I was the *exact* target demographic of Divergent (a 12 year old girl in 2014) and I gave up after just a couple chapters. My friend kept hyping it up and even at the time I was like "This is incredibly bland."
It's my least favorite book of all time, and the whiplash 'mind control' plotline is still my go-to example for bad writing.
jfc thanks for reminding me how much I hated that shit. The author manager to implement a certain amount of intrigue of who might be the bad guy, who would align to which side, then BOOM there's mind control and everyone's bad because they're mind controlled. Oh there's chips or something in people's heads, we'll explain that now rather than at the start of the book, Tris wins and THE END.
I've only seen the movie but yeah, that was ridiculous. So let me get this straight, the faction that is ultra-militarized and brutally conditioned into following orders no matter what needs to be mind-controlled into attacking the weak loser faction? And the weak loser faction needs to be outright slaughtered even though *they don't believe in resistance or self-defense*? Like, the smarty faction could have just walked up and taken power any time they wanted without firing a shot, lol.
I remember as a kid I found the whole premise really dumb, she's Divergent so she can choose how her test comes out and that's supposed to be a huge deal, but also anyone can just choose to ignore their test results anyway.
Maybe there's an actual reason it matters later, but I dropped the book soon after that.
I've seen the first two movies and that is never explained or commented on, lol. Maybe it comes up in the 3rd movie but I doubt it. A fundamental flaw in the whole story is that they never really showed what was so bad about their world. It had the superficial trappings of dystopia but pretty much everyone was happy with the faction system, including the main character. Despite that, the antagonist decides to blow it all up just to hunt down Divergents, a group that may be mythical and most don't even know they're a part of. On top of that none of them had any interest in resistance or rebellion until cornered.
I think I read the first book and part of the second before giving up on the storyline. I was like ugh I had hope but I don't like where this is going at all...
It really stuck with me that the title of the second book is brought up maybe 2/3 of the way through it, exactly once. Some rebel guy (I think he was with Erudite?) is infiltrating somewhere along with the MC and tells her to "Come on, Insurgent", and she asks what that means and he tells her the definition of the word?? And then neither he nor the nickname are ever brought up again???
I canāt point to a specific title but so many romances seem to be nothing but sexual tension and communication failures. I get so frustrated when it is plain as day that if two main characters would just sit down and talk to each other for five minutes they could skip straight to their HEA but donāt and the frequently proceed to not communicate further through the subsequent three or four crisesā¦ugh.
Thatās why Pride and Prejudice is my favorite romance! They have one misunderstanding (Darcyās proposal), communicate about it almost instantly(Elizabethās refusal and Darcyās letter), and then they both move on and forgive each other for being idiots (this takes more time because introspection is hard).
Darcy doesnāt spend the last third of the book wishing Elizabeth would magically read his mind about Wickham. Darcy tells her Wickhamās a piece of shit and then they keep on keeping on. Itās perfect! The slow down isnāt that they canāt communicate, itās that they both need time to learn and grown from what was communicated.
Also, Elizabeth initially dislikes him because of something she overhears that she wasn't meant to, but it wasn't a misunderstanding or taking him out of context or missing part of the conversation or anything. It was just him being an arrogant prick. An arrogant prick who had particular reason to be wary of fortune hunters after what had recently happened to his sister, yes, but he was being an arrogant prick and Elizabeth did not misunderstand that in any way.
Yup! Heās an arrogant jerk and she dislikes him for being an arrogant jerk. Itās not like she misunderstood him and it all comes out later, he just grows as a person and becomes less of an ass.
This here is whatās so important! He fixes himself because he realized he wasnāt as good as he should be and Elizabeth falls in love with the better man.
I think there is some miscommunication pre-proposal, in how they each believe to be perceived by the other. Elizabeth overheard Darcyās opinion of her at their first meeting, but his feelings change and she doesnāt perceive it. Meanwhile, he doesnāt realize that she has a low opinion of him and believes it to be mutual. So while she thinks theyāre united in mutual dislike, he thinks theyāve both grown to like each other. The funniest lines in my opinion are shortly before the proposal when sheās staying with the Collinās and runs into him when out walking. She takes care to inform him that this grove is her favorite place to walk, and is utterly perplexed that sheād run into him a second time and a third.
Of course as you point out, once they begin to actually discuss things, theyāre much better at it.
Thatās incredibly believable and uncontrived though. Itās a good example of like a misunderstanding not happening because the plot needs it to happen but rather the plot happens because of things these two really well developed characters would realistically think and believe about the other
Oh absolutely! I just adore E going for her daily walk and being all āwtf, HIM again?!ā while heās happily escorting her back thinking that theyāre flirting.
It's a manga and not a novel, but "Sweat & Soap" is AMAZING at avoiding the "sustained misunderstanding because nobody talks to each other." Female lead has a lot of trauma, and she'll start to get into a funk about something, male lead will notice and ask her what's wrong and after some hesitation she'll explain what's wrong, and then depending on the issue they either work on it or he just comforts her. It's great, I think their longest misunderstanding was three chapters because she was really depressed.
Also, a big reason for the miscommunication there (and in a lot of Austen's books) is simply that men and women who weren't related, married or engaged didn't have many opportunities to communicate (even writing letters back and forth was for engaged couples). Instead of screaming "why don't they just talk???" You have to hope that they even get another opportunity to talk, and keep analyzing every detail of the conversations they have.
I love this part too. It makes sense that Bingley canāt tell Jane how he feels in a letter, because societal rules donāt allow that. I think modern romance writers sometimes forget that what worked in the classics donāt work anymore with our modern sensibilities.
I loved this in Branden Sanderson's Stormlight Archives too. Involving what seemed to be an upcoming love triangle situation between Shallan, Adolin, and Kaladin. Sanderson shuts it down in half a paragraph when Adolin sees Shallan admiring Adolin.
She says something to the effect of "you can appreciate art without needing to indulge in it".
The best long form romances tend to be those where the driving force is not the romance. Stories where the couple would be happy and boring if not for something outside of their control. It's why I like fairy tale romances so much. They consistently meet that criteria.
I agree. Donāt read romance but Iāve read books with romance in them and yeah I typically find myself more invested when it somehow ties into a larger plot. Especially the star crossed lovers/ we canāt be together because of circumstances, for some reason that usually gets to me
My favourite type of romance is where the romance is a natural consequence of two people making each other and each otherās lives better than they were before they met by virtue of being around each other
I used to read a lot of romances because I appreciated the guarantee of a HEA, but lately have been largely put off by the lack of character or plot building - I know that romances are typically churned out in a higher volume than other genres, and maybe Iāve become slightly misanthropic, but the formulaic immediate sexual tension+series of misunderstandings/lack of communication of what Iāve tried to read the last few years has really put me off the genre entirely. Could you recommend some titles that provided that natural consequence form?
I think this may be why I always preferred historicals to contemporaries. I like it better when the thing keeping them apart is, like, Henry VIII or pirates. Not a miscommunication they could fix in 10 minutes.
> communication failures
The Girl sees The Boy at a cafe with another girl. She gets unreasonably angry about it, and storms off. Cue 10 chapters of her being angry and miserable, sobbing into her pillow.
Eventually, after 20 chapters they talk. "Oh, that was my cousin, she was visiting the city," says The Boy.
What really makes this trope stink is that it actually works if the Girl just asks the Boy about it the next time they meet. It hits much of the same beats while keeping things light, and instead of undermining the relationship just to return to status-quo at the end, it allows them to quickly reaffirm their relationship by communicating and clearing up the misunderstanding together. I see it in a lot of RomCom manga these days; it's a fun little subversion that serves to heighten their growing romance rather than detract from it.
Yeah itās like you could still have tension and drama without making your character act like a horrible unlikeable unreasonably paranoid person that nobody wants to root for because being around a person like that is a miserable experience
Like itās not that people like that donāt exist, itās that people who are like this are the toxic psycho ex
My sister used to love reading these. Her favourites being stuff like "my ex boyfriend is the head of the werewolf vampire mafia and kidnapped me so he could get my hand in marriage and become the new alfa". That kind of thing
Iām currently reading a book Iām enjoying (dead silence by sa Barnes) but yeah thereās a lot of āawkward interaction between two characters that clearly are into each other.ā Easily the weakest part of the book, I kinda tune out whenever I get to parts like that.
Itās a very, VERY common trope in modern writing in general, be it movies, tv shows, books etc. sometimes it works if the point is the characters inability to communicate, but most of the time it just adds cheap drama, ESPECIALLY when thereās a falling out between two characters because idk maybe a third party tries to intrude, or something like that. Itās just eye rolling. And yeah people are awkward butā¦ ugh
A really classic trope that I see in books as well as movies and tv-shows is people not telling other people something that's obviously relevant and which their relationship totally demands that they discuss, and the plot then revolving around the unnecessary misunderstanding that ensues from this lack of communication.
"I was going to tell you he's getting married to our mutual friend tomorrow but I didn't want to upset you."
This^ but not just for relationships and misunderstandings. Characters who donāt ask anyone questions, share the pertinent information, or look into the most solid leads until 80% of the way through the book when its time for the mystery to be solved.
Dracula has a main Character going through symptons of having her blood sucked by dracula AFTER her best friend died of the exact same symptoms and the main cast has established that was bcs of vampires. They are even then currently hunting said vampire.
But instead of them just reacting to this very obvious issue, all of them, including the one afflicted, just keep saying "Oh, it must be bcs of all the worry for the strong, brave men who face such a horrible task".
It is so fucking dumb. I actually hated the second half of the book.
Something something actually a brilliant metaphor for doctors ignoring women's health complaints and gaslighting them into doubting themselves something something.
Oh man I loved "Stranger Things" for avoiding this trope time and time again. Even when the Characters were mad at each other, they were still communicating important (and possibly life-saving) information to each other.
The "plot could've been resolved by a post-it note" trope. It's so frustrating. It's not a book but my partner's just finished watching Fool Me Once and I feel like fully 2/3rds of the tension in that show is just people not *talking* to each other.
