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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Ahmed's Archaeology of Babel. Not much progress.
Finished Monster Hunter International. It's a fun story, though the protagonist is a bit too much of Mary Sue to my taste, but I think that comes with the genre. Still, I can't avoid comparison with Butcher's Dresden series, and the comparison is not to the Monster's advantage. So far, the gist of what happens there is, without spoiling much, "MORE DAKKA!". I mean, I enjoy some good loud action, but at some point it starts to feel a bit one-dimensional. Maybe we'll get more in the next books, but in Dresden we had pretty complex magic system, leveling up Dresden himself and his sidekicks and his challenges, moral development, choices and consequences, all that stuff. Monster's world feels under-developed - for one, the hunters, despite hundreds of years of experience and lore, seem to know preciously little about the monsters they are dealing with, and seem to not be very interested in any study, because why bother if "MORE DAKKA!" always solves the problem?
The core problem of the action genre is that the protagonist should win, but he can't win easily, because it would be boring. On the other hand, he has to win convincingly, otherwise it would be unsatisfactory. So the challenge is how to compose the situation so that the villains are both scary and beatable, and the protagonist is both powerful and challenged, without forcing either to randomly make blunders and look like an idiot, because the plot demanded it. In Monster it didn't always work this way - for example,the main trap that unlocked Z's superpowers was completely unnecessary, because he got the location he was looking for by just working with Mordechai which he could have done anytime . Also, for some reason they never considered that Ray never knew the location and was just bullshitting them the whole time , despite all the previous history. Also, if Z, instead of dicking around, would just have made a run for it as soon as he saw the cave, he'd still see all the key identifying marks and would be able to pinpoint the location, but Mordechai wouldn't have to sacrifice himself .
But in general, it's not bad, hopefully next ones would be better in literary craft.
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