adult, you find a layer of bitingly ironic, anarchic commentary on morality, society, mores, and character. Either way, they're excellent reading.

Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot to Harry Potter beyond what meets the eye, and as an adult reader, that doesn't quite cut the mustard for me.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

I doubt so, because the sheer vastness of knowledge and sheer training in "1337 writing skillz" just CANNOT be as high in a teenager than in a 70s year old literate ...

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It's not relevant to bring up the "he was only fourteen" defense against terrible writing. The garbage you write at fourteen does not deserve to see the light of the day, never mind in print (well, nor garbage you write at thirty-something either, but that's neither here nor there). The only reason Paolini got a publishing deal was because his parents had connections in the industry. It's not fair to expect a toddler not to wet his own diaper and excrete a pile of steaming turd on the carpet, but praising the resulting piss and turd is ridiculous.

Stormwaltz said:

I think you're confusing "depth of the background" with "depth of the story."

Here's what Drew said: "The reason the Mass Effect novels worked so well was the depth of the universe we created for the games."

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And I said I glanced at the background. There's no depth to it. You're confusing quantity with quality. It's no great feat to churn out a bunch of encyclopediac notes for your very precious space opera setting if all you fill these notes with is derivative tripe. I repeat: what depth? What depth is there to be found in Farscape/Star Wars/etc rip-offs?

As for Harry Potter: pretty much what Prime Junta's said. Those books are the opposite of imaginative--Rowling took every single trope and squished them together into one seething mass of mediocrity and cliches. A great writer may be able to rescue overused concepts: Rowling has never been that writer and, I suspect, will never be. HP is a series of join-the-dot formulae, unsubtle moralizing, and failed attempts to "grow up alongside the reader." It's not even that it's children's fiction, either. Roald Dahl, to a lesser extent Terry Pratchett, and many other children's fiction writers can write books that appeal to children but also have more to them, or at least contain things that adults can appreciate.

Prime Junta said:

You think? IMO it was anything but imaginative -- there's nothing there that hasn't been done before, and done better.

(For a few examples, try Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy for a "kid goes to wizard's college" story, Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising cycle for a "kid discovers he's a Chosen One and enters a mysterious parallel reality to vanquish a great evil" story, Lloyd Alexander's The Chronicles of Prydain series for a "kid starts from humble origins and gradually matures to be a great hero" series, with the mythology done right, or anything by Madeleine L'Engle for "fantasy parallel reality discovered at right angles to where we live". Or anything by Astrid Lindgren, especially Mio, my Mio, Ronia the Robber's Daughter, or Brothers Lionheart, or Finland's own Tove Jansson. All of these write circles around JK Rowling. Hell, Enid Blyton writes circles around JK Rowling, and Harry Potter is basically Malory Towers with funny hats.)

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I don't know any of those books =p (yes, I don't read often!)

Essaliad said:

Will you fly off the handle screaming for blood if I tell you exactly what I think of HP?

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Not really. It's your own opinion and unlike BG2 I don't like harry potter THAT much.

purpleblob said:

I don't know any of those books =p (yes, I don't read often!)

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Most people who praise HP and think it's terribly "imaginative" don't read an awful lot, if at all. I sense a pattern.

Essaliad said:

Most people who praise HP and think it's terribly "imaginative" don't read an awful lot, if at all. I sense a pattern.

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I share the opinion that the HP books are nothing special, but if I had enough "trope" to go from living on welfare to being a multi-millionaire in less than 5 years......well....

Essaliad said:

Most people who praise HP and think it's terribly "imaginative" don't read an awful lot, if at all. I sense a pattern.

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And there we have it again. In one sentence you manage to call basically everyone who enjoyed Harry Potter an illiterate simpleton. Well done. Arrogance taken to the extreme.

JDR13 said:

I share the opinion that the HP books are nothing special, but if I had enough "trope" to go from living on welfare to being a multi-millionaire in less than 5 years......well....