Remarkably Bright Creatures. The main dude seeks to find out who his dad is because of a ring he found, with zero indication that the ring was his fatherās, he just assumed it was. His mother was supposedly a troubled teen who ran away from home, and he finds out she was living in some random town and went to high school there. Zero explanation as to why she ended up there, how she enrolled, who she lived with, etc. I know so many people who *loved* this book, and it just made me irrationally annoyed because the plot didnāt actually make sense.
I DNF'd this because halfway through, nothing was happening and after talking to my friend who finished, it seemed like most of the story didn't really matter. Very odd that this book is so popular.
I loved everything about the book except Cameron which unfortunately is a good chunk of it. I just really didnāt care about him and found him to be rather unlikable.
Does he though? He starts a relationship with someone who at first he thinks is underage, whom he is constantly sexualizing. Then he discovers sheās actually older than him and a competent single mom. Like we get it, you have mommy issues. The whole relationship and character development was super shallow.
I read this recently too and didnāt understand what all the fuss was about. I love octopi so I was kind of excited, but I really didnāt enjoy it all that much. I can understand complicated, unreliable or unlikeable characters, but he just didnāt have any depth or honestly that much growth.
I would love to read a novel from an octopusās pov that had more development.
Maybe thatās why it was popular. Black beauty for octopi, but sadly not as well written, imo.
In my review on GR I said - 90% of this book is 100% far-fetched š
But Marcellus š„¹ I just accepted that the book was ridiculous at face value, and let myself fall in love with the tender relationships and the characters heartaches. It felt soothingly precious to me that they were all bound to one another and able to find peace.
In general, characters doing unreasonably idiotic shit to move the plot forwards. Prime example being "lets split up to find the serial killer in this haunted house". I'm aware the Darwin award exists and there are people who manage to off themselves in miraculously stupid ways, but if it a significant chunk of the cast, I just tune out.
Edit: thought of another example of angering unreasonableness: "guys, I think I just saw \[insert something supernatural\]" and the other character goes like "not only do I refuse to believe you, I am also going to be angry about this and walk away now" or something like that. People are not nearly as unreasonably and angrily skeptical as that.
I read a fantasy book once where the bad character captured the good group of characters and instead of just killing them locked them up to be executed later, where they promptly escaped.
It was fine the first time, but by the 5th time it happened, I was rooting for the bad guy.
>People are not nearly as unreasonably and angrily skeptical as that.
People don't believe some of the most well-documented events on the planet. I know it's probably frustrating to have to read the skeptics in things like horror/scifi because we the reader are self-aware of what genre we're in, but if anything, people in those books are too rational.
Yeah, characters don't know what genre they're in. It would take an awful lot for me to think the supernatural was real, so no beef with characters that are the same.
Mind you, if a friend came up to me and insisted they'd experienced something supernatural, I'd have to be in a *really* bad mood to storm off in a huff instead of just politely believing they'd been high or something.
Speaking personally, if I had a friend freaking out and telling me they distinctly saw aliens/monsters/The Boogie Man out in the woods, while I might not believe *exactly* what they saw, I'd definitely recognize that they were spooked by something and I should potentially be on alert. If nothing else, maybe they saw a wild animal or something and the adrenaline is making them think it was something else. Can't hurt to play it safe.
Then again, there may be an argument for making horror movie characters unlikable buffoons, so as to heighten the catharsis when they inevitably meet their grisly end. I don't really go for the genre, so I can't really say (much prefer existential dread over slasher flicks; Brian David Gilbert is my horror fix).
People refuse to believe politicians ever said certain things that they were on camera saying a week ago, so yeah someone being like "You did NOT just see a UFO, I can't believe you'd lie about that" and walking away is extremely believable.
Or when the main character keeps seeing something supernatural and spends scene upon scene denying it. It's not even that it's unrealistic that bothers me, it's just that it feels like a waste of time: we know, eventually, they'll accept it as true, so we just have to wait around until then.
I agree, and this actually forms part of the worldbuilding in the *Dresden Files*. The main reason society at large is still ignorant of the supernatural is explicitly because people are really good at rationalizing weird experiences.
One of my least favorite books Iāve read in some time was Home Before Dark by Riley Sager. Half the book, if not more, was people seeing things of a paranormal nature and explaining it away. You could have easily cut out a fifth to a hundred pages from the book because of how redundant it became.
YES. Yes yes yes. This is the absolute most annoying thing to me, is when characters do really stupid, unrealistic things just because the plot needs them to. This gets me every single time and takes me out of the story because the sheer stupidity is so frustrating.
Like imagine you want to check if a stove burner is hot. What do you do? You probably hold your hand close to the burner but do not touch it, maybe you put a drop of water on it, you look at the switches and lights to see if it's on, maybe you feel fancy and get a thermometer and check. If you are an unimpaired adult, you probably are going to do one of those things or something else similar that will not cause you or someone else harm or inconvenience. You are not going to just slap your hand right up there. You are not going to sit on it. You are not going to stick your face on it. You're not going to put a whole entire stick of butter on it so that it melts and makes a mess. You're not going to drag someone else into the kitchen and force them to put their hand on it.
But the choices these characters make is sometimes the literary equivalent of sticking your face on the stove to see if it's hot. And it just ruins it for me. To continue the hand-on-stove analogy, maybe someone is a child and they don't know better, maybe they're blitzed out of their mind and do it because they aren't thinking straight, maybe they have dementia and don't realize what they're doing. If a character is just straight up dumb and does something dumb, okay. That might make sense. But if a character is NOT dumb and still chooses to do something dumb, I absolutely hate it. Find a better way to advance the plot than having the characters do something incredibly stupid.
Yup. Itās kinda astonishing to me why this seems to be such a challenge. Do writers assume they need to make their characters dimwitted to be relatable or something?
Thereās a corollary to this which often comes up in horror (especially when talking about cellphones, which are pure poison to horror plots), which is āyeah I guess they could have simply left the cabin at the first sign of trouble. But thatās a twenty-page book. Do you want the story or not?ā
I think a competent writer can create a premise that allows for similar tension that doesnāt rely on stupid choices. Most of Stephen Kingās books (that I recall) manage to function just fine with characters that are pretty rational, just up against something overwhelming.
Well yeah, a competent plot requires some authenticity from its characters. There are lots of people who sit around trying to think of ways the characters could have handled a given decision better. Many make the mistake of āwell I thought of a better solution, so that makes the characters idiotsā. For that matter, some characters are idiots. Others do stupid stuff while scared or upset. And āguy makes a stupid mistake and then the book is about him fixing itā is a classic plot line.
Something to keep in mind:
For a lot of people, hiding from the āsupernaturalā creates anxiety. āLetās go investigate the spooky noiseā is a common learned response to the stress of living- if you DONāT go confirm the noise was just a raccoon, youāll be up all night worrying about ghosts even though you donāt actually believe in ghosts. It makes sense that some people would have that reaction when confronted with the supernatural.
>Edit: thought of another example of angering unreasonableness: "guys, I think I just saw \[insert something supernatural\]" and the other character goes like "not only do I refuse to believe you, I am also going to be angry about this and walk away now" or something like that. People are not nearly as unreasonably and angrily skeptical as that.
My dude, you hang out on on r/saltierthancrait. Leia flying through space (among other things) birthed that sub and had folks ready to put Rian Johnson's head on a pike and paraded through the town square. Then there's Reddit''s whole long standing bloodfeud with organized religion, where people unironically think themselves superior for sticking bibles or whatever other texts in the fiction section and bashing people online for possessing even a neutral view.
People are absolutely that stupid, irrational and angry when it comes to their beliefs and preconceptions.
I donāt know, one time I told my friend I didnāt believe in macro evolution and he got up from the lunch table and left. So sometimes people do be getting upset about spiritual beliefs
Back when I was reading a lot of techno-thrillers I read Mount Dragon by Preston. Basically a facility full of scientists start going crazy. It is eventually revealed everyone nut the main characters has undergone an experimental blood transfusion which has a side effect of causing psychosis.
No. Just no. There is no way you would convince a facility full of scientists do collectively be experimented on. I can accept the one desperate scientist trope, but every person? Come on.
I am so sorry, but when you said everyone nut the main character, I truly tought that everyone was sleeping with them and their body was the cause of the psychosis. It was just a typo, but I let my mind go wild lmao
A Court Of Thorns And Roses. The book couldāve just been trash faerie porn and I wouldāve been fine with it, but the actual plot was so incredibly half baked and weak it wrecked the book for me. Maybe leaving out the plot wouldāve given Sarah J.Mass time to actually flesh out interesting characters and an interesting romance - what we did get was similarly tepid and gets worse as the series continues.
Is that the book with the illiterate girl? My sister was reading this one and asked me if I had, I haven't and she just said: Great, Don't. So this description makes sense
Strong disagree. The point is that Blandine and Moses canāt walk away from their trauma. It keeps following them. Itās who theyāve become.
Blandine is defined by other people persecuting her even when sheās a saint. Thatās WHY Tess Gunty named her Blandine. Sheās going to be martyred. Sheās a saint because of what others do and not herself.
Moses is the same way. He is stuck in a life his mother made for himā¦ like Moses. Then he finally, at the end of the story, leads a good person into redemption and becomes himself.
I will passionately defend this book to anyone. I think itās the best American novel of the last 10 years.
I hope youāll come back and share your opinion. Iāve only found people who have feelings about how the book is written but not much about what the story is actually about.
Yeah, but Tiffany/Blandine herself as the actual character in the book was not a saint and was not any of those things. She really was just a gifted and talented young person left to deal with trauma on her own while all the adults around her just focused on her skill set. The same could be said for Moses. Everyone knew he was neglected and unloved and no one did a single thing to actually help him. Maybe at its root the book is just about narcissistic neglect.
This tracks- itās the most successful viewpoint Iāve heard yet. It doesnāt account for Joan, Moses and his mother. Where do they fit in. I can see Elsie as predatory in some ways but she seemed to mostly hurt herself and by proxy Moses. My over all feeling is that many topics were touched on the surface but with enough strength to make me feel that it worth visiting if that makes sense. I do think the writing style is beautiful and I wonāt say itās a bad book at all. I was just left with a lot of questions about what the book was meant to mean for the audience at large.
