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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2837 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Pierce's The Life and Legacy of Ja'far al-Sadiq. Still on Archaeology of Babel.

I was in the mood for cheap fantasy and a lot of people recommended Joe Abercrombie's First Law series as being really good. And it's not that bad, I got midway through the third book so it can't have been that painful, but it's reminding me of the degree of schlock that exists out there in the world, that I haven't really interacted with.

The tone is hopelessly GrimDerp. On the one hand Abercrombie wants to have a brutal world where people are constantly torture-murdered for no reason by mysterious government agencies, a cynical "gritty realism" where characters on a DnD adventure say things like "This wasn't how it went in the stories!" On the other hand, everything is super lightweight, with no effort at realism or serious effort at world building or character creation. Religion is supposed to be a scam, I think, but there's no effort at actually building a religious foundation to the work. The world is weirdly modern, with "bathrooms" and dentists, but no real attention is given to what level of development exists or doesn't exist in the setting.

Characters have no consistent values. Sex is post-Sexual Revolution casual but look out oh no there's the medieval patriarchy, but also characters don't actually do anything interesting when confronted with it they just kind of shrivel. The women are too open and powerful and feminist, but supposedly acknowledged to be exceptional but we don't see any other women so... He wants to create complex characters that do bad things sometimes but also have heroic qualities, but misses the mark, the sins don't have much weight and the struggles feel fake as a result. The best books that use grimdark settings present us with likeable characters that we identify with, that act according to their own internal sense of right and wrong with a consistent moral compass, then deliver a result that is so brutal and discordant that it creates psychic discomfort in the reader and makes you think.

The writing is idiomatic to modern English. The "brutish uncivilized northern barbarians" will use phrases like "That's the point of fucking exercise." There's no real dialect within the text across different regions, other than the fantasy-Africans using the racial slur "pink" for the fantasy-Europeans, as in "I'm stuck here with this group of pinks" or "you don't know what you're talking about, pink;" which might be my favorite racial slur for white people of all time.

The example that finally got me to give up on the third book was this: a character becomes king through a series of completely unforeshadowed unlikely coincidences. He gets an arranged marriage because, you know, of course he does. His wife, on their wedding night, refuses him, knees him in the testicles, and makes clear she will never sleep with him. And it's very confusing to me why he doesn't rape her, or at least consider it and give a reason why he can't. The setting has been persistently grimdark up to this point, and we're dealing with a feudal patriarchy in which this marriage was arranged, the character himself is shown to be of questionable moral fiber at numerous points. But then his wife refuses him on his wedding night and he just...tolerates it? This is what I mean when I say creating a morally grey-dark grey grimdark universe can create an interesting values dissonance, how does one deal with a refusing wife when one's marriage is a political creation to begin with? Is it, in fact, the king's duty to rape his wife and seek to produce an heir? Alternatively, he can deal with the political consequences of an annulment, which could be severe but are necessary if she won't do her wifely duty. What doesn't work is telling me, the reader, that the young king just sits there and stews. That dog don't hunt.

Anyway it's fine enough as a book if you want schlock, but I forgot how much schlock there was in the world. And it's making me think about the recent discourse in themotte about "female characters" and similar, in that so much of complaint about the lack of quality representation of such-and-such is that people read garbage and call it literature. There's great genre fiction, but there's also so much junk, and this isn't even close to the junkiest junk, and I think that the complaints about things like "rounded female characters" are a matter of expecting genre junk to be literature.

a character becomes king through a series of completely unforeshadowed unlikely coincidences.

You are slightly wrong here, though I think the reveal is at the end of this book. I thought it was kinda of foreshadowed but in general the character responsible is generally subtle and is very much part of the grim-dark element trope subversion element. I think thats a pretty core part of his writing theory. He wants to subvert fantasy tropes in a dark/grim way. As Tanista said below, Bakker does it better.

The king doesn't rape his wife because he's a coward. That's the whole point of why he was chosen to become king.

Overall I don't think you are wrong about your reading that Ambercrombie really throws a ton of modern anachronisms into his writing. His prose is essentially Sanderson-tier and his worldbuilding is not that good. Lots of inconsistent values. I do think the second series on the industrial revolution is better, mostly because the values are a bit more aligned with his apparent blindspot. But I don't think consistent worldbuilding is his forte. He seems to be a character-oriented writer. And the three characters he wants to write are Logan, Bayaz and Old Sticks. Everyone else is weaker, but still enjoyable.

You are slightly wrong here, though I think the reveal is at the end of this book. I thought it was kinda of foreshadowed but in general the character responsible is generally subtle and is very much part of the grim-dark element trope subversion element. I think thats a pretty core part of his writing theory. He wants to subvert fantasy tropes in a dark/grim way.

