Nothing exceptional in the context of the rest of the genre, but not challenging the genre's problems in the slightest either. Even Tintin eventually started calling out its own earlier prejudices.
But while they were definitely gory, they weren't violent in the service of much except being violent. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.M.H. was less graphic but much more disturbing because its topics weren't just pablum about the evil necessity of war.
Also a book with an unpleasant moral, but at least it was consciously building to its apocalyptic message about the irredeemable nature of human society.
Redwall doesn't really seem aware of its theme that good people are isolated communities constantly in danger from congenitally evil outsiders, and the only defense is all-out war without honor or quarter.
> Give him a name and leave him awhile, Veil may live to be evil and vile, Though I hope my prediction will fail, And evil so vile will not live in Veil.
(Spoilers: he was congenitally evil and being nurtured by the "good" guys didn't change that, all they could do was give him a redemption-equals-death conclusion.)
I just couldn't believe that. Outcast was one of the last ones I read because I read them out of order so I thought that the issue with rodents was more cultural, and that the villains were just from outer warrior tribes.
I thought maybe we would learn about core rat society and that they weren't all that different from mice, but in the end we found out just how little thought had been put into their creation.
I guess that makes sense, considering all the errors and inconsistencies involved in the original print version of Redwall, like the horse-drawn carriages and so on.
Nooope. Rats are evil 'cause rats gonna rat. Or orcs. Or native tribes.
It's all the same euphemism-as-text with different stickers on top.
The outsider opposing us is less human than us, and we must be good so they must be irredeemably evil. But in fantasy it gets to be literal, not just propaganda.
Those black-and-white views of morality and birth are unsettling to me. I've had friends with prejudices that remind me a lot of how the mice see the rats in Redwall.
@MikeQ I think that's not a useful way to phrase the issue, because it presents a false dichotomy that implies a failure of the adults in the kids' lives to engage with the kids about the ideas the kids encounter.
@SimonH. Right now I'm a big fan of NK Jemisin, Ann Leckie, Ursula Vernon (T Kingfisher), Nnedi Okorafor...
@MikeQ For example, I read the Tintin books as a kid. The early ones are super racist and the later ones actively work to engage positively with diverse cultures. It was a great opportunity for my parents to talk with me about recognizing prejudices and overcoming them when I notice them in myself.
(Similarly when I was much younger we talked about how the characters in Sesame Street are often quite mean, teasing and tricking each other. That was much better for me than either just keeping me from watching it, or letting me watch it without helping me develop critical tools.)
I know the Chronicles of Narnia are fairly well-respected books, but I don't like them because a lot of the characters and settings seemed shallow to me at the time.
@SimonH. It's largely a marketing term, applied by publishers rather than authors to describe the group they think will be most likely to buy the book.
There's no coherent content-based guidelines, it changes dramatically over time.
@SimonH. Average quality. I find that a lot of YA dilute their storytelling to cater to a target audience, which usually means making a simplified ripoff of a more popular story
@SimonH. I'd say there is less sex and less explicit violence in general. The worst stuff oversimplifies things; the best deals with things in a fairly mature manner, at least by the end.
The idea of "books for kids" is relatively young, and suffers from periods of inundation by cheap cash-grab series (usually ghostwritten and published monthly).
@BESW Fair enough. I think the most accurate, but least useful, is to point out that YA is a description of the intended audience, not necessarily the work itself.
The "Akata" series which started this part of the conversation is pretty solidly YA in terms of marketing and readability, but it's absolutely a great series for any age.
Deals with very real weighty and intractable issues with nuance and compassion.
@trogdor Hence the "in cases". I'm not saying that YA is inherently a A or B or C, however due to the law of large numbers, you end up with a lot of lazy authors who just recycle what's already popular
@SimonH. Fair warning: I recommend pretty much everything he's written, except for the Stormlight Archive series, which I love. It's great, but he just put out book 3 of 10, and they're each over 1000 pages. At one every other year, I'll be waiting until 2030 to get the last one. Ask a George R.R. Martin fan about that.
(LaValle's Ballad of Black Tom is especially fascinating because it's a compassionate re-telling of one of Lovecraft's more unashamedly racist stories--and yes, that's a high bar to clear--from the perspective of the black man he cast as the villain.)