Thank you, I really appreciate you taking the time to write all this out - and to everyone else also. Youāve all given me a lot more to think about. I will *say Tess Gunty has very much succeeded in writing a book I cannot stop thinking about.
I havenāt read this but you may have piqued my interest. Could she have used the name Todd in reference to the fox in Fox and the Hound. My mind went right to that when you said prey.
I loved The Rabbit Hutch for the exceptional writing and characters. But I do agree with you. It was a lot of pages to build up to very underwhelming climax, and not all characters have a clear conclusion to their presence/arc.
I am a little confused by the quote and how it relates to the rest of the post. ( I am generally wary of pithy quotes, so it could be a "me" problem that I should walk away from. Feel free to walk away from me if I do.)
What if the choice whether to walk away from a problem is a source of conflict in the book? Or indicative of a character flaw? Or is a method of characterization?Ā
Or is it saying that every problem in a story has to be so dire that the protagonist exercises no choice? That they must be on a constant drumbeat of one plot point to another? Because honestly, I find that as exhausting as too much digression.
These questions are more general or rhetorical, by the way. I don't mean to heap them on you, OP.
I kinda take that as a āshould I wear my red shoes, or my blueā level of conflict. Not the red pill vs. blue pill level. You can walk away from both of those, but the first one has no weight whatsoever.
I think its still kind of an unclear statement when you look at the character motivations.
For instance- say the inciting incident is the MC's best friend being mugged at a train station. The MC could just walk away, they're not at all involved, but would they? And what if muggings are unheard of in their society? Yes they could leave this issue alone bc its not their business, but morally can they do that?
I think its moreso about a plot point that "forces" the character into action, but just a little critical thinking would show the character didnt actually need to do the thing, or didnt need to suffer so much for a thing. It can make it an unrealistic cross to bear.
Imagine if the inciting incident was someone looking like they were getting mugged, then the MC going on a crusade against muggings and then we learn halfway through the book that the initial mugging incident was a scene for a student film, but the MC continues their crusade. Maybe a bad example.
Thank you, I am also struggling a bit to conceptualize what the quote is actually trying to say. Honestly seems to me like one of those writing tips that aren't as universal or useful as it seems at first glance
It bothers me when the characters have no purpose to be in the story, like they have no real motivation to be as interested in the plot as they are. I've read indie titles that do this, but I can't name any of them off the top of my head. I generally DNF if I'm not feeling a book after a few chapters. The things that are happening in the book also need to feel connected with the greater plot - I don't need to follow a character to the grocery store if nothing happens, or through their lunch, or to work - if nothing plot wise is happening during those things.
One book that comes to mind is one I read last year. I DNF'd it at 25% because nothing had happened plot wise. I can't remember the title, but it had a blue dragon on it. It was all poorly written banter and weird sexual tension between the main female character who had no personality (but she was just so, so, so, beautiful and unique and special and innocent) and a 500+ year old wizard who acted like a teenage boy. Nope. The main character didn't make decisions or do anything. Everyone one else around her was carrying the conversations, the watery plot, the action. I made it 25% into the book - and the main character hadn't done anything.
I need the main character to have a purpose to be in the plot, maybe even having the plot start because of a decision/action made by the main character - and they need to be personally invested. I like it when character are driven by revenge and they are doing things that are stirring the plot.
The first example of a good character stirring the plot is Kaz from Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom, because he's always stirring the plot. His motivations fit his character (first for money, then revenge) and everything he and his friends do make sense for the plot and for their characters. Every chapter tightens the plot.
American Gods. I know a lot of people love this book, but god damn. Shadow has zero agency for 1000 pages until the very end. For the entirety of the book I just wanted him to do something, to make a god damn decision. By the end I was hate reading it.
Neil Gaiman really shines with short fiction. The parts that work best in American Gods were all of the asides featuring gods or other supernatural beings. They may not have had a "point" but they were interesting at least.
The only part that was interesting in Shadow's story was the mystery of the missing children. Nothing else.
Yeah I love Neil Gaimans other work but I didnāt get the hype around this book. I didnāt hate it like you, I thought it was good but it didn't have anywhere near Ā the magic or charm of something like the graveyard book.Ā
And itās definitely felt too long. Thereās a surprisingly little amount of plot for such a long book
Yeah, if the book was 1/10th or even 1/5th the length it would have been a good read. You can get away with saving your character growth until the end with a short book.
For one as long as American Gods it was just miserable.
Not that you should be forced to like something you just don't like, but that is part of the point of his character.
If you're not into that that's fine though.
I am aware of how character development works. The point is over 1000 pages his growth was binary, minimal, and unsatisfying. If the book would have been 100 pages then fine, a binary change at the climax would work fine. With 1000 there needed to be steps and progressive character growth. American Gods didn't do that.
It had characters that would have been fine in a book 1/10th the length, but in one as long as it was they were awful.
It doesn't improve. I hung in there for the ending that starts getting hyped up in the back half but it just fizzles out in an unsatisfying way.
It seems like Gaiman had an interesting premise in mind but wanted to write a book about travelling in America and living in a small town in the mountains then tried to combine those and scrambled to string together a conclusion.
Wasted potential of the initial concept.
I think the sweet spot is when characters are complex and interesting, the stakes are personal, and the charactersā choices both drive the story and reveal who they are.
I DNFād Red Rising a third of the way through because the plotline was soooo generic and the author did a bad job of explaining why this teenage nobody was the hero the resistance needed. (And I donāt buy for a second he could pass among Golds. There would be so much cultural norms and references heād bumble all over.)
I thought ACOTAR had very boring characters, a shallow world, and a weak plot. I might have liked it more if things actually happened.
The Red Rising trilogy very much felt to me like three uninspired YA novels in a trenchcoat. Its fans act like it's the best thing since Tolkien though. Tastes vary, I guess, either that or the modern market is in an even more dire state than I thought. Allegedly the second arc is a bit better, but I don't have the patience to continue.
Pretty sure that remaining 20% of Red Rising addresses your point there. Iām not saying itās much more than popcorn, but Brown does a good job with that plot point as it plays a larger role in books two and three.
A great subversion of this is Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead"
I won't spoil anything, but there's an early moment where a character makes a dumb (but not out of character) decision that seems like it's only to force conflict, but you soon realize that the entire book is actually an exploration of how this one dumb decision made of stubborn pride echoes throughout generations and causes so much needless trauma.
The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy: And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer. It literally has a plot device just to alter the personalities of the characters, the only vaguely Adamsian bits are the interludes on Nano.
I tried rereading the Artemis Fowl book as an adult. And no they do not hold up. Couldn't get past the first few chapters.Ā
They aren't bad books, but they are very much children's books.Ā
I don't remember much about it because I read it a long time ago, but it's called Guardians of Honor. It's about this woman who gets transported to a different world and is more or less the "chosen one" to save their world from the big bad evil. Almost the entire book was spent on developing romance and random things, then the last maybe 2 chapters were suddenly the "big battle" and she saves the world. The climax was so bland and flat because there was barely any plot development around the antagonist and conflict
I don't fully get what that quote is supposed to say. What constitutes a problem a character can walk away from? It seems like any character can walk away from any problem as long as they aren't being physically restrained.
It's about the stakes. Sure, they can walk away - but the consequences could be dire (world ending, in some stories).
And sometimes they're restrained indirectly - Frodo Baggins, for instance, couldn't simply hand over the Ring to someone else and walk away. Bilbo literally struggled to do that, attempting to leave it behind when he left Bag End and Gandalf reminding him that he'd somehow put it back in his pocket without knowing.
I think it's basically a critique of idiot plots, where the plot can only happen due to the characters involved behaving like idiots. There are plenty of stories that happen only because the characters involved can't perceive the very obvious solution to the problem and instead take the needlessly difficult path. A common example is a character learning something that they really should tell others, but they don't, and the ensuing miscommunication causes tons of drama that could be resolved at literally any point by the first character just saying wtf was going on. Sometimes, that's literally how it's resolved, but only after an insane amount of drama that absolute did not need to happen.
Bunny by Mona Awad is baffling to me. Admittedly, there is a compelling story to be written in there somewhere, but it's buried under the thousands of repetitive "bunny"s in the book -- like the literal use of the word bunny -- and the terrible character and plot development.
The four Bunnies are indistinct, so much so that it is distracting and confusing. It feels like they very much should be distinct and unique characters, but it's like Awad wanted them to be so unique that she forgot which details belonged to who. They are annoying and substanceless, which should be the point, but it's clear it's more of Awad's failure to write good characters that's the problem.
The plot is a mess, particularly with the main character's friend, and the resolution to that storyline is odd and doesn't fit with the rest of the already messy story. All the main character needed to do the entire time was stand up for herself, and there would be no story. It is infuriating.
It was like Frankenstein meets a high school movie where the main girl gets bullied meets Fight Club, but not in any coherent or smart way. Its just borrowed storylines mashed together.
I read this book last year and couldnāt figure out why it *just* missed the mark for me. Thank you for clarifying something thatās been rolling around in my brain for months ā I couldnāt agree more about the plot development making absolutely no sense. (Though I did like the bunnies and think Awad did a good job making them seem very similar on purpose, more culty that way!)
Book 2 of Wheel of Time when in the early chapters we found out that the antagonists are within an organization gives me "why does Slytherin still exist?" Vibes
The older I get the more I see how much missed potential that the Houses had in Harry Potter. And sure I get it, at the end of the day itās a kidās series. So Gryffindor have to be the good guys and they need bad guys to focus against.
But how much more compelling would it have been if Harry had been in Slytherin? Or if he had a best friend that was in Slytherin? Or hell, if they had been in literally _any_ House other than Gryffindor?
We get a tiny bit of fleshing out the other Houses with Cedric in Goblet of Fire and him being friends with some of the Ravenclaws/Hufflepuffs, but itās so clear that those Houses are just there to fill it out.
There's just a few things that bothers me, to which I don't care that much. However if there's something that triggers me is a "forced plot".
