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  1. In Memory of LAJ_FETT: Please share your remembrances and condolences HERE

Lit Eleven-ThirtyEight and stuff

Discussion in 'Literature' started by CooperTFN, Jul 8, 2013.

?

Well?

  1. I don't care

    20 vote(s)
    17.7%
  2. Hm, neat

    49 vote(s)
    43.4%
  3. OMG COOPER IS MY HERO

    44 vote(s)
    38.9%
  1. patchworkz7

    patchworkz7 Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    Mar 26, 2004

    *sigh*

    Excellent article, but it still just kills me that Sev and RC fans got robbed of something [admitting bias] that would have been AWESOME. Especially when the people who had worked on the RC game and made it awesome had either been let go or scattered to the winds by LA, which had an annoying habit of doing that to their dev teams.

    I guess we'll never get Starkiller's story wrapped unless the story group decides to keep his story canon because George had a hand in.
     
  2. patchworkz7

    patchworkz7 Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    Mar 26, 2004

    Interesting, but I take issue with the comment that military writing is "white and manly" considering most of my military friends at PoC and the Gears of War books feature loads of soldiers of colour, soldiers from various class divides, and Gears and the Mandos have quite a lot of women in.

    Now, in the greater world of video games there's a representation problem, but for Mandos and Gears I don't really think it's quite at that level, and as another commenter says the Mando PoV's are almost completely from PoC, women, and homosexuals.

    While it took until the third game for females to show up in infantry roles ON SCREEN, we often heard them in infantry roles off screen (Epic hadn't sunk the money into creating generic or specific female soldier models) and the novels clearly had female soldiers while both novels and games had Raven pilots, who took the heaviest losses, often being female.

    Halo, the 800 pound elephant when it comes to "manly shooters" have had female Marines and Spartans since the beginning although it was most often the fact that you heard female infantry voices over the comms even if you didn't see females on screen...so I think the video game market is slowly realizing how many females are playing these games, to the point that the latest Call of Duty uses non-sexualized females in multi-player.

    I do agree with the privilege argument and point out, as I did in the other thread, that Jaina probably just has access to better health care and beauty care. It doesn't take away from her accomplishments at all...heck, she's been tasked with finding a way to kill or stop her brother, a Sith Lord. There's no doubt that she's a BA. The Mandos are reacting to a class divide, not taking away from whatever she may well have done...and the fact that anyone who has spent time with soldiers view anyone up the food chain as suspect, as given her parents there's probably an assumption of special treatment, which she demolishes by besting their best warriors in short order.
     
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  3. patchworkz7

    patchworkz7 Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    Mar 26, 2004
    Havac's article on photoshop is spot on. Although I do think that it's just another potential tool and don't completely hate it, but I do hate how lazy it's made waaaay too many artists. There are ways to use it as a benefit to the art and not as simply a means to produce the art, that even means the "ugly" art that Coop talks about in his article could benefit from Photoshop being used to tweak things, but when it's just used to slap a filter on existing stock images or put alter some cast photos into making them look like paintings....yeah, that just makes me want to scream.
     
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  4. Ulicus

    Ulicus Lapsed Moderator star 7 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    Jul 24, 2005
    He should be in the "story group" of every franchise, IMO.

    I WANT HIM TO WRITE FOR DOCTOR WHO, TOO, DAMMIT.

    EDIT: And, dammit, Patches, don't triple post. You know better. :p

    It's too early in the morning for mod voice, though. Well, it's not the morning. But I just woke up. So I feel like it's the morning.
     
  5. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Sep 2, 2012

    I'm wondering just how much the "average perception" of Stover's writing has changed over time. I vaguely recall seeing some pretty harsh criticisms of Traitor and LSatSoM in the past - these days they seem much more popular.
     
  6. Gamiel

    Gamiel Chosen One star 9

    Registered:
    Dec 16, 2012
    Maybe something for the people at ElevenThirtyEight to write about: how the percepective on some authores have changed over time
     
    CooperTFN likes this.
  7. CooperTFN

    CooperTFN TFN EU Staff Emeritus star 7 VIP

    Registered:
    Jul 8, 1999
    I could see that--who's gotten better over time and who's gotten worse.
     
  8. instantdeath

    instantdeath Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Jul 22, 2010
    I'd be interested in reading about The Fall of Troy.

    (I'm sorry)
     
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  9. CooperTFN

    CooperTFN TFN EU Staff Emeritus star 7 VIP

    Registered:
    Jul 8, 1999
  10. AdmiralNick22

    AdmiralNick22 Retired Fleet Admiral star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    May 28, 2003
    I hate eggs.

    --Adm. Nick
     
  11. Cynical_Ben

    Cynical_Ben Force Ghost star 4

    Registered:
    Aug 12, 2013
    I'm guessing Denning.

    I'd be down for that sort of article. Going back to see how KJA, Crispen, Traviss, etc al are perceived now compared to when they were writing might make a fascinating study.
     