Neil Gaiman is very weird, but has an excellent writing style. Patrick Rothfuss' Name of the Wind was also very good, but I was less impressed by its sequel. Still looking forward to the end of the trilogy, and the supplementary novella and short stories were also very good.
I found Gaiman very repetitive; whichever of his works you read first will probably be the ones you like most because they'll be the ones that feel new and innovative.
@JoelHarmon ...and I was waiting for someone to mention Kingkiller Chronicles. Yeah... it starts great (book 1) and then takes a weird direction (book 2) and I can't really make myself interested in reading any more of Rothfuss's work
He's often heralded as a scholar of story who combines many different kinds of historical story elements to make new stories which feel timeless, but... he's honestly not drawing from a very big pool.
@SimonH. Atomic Robo is a fun action-adventure comic.
Parts of Wise Man's Fear were very good, but I don't think becoming some awesome sex ninja significantly contributed to either the development of his character or the world, so a good chunk of that book was 'meh' for me. I do know people who really liked it, though.
BTW, @JoelHarmon, these recs are in the context of wanting speculative fiction which doesn't indulge in the common black-and-white morality of prejudices like savagification.
No groups that are congenitally acceptable targets, like orcs or rats, for example.
@BESW Ah, thanks. I didn't quite backscroll far enough, then; I stopped when I thought it was generic book recommendations based off character and world building.
Those black-and-white views of morality and birth are unsettling to me. I've had friends with prejudices that remind me a lot of how the mice see the rats in Redwall.
In that case, I'd have recommended Sanderson's Stormlight Archive, because there's a race that's explicitly considered inferior. Then you learn more about them and what they do, and it's heartbreaking.
I mentioned that I was happy to have found a lot of speculative fiction which doesn't accept those tropes as a necessary part of the genre, and was asked for examples.
@NautArch In a case of weird recursion, that review in the New Yorker killed its own soul by using references to the soulless money grab that is the fashion industry.Given how pretentious New Yorker is as a rag, this does not surprise me: the writer being utterly not self aware .
The Expanse is a rage-inducing example of trying and failing miserably to describe a culturally diverse future where prejudice and bigotry takes other forms.
Eh, I have no problem with Firefly being cancelled. It was too clever for its own good and running into Whedon Syndrom far earlier than most of his series.
@SimonH. For something completely different, consider Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Mycroft Holmes, in which Sherlock's brother goes to Trinidad to help his black friend expose a slavery conspiracy.
For a I-thought-they-were-bad-but-they're-just-different, perhaps Jim Butcher's Codex Alera series? Basically, the Lost Roman Legion get personal elementals and start fighting bipedal canines and other foes.
I've heard good things about Codex Alera, but Dresden Files was so casual in its erasing of people of color (in Chicago of all places!) and the independent agency of women that I've felt like there are better uses of my reading time.
@BESW I vaguely recall different areas with different customs also having somewhat different skin color, but the main divides were either regional or racial (human vs. canine vs. ...), not sub-racial (ethnic? humans with different skin colors).
[wry] Human vs canine, etc, is going to be a euphemism for human vs human.
That's the way these things work: if not-humans are depicted as lesser people, it's with the same arguments used to depict certain groups of humans as less than people--that a fantasy world can make those racist arguments can true doesn't help, it just means somebody thought "What if racist justifications for dehumanization were valid?" is an interesting bit of worldbuilding. There are ways to confront and deconstruct this, but I don't suspect Butcher of having the wherewithal to do so.
And frankly I'm tired of the deconstructions too; I'm at the point of wanting my speculative fiction to explore other ways of thinking about people. Like in Binti, or Broken Earth, or Murderbot Diaries, or Imperial Radch.
Or, heck, Digger.
Which has hyena-like tribal cannibal warriors who are people based on sympathetic understandings of actual human societies with those cultural traits, rather than stereotypes of same.
Oh, and if you ever do want to give mystery a try, there's the Peter Grant series, which is about a black British police officer who becomes the first wizard cop since WWII.
@BESW In Codex Alera, the humans are actually weaker than any other species. The bipedal canines are eight or nine feet tall with heightened strength and reflexes (and also blood magic). The marauding tribes have a spirit-bind with animals that gives them varying traits of their partner animal, etc.
