Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.
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@unknownmat Yeah, the 'using Sorcery takes as much effort as doing things by mundane means' rule would have worked a lot better in a series where the male lead didn't end up walking around with half the power in the universe strapped to his back.
However, the Belgariad/Malloreon actually did have a restriction on the use of sorcery that I think worked pretty well - the noise it made. You can't magic your way past every problem if using it just tells your numerous enemies where to find you...
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I want to drop in on a couple of tropes with some real life experience. First of all, I am so tired of one or both of these tropes being in like almost every single novel. I agree with other people commenting on how annoying they are normally presented.
- Female bust size jealousy
- Rice/soy sauce/wtfever food
I was born and raised in midwestern farm town and live in Chicagoland right now. I went to Japan in 2005 for the first time and had a blast (toured Production I.G. studio in fact). Some time later, I met a Japanese lady and eventually married her. We've been married over 15 years now.
Now related to 1 and 2 above:
- While dating, she discussed getting a boob job as soon as she moved to the U.S. because she felt small.
- If we go more than 5 days without an authentic Japanese dish things get gloomy. I have a subscription to Cookpad on her phone because of this.
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@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
I'm reminded of The Belgariad's "The Will and The Word" system. Although Eddings tried to constrain things, he never succeeded.
I think the Belgariad series worked extremely well with it's magic system. Now this is also because there was not "modern knowledge" injected onto something as simple as the will and the word. Because as a teenager reading those books the first time around, I absolutely thought of ways to use it better and/or abuse it.
@kuali said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
However, the Belgariad/Malloreon actually did have a restriction on the use of sorcery that I think worked pretty well - the noise it made. You can't magic your way past every problem if using it just tells your numerous enemies where to find you..
This restriction was situational and thus only worked well in the series because most of the time that sorcery was important, it was in combat or stealth type missions where there were opponents that could detect it.
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@unknownmat in somewhat fairness to the Belgariad, there were some good ideas about constraints and consequences, like controlling the weather to make some fancy lightning strikes could destabilize the weather across the continent and take months to fix. Or that trying to unmake (vs. destroy) anything would unmake you instead.
Wasn't there also the chance that failing to have a strong enough will or strength to gather the power to enact the word would ...kill you? turn you into a newt?... it's been too long since I read the books :)
I agree that there weren't very predictable limits to what anyone could do beyond "whatever the plot requires."
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@sorvani said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
This restriction was situational and thus only worked well in the series because most of the time that sorcery was important, it was in combat or stealth type missions where there were opponents that could detect it.
If the rules let the powers be useful and cool while keeping them from breaking the plot, that's really all they need to accomplish, no?
@sorvani said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
While dating, she discussed getting a boob job as soon as she moved to the U.S. because she felt small.
Suddenly finding yourself outclassed by everyone and wanting to fit in seems way more normal than instant envy any time an individual happens to be better endowed than you are...
@HarmlessDave said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Wasn't there also the chance that failing to have a strong enough will or strength to gather the power to enact the word would ...kill you? turn you into a newt?... it's been too long since I read the books :)
Overexertion was a 'Kill you' thing. They also raised the possibility that it could strip you of the power of Sorcery at one point. Neither ever happened on-page, though (and Belgarion explicitly exceeds this limit by using the Orb), so it wasn't much of a restriction in practice.
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One of the larger issues I have is so many authors not even attempting to understand time. I'm blanking on naming a specific series or example right now, but I'll describe the issue.
You have long lived races elves/dragon but treat 100 years ago as ancient history. Even if your entire human population is dumber than a box of rocks, the long lived races still know everything that happened. Basically anything less than a generation for your longest lived race will not be forgotten.
How hard is it to actually scribble out a timeline on a piece of paper and then follow it. When you want to add something a book or two later refer to the timeline.
I do not write coherent narrative stories, but 10 years ago I decided to spin off my D&D campaign from the shared world that I had started the game inside of in 1999. Our original "realm" we called it the Forgotten Mess since it was a pieced together planet mostly based on Toril. But when I split into my new multiverse I wrote up simple timeline of major events that I wanted to have as background knowledge for the players. As the games have proceeded since then I have added more detail to the timeline as the players go in their various ways, or as players create new character and want a new history added.
So, when a players asks about the legend of the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords, I look at the timeline and pick the fall of a dwarven mountain to invaders 5000 years ago as the last time it was seen. Did I plan that out? Heck no, world building is hard. But Just a little planning can make expanding or adding easy without being stupidly unrealistic.
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@sorvani said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
One of the larger issues I have is so many authors not even attempting to understand time. I'm blanking on naming a specific series or example right now, but I'll describe the issue.
