Then there is the sequel where the poo people fight back, but they do it in the wrong and bad way which really enforces why we kept them as poo people in the first place! Otherwise it upsets the natural hierarchy and don't you know they just create their own hierarchy that is even worse because it doesn't even acknowledge special people?
Edit: that also makes it praised for it's 'realism'.
There are a couple other book series like that too, I can't be bothered to remember them, but they are definitely like that. One literally has the common side called 'the revolution', and basically makes the arguement that edgy magical libertarians are the only force that can save or doom humanity and the environment.
Yeah, the butcher bit was incredibly unnecessary, you could have just had them have the same economic failures that Dany was facing and had them fall that way. There was really no need to indulge in the 'ignorant authoritarian peasant warlord' fantasy.
In Gambo, the status quo was maintained and the naive attempt to improve society somewhat was thwarted, allowing the same bunch of hereditary sociopaths to regain and maintain control over a relatively stable ongoing regime, and the "no plot armor no favored characters" ego insert of the author got to be a special boy after all and wander off with all the cool mysterious nomad people. Also he had (CW: sexual violence and general GRRM creepiness)
spoiler
le sexy sex with the le crazy sexual violence victim that went too far then killed her
:so-true:
Disclaimer: Maybe "Winds of Winter" would have gone differently if the author could be bothered to finish it instead of being high on his own farts, but judging by how much more :libertarian-alert: there is in the books I don't think it'd be less ideologically terrible than the show's ending.
Hey now not all of them survived.
The Tyrells who gave alms to the poor were wiped out in the show :)
The naive attempt to improve society somewhat involves conquering an entire city, changing it's laws inmediately, and then leaving inmediately. Maybe i'm misremembering but Martin said that plotline was inspired by the US involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's very convenient that the only attempt to change the status quo was presented as that bad to imply the status quo is preferable by default. :liberalism:
There are more examples of good attempts at changing the status quo, but go on.
Damn, i wonder why the story about rich bastards destroying entire kingdoms for their own benefit doesn't show said bastards doing jolly stuff for the masses lr abolishing the status quo that benefits them.
Of all the themes I've seen in fiction, I think rape and slavery have two of the worst ratios of "creators putting these in their stories" to "creators using these in a responsible and mature manner."
I hated the Harry Potter series so much as a kid. Specifically becuase the wizards were smug assholes who thought they were better than the Muggles, despite the fact that modern technology could replicate almost everything magic could do in the books. And in many areas, our technology was far superior and indeed incomprehensible to the magic users, such as rocketry and atomic physics.
I truely feel bad for my parents for having to listen to my third diatribe in a week about the wizards lived like medieval oafs while we explored space and invented computers. Then it would get dark when I started ranting about how we could wipe these pointy-hatted slave-owners off the face of the Earth with a push of a button, how dare they condescend to us.
Granted I was a annoying le-science loving nerdlinger, but I feel vindicated in my hatred.
i like kid you's moxie. give those wand-kulaks a lil what-for :posadist-nuke:
Just don't become methods of rationality pilled and join an ai cult
Especially not if you're feeemale. "LessWrong" tends to get off to (CW: sexual violence)
spoiler
drugging, amateur brainwashing (usually with mantras like "you are only a figment of my imagination made specifically to serve and please me") and consequently violating their "cuddle party" company to brag about it later.
I am freeing the House-elves by giving them Ushankas and tiny AK-47s along with a copy of Che's Guerilla warfare. I hope they make the Hatian revolution look like a modest reform movement.
add a panel about males having this magic and females having that magic and you get wheel of time almost perfectly
:(
I'm listening through WoT books for the first time and honestly they are pretty mid. I'm going to finish them, but it was wildly oversold to me.
what book are you on? i just started book 10. truth be told i like the books a lot and they are absolutely epics with incredible world building especially given how long ago the first was written. having said all that... yah, there's infinitely better stuff written in the past decade
I'm halfway through book two. I think part of the problem is I am listening to them immediately consecutively after each other. I am at the point where if Rand and Egwene have another stupid fight I am going to scream.
World building is solid af though it's why I'm still listening.
If men and women constantly arguing is too grating for you I've got some bad news about the other 12 books. I don't think it starts to get particularly good until like book 3 and then around 7 or 8 it's nothing but people sitting in rooms arguing for an entire book.
Not men and women, Rand and Egwene specifically. They have fought and made up and then fought about the exact same thing again four times now. Perhaps it's 'realistic' to teenagers, but it does not make for compelling reading material.
Jordan beats the "men and women just don't understand each other" horse into the dirt, with a lot of braid tugging and men being stubborn / stoic.