The lack of foreshadowing is part of the trope-subversion, things just happen without massive buildup. This can work really well as a rug-pull subverting expectations, but without a connection to the characters or otherwise caring about what happens, it ends up feeling to me like "a bunch of things happen" rather than "a story." Subverting expectations works when the writer is cleverly creating expectations and then dashing them, once I have no expectations there's nothing to subvert.

The king doesn't rape his wife because he's a coward. That's the whole point of why he was chosen to become king.

If that's what he was going for, he just didn't land that plane for me. The whole scene was anachronistic and immersion breaking.

There's not really a lack of foreshadowing here. I think its pretty well foreshadowed. It's the character trope that is being subverted. It just becomes a lot more clear after you understand the weird inconsistencies that you saw but were missing understanding for. One could argue, that Abercrombie is not a good enough writer if the big twist is not deducible prior without knowledge of the ending, which is fair, and might be true. But I do think the idea that its a "series of completely unforeshadowed unlikely coincidences" is wrong.

Spoiler: Bayaz is deliberately manipulating Jezal into the throne because he's spineless coward and the son of a whore Bayaz bought. He knows he can control him. Bayaz is probably at fault for 90% of bad things that have happened in this world. He's evil Gandalf/evil Dumbledore. There are a bunch of clues from the other magi about this. Khalul is pretty much correct

Spoilers

No, I get all that argument and storyline, I just don't really buy it! And that can also be my perception, the series is very reliant on the use of tropes to engage in storytelling. The reader is very much meant to come in with a pre-existing understanding of like 95% of the stuff in the story, so that Abercrombie doesn't have to waste time explaining it to us. This isn't inherently bad, but the thin characterization of Jezal leaves him open to reader interpretation, and I just don't really buy him as the spineless coward that can be manipulated at will, or buy "idiot king who is manipulated at will" as a real archetype. Jezal starts as a lazy, indolent young officer, like Nikolai Rostov in Tolstoy. He grows through his determination to compete in the Contest following his encounter with Glokta ("I'm going to prove everyone wrong by working super hard"), and again from his wounds during his adventures with Logan and Bayaz (becoming less arrogant and abrasive to his lessers, killing two men in combat, losing his looks). Then any kind of growth is just sort of erased, we don't hear about any of it again, Jezal is right back to being lazy and drunk and indolent. He's back to being the young officer who doesn't want to train for the contest. Which is fine, that's what Abercrombie is going for; but I find it boring. If prior events will have no impact on later events, then what am I reading exactly? That's not a story, it's just a series of what Joe Abercrombie thinks are cool fantasy set pieces. No one is going to grow or change, everything that happens later could have happened without what happens earlier. If you cut out the entire middle bit about the quest, and just have Bayaz install Jezal after the contest win, and Logan wander back north, nothing really changes.

And I'll again note that I gave up late in the third book, and might not have given up at all if it weren't for my current mood (newborn baby) so my criticism is limited, the book wasn't bad, just not perfect.

I remember thinking that the barbarian character was the most fleshed out, which makes sense since apparently Abercrombie has been writing short stories about him for a decade. The rest of the characters felt flat. But also, I'm pretty sure you were really close to the end if you got to the wedding night and I'm a bit surprised you didn't get to the end just from sunk cost fallacy reasons. I think there was some pretty dramatic shit with the Gandalf character at the end but it's been years since I read it

I thought Glokta started out as a very interesting character, nine fingers I found kinda lame in that there was never any good reason for him to be the toughest and the best, he was just kind of a dude until he got REALLLLLLY MAD. The adventuring party felt kinda like adolescent wish fulfillment.

But also, I'm pretty sure you were really close to the end if you got to the wedding night and I'm a bit surprised you didn't get to the end just from sunk cost fallacy reasons.

I still might finish it, I only put it down two days ago. But I've noticed this kind of baseness or selfishness cropping up in certain (mostly meaningless) activities since my wife had the baby. Ordinarily I feel a DNF on a book as a kind of failure, a personal moral failing. With the baby in my life, and a book as a limited form of pleasure in limited free time, I simply realized I was not enjoying the book anymore and it seemed absurd to continue to not enjoy it.

"This wasn't how it went in the stories!"

There is a great bit in The Two Towers where Sam and Frodo get to discussing Great Stories, but I think that one works really well because they recognize their part is, maybe reluctantly, to be in one. It can be done well, IMO.

