Turn Me Up When You Feel Low

[newsong]

Make me your radio
Turn me up when you feel low
I pray you'll never leave me behind
Because good music can be so hard to find

When I started writing this post, it was a couple of days ago and I was enjoying the different surroundings of sitting at Starbucks and playing on Paul's laptop while puttering around on the internet and waiting on hold to talk

Comments

[newsong]

Oh man, I feel rants coming on! =)

See, this is a pretty ad hominem argument against a book, and a prime example of why I make it a point never to try and know anything about authors, musicians, and actors, lest it destroy their craft for me. I get where you're coming from, but if my enjoyment of something could be endangered, I either avoid or purposefully forget the facts in favour of the fiction.

As far as not needing another arrogant white male, in fantasy at any rate, I am almost ready to say bring it on if it means fewer conniving women. Not that balance actually works that way, but still. I'm tired of extreme agenda-driven female writers like Libba Bray whose works, along with many other female fantasy writers I encounter, dip so far into social commentary without applying any art that they ruin the whole story for me. I don't mind transparent agendas in books, they're always there, but at least work them into the story in a real way, which I see women writers failing at far more than men. "Obvious Footnote" agendas make me so livid I have actually stood up and chucked books across the room. Arrogant people I have a much less severe reaction to, for whatever reason.

Also, I actually really liked Divergent, but only because, right from the start, I identified strongly with the Dauntless. I could have cared less if it was plausible (and knew it wasn't), it took me on a thrill ride that made me consider my own story and I liked that. I totally agreed with another poster on Goodreads who says she gave another book four stars that was "a much better written book" but this one was just fun.

I disagree with English academia (and many stuck up artists, and copyright in general) about cliches and "ripping off" other things. I think that's where most if not all works of creative genius really come from when they're done well. Works that everyone agrees are creative genius are nearly always just really, really good ripoffs of a storyline that's been done before, with varying details. There's nothing new, as TV Tropes so obviously displays.

[jesusphreaq]

Hey man, I hated Eragon way before I found out that Paolini was a jerk, and here's why. It came out, it was blah, it had an blah main character, blah plot, totally par-for-the-course tropes such as mentor-and-student, dragons-bond-with-you-and-talk-through-mind-speak (what book with dragons DOESN'T do that?), and warrior-elf-chick-just-because-that's-hot. The only character I liked was Murtaugh, because he was the only one who didn't *quite* rip off the type he was based on (Aragorn). He had hints of originality, so I liked him. The whole book, though, was unremarkable.

But it hit the best seller list and became a huge phenomenon, and no one I knew had ever heard of the name Megan Whalen Turner.

That, my friend, is why I hated Eragon, rather than merely tossing it aside as blah.

And Twyla, I agree with you that there are some pretty bad female authors in the field of YA as well, but I am sure that there are no more so than bad male authors. If you are telling yourself that in general, female authors get as much respect and readership, you're wrong. :( Equality definitely has strides to make here as well.

As for the argument of "dip[ping] so far into social commentary without applying any art that they ruin the whole story for me," it seems like an odd one for you to make, because I absolutely had that problem in Graceling and Fire, which you liked! I would set those on par with A Great and Terrible Beauty. Clearly it is not only social commentary that you are against, but something else, or else you would have had problems with Kristin Cashore as well. And I think you must be saying that you say women authors (that you have read in YA) fail at it more than men, because I've seen a heck of a lot of male authors fail at it in science fiction, which can be a more heavily male-based genre (as YA can be more heavily female-based).

In any case, I'm not sure how this became about female-authors-aren't-as-good-as-male-authors? The argument that the "stale pale male" is the best or only worthwhile author is certainly not something I would feel like arguing, as at this point it should be self-evident. The problem is that schools and universities are still heavily weighted this way, but slowly it is changing. :)

I could see the appeal of the Dauntless, but it was too cruel for me. :\ Her character chose the life of violence, then whined about it all the time, and I found that kind of grating. The reason we empathize with Katniss is that she was forced to be there to save her sister. I had absolutely no empathy for the selfish, whiny snob of Divergent. :( Kind of like I had no empathy for Katsa. Female MCs who choose violence are mistaken for "cool" by a lot of people nowadays, but I'm going to stick with my "reluctant hero has moral compass and wouldn't be here if had a choice." Once again, I worry if this is people with the mindset of "girls are cool if they can do what boys can do" (i.e. physical strength, aggression, violence) when those are not necessarily good qualities and women should be valued for themselves without any standard of male=good, female=bad.

Ha ha ha, didn't this start out as me saying I hate academic/literary snobs who rip things off? Now you're saying you hate snobs who say you can't rip things off. Now, unfortunately, I can't understand your argument, because I haven't met any of those snobs, unless you are calling me one. In my academic English life, the snobs were ALWAYS the ones ripping stuff off. So I can't quite see your argument there, so let's drop the snobs part. You hate the idea that ripping things off is bad? Hmmmmmm.

[jesusphreaq]

Here is what I believe: it is a great purpose of all stories to inspire. And if a person can be inspired to take what they have seen (not only from one story, but from several or many) and weave the elements that inspired that person together into a new but similar story, while polishing and perfecting those original elements at the same time as they bring new ideas and story to the table--that is a wonderful, wonderful thing. (I would put most of my favorite books in this category, but for one example Ella Enchanted. Clearly it takes myth and fairytale elements, but creates a very new story from them. But a better example of this in my recent memory is the film Super 8, in which very little was new. You could see ideas and homages of many movies, but Super 8 outshone and did a better job than those, bringing those original good ideas to an even greater height.) However, for someone to take the original good ideas of several (Eragon--Lord of the Rings, Dragonlance, possibly other popular high fantasy books at the time) or worse, just one (Matched--The Giver) and restate those with only the slightest additions--basically, renaming and tweaking the main characters from those works--that is bad. We all learn from copying, but no great artist should be able to get famous from tracing over other famous works, never truly adding anything at all to the corpus they owe. The humble author knows that she or he stands "on the shoulders of giants," but doesn't that come with some responsibility to those giants?

Ahahaha, what can I say, I took five years of this, I have no end to words about it. You can stop whenever you want, and especially if you feel that you are beginning to become more upset than you want to be. I know that this is not an argument to say that either one of us is right, but merely an exchange to understand the ideas and motivations of each other better, and in that way I think it is constructive for friends to debate.