You have long lived races elves/dragon but treat 100 years ago as ancient history. Even if your entire human population is dumber than a box of rocks, the long lived races still know everything that happened. Basically anything less than a generation for your longest lived race will not be forgotten.Ironically, one of my pet peeves is the about the opposite: pretending that memory is unlimited and indelible. It's not. Memories fade and blend together. Details are lost and twisted. In the end, only the patterns remain.
That's what journals and diaries are for, to start with. And then treatises, history books, etc. Alas... immortality does not mean your possessions are immune to house fires, or your books to rot and decay.
The only time it's really escalated to a grievance though is w/ Sword Art Online. So many aspects of Alicization's plot rely on the conceit that Fluctlights have limited capacity that fills up with memories.
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@Gamen said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
That's what journals and diaries are for, to start with. And then treatises, history books, etc. Alas... immortality does not mean your possessions are immune to house fires, or your books to rot and decay.
Yes, but most of these stories take place in societies that have history books and schools.
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You know, it's been 20+ years since I read The Belgariad. I can't remember it all that well.
Eddings absolutely tried to put restrictions on the system. You guys mentioned many of them, and I agree with this.
But I think you're missing the other key ingredient that usually makes "the power of imagination" magic systems fail to cohere - namely the idea of what it actually means to "conceptualization" something. There are plenty of things I can "conceptualize" happening where the outcome is relatively simple and well-defined, but that - were they to actually happen - would completely break fundamental constraints about the world. Authors will typically structure the narrative so that nothing world-breaking occurs (and maybe the authors themselves are not even aware that such constraints are being violated). But nevertheless, it affects my willing suspension of disbelief.
Within the Belgarath universe, I seem to recall a humorous scene where Ce'nedra was pregnant with bizarre craving, and Garion just will-and-worded those dishes into existence for her. Things like that are completely broken because it ignores constraints like how to identify the ingredients that go into the dish (e.g. this breaks the law of entropy - and why we can't reverse engineer the Coca Cola formula), the time needed to cook the food (e.g. energy-change/time where time->0 would require vast amounts of power), etc.
Above, I gave the example of Frieren. The idea that a character can cut any object regardless of its hardness, thickness, etc., as long as she can imagine herself doing it is completely world-breaking. Sure, for most things, it might only require the same effort as operating a pair of scissors, or a chainsaw. But it might also require as much energy as a stick of TNT or even as a nuclear weapon. Actually cutting through certain substances might generate so much heat that it wipes out everything in a kilometer radius, for example. And I suspect that the author is completely unaware of just how ridiculous this ability is. It makes for a fun little sub-plot in one of the arcs. But it also renders the magic system completely beyond sensibility (i.e. no point in speculating/predicting - you just have to accept whatever outcome the author decides on).
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@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
namely the idea of what it actually means to "conceptualization" something
I mentioned that as the only reason it was not completely broken. Since there was no injection of "modern knowledge" giving better conceptualization in the those books.
An example of a LN series that bound conceptualization magic in a good way is The Magician Who Rose From Failure. The MC is still OP and all, I mean it is a LN, but even though he can conceptualize things from the modern era of his previous life, he has to find the right magic words in the various ancient scripts that will work with his concept.
I won't say how good or bad the series is here, just that this series is an example of a good way to both use conceptual magic and set limits.
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@sorvani said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
I won't say how good or bad the series is here, just that this series is an example of a good way to both use conceptual magic and set limits.
Sure. I'm not saying that it can't be done well, and I love OP MCs. And I even like magic systems to be slightly ambiguous and mysterious. It's just that - in the spirit of "hate on what you love" - when "the power of imagination" is done without enough care, the implications can easily escape the author's grasp. It can knock me out of the story at least long enough to roll my eyes.
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@sorvani said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
One of the larger issues I have is so many authors not even attempting to understand time.
Good call. I have a similar observation but from the opposite direction.
We tend to conceptualize time logarithmically. So while we realize that a million years is more than ten-thousand years, we tend to lump them both into the category of "a long time ago" and fail to grapple with the implications that come with an extra 990,000 years.
I also can't think of any specific examples at the moment. But it's not uncommon for writers to write about some ancient civilization that existed an arbitrary large number of years ago, as if more zeros just adds to the mystique.
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@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
But it's not uncommon for writers to write about some ancient civilization that existed an arbitrary large number of years ago, as if more zeros just adds to the mystique.
In light novels it seems to always be less than 500 years though and that is what annoys me. Because they have long living races and educational institutions in almost all the series also.
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@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
We tend to conceptualize time logarithmically. So while we realize that a million years is more than ten-thousand years, we tend to lump them both into the category of "a long time ago" and fail to grapple with the implications that come with an extra 990,000 years.