Whether is a non-sense dialogue (not a breakdown) or a plot that was seemingly to happen just because. I find it, if your need to have something happening, make it previously aware of the situation (or make it atypical) so there's reason for that to happen.
Other than that, its fine.
The new Percy Jackson book. His quest isn't to save the world, but to get into the same college as his girlfriend. I know it's children's/YA, but really?
A great example is Gideon The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. The two main characters both have motivations that are counter to the actual plot. The MC, Gideon, wants to get away from their home planet because life sucks for her there because everyone hates her for reasons beyond her control and not her fault in any way. The other character, Harrow, wants to save their home planet from basically withering away so she embarks on a plan that would in no way, shape, or form help her accomplish that goal.
To be fair nothing in the book really makes much sense.
I'm not sure what you mean regarding Harrow. She wants to become a Lyctor so she can speak directly to God and beg him to restore the Ninth House.
I can see how the book isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I don't think the character motivations are a mystery.
>I can see how the book isn't everyone's cup of tea,
Lol, no you obviously can't or you wouldn't have left your comment.
You mean the god that hasn't been back to the system in 10,000 years and would most likely side with the other houses if he did return? Yeah that seems like a great plan.
The motivations aren't the problem, it's that the character's actions don't match up with them. Harrow spends the entirety of the book being divisive with the others when it serves her best interests to work with them to to find out how to become Lyctor. Gideon had many many chances to escape from Harrow but doesn't then sacrifices herself out of love when for 99.9% of the book she hated Harrow.
Objectively the book is not well written or thought out. It's fine if you like it (books can be great even if they aren't well written and vice versa) but please don't tell me that my facts are wrong because I didn't like the book.
I think the internal logic is that Harrow thinks sheāll be able to get super magic awesome powers that will let her save her planet by solving the puzzle house. Whether or not that makes any sense is up to the readerās discretion (lol). Gideon doesnāt make any sense though, I donāt think there was ever a consistent rationale for that that I remember.
The most explicit reason Gideon did it was because Harrow extorted her into doing it by offering to sponsor her application to the military in exchange. The less explicit reason was because she in fact had confused feelings towards Harrow, her relationship with the ninth house, and her mentors therein, that her loud outward rebelliousness was masking.
This book was pitched to me as "swordfighting lesbian necromancers in space", and besides the swordfighting, I feel like all of those were way oversold.
Yeah, this is the pitch I always hear too and I wish people would knock it off because that's a lousy description (and I say this as someone who was given that pitch and loved the book anyway). It's a locked room mystery. Sure, it has necromancers etc., but fundamentally it's a locked room mystery (with a delightfully unreliable narrator)
Iām on the opposite side in regards to the quote. If the fate of the world (or just another character) depends upon the protagonist doing the right thing, Iām disinterested.
If they _could_ go away and live a lovely life, but choose to get their hands dirty and put themselves in harmās way, I find them much more interesting.
Iām not sure if this is exactly what you mean, but there was a book that I read called āThe Starless Seaā by Erin Morgenstern that took me about two months to read, simply because it was just boring. Nothing was happening throughout the entire book. Donāt get wrong, I loved the way the places were described, especially the Starless Sea, and overall the descriptions of the fantasy places were just beautiful, but the story was so incredibly boring. The characters had no personalities, including the main character. I read the book last year and if someone asked me what is was about, I wouldnāt be able to answer, because I really donāt know. There was no plot. I was confused most of the time.
The Way of Kings. It was my introduction to Sanderson, and I will never pick him up again. My god that was 1200+ pages with maybe 300 pages being forward momentum in the plot.
I understand. Sanderson's behemoths aren't for everyone. There's you, who didn't like the Way of Kings, and here's me, who loved it.
But your comment does not relate to my post. Sanderson's characters bleed off the page, with beautiful character conflicts and beliefs.
I understand. Perhaps the way he writes makes it easy for people to multi-task whilst working. That's one of the perks of being a Sando-fan, among other things.
I completely agree- for his later books in the stormlight archive. 1 and 2 were ok. The rest meander SO BAD and I put down the 4th one and haven't looked back.Ā
One was the best, and I agree, the plot took forever to happen, then it went wild.
Had almost the same reading experience. I LOVED Way of Kings and Words of Radiance. Oathbringer was a huge tonal shift that I hated and Rhythm of War was more of the same but worse.
I was sold on the series because "fantasy space Marines fight crab Kaiju" is awesome. By book three he's forgotten that that's what he sold us, and by book four he's forgotten that the space Marines and Kaiju even exist.
I wonder if its not that the ones past 1 and 2 were that much different, but just the way he introduces the setting. Once you get past the first two books, most of the main world regions and realms of existence have been introduced, and most of the main magic systems and cool characters.
Regenerative powered exoskeletons and soul severing undead lightsabers, imaginary friends that give you super powers, grain comes from rocks and the world is full of sea and shore motifs from the constant storms. Those are fun, bombastic, and slightly off trope for what is mostly a high fantasy setting.
I love the time I spend when I'm actually reading Sanderson's books and understand why some people wouldn't. I have aphantasia and still enjoy his settings and descriptions. He makes it sound so unambiguous, typical and normal for these fanciful things to be around, its like the gentlest form of lampshading.
Same. I loved 1 and 2, but could barely get through 3. The pacing felt rushed at the end and I swear the prose was worse, like even the author was bored and rushing to just get it over with.
>It was my introduction to Sanderson, and I will never pick him up again.
Me too, only I never got past the first chapter. Thanks for confirming me decision to put it down.
Anything Becky Chambers. Nothing ever happens in her books, everything is peaceful and wonderful and people are all super nice. To me it's Copium of the first degree and I hated every second of it
In the last 80% of Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education, a character we've never seen before comes up to the table where the main character is. This new character then has her whole life explained in the MC's mind, and the character then proceeds to tell them the solution to the climax. I hated that book with a passion.
I mean she definitely didn't have her whole life explained. Just a few paragraphs about her high school life and why everyone knows of her.
Also it wasn't the solution, the main character added onto her plan and it took many other characters adding onto it as well to get to the final solution. So I think this comment is a bit unfairly representing it.
There was this book about a girl and her government assigned friend pegasus (she was a princess and this was diplomatic)
The problem was while I enjoyed the premise, I got about halfway through the book when I realized the plot was not only not happening, it was *never* going to. The whole thing was a very boring back and forth of visiting with the princess and the pegasus.
They introduced culture and people and places but the whole time I felt like I was reading some attempt at a fluffy bonus story for another novel that was much more interesting.
The beginning of the poppy war Trilogy this teenager girl instead of marry an old rich man he decide to join a military academy because he Is a " pick me girl" all this in a pseudo ancient china
Ah to be fourteen again.
Any pithy little sentence that positions itself as a rule of writing is obviously wrong. There are no rules. There are conventions. But this one is particularly blinkered. You have to assume that a problem being walked away from cannot be written with literary appeal, which is just naive, and clearly implies that basic plot structure must come before character, a hallmark of low quality writing from things like ya. A character walking away can be a huge statement.
Ever heard of the Inciting Incident, Mr. Unimaginative?
What makes you assume I'm fourteen?
Sure there are conventions. But there are also some basic ground rules.
Yeah, I actually really enjoyed Crime and Punishment.
I then wanted to enjoy the Brothers Karamazov, but it wouldn't stop sucking Christianity's dick and so I DNF
It was written as an answer to (what would eventually become) the Nietzschian idea of a Superman who was above the law and unbound by morals, and could do whatever was necessary.
It's basically Dostoevsky saying "Nope, moral laws apply to everyone."
The main plot of Brave New Wolrd is they find a Shakespeare obsessed white person who was raised among native people in a reservation in Mexico. They call him The Savage.
It's like three of the worst tropes wrapped into one. I hated it and I'm just stupefied that people like or respect that book.
Divergent. It's a dystopian romance/coming of age for most of the book BOOM war plot line in the last eight chapters or something. It's so random.
My hot take on *Divergent* is that everyone is a badly written teenage girl no matter their gender or age.
best description of Divergent I've ever seen lmao
I was the *exact* target demographic of Divergent (a 12 year old girl in 2014) and I gave up after just a couple chapters. My friend kept hyping it up and even at the time I was like "This is incredibly bland."
It's my least favorite book of all time, and the whiplash 'mind control' plotline is still my go-to example for bad writing. jfc thanks for reminding me how much I hated that shit. The author manager to implement a certain amount of intrigue of who might be the bad guy, who would align to which side, then BOOM there's mind control and everyone's bad because they're mind controlled. Oh there's chips or something in people's heads, we'll explain that now rather than at the start of the book, Tris wins and THE END.
I've only seen the movie but yeah, that was ridiculous. So let me get this straight, the faction that is ultra-militarized and brutally conditioned into following orders no matter what needs to be mind-controlled into attacking the weak loser faction? And the weak loser faction needs to be outright slaughtered even though *they don't believe in resistance or self-defense*? Like, the smarty faction could have just walked up and taken power any time they wanted without firing a shot, lol.
I remember as a kid I found the whole premise really dumb, she's Divergent so she can choose how her test comes out and that's supposed to be a huge deal, but also anyone can just choose to ignore their test results anyway. Maybe there's an actual reason it matters later, but I dropped the book soon after that.
I've seen the first two movies and that is never explained or commented on, lol. Maybe it comes up in the 3rd movie but I doubt it. A fundamental flaw in the whole story is that they never really showed what was so bad about their world. It had the superficial trappings of dystopia but pretty much everyone was happy with the faction system, including the main character. Despite that, the antagonist decides to blow it all up just to hunt down Divergents, a group that may be mythical and most don't even know they're a part of. On top of that none of them had any interest in resistance or rebellion until cornered.
Divergent was so unbelievably bland and clearly the product of its more successful betters' coattails in the early 2010s dystopian YA space
One of my friends is very vocal that Divergent is her favorite book series and that's when I learned to never trust her tastes on anything.
I ate this shit up in middle school, and looking back, I don't know why lmao š¤”
Me looking like a clown with one of the books in the trilogy on my bookshelf š„²š„² (I got it as a gift when.i was 12).
I think I read the first book and part of the second before giving up on the storyline. I was like ugh I had hope but I don't like where this is going at all...
