Patrick from the popular blog Pat's Fantasy Hotlist posts an exclusive excerpt from a new Dunk and Egg story by George R.R. Martin. The first comment to this blog entry:

Anonymous
I m really glad that George can find the time to do anything under the sun, but finish the book that everyone is waiting for. For example, eating, watching football, editing crappy novels nobody cares about, talking about Paris, conventions in 3rd world countries, etc. Also, its really cool how he releases books in England first when 95 % of his fans are in the U.S. Good job fatso! Boycott?

And it goes downhill from here. For more than 200 comments "Martin sucks because he is doing everything except writing A Dance with Dragons" people and "Leave Martin alone! Quit whining and find something else to read!" people are bitching at each other. Highlights include:

( You called me Oprah? It's defamation! )

Eventually Patrick disabled new comments and made this post:

For fuck's sake. . .
Posted by Patrick

Are you fucking kidding me???? Am I running a day care??? I've been running this blog for more than 5 years, and it's the first time I've been forced to disable the comment function.:\

To the GRRM haters and the trolls out there, do everyone a favor and stop reading anything Martin writes. There's enough good SFF material to keep everyone happy, I believe. And yes, a little maturity would go a long way. . .

Never thought I'd be saying this, but you are even worst than the brainwashed Goodkind fans on the Yeard's forums. And Christ, that's saying something!=( As a matter of fact, you make Mystar sound like the Voice of Reason and the Soul of Wisdom. . .

I would like to believe that this is the work of pimply anti-social teenagers who get pick on at school and whose sex lives amount to downloading porn every night. But my gut tells me that it's from "responsible" adults. . .

Come on, man. . .

On the Rpg.net forums, a review by Louis Catchet of Dungeons and Dragons, 4th edition is posted. The review has since been pulled (EDIT: reeve has found us a copy, but going by the comments it seems to have been pretty negative and badly written. Some of it may be replicated here. Both his grammar and his ideas are criticized until the man himself shows up on page 2. And that's where the crazy starts.

( How is it possible for one man to be so wrong about everything? He must be very weary by now. )

A Slytherfan terri_testing writes an essay The Wizarding World and the Otherworld, where she argues that Harry Potter books are horror, not fantasy and that Hogwarts is like the school where the Native American children were brainwashed:

( Read more )

The essay provokes a chorus of "I agree"s and complaints about JKR's treatment of Snape:

mary_j_59 (see "Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!")

This is brilliant, Terri! And absolutely consistent. You know, my sister and I went to hear Rowling, Irving and King in NYC, and we both liked John Irving (reading from Owen Meany) best. Now the reason is clear. Rowling is actually a horror writer, like King, and I do not like horror. Still less do I like horror disguised as a children's fantasy quest. Irving, on the other hand, was writing in the great tradition of picaresque novels - a tragicomedy with a moral core.

But what I still wonder is: did (and does) Rowling know that she has actually written a dystopion/horror story? Somehow I don't think she realizes this.

condwiramurs/00sevvie

I second the 'brilliant' comment. And I highly doubt Rowling is aware of what she has actually written. She is too utterly blind to the reasons we like Severus, for example, to have any clue that she may have written something different from what her perfect picture of her work in her head is. I'm sure she thinks we're just getting it 'wrong.'

oryx_leucoryx (see Cry the Beloved Slytherins)

So if Severus Snape actually survived Nagini's bite, returned to the Muggle world and became some kind of counselor to delinquent youth or someone who runs an anti-bullying program (by working both with victims and perpetrators) he would be a hero with a rather protracted but complete journey? Starting out as the victim of neighborhood bullies (I doubt Petunia was the only one who knew that the strangely dressed kid was the Snape boy from Spinner's End) who must have dreamed that magic would solve his problems, learned that magic simply gave bullies more dangerous/'interesting' ways to hurt people, played a key role in getting rid of the biggest bully in the magical playground and came home to use non-magical ways against bullies?
***
bohemian_spirit has some fics in that general direction - in her 'Light Between the Cracks' series Severus Snape of canon years was secretly married to a Muggle school teacher and while at his Muggle home watched over the neighborhood children. And in her 'Professor Grunge' Severus immigrates to the US instead of joining the Death Eaters. He studies at a wizarding university and becomes a teacher who fights bullying and uses music to assist in magical healing.

But the real fun starts when night_train_fm decides to argue with terri_testing and says, among other things:

'Hermione exiling her parents to Australia'
She did that because she was terrified (with good reason) of the DEs coming after them: Voldemort was taking over the government, had already ordered several public mass-Muggle-killings, and anyone remotely connected to Harry was a potential target. According to Jo, Hermione reversed the spell ASAP once the threat was over. For that matter, is it ever outright stated that she didn't sit down and discuss it with them first?

That doesn't go well.

( Hermione is teh ebil! )

Dearest, beloved, Fandom Wank.

I know you were looking forward to great excitement today. Some of you said words to me that indicated you anticipated fiery 'judgement' upon those who remained fresh and dewey white, those you call n00bs.

Anyway, you got today instead.

Stop anticipating things, we'll just break your hearts.

