[ SECRET POST #3550 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3550 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Star Trek]


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages,08 secrets from Secret Submission Post #507.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[ketita]

Yes! People are like "it's DARK, unlike that sparklepoo Tolkien" and I froth and go HAVE YOU EVEN FUCKING READ TOLKIEN. Yes, it's not the current fashion of grim-n-gritty, but Tolkien was pretty dark.

And even when people go "yes, but it set up a Good Main Character and killed him of brutally in the first book, so surprising!" I'm like fuckers, I can list fantasy books that did that way before.

[philstar22]

Yup. Definitely a rage button for me. Even the Hobbit has dark parts, and that was written for children. LOTR has lots of darkness, and the Silmarillion even more so. The only thing not there is the sex and the rape (unless you go by fanfic), but there is war and torture and horrific deaths and awful and complex people. Like, stop saying Tolkien isn't dark. Clearly you haven't actually read anything he ever wrote.

And yes, the good main character dying has happened before in fantasy.

[sarillia]

I don't get what version of Lord of the Rings those kinds of ASOIAF fans have read either.

[ketita]

I'd assume that all they remember from the books is "pretty elves singing songs", which... it did happen, but apparently they missed the rest of the plot.

Though to be honest, if I have two series of which I will only remember very vague details, and one of them is "pretty elves singing songs" and the other is "rape and death", I'd stick with the elves personally.

[(Anonymous)]

>I'm like fuckers, I can list fantasy books that did that way before.

Okay, so name them.

[ketita]

meh, of course somebody was going to ask for that here. I'm having serious trouble listing fantasy books today, in part because I'm half a world away from all my bookshelves and it's kind of tough to rattle it off.
I remember though that Mickey Zucker Reichert's The Last of the Renshai subverted the "chosen hero" trope in a very surprising way - it surprised me way more than AGOT did, when Ned Stark was killed. (those books have other issues... but I quite liked them).
Thing is, I don't generally like it when a hero I like is killed off, so I quit a lot of those books when that happened. I'm trying to remember the names, but blanking atm :(

[(Anonymous)]

.2 seconds to google. Warn8ng, obviously spoilers in the links.

Whats a good book where lots of the main characters get killed off? Particularly ones you care about?
https://m.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/2hjk4i/whats_a_good_book_where_lots_of_the_main/

Popular main character dies books
https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/main-character-dies

What are some really good books where the protagonist dies?
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-really-good-books-where-the-protagonist-dies

There are more, but I was trying not to spoil myself.

[(Anonymous)]

But claiming "bitch I can list so-and-so" would have implied you had actually read or been somewhat familiar with books like that. If you only go looking for them when you're put on the spot, it's clear you were only trying to one-up the GRRM fanatics.

[world_eater]

are you confusin anon with ketita?

[(Anonymous)]

By stepping in on that challenge for credentials, they assumed the same responsibility. It's not like that comment was an honest request for recs.

[world_eater]

wat

[(Anonymous)]

"so name some" = "oh yeah, prove it"

[ketita]

Eh, you'll notice that anon didn't respond to me - since I did actually name a series, I guess. I'm annoyed that I can't remember the other one - I remember the entire plot, and the death of the main hero that so annoyed me, everything, but not the name of the series.

tbh you could probably even compare Ned Stark with Duke Atreides.

anon is just being an asshat.

[arcadiaego]

I'm rereading LotR at the moment and the Mordor sections are so unremittingly grim. And given lots of it is clearly based on World War One, just as 'realistic' as ASoiaF

[ketita]

Yeah. I think tbh it has more to do with today's mentality of "everybody is actually a shitty human being" than anything else. So you get characters in Tolkien who actually strive to do the right thing shock horror, so people think of it as "unrealistic". It's stupid.

[(Anonymous)]

Tolkein was dark, but fairly bloodless. LotR's violent segments read more like a history text - it was an account of bad things that happened, but wasn't a visceral description. There was more emotional weight to the description of the psychological toll of the events, but that's the sort of thing that's very hit-and-miss, and will come off just as dry and bloodless to some readers, so even if on an objective level LotR was just as dark as AsoIaF, on a subjective level, it doesn't feel nearly so to a lot of readers.

And a lot of people probably just saw the movies, which were a lot shinier.

[ketita]

You're right. A lot of it comes down to style rather than content.
Somebody should write a "gritty version" of LOTR, just to demonstrate what it would look like in contemporary grimdark style XD

I guess I just fundamentally reject the binary people try to have, with LOTR on one side and ASOIAF on the other, because that's not true to the genre at all.

[lotesse]

It's interesting, in light of this distinction, to consider that Tolkien was a war vet and Martin, afaik, is not