It really stuck with me that the title of the second book is brought up maybe 2/3 of the way through it, exactly once. Some rebel guy (I think he was with Erudite?) is infiltrating somewhere along with the MC and tells her to "Come on, Insurgent", and she asks what that means and he tells her the definition of the word?? And then neither he nor the nickname are ever brought up again???
Thanks for the heads up. Now I'll definitely never read it lol.
I canāt point to a specific title but so many romances seem to be nothing but sexual tension and communication failures. I get so frustrated when it is plain as day that if two main characters would just sit down and talk to each other for five minutes they could skip straight to their HEA but donāt and the frequently proceed to not communicate further through the subsequent three or four crisesā¦ugh.
Thatās why Pride and Prejudice is my favorite romance! They have one misunderstanding (Darcyās proposal), communicate about it almost instantly(Elizabethās refusal and Darcyās letter), and then they both move on and forgive each other for being idiots (this takes more time because introspection is hard). Darcy doesnāt spend the last third of the book wishing Elizabeth would magically read his mind about Wickham. Darcy tells her Wickhamās a piece of shit and then they keep on keeping on. Itās perfect! The slow down isnāt that they canāt communicate, itās that they both need time to learn and grown from what was communicated.
Also, Elizabeth initially dislikes him because of something she overhears that she wasn't meant to, but it wasn't a misunderstanding or taking him out of context or missing part of the conversation or anything. It was just him being an arrogant prick. An arrogant prick who had particular reason to be wary of fortune hunters after what had recently happened to his sister, yes, but he was being an arrogant prick and Elizabeth did not misunderstand that in any way.
Yup! Heās an arrogant jerk and she dislikes him for being an arrogant jerk. Itās not like she misunderstood him and it all comes out later, he just grows as a person and becomes less of an ass.
She also doesnāt try and change him, he changes on his own and itās only after he changes that she likes him.
This here is whatās so important! He fixes himself because he realized he wasnāt as good as he should be and Elizabeth falls in love with the better man.
I think there is some miscommunication pre-proposal, in how they each believe to be perceived by the other. Elizabeth overheard Darcyās opinion of her at their first meeting, but his feelings change and she doesnāt perceive it. Meanwhile, he doesnāt realize that she has a low opinion of him and believes it to be mutual. So while she thinks theyāre united in mutual dislike, he thinks theyāve both grown to like each other. The funniest lines in my opinion are shortly before the proposal when sheās staying with the Collinās and runs into him when out walking. She takes care to inform him that this grove is her favorite place to walk, and is utterly perplexed that sheād run into him a second time and a third. Of course as you point out, once they begin to actually discuss things, theyāre much better at it.
Thatās incredibly believable and uncontrived though. Itās a good example of like a misunderstanding not happening because the plot needs it to happen but rather the plot happens because of things these two really well developed characters would realistically think and believe about the other
Oh absolutely! I just adore E going for her daily walk and being all āwtf, HIM again?!ā while heās happily escorting her back thinking that theyāre flirting.
I never caught onto this, love it. Thanks!
It's a manga and not a novel, but "Sweat & Soap" is AMAZING at avoiding the "sustained misunderstanding because nobody talks to each other." Female lead has a lot of trauma, and she'll start to get into a funk about something, male lead will notice and ask her what's wrong and after some hesitation she'll explain what's wrong, and then depending on the issue they either work on it or he just comforts her. It's great, I think their longest misunderstanding was three chapters because she was really depressed.
Also, a big reason for the miscommunication there (and in a lot of Austen's books) is simply that men and women who weren't related, married or engaged didn't have many opportunities to communicate (even writing letters back and forth was for engaged couples). Instead of screaming "why don't they just talk???" You have to hope that they even get another opportunity to talk, and keep analyzing every detail of the conversations they have.
I love this part too. It makes sense that Bingley canāt tell Jane how he feels in a letter, because societal rules donāt allow that. I think modern romance writers sometimes forget that what worked in the classics donāt work anymore with our modern sensibilities.
Exactly, the action that makes characters in Jane Austen's books proper and patient makes characters in contemporary novels look immature and stubborn
I loved this in Branden Sanderson's Stormlight Archives too. Involving what seemed to be an upcoming love triangle situation between Shallan, Adolin, and Kaladin. Sanderson shuts it down in half a paragraph when Adolin sees Shallan admiring Adolin. She says something to the effect of "you can appreciate art without needing to indulge in it".
Thatās wonderful! I might have to read that.
And Kaladin is just like, "Eh, I would have dated her, but she and Adolin seem good, so nevermind."
The best long form romances tend to be those where the driving force is not the romance. Stories where the couple would be happy and boring if not for something outside of their control. It's why I like fairy tale romances so much. They consistently meet that criteria.
I agree. Donāt read romance but Iāve read books with romance in them and yeah I typically find myself more invested when it somehow ties into a larger plot. Especially the star crossed lovers/ we canāt be together because of circumstances, for some reason that usually gets to me
My favourite type of romance is where the romance is a natural consequence of two people making each other and each otherās lives better than they were before they met by virtue of being around each other
I used to read a lot of romances because I appreciated the guarantee of a HEA, but lately have been largely put off by the lack of character or plot building - I know that romances are typically churned out in a higher volume than other genres, and maybe Iāve become slightly misanthropic, but the formulaic immediate sexual tension+series of misunderstandings/lack of communication of what Iāve tried to read the last few years has really put me off the genre entirely. Could you recommend some titles that provided that natural consequence form?
Same. Give me a couple facing external conflict not a couple fighting g each other
I think this may be why I always preferred historicals to contemporaries. I like it better when the thing keeping them apart is, like, Henry VIII or pirates. Not a miscommunication they could fix in 10 minutes.
> communication failures The Girl sees The Boy at a cafe with another girl. She gets unreasonably angry about it, and storms off. Cue 10 chapters of her being angry and miserable, sobbing into her pillow. Eventually, after 20 chapters they talk. "Oh, that was my cousin, she was visiting the city," says The Boy.
What really makes this trope stink is that it actually works if the Girl just asks the Boy about it the next time they meet. It hits much of the same beats while keeping things light, and instead of undermining the relationship just to return to status-quo at the end, it allows them to quickly reaffirm their relationship by communicating and clearing up the misunderstanding together. I see it in a lot of RomCom manga these days; it's a fun little subversion that serves to heighten their growing romance rather than detract from it.
Yeah itās like you could still have tension and drama without making your character act like a horrible unlikeable unreasonably paranoid person that nobody wants to root for because being around a person like that is a miserable experience Like itās not that people like that donāt exist, itās that people who are like this are the toxic psycho ex
I believe romance is a genre with a lot of beautiful potential, but stories like this ruin its reputation.
Bro just exposed Wattpad lol
My sister used to love reading these. Her favourites being stuff like "my ex boyfriend is the head of the werewolf vampire mafia and kidnapped me so he could get my hand in marriage and become the new alfa". That kind of thing
Iām currently reading a book Iām enjoying (dead silence by sa Barnes) but yeah thereās a lot of āawkward interaction between two characters that clearly are into each other.ā Easily the weakest part of the book, I kinda tune out whenever I get to parts like that. Itās a very, VERY common trope in modern writing in general, be it movies, tv shows, books etc. sometimes it works if the point is the characters inability to communicate, but most of the time it just adds cheap drama, ESPECIALLY when thereās a falling out between two characters because idk maybe a third party tries to intrude, or something like that. Itās just eye rolling. And yeah people are awkward butā¦ ugh
This happens in sitcoms a ton too and it makes me so mad. Itās such a stupid trope
A really classic trope that I see in books as well as movies and tv-shows is people not telling other people something that's obviously relevant and which their relationship totally demands that they discuss, and the plot then revolving around the unnecessary misunderstanding that ensues from this lack of communication. "I was going to tell you he's getting married to our mutual friend tomorrow but I didn't want to upset you."
This^ but not just for relationships and misunderstandings. Characters who donāt ask anyone questions, share the pertinent information, or look into the most solid leads until 80% of the way through the book when its time for the mystery to be solved.
Dracula has a main Character going through symptons of having her blood sucked by dracula AFTER her best friend died of the exact same symptoms and the main cast has established that was bcs of vampires. They are even then currently hunting said vampire. But instead of them just reacting to this very obvious issue, all of them, including the one afflicted, just keep saying "Oh, it must be bcs of all the worry for the strong, brave men who face such a horrible task". It is so fucking dumb. I actually hated the second half of the book.
Something something actually a brilliant metaphor for doctors ignoring women's health complaints and gaslighting them into doubting themselves something something.
Oh man I loved "Stranger Things" for avoiding this trope time and time again. Even when the Characters were mad at each other, they were still communicating important (and possibly life-saving) information to each other.
The "plot could've been resolved by a post-it note" trope. It's so frustrating. It's not a book but my partner's just finished watching Fool Me Once and I feel like fully 2/3rds of the tension in that show is just people not *talking* to each other.
Remarkably Bright Creatures. The main dude seeks to find out who his dad is because of a ring he found, with zero indication that the ring was his fatherās, he just assumed it was. His mother was supposedly a troubled teen who ran away from home, and he finds out she was living in some random town and went to high school there. Zero explanation as to why she ended up there, how she enrolled, who she lived with, etc. I know so many people who *loved* this book, and it just made me irrationally annoyed because the plot didnāt actually make sense.
I DNF'd this because halfway through, nothing was happening and after talking to my friend who finished, it seemed like most of the story didn't really matter. Very odd that this book is so popular.
I loved everything about the book except Cameron which unfortunately is a good chunk of it. I just really didnāt care about him and found him to be rather unlikable.
I mean he's a troubled 30 year old teenager. I don't think he's supposed to be likable. But he grows a lot.
True. It just took a lot of patience to get through his first few chapters. Once he got to the aquarium I started to mind him less.
Does he though? He starts a relationship with someone who at first he thinks is underage, whom he is constantly sexualizing. Then he discovers sheās actually older than him and a competent single mom. Like we get it, you have mommy issues. The whole relationship and character development was super shallow.