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Well, yeah, Rowling exploits the gullible with mediocrity: in that respect she's good. I guess it doesn't matter if you put out undiluted excrement and people lap it up calling it ambrosia, as long as you get to laugh all the way to the bank.

fatBastard() said:

And there we have it again. In one sentence you manage to call basically everyone who enjoyed Harry Potter an illiterate simpleton. Well done. Arrogance taken to the extreme.

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Gosh, my boy, you should talk to someone about that persecution complex. Or maybe it's an inferiority one?

I enjoyed the mass effect prequel book for what it is - a prequel to game series. B-class scifi.

Best way to explain it might be the way I fancy (B-class scifi) TV series more than actual movies. If you follow a series through many episodes / seasons it kind of grows on you and comes out as somthing much bigger than just single movie (no matter how good the single movie is).

The same goes for books about games. ME books widened the series and abled me to get more out of it. It was quite somthing to meet the characters ingame after just reading a book about them.

For me reading just "class A" literature is like eating beef everyday - very delicious but not somthing I would want on my plate all the time. Somtimes just ordinary hamburger will do. Im not that picky.

EDIT: One thing often overlooked is that games are more than just books. They are multimedia pieces with interaction, audio and video. With multiple medias the story does not need to rely on the text alone. If not for the game I would not have bought the me books (its not rl good enough alone).

Also there could be differences how people react to different medias. For me video is always more important than audio, somone else might get more out of the story through text etc...

Essaliad said:

Gosh, my boy, you should talk to someone about that persecution complex. Or maybe it's an inferiority one?

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Nah, It's just that there was this guy in my school (back in my youth) who could only laugh when someone got hurt. Ever since those days I always get an uncontrollable urge to lash out whenever I encounter the type that can only find enjoyment from other people's misery or, as is in this case, can only seem to argue your own position by belittling those who don't agree with you.

Both Prima Junta and booboo more or less agrees with you but even though booboo uses very explicit words to describe how utterly awful he finds the Harry Potter books to be, there is not a single mention about how other people should feel. It is therefore entirely possible to express one's opinion in very clear terms without having to step on other people in the process.

*EDIT*
Didn't realize I was responding to the source, so I changed the third person references.

fatBastard() said:

Nah, It's just that there was this guy in my school (back in my youth) who could only laugh when someone got hurt. Ever since those days I always get an uncontrollable urge to lash out whenever I encounter the type that can only find enjoyment from other people's misery or, as is in this case, can only seem to argue your own position by belittling those who don't agree with you.

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Ahahahaha, oh man. I haven't seen this one in a while!

Whenever two (or more) groups of people are arguing, anywhere on the web* (usenet, mailing lists, message boards, blogs, etc.), inevitably, someone on one side of the argument (regardless of age or gender) will compare the group on the other side to "those bitchy girls who made everyone's life hell in high school."

Say, did you ever do anything to that guy in your school (like, I don't know, heroically speak up like you just did here), or was all you could manage to gather the courage for was seething in passive-aggressive resentment? Or thoughts along the line of "he'll get his comeuppance one day, oh yes, oh yes, and then he'll know what's what!" maybe?

Essaliad said:

Gosh, my boy, you should talk to someone about that persecution complex. Or maybe it's an inferiority one?

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I regard that you have a narcissism complex.

Because of that reply from yours.

Nobody would *normally* call a person having an inferiority complex - as a reply to a criticism to the own remarks, as you did it.

Your idea seems to be "attacking is the best defense".

Good luck. You won't have many friends with that paradigm. BUt I also believe that you wouldn't want to have some anyway, otherwise you'd behave differently.

Or you are part of an environment where this paradigm is common - so I regard that ALL of your friends are of this type of philosophy.

Essaliad said:

Ahahahaha, oh man. I haven't seen this one in a while!

Whenever two (or more) groups of people are arguing, anywhere on the web* (usenet, mailing lists, message boards, blogs, etc.), inevitably, someone on one side of the argument (regardless of age or gender) will compare the group on the other side to "those bitchy girls who made everyone's life hell in high school."

