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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   3023 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026

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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'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?

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.

We have religious institutions in our world because we have religious doubt in our world.

People wouldn't want to communally praise the gods, have organized teaching about them, have a profession to serve as intermediaries for them or ask them for help and guidance in their everyday affairs and troubles if they were certain they did exist?

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