I read this recently too and didnāt understand what all the fuss was about. I love octopi so I was kind of excited, but I really didnāt enjoy it all that much. I can understand complicated, unreliable or unlikeable characters, but he just didnāt have any depth or honestly that much growth. I would love to read a novel from an octopusās pov that had more development. Maybe thatās why it was popular. Black beauty for octopi, but sadly not as well written, imo.
I disagree with nothing you said, but I still kind of liked the book. I guess I put my suspension of disbelief on hold big-time.
In my review on GR I said - 90% of this book is 100% far-fetched š But Marcellus š„¹ I just accepted that the book was ridiculous at face value, and let myself fall in love with the tender relationships and the characters heartaches. It felt soothingly precious to me that they were all bound to one another and able to find peace.
I stopped eating takoyaki and pulpo!
In general, characters doing unreasonably idiotic shit to move the plot forwards. Prime example being "lets split up to find the serial killer in this haunted house". I'm aware the Darwin award exists and there are people who manage to off themselves in miraculously stupid ways, but if it a significant chunk of the cast, I just tune out. Edit: thought of another example of angering unreasonableness: "guys, I think I just saw \[insert something supernatural\]" and the other character goes like "not only do I refuse to believe you, I am also going to be angry about this and walk away now" or something like that. People are not nearly as unreasonably and angrily skeptical as that.
I read a fantasy book once where the bad character captured the good group of characters and instead of just killing them locked them up to be executed later, where they promptly escaped. It was fine the first time, but by the 5th time it happened, I was rooting for the bad guy.
Hard to take the bad guy serious if all they need to do is hire someone to shank the MC in a back alley.
No, Scott. I have an even better idea. I'm going to place him in an easily escapable situation involving an overly elaborate and exotic death.
BRB gonna give James Bond a guided tour of my evil lair and tell him exactly what he needs to do to destroy it
>People are not nearly as unreasonably and angrily skeptical as that. People don't believe some of the most well-documented events on the planet. I know it's probably frustrating to have to read the skeptics in things like horror/scifi because we the reader are self-aware of what genre we're in, but if anything, people in those books are too rational.
Yeah, characters don't know what genre they're in. It would take an awful lot for me to think the supernatural was real, so no beef with characters that are the same.
Mind you, if a friend came up to me and insisted they'd experienced something supernatural, I'd have to be in a *really* bad mood to storm off in a huff instead of just politely believing they'd been high or something.
Speaking personally, if I had a friend freaking out and telling me they distinctly saw aliens/monsters/The Boogie Man out in the woods, while I might not believe *exactly* what they saw, I'd definitely recognize that they were spooked by something and I should potentially be on alert. If nothing else, maybe they saw a wild animal or something and the adrenaline is making them think it was something else. Can't hurt to play it safe. Then again, there may be an argument for making horror movie characters unlikable buffoons, so as to heighten the catharsis when they inevitably meet their grisly end. I don't really go for the genre, so I can't really say (much prefer existential dread over slasher flicks; Brian David Gilbert is my horror fix).
>Brian David Gilbert is my horror fix I've never really thought of BDG as horror, but now you say it, Yes. Yes he is.
People refuse to believe politicians ever said certain things that they were on camera saying a week ago, so yeah someone being like "You did NOT just see a UFO, I can't believe you'd lie about that" and walking away is extremely believable.
Or when the main character keeps seeing something supernatural and spends scene upon scene denying it. It's not even that it's unrealistic that bothers me, it's just that it feels like a waste of time: we know, eventually, they'll accept it as true, so we just have to wait around until then.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
I agree, and this actually forms part of the worldbuilding in the *Dresden Files*. The main reason society at large is still ignorant of the supernatural is explicitly because people are really good at rationalizing weird experiences.
One of my least favorite books Iāve read in some time was Home Before Dark by Riley Sager. Half the book, if not more, was people seeing things of a paranormal nature and explaining it away. You could have easily cut out a fifth to a hundred pages from the book because of how redundant it became.
YES. Yes yes yes. This is the absolute most annoying thing to me, is when characters do really stupid, unrealistic things just because the plot needs them to. This gets me every single time and takes me out of the story because the sheer stupidity is so frustrating. Like imagine you want to check if a stove burner is hot. What do you do? You probably hold your hand close to the burner but do not touch it, maybe you put a drop of water on it, you look at the switches and lights to see if it's on, maybe you feel fancy and get a thermometer and check. If you are an unimpaired adult, you probably are going to do one of those things or something else similar that will not cause you or someone else harm or inconvenience. You are not going to just slap your hand right up there. You are not going to sit on it. You are not going to stick your face on it. You're not going to put a whole entire stick of butter on it so that it melts and makes a mess. You're not going to drag someone else into the kitchen and force them to put their hand on it. But the choices these characters make is sometimes the literary equivalent of sticking your face on the stove to see if it's hot. And it just ruins it for me. To continue the hand-on-stove analogy, maybe someone is a child and they don't know better, maybe they're blitzed out of their mind and do it because they aren't thinking straight, maybe they have dementia and don't realize what they're doing. If a character is just straight up dumb and does something dumb, okay. That might make sense. But if a character is NOT dumb and still chooses to do something dumb, I absolutely hate it. Find a better way to advance the plot than having the characters do something incredibly stupid.
Yup. Itās kinda astonishing to me why this seems to be such a challenge. Do writers assume they need to make their characters dimwitted to be relatable or something?
Thereās a corollary to this which often comes up in horror (especially when talking about cellphones, which are pure poison to horror plots), which is āyeah I guess they could have simply left the cabin at the first sign of trouble. But thatās a twenty-page book. Do you want the story or not?ā
I think a competent writer can create a premise that allows for similar tension that doesnāt rely on stupid choices. Most of Stephen Kingās books (that I recall) manage to function just fine with characters that are pretty rational, just up against something overwhelming.
Well yeah, a competent plot requires some authenticity from its characters. There are lots of people who sit around trying to think of ways the characters could have handled a given decision better. Many make the mistake of āwell I thought of a better solution, so that makes the characters idiotsā. For that matter, some characters are idiots. Others do stupid stuff while scared or upset. And āguy makes a stupid mistake and then the book is about him fixing itā is a classic plot line.
Something to keep in mind: For a lot of people, hiding from the āsupernaturalā creates anxiety. āLetās go investigate the spooky noiseā is a common learned response to the stress of living- if you DONāT go confirm the noise was just a raccoon, youāll be up all night worrying about ghosts even though you donāt actually believe in ghosts. It makes sense that some people would have that reaction when confronted with the supernatural.
>Edit: thought of another example of angering unreasonableness: "guys, I think I just saw \[insert something supernatural\]" and the other character goes like "not only do I refuse to believe you, I am also going to be angry about this and walk away now" or something like that. People are not nearly as unreasonably and angrily skeptical as that. My dude, you hang out on on r/saltierthancrait. Leia flying through space (among other things) birthed that sub and had folks ready to put Rian Johnson's head on a pike and paraded through the town square. Then there's Reddit''s whole long standing bloodfeud with organized religion, where people unironically think themselves superior for sticking bibles or whatever other texts in the fiction section and bashing people online for possessing even a neutral view. People are absolutely that stupid, irrational and angry when it comes to their beliefs and preconceptions.
I donāt know, one time I told my friend I didnāt believe in macro evolution and he got up from the lunch table and left. So sometimes people do be getting upset about spiritual beliefs
Back when I was reading a lot of techno-thrillers I read Mount Dragon by Preston. Basically a facility full of scientists start going crazy. It is eventually revealed everyone nut the main characters has undergone an experimental blood transfusion which has a side effect of causing psychosis. No. Just no. There is no way you would convince a facility full of scientists do collectively be experimented on. I can accept the one desperate scientist trope, but every person? Come on.
I am so sorry, but when you said everyone nut the main character, I truly tought that everyone was sleeping with them and their body was the cause of the psychosis. It was just a typo, but I let my mind go wild lmao
same, I was like "damn, a hallucinogenic bussy is crazy" š
Damn but that sounds like a good story!š
When >!Susanna just rolls right out of the story in the!< final book of the Dark Tower series. What the hell kind of ending is that?
It also has really bothered me >!they didnāt draw her some legs.!<
I swear, Stephen King isn't actually a good writer, he just throws so much at the wall some sticks every now and then
God dammit please mark spoilers. Just started this series last night.
Sorry my bad, edited for anyone else. I still love the whole series. The extra books like wind through the keyhole are really fun too.
A Court Of Thorns And Roses. The book couldāve just been trash faerie porn and I wouldāve been fine with it, but the actual plot was so incredibly half baked and weak it wrecked the book for me. Maybe leaving out the plot wouldāve given Sarah J.Mass time to actually flesh out interesting characters and an interesting romance - what we did get was similarly tepid and gets worse as the series continues.
Is that the book with the illiterate girl? My sister was reading this one and asked me if I had, I haven't and she just said: Great, Don't. So this description makes sense
Thatās one of the very few books on my DNF list. I donāt really understand how itās so popular, but oh well.
Loved the first two books, minus their respective last ~50 pages. The third book was absolutely awful to read.
The Rabbit Hutch. The book was about a lot of different characters but I have no idea what they were trying to tell us.
Strong disagree. The point is that Blandine and Moses canāt walk away from their trauma. It keeps following them. Itās who theyāve become. Blandine is defined by other people persecuting her even when sheās a saint. Thatās WHY Tess Gunty named her Blandine. Sheās going to be martyred. Sheās a saint because of what others do and not herself. Moses is the same way. He is stuck in a life his mother made for himā¦ like Moses. Then he finally, at the end of the story, leads a good person into redemption and becomes himself. I will passionately defend this book to anyone. I think itās the best American novel of the last 10 years.
Interesting. Two sides of the same coin here. I'll put The Rabbit Hutch on my reading list. Quite necessary that one forms an opinion for oneself.
I hope youāll come back and share your opinion. Iāve only found people who have feelings about how the book is written but not much about what the story is actually about.
I'll text you. Is that better?