It's a great line, the first time you hear it. Like maybe in 1954 when LOTR came out. By the fifth time it comes up in a book, it's a cliche, this is actually exactly how it goes in the stories, because this is what all the stories do these days. The story was always going to go exactly this way.

Well, it's also somewhat the opposite of your exact quote: that this is how it went in the stories, and how they rather wish they didn't have to be in one.

But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.

That's sort of my point. In 1954 you have this established idea of the story, and you can play with that in important ways, and then after it's established you can get a big kick out of it, really play with audience expectations.

Once subversion becomes your expectation, it's eye-roll inducing.

I often wonder how Tolkien's readers would have thought about the great Elf-Human romance subplots. Beren and Luthien, Aragorn and Arwen, these were (for Tolkien) Big Deals. Then every fantasy writer afterward did the same thing, to the point where if you have a human and elves, you know they're gonna bone, and if the setting allows cross-breeding any RP ruleset needs to figure that there's going to be halfsies running around in every combination imaginable. But the first time that happens, it's a big deal! It's epic!

Characters have no consistent values. Sex is post-Sexual Revolution casual but look out oh no there's the medieval patriarchy, but also characters don't actually do anything interesting when confronted with it they just kind of shrivel. The women are too open and powerful and feminist, but supposedly acknowledged to be exceptional but we don't see any other women so... He wants to create complex characters that do bad things sometimes but also have heroic qualities, but misses the mark, the sins don't have much weight and the struggles feel fake as a result. The best books that use grimdark settings present us with likeable characters that we identify with, that act according to their own internal sense of right and wrong with a consistent moral compass, then deliver a result that is so brutal and discordant that it creates psychic discomfort in the reader and makes you think.

How do you feel about Scott Bakker's work? Because I think he makes a real effort at this (he explicitly said he refused to make certain characters female because it'd under the patriarchy in the worldbuilding) and has subsequently been vastly more criticized than Abercrombie (the bleakness at best turns people off, at worst annoys them) and vastly less successful.

I did not enjoy The Prince of Nothing. Pretty much every female character in the first half of the first book gets raped and exists to be a sex slave or prostitute. I don't think all men are that shitty. And one of the men is a huge Marty Stu.

I personally think the series is worth it and better than the bleakness on its face, but this is a common reaction (the gender bleakness, not the Marty Stu, not sure which character you mean there), which is why I asked how he felt about Bakker. He's...less uneven on how modern/irenic the gender and religious politics are, but too much for many.

Maybe it gets better but I got to the part where the woman who was taken as a sex slave by the Mongol horde stand ins was rescued only to be raped by I forget who. And I felt that I was just reading the author's barely disguised fetish (though women are usually the ones who write stuff like that...)

The guy who was a monk and mastered himself and then was able to get anyone to do anything he wanted by psychological manipulation, able to learn other languages in hours of listening to someone speak it. That guy. Who then also psychologically manipulated the rape victim. It was too much.

I can see why you come to that conclusion from reading The Darkness That Comes Before but Kellhus isn't the Bakkerian self-insert. He represents rapacious modernity more than he is a person. It's meant to be uncomfortable.

The real Bakkerian self-insert is Achamian - the sorcerer. He's a philosopher, like Bakker himself, continually praises the path of doubt and uncertainty and is willing to keep fighting for humanity despite it writing him off as damned.

The guy who was a monk and mastered himself and then was able to get anyone to do anything he wanted by psychological manipulation, able to learn other languages in hours of listening to someone speak it. That guy. Who then also psychologically manipulated the rape victim.

I think the bit with Kellhus was great. He starts out set up as the protagonist and it slowly dawns on you that he's completely inhuman on the inside and closer to the Lovecraftian horrors of the setting than a person. And it feels like the book's aware of this, the whole thing is a send-off of the whole ultracompetent fantasy protagonist trope, someone set out to actually engineer one and created a walking nightmare.

The guy who was a monk and mastered himself and then was able to get anyone to do anything he wanted by psychological manipulation, able to learn other languages in hours of listening to someone speak it. That guy. Who then also psychologically manipulated the rape victim.

He's essentially a strong AGI in a human body. Essentially a conception of the Ubermench or the Kwisatz Haderach but laudered through a very bleak and dark philosophy about human's blindness to cognitive functions and innate biases. I wouldn't go so far as to say he's not a person but he is very close to a plot device + philosophical exploration than a real character.

The second series makes this even more clear by completely removing him as a POV character.

Edit:

I felt that I was just reading the author's barely disguised fetish

Bakker is on record for deliberately doing this to target the moral convictions of the modern reader in a way that grates. Not entirely for edge-lordism but to push the reader to consider their own moral blindspots. If anything his fetish is being a contrarian (tho apparently his politics are super normie boomercon by some recent blog posts of his).

very close to a plot device + philosophical exploration than a real character

Agreed, and that's why 2 books was enough for me. I don't think I even started the third.

