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Case ([personal profile] case) wrote in [community profile] fandomsecrets2013-01-06 03:26 pm
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[ SECRET POST #2196 ]


⌈ Secret Post #2196 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 060 secrets from Secret Submission Post #314.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 1 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - empty image with a text comment ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
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(Anonymous) 2013-01-06 09:47 pm (UTC)(link)
well, it would be easier to get into it if we could make out the author and titles beyond the light reflection in the picture so we could know what series it is

um, but i get what you mean; i'm sure there are tons of fantasy series that are way better than asoiaf but somehow asoiaf is the one that got super popular. how did that happen? connections?

(Anonymous) 2013-01-06 09:59 pm (UTC)(link)
It's the Inda series by Sherwood Smith. Great military fantasy series.

(Anonymous) 2013-01-06 10:38 pm (UTC)(link)
thank you!

(Anonymous) 2013-01-06 10:53 pm (UTC)(link)
ASOIAF got popular because it did things that epic fantasy readers wanted to see better than other epic fantasy series did

it's not really a mystery why ASOIAF became popular

(Anonymous) 2013-01-07 01:30 am (UTC)(link)
not all epic fantasy readers like that heaping pile of shit.

(Anonymous) 2013-01-07 03:02 am (UTC)(link)
Well, here's some intense bitterness.

(Anonymous) 2013-01-07 03:04 am (UTC)(link)
There are many things that I enjoy seeing in epic fantasy that ASOIAF does not do.

ASOIAF is a soap opera with a fantasy backdrop, as far as I'm concerned.

(Anonymous) 2013-01-07 03:20 am (UTC)(link)
The majority of the epic fantasy reading marketplace as a whole, then. I didn't mean to imply anything about the tastes of individual epic fantasy readers, or the rightness or wrongness of the desires of the epic fantasy reading marketplace as a whole. But it's not that hard to figure out why ASOIAF is popular if you talk to people who like it. It has violence and it's unpredictable. And I think the soap opera elements probably help a lot - I reckon a lot of people are a lot more interested in soap opera than they'd like to admit.
(reply from suspended user)
queerwolf: (wolf)

[personal profile] queerwolf 2013-01-06 10:09 pm (UTC)(link)
There's always gonna be something out there that we think is more deserving of attention (or just as deserving) as something popular. To me it's often a crapshoot as to what becomes popular and what doesn't. I read both this series and Charlaine Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series before they ever became shows and I never would have predicted they'd be so popular.

(Anonymous) 2013-01-06 11:16 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh god but the Sookie Stackhouse mysteries are so bad.

Like I never thought I'd be saying HBO would IMPROVE a story but...

(Anonymous) 2013-01-07 05:59 am (UTC)(link)
You have questionable tastes then.

(Anonymous) 2013-01-06 10:31 pm (UTC)(link)
I really, really don't agree. I mean, the Inda series is okay, but it doesn't have near the depth of character development or the intricacy of the plot that ASOIAF does, and Sherwood Smith is just not as good a prose writer as GRRM is. I'm not even that high on ASOIAF, and the Inda series is legitimately entertaining and fun, but there's a reason that ASOIAF is more popular than the Inda series, and it's basically because it's more well-developed and better. I think the Inda series does deserve to be better known though, but that's true of a million fantasy series.

Sorry anon, I guess I'm a hater.

(Anonymous) 2013-01-07 03:05 am (UTC)(link)
Nah, you're not a hater. You're just more into soap opera than you might want to admit to yourself.

(Anonymous) 2013-01-07 03:23 am (UTC)(link)
The funny thing is, I'm really not that into ASOIAF. I'm really not that high on the series. But I don't think there's really anything that the Inda series does markedly better than ASOIAF, and I think any criticism you could make of ASOIAF, you could probably make just as well of Inda.

If you don't like ASOIAF, you know, that's cool with me. I'm okay with that. If you think it's a soap opera, that's cool.