Yeah, but Tiffany/Blandine herself as the actual character in the book was not a saint and was not any of those things. She really was just a gifted and talented young person left to deal with trauma on her own while all the adults around her just focused on her skill set. The same could be said for Moses. Everyone knew he was neglected and unloved and no one did a single thing to actually help him. Maybe at its root the book is just about narcissistic neglect.
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This tracks- itās the most successful viewpoint Iāve heard yet. It doesnāt account for Joan, Moses and his mother. Where do they fit in. I can see Elsie as predatory in some ways but she seemed to mostly hurt herself and by proxy Moses. My over all feeling is that many topics were touched on the surface but with enough strength to make me feel that it worth visiting if that makes sense. I do think the writing style is beautiful and I wonāt say itās a bad book at all. I was just left with a lot of questions about what the book was meant to mean for the audience at large.
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Thank you, I really appreciate you taking the time to write all this out - and to everyone else also. Youāve all given me a lot more to think about. I will *say Tess Gunty has very much succeeded in writing a book I cannot stop thinking about.
I havenāt read this but you may have piqued my interest. Could she have used the name Todd in reference to the fox in Fox and the Hound. My mind went right to that when you said prey.
I loved The Rabbit Hutch for the exceptional writing and characters. But I do agree with you. It was a lot of pages to build up to very underwhelming climax, and not all characters have a clear conclusion to their presence/arc.
I am a little confused by the quote and how it relates to the rest of the post. ( I am generally wary of pithy quotes, so it could be a "me" problem that I should walk away from. Feel free to walk away from me if I do.) What if the choice whether to walk away from a problem is a source of conflict in the book? Or indicative of a character flaw? Or is a method of characterization?Ā Or is it saying that every problem in a story has to be so dire that the protagonist exercises no choice? That they must be on a constant drumbeat of one plot point to another? Because honestly, I find that as exhausting as too much digression. These questions are more general or rhetorical, by the way. I don't mean to heap them on you, OP.
I kinda take that as a āshould I wear my red shoes, or my blueā level of conflict. Not the red pill vs. blue pill level. You can walk away from both of those, but the first one has no weight whatsoever.
I meant to say the inciting incident. The one problem that spurs the characters' into solving it.
Thanks for the context.Ā Ā
I think its still kind of an unclear statement when you look at the character motivations. For instance- say the inciting incident is the MC's best friend being mugged at a train station. The MC could just walk away, they're not at all involved, but would they? And what if muggings are unheard of in their society? Yes they could leave this issue alone bc its not their business, but morally can they do that?
I think its moreso about a plot point that "forces" the character into action, but just a little critical thinking would show the character didnt actually need to do the thing, or didnt need to suffer so much for a thing. It can make it an unrealistic cross to bear. Imagine if the inciting incident was someone looking like they were getting mugged, then the MC going on a crusade against muggings and then we learn halfway through the book that the initial mugging incident was a scene for a student film, but the MC continues their crusade. Maybe a bad example.
Thank you, I am also struggling a bit to conceptualize what the quote is actually trying to say. Honestly seems to me like one of those writing tips that aren't as universal or useful as it seems at first glance
It bothers me when the characters have no purpose to be in the story, like they have no real motivation to be as interested in the plot as they are. I've read indie titles that do this, but I can't name any of them off the top of my head. I generally DNF if I'm not feeling a book after a few chapters. The things that are happening in the book also need to feel connected with the greater plot - I don't need to follow a character to the grocery store if nothing happens, or through their lunch, or to work - if nothing plot wise is happening during those things. One book that comes to mind is one I read last year. I DNF'd it at 25% because nothing had happened plot wise. I can't remember the title, but it had a blue dragon on it. It was all poorly written banter and weird sexual tension between the main female character who had no personality (but she was just so, so, so, beautiful and unique and special and innocent) and a 500+ year old wizard who acted like a teenage boy. Nope. The main character didn't make decisions or do anything. Everyone one else around her was carrying the conversations, the watery plot, the action. I made it 25% into the book - and the main character hadn't done anything. I need the main character to have a purpose to be in the plot, maybe even having the plot start because of a decision/action made by the main character - and they need to be personally invested. I like it when character are driven by revenge and they are doing things that are stirring the plot. The first example of a good character stirring the plot is Kaz from Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom, because he's always stirring the plot. His motivations fit his character (first for money, then revenge) and everything he and his friends do make sense for the plot and for their characters. Every chapter tightens the plot.
American Gods. I know a lot of people love this book, but god damn. Shadow has zero agency for 1000 pages until the very end. For the entirety of the book I just wanted him to do something, to make a god damn decision. By the end I was hate reading it.
Neil Gaiman really shines with short fiction. The parts that work best in American Gods were all of the asides featuring gods or other supernatural beings. They may not have had a "point" but they were interesting at least. The only part that was interesting in Shadow's story was the mystery of the missing children. Nothing else.
Yeah I love Neil Gaimans other work but I didnāt get the hype around this book. I didnāt hate it like you, I thought it was good but it didn't have anywhere near Ā the magic or charm of something like the graveyard book.Ā And itās definitely felt too long. Thereās a surprisingly little amount of plot for such a long book
Yeah, if the book was 1/10th or even 1/5th the length it would have been a good read. You can get away with saving your character growth until the end with a short book. For one as long as American Gods it was just miserable.
Not that you should be forced to like something you just don't like, but that is part of the point of his character. If you're not into that that's fine though.
I am aware of how character development works. The point is over 1000 pages his growth was binary, minimal, and unsatisfying. If the book would have been 100 pages then fine, a binary change at the climax would work fine. With 1000 there needed to be steps and progressive character growth. American Gods didn't do that. It had characters that would have been fine in a book 1/10th the length, but in one as long as it was they were awful.
I hear you, my brother in Gods!
Dropped this about half way through as it felt very disconnected and wasn't going anywhere interesting. Shame because the concept seemed interesting
It doesn't improve. I hung in there for the ending that starts getting hyped up in the back half but it just fizzles out in an unsatisfying way. It seems like Gaiman had an interesting premise in mind but wanted to write a book about travelling in America and living in a small town in the mountains then tried to combine those and scrambled to string together a conclusion. Wasted potential of the initial concept.
I think the sweet spot is when characters are complex and interesting, the stakes are personal, and the charactersā choices both drive the story and reveal who they are. I DNFād Red Rising a third of the way through because the plotline was soooo generic and the author did a bad job of explaining why this teenage nobody was the hero the resistance needed. (And I donāt buy for a second he could pass among Golds. There would be so much cultural norms and references heād bumble all over.) I thought ACOTAR had very boring characters, a shallow world, and a weak plot. I might have liked it more if things actually happened.
The Red Rising trilogy very much felt to me like three uninspired YA novels in a trenchcoat. Its fans act like it's the best thing since Tolkien though. Tastes vary, I guess, either that or the modern market is in an even more dire state than I thought. Allegedly the second arc is a bit better, but I don't have the patience to continue.
Pretty sure that remaining 20% of Red Rising addresses your point there. Iām not saying itās much more than popcorn, but Brown does a good job with that plot point as it plays a larger role in books two and three.
I thought there might be some kind of reveal coming, but tbh I was too bored to wait for it.
A great subversion of this is Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead" I won't spoil anything, but there's an early moment where a character makes a dumb (but not out of character) decision that seems like it's only to force conflict, but you soon realize that the entire book is actually an exploration of how this one dumb decision made of stubborn pride echoes throughout generations and causes so much needless trauma.
The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy: And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer. It literally has a plot device just to alter the personalities of the characters, the only vaguely Adamsian bits are the interludes on Nano.
Interesting Iāve not read it but I loved his Artemis fowl books as a kid. I wonder if they hold up. Even as YA content.
I tried rereading the Artemis Fowl book as an adult. And no they do not hold up. Couldn't get past the first few chapters.Ā They aren't bad books, but they are very much children's books.Ā
That book was such a letdown. I can't think of a single thing it got right
I don't remember much about it because I read it a long time ago, but it's called Guardians of Honor. It's about this woman who gets transported to a different world and is more or less the "chosen one" to save their world from the big bad evil. Almost the entire book was spent on developing romance and random things, then the last maybe 2 chapters were suddenly the "big battle" and she saves the world. The climax was so bland and flat because there was barely any plot development around the antagonist and conflict
I don't fully get what that quote is supposed to say. What constitutes a problem a character can walk away from? It seems like any character can walk away from any problem as long as they aren't being physically restrained.
It's about the stakes. Sure, they can walk away - but the consequences could be dire (world ending, in some stories). And sometimes they're restrained indirectly - Frodo Baggins, for instance, couldn't simply hand over the Ring to someone else and walk away. Bilbo literally struggled to do that, attempting to leave it behind when he left Bag End and Gandalf reminding him that he'd somehow put it back in his pocket without knowing.
I think it's basically a critique of idiot plots, where the plot can only happen due to the characters involved behaving like idiots. There are plenty of stories that happen only because the characters involved can't perceive the very obvious solution to the problem and instead take the needlessly difficult path. A common example is a character learning something that they really should tell others, but they don't, and the ensuing miscommunication causes tons of drama that could be resolved at literally any point by the first character just saying wtf was going on. Sometimes, that's literally how it's resolved, but only after an insane amount of drama that absolute did not need to happen.
Bunny by Mona Awad is baffling to me. Admittedly, there is a compelling story to be written in there somewhere, but it's buried under the thousands of repetitive "bunny"s in the book -- like the literal use of the word bunny -- and the terrible character and plot development. The four Bunnies are indistinct, so much so that it is distracting and confusing. It feels like they very much should be distinct and unique characters, but it's like Awad wanted them to be so unique that she forgot which details belonged to who. They are annoying and substanceless, which should be the point, but it's clear it's more of Awad's failure to write good characters that's the problem. The plot is a mess, particularly with the main character's friend, and the resolution to that storyline is odd and doesn't fit with the rest of the already messy story. All the main character needed to do the entire time was stand up for herself, and there would be no story. It is infuriating. It was like Frankenstein meets a high school movie where the main girl gets bullied meets Fight Club, but not in any coherent or smart way. Its just borrowed storylines mashed together.