Say, did you ever do anything to that guy in your school (like, I don't know, heroically speak up like you just did here), or was all you could manage to gather the courage for was seething in passive-aggressive resentment? Or thoughts along the line of "he'll get his comeuppance one day, oh yes, oh yes, and then he'll know what's what!" maybe?

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Ah well. I can't say that I'm surprised, just disappointed I guess.

If you go back a bit, you'll notice that I haven't even once tried to argue with you about the topic at hand but merely attempted to get you to change the tone in your argumentation. As such your reference to Snacky's Law is unfounded as I'm not trying to "win" the argument.

Once again your choice of argumentation method shows more about how you regard other people and their opinions than it does about what you're actually arguing for/against.

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Nobody would *normally* call a person having an inferiority complex - as a reply to a criticism to the own remarks, as you did it.

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The Internet is scintillating and full of surprises, isn't it? So much must be so new to you everyday! How enviable.

Good luck. You won't have many friends with that paradigm. BUt I also believe that you wouldn't want to have some anyway, otherwise you'd behave differently.

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Believe me, I don't want to be friends with you. Seriously and truly. I kinda prefer making friends with witty, funny people whose sensibilities aren't made of snowflakes, and whose egos aren't made of eggshells.

fatBastard() said:

If you go back a bit, you'll notice that I haven't even once tried to argue with you about the topic at hand but merely attempted to get you to change the tone in your argumentation. As such your reference to Snacky's Law is unfounded as I'm not trying to "win" the argument.

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Huh? No, it's modeled after Godwin's, which originally isn't about winning or losing, but simply the probability of the reference (be it to Nazis or those mean girls in school) becoming higher as an online discussion goes on. Although are you sure you're not trying to "win" something? People white-knighting always are.

Once again your choice of argumentation method shows more about how you regard other people and their opinions than it does about what you're actually arguing for/against.

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What am I arguing for? What are you? If either of us ever had a point, I don't see it, and yours never had a point beyond CAN'T YOU BE MORE NICE PLZ THINK OF THE CHILDREN. You wanted to launch into an ad hominem mud-slinging fest. You can dress it up with your precious moral high ground forever, but that's all it is. Sorry.

Well, at least I tried.

You obviously have enough gray matter to not only behave in a more civilized manner but also to contribute constructively to the discussions, so you must be choosing to act like an arrogant prick for some reason.

I think I'll just ignore you from now on. Have nice day.

Narcissism. Definitively.

*shakes head*

Essaliad said:

Well, yeah, Rowling exploits the gullible with mediocrity: in that respect she's good. I guess it doesn't matter if you put out undiluted excrement and people lap it up calling it ambrosia, as long as you get to laugh all the way to the bank.

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Yes of course, that must be it!

Which explains why it's just so damn easy to become a Millionaire.

Whoever said it's easy to exploit the gullible with mediocrity? I couldn't do it to save my life! I've no doubt JKR has earned her millions, and more power to her for that -- and, what's more, anything that gets kids reading an entire series of books through at a sitting can't be all bad from where I'm at.

But that doesn't say anything much about her writing: she's still pedestrian, derivative, and rather boring. I figure many HP fans will discover as much, once they stumble on some good imaginative fiction with the appetite that JKR whetted for them. Or perhaps HP will always have a special place in their hearts, as the series that got them to enjoy reading -- a bit like the place Star Wars: A New Hope holds in mine. Which is just fine too.

Essaliad said:

The only reason Paolini got a publishing deal was because his parents had connections in the industry. It's not fair to expect a toddler not to wet his own diaper and excrete a pile of steaming turd on the carpet, but praising the resulting piss and turd is ridiculous.

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Paolini self-published Eragon. It sold well enough that he eventually got a real editor to publish it, and the sequels. His family did work like hell to market it, though. (I have a copy from the self-published edition.)

The explanation for Eragon's success is real simple: the general public has terribly bad taste.