All the humans have going for them is that some of them bind varying strength elementals, and they have good logistics and phalanx tactics/discipline of the Romans.
Weakness is not the same as inhumanness. Often arguments against racial equality contain the belief that the "less human" group is strong like a work animal.
There's no one quality that's going to single out the work as more or less responsible on this topic, it's about presentation and treatment as much as the individual elements.
And every work is going to be better or worse in particular areas; there's no perfect example. Everything has problems and part of living in the world is figuring out how to deal with imperfect things without rejecting everything.
For me, Dresden Files made me feel ickier and ickier the more I read, and there are authors who don't make me feel icky, so I'm gonna focus on those instead of going back to give Butcher a "second" chance after giving him more than a half-dozen chances at Dresden.
And that's not the same as authors I agree with, not by a long shot. I like Mrs. Frisby very much despite disagreeing with pretty much everything it has to say about society.
This question, about the fairness of a 7-sided die, troubles me.
It is in my opinion well-thought out and well-formulated. It is asking if a particular die has had any sort of rigorous analysis (physics-based or statistics-based) performed to test its fairness. That is simple, direct, and if s...
@trogdor Yeah, it's good to read things that are outside one's comfort zone, but that doesn't necessarily mean reading poorly written things which don't know what they're saying, or giving any legitimacy to obviously toxic things which shouldn't be part of a reasonable discourse in the first place.
Going by RAW, is there a way to (reliably) kill someone that cannot be undone? Short of outright wishing it'd never happened, I mean.
I don't mean just Imprisonment, or whatever. The creature has to actually be dead, and this death has to actually be non-undoable by using something like True Res...
I don't know much about your tastes, but there's a very good ramen place in the old market hall of Hietalahti and my SO just asked me if we could go there. (she also likes the milkshake bar conveniently next to it, hehe)
Also conveniently, the best burger place in Helsinki, if that's more your style :)
I have a preference for vegetarian stuff if given a choice, does the ramen place have veggie ramen?
One reason I didn't even grab a sandwich is that I found a new way to mess up train ticket bookings: I have booked for the wrong week, the wrong month, the wrong time-of-day and the wrong destination in the past and learned to check these. This time I managed to book the wrong direction, Helsinki→Turku, without noticing until I was in Turku station; the train I needed left 12 minutes earlier than the time I had in mind, so I was in a rush.
I mostly noticed because there was no 12:37 train on the departures board, only a 12:25 one, so I checked my ticket whether I accidentally managed to find some other train station of Turku (suburban or something) for departure. But no, Turku was just the destination of my ticket.
Maybe at some point I'll have learned booking exactly the ticket I need. This is not that time, though.
@Anaphory Depends a bit on where you want to go. HSL (the mass transit authority) sells relevant tickets of three categories: tram, city-wide and metropolitan area. City-wide works on the buses, metro and Suomenlinna ferry (not on the Vallisaari ferry, though) and the metropolitan area works if you want to go to the neighboring towns of Vantaa or Espoo
Espoo has the Nuuksio nature park, Vantaa has the Kuusijärvi lake and sauna. Of course determining if a three day ticket is worth it for possible visits is a problem of optimization :)
anyway, this reminds me, I need to start packing up my things so you won't have to wait for me
I'll probably chat to you about it when there, but probably a 48h city-wide would be good, for getting to the airport on Sunday I need a regional one anyway so it's not worth trying to include that in the other one, and I saw that HSL has 48h ones (in Copenhagen and Stockholm it was just 24 or 72h).
@Ben (If it's really bugging you and it's unambiguously improvable, an elected moderator can go back and edit anyone's comment. The other three probably wouldn't abuse their powers this way, but I'm clearly a lower-character mod.)
@NautArch I see you're not on my punchspace game-organizing list. Would you like to be? The pitches people put together for the "summer season" are going out today for voting/selection/commitment/"Avengers, assemble!"
Urrgh the haze from Kilauea is making it hard to think. Must be awful for the people actually in the same island chain.
Not as bad as when Anatahan erupts, of course. But if it continues it'll probably be like the 2015 Southeast Asian haze.
...wait, was it Anatahan or Pagan that erupted most recently? It's probably a sign of... something... when you can't remember which order your local volcanoes erupted in over the last ten years.
