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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3970 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for April 21, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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"Seinfeld" Is Unfunny

"J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: This book popularized most of the cliches found in fantasy today, but modern readers may well find it unspeakably boring, purely because everything in it has since been subverted, inverted, parodied, and otherwise done to death. Aside from that though, it also has lots of Unbuilt Trope which are actually not like what non-readers think the book contains."

It was first published in 1954 and has been very influential. The problem is that you won't find anything new there now if you've already read other fantasy books.

Yeah that's probably a huge part of it. I'm trying to experience it as though I'm someone encountering all these tropes for the first time but I'm probably so used to them that I can't experience the same novelty and wonder as a first timer.

It’s ironic that I’d been a lifelong lover of science fiction and didn’t read fantasy (other than Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept, which barely counts). LOTR was the first fantasy book series I read, and so I got it all firsthand.

I feel like the two genres get bundled together but for some people scratch different itches. I’ve never been a major scifi guy but always took to it more easily than fantasy, and I absolutely love the cyberpunk subgenre

My Triessentialist view is that SF/F as a mega-genre addresses three itches which realistic fiction has to try harder to scratch:

  • The What - The desire to see or imagine amazing and impossible things, and see other species or peoples in fascinating and unique garb - Science Fiction or Fantasy

  • The How - The desire to understand a world or a society which functions in fascinating yet logical ways - Science Fiction or Fantasy

  • The Why - The desire to have unique or intoxicatingly different feelings as members of or visitors to fantastic societies and their rituals, goals, and folkways - Science Fiction or Fantasy

Or, in familiar words, "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."

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