(Anonymous) 2013-01-06 10:46 pm (UTC)(link)
ASOIAF receives praise because it has a TV show. This means more people are reading it than originally did. If you want heaps of praise on your favorite books, find some way for your favorite books to be a tv show, duh.

(Anonymous) 2013-01-06 10:51 pm (UTC)(link)
ASOIAF was already very popular (by the standards of a fantasy series) well before it got the TV series, though. It was one of the most popular epic fantasy series for a long time (I'd say the only other contemporary one that came close in terms of readership was WoT, and maybe Goodkind's rubbish). That's kind of why it got the television show in the first place. The reason it was popular to start with was because it was well-written for epic fantasy, it had good characters, but more than anything else, because it was willing to be violent and mature and it was legitimately difficult to see where the plot was going. It was surprising and shocking when a lot of epic fantasy was really predictable.

(Anonymous) 2013-01-07 03:09 am (UTC)(link)
Sure, if "surprising" and "shocking" entails outright masochism. ASOIAF is 'General Hospital,' but with ice zombies and dragons. The shock is just that: emotional bullshit for the sake of it.

It's not actually good. It's just that most fantasy readers have never actually read anything good.

(Anonymous) 2013-01-07 03:28 am (UTC)(link)
(I'm pretty sure this is the third post I've written responding to you responding to me) (but w/e)

I think there's some fairness to the idea that ASOIAF is soap opera-like in its appeal, and as I've said, I definitely don't think it's the greatest thing ever. But I don't think it's true that the shock is just emotional bullshit for the sake of it - I think there's more or less an underlying logic to a lot of what happens (not all of what happens, I don't think it's a perfect series, and some stuff especially in the later books probably is just shock for shock's sake) but there is some emotional or character logic to the books. And I think it legitimately is surprising and that's something that people legitimately liked - for instance, there are good narrative reasons for the fact that Ned dies at the end of book 1, but it's still something that is shocking to first time readers, and in particular is shocking and was shocking at the time to people who have read a whole lot of epic fantasy, because it's somewhat against the genre conventions as they existed when WoT came out. You can argue about the ultimate value of that sort of thing, but I think it certainly is a real reason that the book is so popular. It's not by-the-numbers in a way that a lot of things are.

I get the impression that you're not really going to respond all that seriously here, and are just going to reiterate that ASOIAF is bad, shitty, soap opera-like, emotionally manipulative, and that people who like it are idiots. And, you know, if you don't agree with me, that's cool. Just thought I'd kind of respond to your thoughts.

(Anonymous) 2013-01-07 03:47 am (UTC)(link)
I don't think that people who like it are idiots. I just think that they wouldn't be as impressed if they were more widely read.

It's a series that, to me, undermines itself by trying so hard to go against the grain. It's predictable because it's defiant, and it doesn't really offer anything new; it only appears to do so because it moves in directions that are "shocking" to its audience.

Perhaps I've simply had an adverse reaction to the hype, which I perceive to be rather overblown.

(Anonymous) 2013-01-07 04:10 am (UTC)(link)
Cool, cool.

Like I've said before, I'm not the biggest fan of the series, so it's not like I'm saying it's a work of genius or anything. But I do think that the twists - at least some of the biggest twists - don't come about just for the shake of being shocking and surprising. They're well set up and they have their own narrative logic; they're justified and earned howsoever you please. There are definitely times when it does, but I don't think that's true of the series as a whole. Is it anything fundamentally new? On the whole, no, but I don't think most multi-volume contemporary epic fantasy offers that. And it is entertaining, to me at least.

It might be a reaction to hype, I definitely understand where that's coming from. And, you know, if you don't like it, you don't like it. It has its qualities, but taste is taste.

(Anonymous) 2013-01-06 11:01 pm (UTC)(link)
Heck, I like the Inda series too, but...man, the last book was a bit of a letdown.

Note: If you introduce a love subplot, authors, you damn well better resolve/confront it before the series ends.
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