Sincerely,

Sepia P. Magpie, Esq.



PS: Use this post to reflect on how you could be better people. Or just fuck around in the comments.

My first time. Be gentle.

The wank has been on a back burner for a while, I'd say -- it started in February, but has, as of August 31, become a matter of "I'm not playing anymore, so there."

(WARNING: These links are definitely gonna be borderline tl;dr for some.)

It starts out as a fairly erudite exploration of high fantasy, (or "fat fantasy" in the OP's terminology), calling it inherently "conservative" (the word "authoritarian" comes up as well, later) and explaining why. Unfortunately, the OP steps on a few toes while doing so.

In Full:
The Aesthetics of Fantasy: One
The Aesthetics of Fantasy: Two (Scott Bakker shows up!)
part three
part four, and good-bye

He begins citing, as cut-and-dry & obvious examples, works he is not entirely familiar with. He is called on it. Aaaaaaand...everything swiftly devolves into a G.R.R.Martin debate.

"So [...] there is a well travelled path to decent fantasy that isn't all about traditional genre staples[....] I tend to forget this in my haste to spit bile at the likes of Robert Jordan and George R. R. Martin and their legions of passive, sheep-like fans. So point well taken[...]"

Martin readers take issue with being compared to ovines. Much debate of Martin's politics ensues. Surprisingly it takes a good while for the ire to manifest...

'But [...] your problem seems to be that you want the genre to be something that you enjoy, and that anything that doesn't conform to this is immediately derivative and not worth reading, whose followers are mindless sheep [...]'

Nuh-uh
Yeah-huh
It's not FOR you

And we end it all with a bona-fide "You were all mean to me, so I'm going home forever." In fancy language. (But why can't I spew bile unscathed on the Internets? No fair. Your fault.)
The Commonwealth of Fantasy and Why I No Longer Belong to It.

Highlights:

Martin fans are worse than LK Hamilton fans:
" ...while GRRM fans might consider themselves a cut above the average fantasy fan, I can, from experience, state categorically that they're more tribal, closed minded and vindictive than people who read stories about A Mary Sue that fucks vampires and werewolves."

Damn.

And in response to "Don't call me a sheep because I like fantasy":
"I did no such thing. I called fantasy fans, as a demographic, passive and sheep like because they are. I made no inferences from the group to the individual. [...] Similarly one can talk about Americans being fat and religious as a group without necessarily speaking about any particular American. [...] The former is akin to sociology, the latter is racism.

(Er...I think we've got that last one a bit backwards. Isn't it more questionable to make the generalization than to point out observable characteristics in a particular individual? Gotta admire the wiggle-room, though. Not to mention the funky math... *draws Venn diagrams* If all squares are rectangles, and you are a square..)

And to conclude! The drive-by lulz:
lol I dont read Fantasy at all and just randomly stumbled on this site and its pretty clear that you got owned and are in fact retarded.

Comments are closed. (No baleetion, though.) Sad thing is, the guy did have a salient point about some mass market fantasy. But nobody listens to you if you call them names. Human Nature 101.

*Ahem* *steps up to the microphone* This is my first posting of a wank, and though it is now a little old and crusty, I hope it'll still serve to entertain... or whatever.

Anyway, this one really fits under 'psuedo-intellectual definitions'.

Gregory Benford, whether you've heard of him or not, is a hard-science fiction author. In his blog, he has a conversation with Darrell Schweitzer about the rise in popularity of fantasy fiction, as opposed to science fiction. The conversation begins thusly, with Benford's side:

We’ll run current commentary here, and to start, here’s something a bit more substantial, yet in the news.
George Martin’s mammoth fantasy novel sits atop the bestseller lists, so it’s time to ask:

WHAT DOES THE RISE OF FANTASY MEAN?

A conversation between GB and DARRELL SCHWEITZER

Four out of the last five Hugo awards were won by fantasy. Yet it’s the award of the World Science Fiction Convention, named for Hugo Gernsback, who edited the first science fiction magazine.

Fantasy has very, very cleverly managed to capture the apparatus erected by science fiction fandom and pro-dom, and fantasy writers now dominate the Science Fiction Writers of America. They’ve taken over the Hugo awards—which I thus usually don’t attend. A Harry Potter novel won a few years back and I walked out.

That's polite. [/sarcasm]

But wait! There's more! Fantasy = Intellectual Cowardice!

( Read more... )

Marvel at the galaxy-spanning leaps of logic! I'm not sure if I should be offended or just amused that he's smeared-- er, profiled an entire group of genre enthusiasts like that. It's sort of like saying that science-fiction fans are all pimple-faced teenage boys with no social lives and, especially, no girlfriends.

Oh, wait-- people already say that!

Not to be deterred, Benford concludes by saying in essence that those in the West should damn well better start reading intellectual hard science-fiction so as to better their societies, because if Americans and Europeans don't, the Chinese and Indians will! After all, who can create a better society when you spend your free time thinking about really big problems like dragons?

WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE BETTER SOCIETY?!

Original wank and the ensuing comments can be found at: http://benford-rose.com/blog/?p=3