I've been playing for about twelve years, and the last several I've been playing with a group that's not able to commit to a single long-term campaign so we play a lot of little games instead.
The Sisters Grimm is a children's fantasy series written by Michael Buckley and illustrated by Peter Ferguson. The series features two sisters, Sabrina and Daphne Grimm, and consists of nine novels, published from 2005 to 2012
== Summary ==
Sabrina and Daphne Grimm have gone through a series of foster homes after their parents disappear. They have been treated as maids, servants, and other things that children shouldn't be. They've even been abused and ignored. This is mostly because they have a harsh and uncaring caseworker, Ms. Smirt, who is supposed to help find a safe new home for them. After...
OUaT is about specific fairy-tale characters while Grimm is about communities of contemporary individuals who collectively inspired myths and fairy-tales.
@BESW I linked to the wiki page without reading it closely. The characters know who they are, and can change form (from normal human -> character) at will. They live in a town among regular humans who don't have a clue
A lot of folks really like OUaT, but it bored me to tears. YMMV.
All the others mentioned are at least good in my opinion, though. Grimm, Haven, Warehouse 13, The Librarians. (Atomic Robo is awesome too, but it's a free-online, pay-for-books comic.)
Yes, absolutely! Our primary tags should be body-of-literature tags. Tags about individual authors may be useful for fine-grained filtering but they're useless for area-of-expertise filtering.
The primary purpose of tags is to convey areas of expertise, to allow experts to quickly filter questio...
@Gilles I didn't downvote, but I think one of the reasons your answers got downvoted were because they don't seem to have many arguments other than "it works well for these people"
the one you just linked basically says "people do this and like this method therefore we should do this also"
which isn't a bad argument, but doesn't stand well by itself
@Riker Oh, right. The only answers on the site that actually went out and documented objective reasons to pick tags “don't seem to have many arguments”.
the genre tags one doesn't really have much backing either, it just proposes a method
@Gilles that's the problem. there seem to be a grand total of 1 objective reason you used and it's that 'other people use it, so we should consider it'
which isn't a bad argument, but the subjective ones are pretty good for being subjective
In Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years, chapter 4 ("The World Behind the Wind"), the second-to-last sentence:
On the evidence of the events of the fifteenth century, in the world east of the Bay of Bengal—the world "behind the wind", as Arab navigators called it—China could have ...
@Riker I don't see how this question relates to literature
whether in its initial state or its current state
Presumably “behind the wind” is a literal translation of the Arabic phrase meaning leeward. Why is it interesting who first used this literal translation, and why is it a literature question?
@Gilles Hmmm. I think these suggestions have plenty of support in the text. For example, Asimov never really explored how close robots are to humans. I'd say "The Bicentennial Man" is an iconic "robot desiring to be human/displaying humanity" story, no? — Standback2 mins ago
Displaying humanity, yes, but it's played purely from the point of view of the humans: humans shouldn't be afraid of being governed by robots, as long as the robots are good at it (and in fact they're better at it than humans)
Is there any objective system for telling the difference between a genre and a subgenre? It seems to me that the entire genre classification system is quite woolly and hard to pin down. As, in fact, you yourself said in another post here: "Debating whether a book is this or that genre is sterile. Many books have elements of one genre, and other elements of another genre." Given that, how do you expect genre tags to be able to be applied objectively and intuitively? — Rand al'Thor4 mins ago
@Randal'Thor It's comments like ^^^^ this that make me feel so bad about Lit.SE
I spend half my answer explaining the very point that you raise in your comment. Did you even bother to read my answer?
> As a reader, if I'm looking for a book in a library or in a bookstore, I'll find the book on the shelf dedicated to the broad genre that this book is in — most separate at least several broad genres: general fiction, mysteries, romance, SF.
> A question about a book should be tagged speculative-fiction, romance or mystery if it's marketed as SF/romance/mystery. This is a subjective judgement to some extent, but one that someone else (the publisher, the author or their agent) has made for us.
@Riker hard-science-fiction is a subgenre. I'm against subgenres, for the same reasons that they didn't work on SFF. I'm for broad genres, for the same reason that SFF works.
For values of "work" which involve people yelling at each other about whether anthropomorphism always counts as speculative fiction, or if it's only sf if there's also humans in the story.
I don't think "SF&F does it" is a great argument for much of anything.
@Gilles It's not strawmanning to ask questions about what's unclear. I know it's clear to you, you wrote it! But other folks aren't going to magically understand all the nuances you intend to imply.
If we wanted to discount your ideas, we'd just downvote and leave.
We're asking questions because we want to see how it can work, not because we want to prove it can't.
If somebody's asking questions about a thing you feel you've already explained well, consider that maybe you're experiencing that common syndrome where we read our own context into a work and see things which aren't explicitly on the page: people without the same context won't see the same thing.
This is a really really easy thing for writers to do with their own texts.
You've noticed a pattern: many many folks on lit.se ask you questions about things you feel you've already explained, or re-state your ideas inaccurately. You've chosen to interpret this as perversity on the part of a large segment of the lit.se community. I suggest it may also/instead signify that your usual communication techniques are breaking down somewhere in the lit.se context.
> perverse [...] 2 a : obstinate in opposing what is right, reasonable, or accepted : wrongheaded b : arising from or indicative of stubbornness or obstinacy 3 : marked by peevishness or petulance : cranky
This may be because lit.se users are coming from many different Stack backgrounds and there's not a coherent lit.se dialectic yet.
@Gilles You seem to be going off the assumption that the genre categories used by bookshops are some kind of universal and objective classification system. But different bookshops and libraries (even in the same country, let alone different ones) have different genre and classification systems. As said in my answer, genres usually can't be objectively defined.
I don't believe objective genre tags exist. It's possible to tag according to publisher choices about genre tags, which is passing the buck and causes problems of its own (eg, "young adult").
Yes, of course there are outliers. But tags don't have to have 100% objective rules. Otherwise we'd never use any tags whatsoever. There's always ambiguity somewhere. That's why tags are chosen by humans and not by computers.
@Randal'Thor It's the genre that the imprint advertises.
I'm not going to try to define genres. I want to reuse other people's empirical definitions. I don't care whether they're Right or Wrong.
Genre describes the group of people a publisher thinks would be most likely to buy a book. Not uncommonly the author doesn't agree with the publisher's genre label, and the label changes as market audiences shift.
Genre is not a description of a book's content or themes, except incidentally.
There is value in genre as a sorting tool, but it's neither universal nor immutable.
I'd be interested in seeing a proposal to use genre tags which takes this into account.
@Gilles But different people have different empirical definitions. There's no One True Definition of any genre (as far as I can tell, unless you can prove me wrong).
I mean, we could use LOC filing numbers. That'd at least put all the choices under one roof instead of using thousands of different publishers' conflicting ideas about genre depending on who published what when.
And I don't care, at this point, about the outliers. Now (or rather three weeks ago) is the time to find tags that work 99% of the time. We'll tackle the outliers as they arise. If they ever arise.
Let me give you an example (about on-topic-ness, not about tags, but it's the same principle).