@BESW Has the haze blown across the pacific already? (As in, did it reach Guam?) ... I have an old memory of haze from Mt St Helens and Mt Pinatubo both spreadhing haze/dust across large amounts of the globe as the wind patterns did their work...
My friends who just got back fro ma trip to Kuaii said that nothing had reached them yet. (Not sure whether local wind patterns blow the stuff away from them or not ...)
Hmm, heading to USGS for a few looks at what they have mapped out.
Heh, when I lived in Taiwan, we were above the city on a mountain, while those who lived in Taipei had to deal with the city being more or less surrounded on three sides by mountains, so with certain winds, it all blew in there and stayed there. Sorta like LA.
@BESW I wonder if it could have lasted three seasons (Firefly); at some point, what you say about the Whedon syndrome would certainly have arisen (IIRC Angel only lasted two seasons)
Whedon Syndrome is what I call it when a show with a wide variety of interesting and engaging storytelling devices stops using them, and instead repeats this one formula: Choose a popular character. Make her happy. Take away her happiness as brutally as possible. Linger on her misery.
@BESW Hmm, I was never aware that the series "dollhouse" was a thing. I guess I stopped watching TV shows for a while; might take a look at season 1 if I can dig it up on Hulu or something, might not. Son and I have a date to watch a couple episodes of the new westworld, which has a different take on the robot/self awareness thing. (Season 1 was pretty good, albeit creepy).
@DavidCoffron Don't worry. I realise there's only a small subset of users who could satisfactorily answer the question. I'm just hoping that a slightly larger subset think that it can be answered!
@Ladifas Even without B/X experience (I was raised on BECMI), I think we can probably help talk through some of the question's issues. For me, it it screams both "this feels like fishing for ideas" (not great in Stack-world) and "there are definitely people here who can help!" (what Stack's best at).
So I feel like we need to focus the question in a way that fits a little better.
The typical question is "what's the problem" you're having that you think importing B/X rules helps with? Then ask about that problem, rather than presupposing that importing B/X is the solution.
Or, digging down one layer, perhaps you're trying to import B/X rules for $REASONS, and you're having trouble making them work. (Mechanically, "feel," whatever.) If you dig into that a bit there's probably a workable question there?
I guess what really feels like it's not fitting is that you're trying to find a solution to a problem you haven't actually encountered yet.
@nitsua60 I'll have a think about it. My problem is that, by the time I have actually attempted to import some of the ideas and have run the session, it will be too late. Such sessions are unlikely to become commonplace in the campaign - I'm not sure I could face 10 players every time!
But I will think further about how I might import some of the changes (and read the book a bit more, but @KorvinStarmast makes the point that a lot of this stuff wasn't unique to any particular book), and see if I can formulate a way of doing it, then ask about that.
@Ladifas I run 10-15-player sessions with distressing regularity: the thing that's worked best for me is either co-GMing or having a player-assistant. When I co-GM we usually split one running the "mechanical" bits, the other putting the dice and pencil down and just roleplaying/narrating what's going on. When I've got a player-assistant it's a lot of the traditional "caller" stuff in exploration/combat.
3
In social situations the table(s) usually fracture into small groups and I have the player-assistant precede me to each group in turn to get a sense for what their objective is, they eavesdrop on the scene, and we move on. I can usually "get through" 4 groups/independent scenes in 10-15 minutes this way, then we bring the whole group back together and the player-assistant recaps a "here's what everyone did in town today" while I'm jotting notes for my future self.
@SPavel Ah, but fifteen teenagers with soda and chips and brownies and license to shout and dice and computers and "varsity D&D" sweatshirts... it's not just a classroom =)
(Plus, we play in a conference room. We're not barbarians!)
@nitsua60 don't leave barbarians to figure out the keycard-entry system for a long period of time, or they will resort to the more classically successful method of simply removing the door from the doorway.
usually the basic idea is you send a HTTP request to the URLs they give you, potentially using a HTTP GET/PUT/POST method as appropriate, and pass data either as query parameters in the URL or as your request body.
This question, about the fairness of a 7-sided die, troubles me.
It is in my opinion well-thought out and well-formulated. It is asking if a particular die has had any sort of rigorous analysis (physics-based or statistics-based) performed to test its fairness. That is simple, direct, and if s...