I don't know if I could ever read them again. I was a fairly voracious reader when I was a teenager and there's a couple entries in the series that really drag.
try to make it to the end of book 3 if you can. shit was awesome
for recent "epics" i liked mistborn quite a bit. it's fairly YA but the themes were good
the themes in brent weeks lightbringer were god awful but the dude writes like an absolute poet and, unfortunately, i found the world to be super interesting.
american gods is cool. the witcher books are fun.
gentleman bastards book 1 is phenomenal. NICE BIRD, ASSHOLE. book 2 is okay and book 3 is meh.
next on my list once i finish WOT (@ book 10 rn) is the blacktongue thief. i'm pret stoked.
So what I remember is some magic dude went to fight Satan and got owned like a thousand years before. Said process of ownage broke the kind of magic that men get so men go insane if they use magic but women are fine.
spoiler
All magic dudes are killed because they eventually get too powerful and literally start to go mad seeing past the fabric of reality and through the wheel of time. Dudes are magic way less but when they are magic they do a bunch of damage.
that ain't it
Men go mad because before the post- apocalypse (yes, it's post apocalyptic) setting their half of the source of magic was tainted by Not Satan. It's not that they're more powerful (they are explicitly stated to be more powerful in general, though), but every time they "touch" the source this taint feeds into them and drives them insane. It's not about how powerful they get, but how often they are exposed to and how resistant they are to this taint.
And then when they go mad they're a danger because they're essentially casting wild magic according to their delusions
spoiler
I am very literally guessing based off of information I have halfway through book two. But this doesn't really ruin anything for me as I was going to listen to it anyways.
i don't want to plot spoil, but yes. in book 1 you're introduced to the white tower of female magic users. the red faction hunts down males who can wield the power because when men wield magic power they eventually go crazy and kill everyone (analogy for male rage, power, abuse, etc.)
there's more to it but it might be plot spoiling
The answer is "Robert Jordan was a boomer who probably was never presented with the existence of trans people before he got too far into the series to figure out how to make his gender binary a spectrum," but they do explain that which half of magic you get access to is basically a boolean flag on your soul so presumably a trans channeler would just be someone who's soul got reincarnated into a body opposite whatever that flag was.
kinda sorta spoilers for a minor plot point
There's actually a quasi trans character, though I'm using that term very loosely here, who is a channeler. They were a heavily misogynistic man, pissed off Not Satan quite a lot by failing at something, and got their soul forcibly shoved into a woman's body as punishment. They continued to wield the male half of the Source.
exactly. i also think this is why idiot jk rowling's brain is broken
Frank Herbert decreed that men, by essentialist nature, could only be Mentats, and feeemales could (only) be Bene Gessarits, and if a male Mentat eventually got Bene Gessarit powers, his male awesomeness would rule the universe.
Still loved the novels, but that's fucked up ideology.
spoilers
They go mad because prior to the books the world was a magical scientific utopia but they discovered a source of energy that, if tapped, could theoretically allow people to do basically anything with magic along with eliminating the differences between male and female channelers (since each can only touch half the source of magic, and each half lets them do different things more easily).
Well it turns out this energy source was Not Satan, detected through a thinning in the skin of reality, which they bored through and consequently released
This led to the downfall of the utopia as Not Satan spread his influence and turned people violent and greedy, etc.
Lews Therin Telamon, The Dragon, and his 100 Companions attacked the Bore and used their magic to seal it shut. However, the contact made in doing so allowed Not Satan to connect to Saidin, the male half of the Source, and taint it with malignancy.
It's described as an oily taint on top of a pool of water, you can't dip into the pool without being exposed to the taint, and repeated exposure is essentially guaranteed to drive a channeler insane over time.
980(? i don't know exactly, a long time ago) years ago in the past from the books (what you're referencing in your comment):
spoiler
this guy lews therin was hella powerful with the male magic. him and a bunch other fought the devil and sealed the devil away. the devil, as a last gesture before being sealed away, tainted the male power so anyone who wielded it would go mad.
all the male magic users went absolutely crazy, killed everyone, moved mountains, oceans, etc. literally "broke the world"
the books are generally about the present day and lews therin being "reborn" (debately if true or not) and fighting the devil once and for all
She's not the only one.
I'm a huge fan of the Dune series, but Frank Herbert had some very gross gender essentialist ideology in the foundations of the story.
yaya like min farshaw or the ogiers. i'm just generalizing. i really like WOT a lot even tho it leans into a lot of m/female tropes
I need one where the "poo people" overthrow all the "specials" and destroy magic
We need more works of fantasy about class struggle
EDIT: It's interesting because I think most readers read those stories and imagine themselves as one of the specials, whereas I always imagined being one of the poo people.
Commonweal, they don't destroy magic (though they'd dearly like to since whoever made it was an asshole) in fact most people are low level magic users, but any wizards capable of immortality have the choice of obey a revolutionary socialist republic (and never leave) or die in one of several ways.
i was going to write a story that's basically about this (well, with magic additionally being a hoarded resource rather than a thing inexplicably special to certain bloodlines)
too bad it's tied to a needlessly complex/large project and will therefore never be finished 😔
Is this just a roundabout way of saying you don't like Fire Emblem?
spoiler
And it's not working anymore because the poorer nobles are being proletarianised and some of the banned children survive anyway and are now spread through the slave population
Sanderson has always come from the left wing of Mormonism, and his views have got better and better as time goes on, with canonically gay and trans characters and honestly one of the best autistic characters in fiction with Sterris. I love how you think she's awful...until you get her perspective.