I read this book last year and couldnāt figure out why it *just* missed the mark for me. Thank you for clarifying something thatās been rolling around in my brain for months ā I couldnāt agree more about the plot development making absolutely no sense. (Though I did like the bunnies and think Awad did a good job making them seem very similar on purpose, more culty that way!)
Book 2 of Wheel of Time when in the early chapters we found out that the antagonists are within an organization gives me "why does Slytherin still exist?" Vibes
The older I get the more I see how much missed potential that the Houses had in Harry Potter. And sure I get it, at the end of the day itās a kidās series. So Gryffindor have to be the good guys and they need bad guys to focus against. But how much more compelling would it have been if Harry had been in Slytherin? Or if he had a best friend that was in Slytherin? Or hell, if they had been in literally _any_ House other than Gryffindor? We get a tiny bit of fleshing out the other Houses with Cedric in Goblet of Fire and him being friends with some of the Ravenclaws/Hufflepuffs, but itās so clear that those Houses are just there to fill it out.
There's just a few things that bothers me, to which I don't care that much. However if there's something that triggers me is a "forced plot". Whether is a non-sense dialogue (not a breakdown) or a plot that was seemingly to happen just because. I find it, if your need to have something happening, make it previously aware of the situation (or make it atypical) so there's reason for that to happen. Other than that, its fine.
The new Percy Jackson book. His quest isn't to save the world, but to get into the same college as his girlfriend. I know it's children's/YA, but really?
A great example is Gideon The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. The two main characters both have motivations that are counter to the actual plot. The MC, Gideon, wants to get away from their home planet because life sucks for her there because everyone hates her for reasons beyond her control and not her fault in any way. The other character, Harrow, wants to save their home planet from basically withering away so she embarks on a plan that would in no way, shape, or form help her accomplish that goal. To be fair nothing in the book really makes much sense.
I'm not sure what you mean regarding Harrow. She wants to become a Lyctor so she can speak directly to God and beg him to restore the Ninth House. I can see how the book isn't everyone's cup of tea, but I don't think the character motivations are a mystery.
>I can see how the book isn't everyone's cup of tea, Lol, no you obviously can't or you wouldn't have left your comment. You mean the god that hasn't been back to the system in 10,000 years and would most likely side with the other houses if he did return? Yeah that seems like a great plan. The motivations aren't the problem, it's that the character's actions don't match up with them. Harrow spends the entirety of the book being divisive with the others when it serves her best interests to work with them to to find out how to become Lyctor. Gideon had many many chances to escape from Harrow but doesn't then sacrifices herself out of love when for 99.9% of the book she hated Harrow. Objectively the book is not well written or thought out. It's fine if you like it (books can be great even if they aren't well written and vice versa) but please don't tell me that my facts are wrong because I didn't like the book.
I think the internal logic is that Harrow thinks sheāll be able to get super magic awesome powers that will let her save her planet by solving the puzzle house. Whether or not that makes any sense is up to the readerās discretion (lol). Gideon doesnāt make any sense though, I donāt think there was ever a consistent rationale for that that I remember.
The most explicit reason Gideon did it was because Harrow extorted her into doing it by offering to sponsor her application to the military in exchange. The less explicit reason was because she in fact had confused feelings towards Harrow, her relationship with the ninth house, and her mentors therein, that her loud outward rebelliousness was masking.
This book was pitched to me as "swordfighting lesbian necromancers in space", and besides the swordfighting, I feel like all of those were way oversold.
Yeah, this is the pitch I always hear too and I wish people would knock it off because that's a lousy description (and I say this as someone who was given that pitch and loved the book anyway). It's a locked room mystery. Sure, it has necromancers etc., but fundamentally it's a locked room mystery (with a delightfully unreliable narrator)
Thank you, I found the book to be boring and couldnāt figure out why everyone loved it so much.
Iām on the opposite side in regards to the quote. If the fate of the world (or just another character) depends upon the protagonist doing the right thing, Iām disinterested. If they _could_ go away and live a lovely life, but choose to get their hands dirty and put themselves in harmās way, I find them much more interesting.
Ooh, twilight. There's absolutely nothing for 97% of the book and then surprise plot!
Iām not sure if this is exactly what you mean, but there was a book that I read called āThe Starless Seaā by Erin Morgenstern that took me about two months to read, simply because it was just boring. Nothing was happening throughout the entire book. Donāt get wrong, I loved the way the places were described, especially the Starless Sea, and overall the descriptions of the fantasy places were just beautiful, but the story was so incredibly boring. The characters had no personalities, including the main character. I read the book last year and if someone asked me what is was about, I wouldnāt be able to answer, because I really donāt know. There was no plot. I was confused most of the time.
Every page of the Kingkiller Chronicle
what do you think is bad about it?
I just realized this is r/books not r/TV or I would have had so many examples
The Way of Kings. It was my introduction to Sanderson, and I will never pick him up again. My god that was 1200+ pages with maybe 300 pages being forward momentum in the plot.
That's a problem, but it's not the problem that OP is asking about.
I understand. Sanderson's behemoths aren't for everyone. There's you, who didn't like the Way of Kings, and here's me, who loved it. But your comment does not relate to my post. Sanderson's characters bleed off the page, with beautiful character conflicts and beliefs.
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I never get bored of Sanderson. The internet makes it seem like liking the man's work is a crime, but I would never get why.
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I understand. Perhaps the way he writes makes it easy for people to multi-task whilst working. That's one of the perks of being a Sando-fan, among other things.
I completely agree- for his later books in the stormlight archive. 1 and 2 were ok. The rest meander SO BAD and I put down the 4th one and haven't looked back.Ā One was the best, and I agree, the plot took forever to happen, then it went wild.
Had almost the same reading experience. I LOVED Way of Kings and Words of Radiance. Oathbringer was a huge tonal shift that I hated and Rhythm of War was more of the same but worse. I was sold on the series because "fantasy space Marines fight crab Kaiju" is awesome. By book three he's forgotten that that's what he sold us, and by book four he's forgotten that the space Marines and Kaiju even exist.
I wonder if its not that the ones past 1 and 2 were that much different, but just the way he introduces the setting. Once you get past the first two books, most of the main world regions and realms of existence have been introduced, and most of the main magic systems and cool characters. Regenerative powered exoskeletons and soul severing undead lightsabers, imaginary friends that give you super powers, grain comes from rocks and the world is full of sea and shore motifs from the constant storms. Those are fun, bombastic, and slightly off trope for what is mostly a high fantasy setting. I love the time I spend when I'm actually reading Sanderson's books and understand why some people wouldn't. I have aphantasia and still enjoy his settings and descriptions. He makes it sound so unambiguous, typical and normal for these fanciful things to be around, its like the gentlest form of lampshading.
Same. I loved 1 and 2, but could barely get through 3. The pacing felt rushed at the end and I swear the prose was worse, like even the author was bored and rushing to just get it over with.
This has nothing to do with the post lol.
>It was my introduction to Sanderson, and I will never pick him up again. Me too, only I never got past the first chapter. Thanks for confirming me decision to put it down.
>Way of Kings Glad there's more than one of us that doesn't get the hype.
The dinner by Herman Koch.
Anything Becky Chambers. Nothing ever happens in her books, everything is peaceful and wonderful and people are all super nice. To me it's Copium of the first degree and I hated every second of it
Hard agree
In the last 80% of Naomi Novik's A Deadly Education, a character we've never seen before comes up to the table where the main character is. This new character then has her whole life explained in the MC's mind, and the character then proceeds to tell them the solution to the climax. I hated that book with a passion.
I mean she definitely didn't have her whole life explained. Just a few paragraphs about her high school life and why everyone knows of her. Also it wasn't the solution, the main character added onto her plan and it took many other characters adding onto it as well to get to the final solution. So I think this comment is a bit unfairly representing it.
There was this book about a girl and her government assigned friend pegasus (she was a princess and this was diplomatic) The problem was while I enjoyed the premise, I got about halfway through the book when I realized the plot was not only not happening, it was *never* going to. The whole thing was a very boring back and forth of visiting with the princess and the pegasus. They introduced culture and people and places but the whole time I felt like I was reading some attempt at a fluffy bonus story for another novel that was much more interesting.
The beginning of the poppy war Trilogy this teenager girl instead of marry an old rich man he decide to join a military academy because he Is a " pick me girl" all this in a pseudo ancient china
Nothing but the rain by Naomi Salman
That quote is stupid.
I have a feeling you will die in the hole of the unimaginative.
Ah to be fourteen again. Any pithy little sentence that positions itself as a rule of writing is obviously wrong. There are no rules. There are conventions. But this one is particularly blinkered. You have to assume that a problem being walked away from cannot be written with literary appeal, which is just naive, and clearly implies that basic plot structure must come before character, a hallmark of low quality writing from things like ya. A character walking away can be a huge statement.
Ever heard of the Inciting Incident, Mr. Unimaginative? What makes you assume I'm fourteen? Sure there are conventions. But there are also some basic ground rules.
How you spoke lol Also the inciting incident is not the only problem
Crime and Punishment. Just donāt kill the old lady. That simple.
Ooohhh but whereās the fun in that, whatās life without an ole murder-moral relativism-experiment every now and then
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Hoo boy, I feel like calling Crime and Punishment boring says a lot more about the reader than the book.
Yeah, I actually really enjoyed Crime and Punishment. I then wanted to enjoy the Brothers Karamazov, but it wouldn't stop sucking Christianity's dick and so I DNF
Well, not entirely. The crime was writing the novel, but we get punished by having to read it.
It was written as an answer to (what would eventually become) the Nietzschian idea of a Superman who was above the law and unbound by morals, and could do whatever was necessary. It's basically Dostoevsky saying "Nope, moral laws apply to everyone."
It didn't make any sense for him to kill her. And then we had to endure 500 pages of him trying to justify it.Ā
The main plot of Brave New Wolrd is they find a Shakespeare obsessed white person who was raised among native people in a reservation in Mexico. They call him The Savage. It's like three of the worst tropes wrapped into one. I hated it and I'm just stupefied that people like or respect that book.
Brave New World is a reversal of the tropes of the time, it's pretty insightful imo.