  12. CooperTFN

    CooperTFN TFN EU Staff Emeritus star 7 VIP

    Registered:
    Jul 8, 1999
  13. instantdeath

    instantdeath Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Jul 22, 2010
    Yep, Troy Denning's descent from fairly good (going off of Tatooine Ghost, though I've heard some describe Star by Star as nothing short of excellent) into unspeakable horror.

    [​IMG]
     
  14. AdmiralNick22

    AdmiralNick22 Retired Fleet Admiral star 6 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

    Registered:
    May 28, 2003
    I know... it is wierd to hate eggs. But I do.

    --Adm. Nick
     
  15. RC-1991

    RC-1991 Jedi Grand Master star 4

    Registered:
    Dec 2, 2009
    That would be a fun project, and one that would be intimately tied to this forum's history. Of course, post truncation is an issue- that quote from Stover regarding Luke which I included in my last article was a victim of the truncation bug.

    In terms of Denning, it would be interesting to examine how many of his authorial tendencies do show up in works like Tatooine Ghost and Star By Star, how they work or don't work in those generally well-received earlier works, and where and how this changes. So sort of like how Trip and Havac charted Jacen's character arc in the Jacen Snark thread, but less snarky and a bit more depressing.
     
  16. CooperTFN

    CooperTFN TFN EU Staff Emeritus star 7 VIP

    Registered:
    Jul 8, 1999
    Honestly, not only would I philosophically not want to focus a whole piece on "why we hate Denning now", I also think it's hard to prove our collective opinion here in Lit is demonstrative of most fans. I assume they kept giving him books for a reason.
     
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  17. DigitalMessiah

    DigitalMessiah Chosen One star 6

    Registered:
    Feb 17, 2004
    I get the impression it is a matter of inertia, along with the fact that I don't think many authors want to write in the Legacy era. Stover and Luceno are both on record (even though Luceno did write MF) saying they have no interest and it isn't hard to imagine that Zahn doesn't want to write the era either.

    Couple that with the wonky format they'd been using that seems really terrible just from the author's perspective, and I think to some extent writing those books seems like the bad assignment.
     
  18. instantdeath

    instantdeath Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Jul 22, 2010
    It would be far more interesting, I'd say, to chart the development of someone like Zahn. His transition from writing stories that arguably plotted the course of the entire post-ROTJ EU to mostly one-off, self-contained stories, the relationship of his work in comparison to the rest of the EU (particularly the development of what is basically his own segment of the universe), and the impact his creations have had on the EU and how they have been subsequently utilized by other authors. Of course, the quality of his progressing work can be examined, since some feel that he's been declining, where others feel he's as good as ever (for my part, I think he's as good of a writer as he ever was, but he's no longer nearly as ambitious).
     
    Iron_lord likes this.
  19. Gorefiend

    Gorefiend Chosen One star 5

    Registered:
    Oct 23, 2004
    Anyone who has read that book can easily see that we was everything but interested in the Legacy era. ;)
     
  20. DigitalMessiah

    DigitalMessiah Chosen One star 6

    Registered:
    Feb 17, 2004
    I don't think it is Zahn's ambition so much as I suspect that Del Rey won't let him write stories on the scale of TTT or HoT. They need three writers to bungle those size stories.
     
  21. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Sep 2, 2012
    Scoundrels shows he's willing to step out of his "comfort zone" and write a story very different from previous ones.
     
  22. DigitalMessiah

    DigitalMessiah Chosen One star 6

    Registered:
    Feb 17, 2004
    Plus you'll notice that Zahn has stuck to the Rebellion era for the past eight years or so. Maybe I'm wrong and Del Rey would give him a Nostril of Thrawn trilogy but the only place to put it would be in Legacy.

    This could be an example of a negative effect of continuity which has boxed him in so he really can't write stories of the scale he formerly wrote in the time period and with the characters he wants to write.
     
  23. Iron_lord

    Iron_lord Chosen One star 10

    Registered:
    Sep 2, 2012
    I still want to see a Katana Fleet story. Or the Bpfasshi Dark Jedi Insurrection.
     
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  24. instantdeath

    instantdeath Jedi Grand Master star 5

    Registered:
    Jul 22, 2010
    Yeah, Luceno has said it wasn't intended to be set in that era, but he did so by request, so it ended up being pretty much a cut & paste deal.

    As for Zahn and ambition, I'd argue you don't need to write stories that threaten to shatter the galaxy in half to be ambitious. Scoundrels is indeed a breath of fresh air, but for awhile he'd been sticking to a comfort zone, stories set in the Rebellion era. All of those stories were well done, in my opinion, but it is nice to see him do something different. I'm actually really disappointed that we might never get Zahn's projected "Maestro Trilogy".
     
  25. DigitalMessiah

    DigitalMessiah Chosen One star 6

    Registered:
    Feb 17, 2004
    What is this Maestro trilogy?