One of the few undivisively good things about the second sequel trilogy film being tossed away like trash for an aggressively mid ending. Love to see it.
Now that we're kinda on the subject: Yay or nay about the trope where it is the specials that are oppressed by the "poo people"?
Examples:
- X-men
- Naruto (kinda)
- inFamous
Reeks of objectivism to me: "a select few people are born superior, but the envious and base masses of inferior people hold them back."
I have a soft spot for X-Men because I loved it when I was younger, but the metaphor is pretty flawed.
Yeah a small subset of the population that has the ability to kill you with impunity isn't any minority group it's cops
I don't like it that much. I never understood how it was supposed to properly represent real world groups
I can't kill anyone with ADHD I don't see how it's similar to lazers or thins X-Men can do
I don’t know much about how ADHD interacts with metaphor enjoyment)
It doesn't, it just makes us read wikipedia lists of metaphors until 4AM
That makes sense, it could totally be a great metaphor for people with control disorders.
I don't know much about X-Men media but I think most can control their powers like most superheros. But I know there are some storylines about trying to keep control as well
I think the X-Men were originally also meant to represent the persecution of racial minorities and that really didn't make sense to me. Makes more sense as a metaphor for neurodivergance for sure!
God I wish I could trade my ADHD for eye lasers or some shit. I could manage that with those ruby glasses, and my room would be clean
Yeah, I took some comfort in stories like this as a neurodivergent kid who's probably queer, and that's the source of me being iffy.
"Yeah, I am discriminated against by the normals too! Thanks media for showing that I am not just not inferior, but if I play my cards right, possibly superior!" That's why edgy 14 year old me loved pre-character development Gaara (who for whatever reason, I thought he was a medic at first but was quickly disproven)
Rock Lee is the hero Leaf Village needs, even if he is not the hero it deserves.
PlagueOfGripes on Youtube has a hilarious video dissecting the hypocrisy of Naruto's story and Rock Lee's character
I saw someone try to justify Rock Lee one time by saying that his goal was never to be the hero hero - nor was it to overcome geniuses. He just wanted to be a splendid ninja and be everything he can be. To that end, he rose magnificently by overcoming his inability to mold chakra and a catastrophic injury. Now that I write it, I don't think that POV trumps Neji being correct about geniuses, but it was a neat way of thinking about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT2Ssj080lM
That is technically true and he did succeed, but he specifically says that hard work can overcome natural talent, and the narrative was being set up in a way for the audience to view him as the underdog that deserves to win. But then at the last second it turns upside down to prove that actually no, natural talent will just always trump hard work (whether the author intended it or not).
Just listened. Pretty good, but also it saddened me because First Season Naruto was the only one I really liked
I have the same disposition that Plague has usually, in that I spend more time dissecting and critiquing the things I like than things I don't like, but I can still say I enjoyed it at the end of the day. I can give you 99 reasons why Dragon Ball is fucking stupid and makes no sense but I love it so much. You can still like Naruto even if it goes off the rails and sabotages itself.
Idk, man. I'm more and more predisposed to the tight 26 ep shows. I'll take Trigun, Full Metal Alchemist, and Digimon over DBZ and Naruto simply because they've got a tighter narrative arc.
Listening to Ballin' Out Super reminds me of how much DBZ was just... awful. Like, they build up these amazing iconic characters and then just abuse or neglect them in later seasons.
At some point, you've told your story and you just have to pack it in and do something new. Unless you're doing Broly. That was pretty good.
Oh believe me I know lol, Tien is one of my favorite characters and they have thrown his character in the dumpster and spit on him for good measure. The story treats him with nothing but contempt. The longer Dragon Ball goes on, the worse it gets, but I keep reading/watching. :shrug-outta-hecks:
The worst ones are the ones that bring up how shitty the situation but never do anything about it. They feel that they have to mention eugenicist class society but don't have the guts to suggest an actual solution.
Every pseudo-revolutionary LN I pick up devolves into magic academy slop after a few arcs at best. Ascendance of a Bookworm was good and now it is Harry Potter and it was created to torture me personally.
Being a child is thinking Sorcerers are cooler because they get their sweet powers automatically due to their magic bloodline and it's perfectly intuitive for them
Being an adult is realizing that Wizards are cooler because they're just regular dudes who figured out the cheat codes to reality and just stack them on top of one another like a speedrunner exploiting glitches to get through a game in 13 minutes
@UlyssesT hey they made a comic about shitty tropes that suck that we've complained about.
I knew about this one and had it bookmarked for months. :agony-wholesome:
You know how everyone of note is powered by nepotism? Makes you wonder why they keep greenlighting projects where having rich powerful parents makes you a hero