... it's not just fiction authors that suffer from this. Archeological/Paleological news reporting does too with their casual use of century and thousand year time spans...
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@sorvani said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
In light novels it seems to always be less than 500 years though and that is what annoys me. Because they have long living races and educational institutions in almost all the series also.
Are you thinking of something like Frieren? For example, there's the elf warrior who performed some marvelously heroic deed... but so long ago that, although there are still statues commemorating his achievement, nobody knows who he was or what he did. In the present he's just some unremarkable guy walking around - even though there are other elves still around who presumably ought to remember him.
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@sorvani said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
@unknownmat said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
But it's not uncommon for writers to write about some ancient civilization that existed an arbitrary large number of years ago, as if more zeros just adds to the mystique.
In light novels it seems to always be less than 500 years though and that is what annoys me. Because they have long living races and educational institutions in almost all the series also.
Some authors treat this properly by having the MC actually go and talk to the elves. Realistically, they might or might not have known or cared about specific events happening at the time in question.
Even in the past twenty years in our connected world you could ask me about many events and I'd have to go to Google to find out, because I wasn't paying attention to them at the time. Many others I'd only have vague knowledge.
An author ignoring libraries and colleges is more of an oversight to me, though better authors make the effort to explain lost history by saying something like that kingdoms and their libraries were destroyed and only fragments remain. In Chise's world (Making Magic) there was a planet-wide catastrophe.
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@HarmlessDave said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Even in the past twenty years in our connected world you could ask me about many events and I'd have to go to Google to find out, because I wasn't paying attention to them at the time. Many others I'd only have vague knowledge.
Yes, things on less than global affecting scale are going to fall away, I don't mind that. But even prior to the current era, the educated class (rich/nobles) know about large historical events passing 2000 years or more. Most of them may not be "learned scholars" about the subject, but they are aware of them, and there are scholars.
I'll pause my thoughts on this again until I pick up a LN that it happens in. I'm mid read of a few, so I am sure it will pop up sooner rather than later.
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@HarmlessDave said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Even in the past twenty years in our connected world you could ask me about many events and I'd have to go to Google to find out, because I wasn't paying attention to them at the time. Many others I'd only have vague knowledge.
Yeah. Plus there's always so much going on in the world. Any particular division of history into distinct events is arbitrary and depends on cultural/historical narratives. Lots of important and momentous things happen that nobody will remember in 20-50 years.
An author ignoring libraries and colleges is more of an oversight to me...
Even this is actually not so crazy to me. Looking at our own history, people have existed pretty much everywhere on the planet for at least the last 10,000 years. Yet in school we only learn about a small handful of notable civilizations. It's not unusual for kingdoms to rise, exist for hundreds of years, and fall. And nobody in the modern world - outside of a handful of experts who specialize in that region or time-period - even knows it ever happened.
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One of my pet peeves is how many LN authors have to jam sexual fetishes in their characters. It's like they're trying to fill a checklist: Physical appearance, personality, skills, hobbies, sex kinks. This is very far down the list of things that make a character interesting or provide narrative motivation.
Jobless Reincarnation is the big offender here. I am fine with Rudeus being a perv, because it's a part of his character arc. Rudeus has no interpersonal skills, starts with a messed up view of sex (otome game brain rot) and over his life negotiates where it fails and where it succeeds. It's a story about a morally grey world where you try, fail sometimes, and keep trying.
What's weird about Jobless Reincarnation is how seemingly every character has to have some fetish. Beastperson slave rape, piss play, legal loli, peeping, panty sniffing, harem, incest, on and on! It doesn't contribute to their characters, it's just a side characterization.
Another example is Middle Aged Sage, which has gay rape monkeys, a shota-con, a nun who gets her big tits groped... It's not essential to the plot, and it's played for laughs. I find it to be unfunny, edgy, and pandering.
Overall I wonder who is it for. Sexual fetishes are not that common. Single-digit percentages of the population have them. Even if you do have one, it's likely not the one the LN has included. I understand that sex sells, but sexual fetishism seems like a niche that would harm sales more than boost them.
Ultimately I have to roll my eyes and focus on the parts of the story I care about.
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@Outinthegardener said in Hate on what you Love. Let's air our grievances.:
Overall I wonder who is it for.
My guess: often it's the author, especially their early novels.
Much as I enjoy TRPG and the characters themselves, Erich's harem of monster girls seems like something for the author's wishes as much as the reader. Not me, I'm good on spider girls thanks. (growl!)
Unlimited Gacha seems even more like the author's wish to live in a world with his 1,000 gacha waifu harem.
When it's not the author's daydream: pandering, trend-following, laziness. Build a harem, follow the checklist to offer a menu of possible reader wishes.
