Quote:
Originally Posted by livinitup0
thats so weird...everyone was telling me this was on par with game of thrones/wheel of time...
this is a cool story i guess but theres so many holes and just so many things he wants me to just assume and not question that its hard to focus on it without roadbumps.
like we have some boy whos dad was supposed to have just died...you wouldnt be able to tell that outside of him saying "Richard's father died" over and over. Hes not distraught, sad....hes in the middle of the woods for some reason and somehow he just "knows" that this girl he sees is going to be killed because the men have "that look on their face" pff..
Now im about halfway through and ths kid whips out his sword at every opportunity and somehow has become a rage-filled psycho in the last 100 pages. imo it kinda takes a bit more than a quarter of a book to completely change a characters entire personality...even if theres a couple monsters on his heels.
imo it just wasnt thought out well... they needed a someone to read this with no knowledge of the character before editing. Hes taking WAY too many liberties and making me work far too hard to keep up.
is fantasy really THAT hard of a genre? i mean christ you get to make up everything...the least you can do is help me relate to your characters and not think of them like afterthought video game characters.
Fantasy is one of the most difficult genres going. Getting to make everything up is actually far more difficult than telling the same story in the present day where the environment is already known and understood. You have to walk a fine line between making it "fantastic" and believable. Every place/concept/item name needs to sound "fantasyish" but not corny. A lot of authors basically do Tolkien because people know that world, and they write in derivative worlds so that they can avoid some explaining.
Exposition is hard enough in a present-day story. Using a narrator or discussions between characters to explain things always feels cheap. Now imagine trying to do that same exposition, while at the same time explaining the culture, geography, laws of physics, and so on at the same time. It used to be fine (even Asimov did it in some sci fi) to have discussions between characters handle exposition.
"As you well know, Jamison, the theory of Twoplustwopery indicates that the moon's orbit is convexically warped by the Hooliganese Dragonstar. This implies that on March 15th 3056 the Dragon eggs in Ireland will hatch and wreak havoc on the countryside, due to the Potatians."
"Indeed every 3rd grader understands that theory, Jax."
These days that sort of thing sounds ******ed and people don't buy it.
I guess this was a long winded way to say: "No, making everything up does not make anything easier, and instead makes it orders of magnitude harder."
Goodkind sucks. WFR was horrible. I think I liked one of the books, but can't remember which one it was. If you keep reading, you'll find that he really did copy everything from the Wheel of Time universe and rename it and spin it more crappily.
The last fantasy book I read that wasn't GRRM, Jordan, or Sanderson (the new Jordan, I guess) was The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss. I thought it was very well written, especially for a first novel.