Fair enough. Different strokes for different folks and all. Second Apocalypse is probably a top 5 fantasy series for me and I consider Bakker to be a great author.

More comments

I'm unfamiliar with it, would you recommend him? I'm on kind of a fantasy kick, I want literary junk food, but the quality of some of this just drives me off.

I'm not against strong female characters, even in a patriarchal setting, I think that female agency exists and is often underestimated in patriarchal settings! I even think you can do ye olde feminist trope well with the right context created.

What bugs me about Abercrombie is the unevenness: there's casual sex, and casually strong women, but then there's also "oh this can't be you're a commoner and I'm a noble!"

For all GRRM's flaws, and I think the setting gets sweaty after too many pages, I'm looking for more ASOIAF, but maybe with a more contained storyline and less bloat. Given that ASOIAF has to be one of the most bloated fantasy stories ever told, that ought not to be hard to find.

Oh, Bakker is up on Mount Rushmore for me as far as epic fantasy goes. Nothing quite scratches the same itch. If the idea of the First Crusade filtered through Tolkien, Herbert and Nietzsche appeals you'll likely find something in there for you.

And I think he treats religion - and the excruciating choices it puts us to - with far more seriousness than most of the genre can manage.

If anything the criticism is that he is too even and unrelentingly negative when it comes to patriarchy.

For all GRRM's flaws, and I think the setting gets sweaty after too many pages, I'm looking for more ASOIAF, but maybe with a more contained storyline and less bloat. Given that ASOIAF has to be one of the most bloated fantasy stories ever told, that ought not to be hard to find.

The first series - Prince of Nothing - I think is pretty focused for epic fantasy. There is some bloat in the sequel series though (4 more books, one more than expected).

Great! I'll give that a try, might scratch the itch for me.

And I think he treats religion - and the excruciating choices it puts us to - with far more seriousness than most of the genre can manage.

Religion is so touchy. Tolkien got it perfect, everyone else tends to either make religion too immanent and just another magical mechanic, or they go full Reddit atheism like the Eragon series which is just eye-roll inducing for me: you have magic but no supernatural?

I think the right way to do religion is to take it seriously as a zeitgeist. It needs to feel like it matters to the people in the universe, that it affects more than just the world mechanics but things like morality, aesthetics, views of history, and eschatology.

What bugs me personally is to have a medieval civilization with a religion that nobody takes seriously. My dude, people in our world killed people accused of desecrating a piece of bread. They had whole wars based on which sect of Christianity was the real one. They killed people for heresy. Yet I read most fantasy and religion is treated like it is in the modern era, just something that exists and nobody thinks that hard about it.

Religion is so touchy. Tolkien got it perfect, everyone else tends to either make religion too immanent and just another magical mechanic

Tolkien had a supernatural cosmology he'd put a lot of thought in, sure, but he has very little in-universe religion. As far as we can tell from The Lord of the Rings, there's no clergy in Middle-Earth and the people don't have any particular religious beliefs they could explain or religious practices and traditions they follow. This was intentional, but it makes everyone feel like 20th century WEIRD people who cringe from espousing the actual metaphysical claims of their local traditional religion even when they don't want to outright denounce it as false.

What I think he got perfect is that in a world of very clear magic, immortality, etc religion is ultimately unremarkable. Religious doubt is impossible in a world where everyone acknowledges that Sauron and Gandalf and Sauruman and Elrond are who they are. I guess you could have hobbit skeptics who say they aren't, but within the story it's all obvious.

Nope, still doesn't work for me. Historical people had regular everyday religious practice with forms (who are the priests, what do we believe?) and regularity (church every Sunday). Everyday people want to commune with the gods, ask them for help, and worship them, and knowing that there's this bearded clever guy, alien hippie or demon warlord out there somewhere who can kinda maybe do some magic doesn't change this. But people in Middle-Earth don't seem to ever do this or have any sort of traditions or institutions for it.

which is just eye-roll inducing for me: you have magic but no supernatural?

This was deeply annoying about the Odyssey. "In a time of apparent magic" and then we see people get turned into pigs. Not in any sort of ambiguous way either. Odysseus even says she gets her power from the Gods!

And if you're going to show that in a pseudo-objective fashion, why do we also need to play coy with Athena?

Of course, if you have actual gods instead of just Bronze Age Zatanna , the whole therapeutic journey of self-discovery where the most important thing is how the protagonist feels about things needs to be rejiggered somewhere.

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