/lit/ - Literature

Is Infinite Jest the Dark Souls of literature?

What does /lit/ think of my premise?

>hell is like an office job in another universe where each demon is in charge of torturing their assigned human soul and as a reward it can ascend to a godlike form, but lately a decrease in mortality rates left many demons jobless while others keep receiving human souls. Our character Emily then gets involved in a hell-like protest against Death, the owner of hell, who fires them by throwing them into a void. Emily floats around endlessly only to later find planet earth where she is found by Jacob, a 25 year old NEET whom happened to be her assigned human and as a result only he can see her. Because she is slowly dying her powers of telekinesis in earth are limited. The story launches from there with Jacob at first trying to kill her only to later accept her as a partner in crime in an attempt to build their own society.

It is full of dark humor and is kinda edgy but I've already written and deleted countless rough drafts to get to what I have now.

Please tell me what you think and no it is not bait

What do you think? Any critique is welcome

T̲h̲e̲ ̲P̲a̲l̲e̲b̲l̲o̲o̲d̲ ̲H̲u̲n̲t̲

I didn’t really like Dark Souls. Objectively speaking, it’s a great game. The gameplay is solid; the world is compelling; the characters are interesting. Maybe it’s because, Demon’s Souls fanatic that I was, I had hyped the game up in my mind to such impossibly high standards that there was no way it could compete with my expectations. But I always found that there was something missing in Dark Souls: the unknown.

The story of Dark Souls is certainly mysterious; the game avoided conventional storytelling and instead gave the player the burden of uncovering the truth on their own. One could pull back the curtain of Anor Londo and discover the machinations of Gwyndolin and Frampt, or bring the Lordvessel to Kaathe and learn of another layer to the story. Even so, the story of Dark Souls was all too grounded for me. It was the kind of story that could be re-arranged and presented as fact, with all of the mysteries solved like a novel where, at the end of the book, the brilliant detective goes over the evidence to the rest of the characters and makes all the connections for them.

Demon’s Souls had been different. In Demon’s Souls, the answers hadn’t been there. It’s no mystery that the concept of Souls Lorehunting didn’t really exist with Demon’s Souls other than a few notable exceptions like GuardianOwl. The only real topic of debate was whether or not the Old One was the God of the Church. But there was no answer to whether the Monumental was good or evil; there was no explanation for how Biorr’s armor could be found in Miralda’s well; the mysteries behind Lord Rydell and the Old Monk remained void of answers. They were unknown.

Hidetaka Miyazaki, the genius behind the Souls franchise, grew up in poverty in the city of Shizuoka. Unable to afford any means of entertaining himself, Miyazaki would spend most of his childhood reading books found in his local library. He was fascinated with western tales of fiction, but his English was not fluent enough to understand every single word. Many times he would read a story and find that he couldn’t understand half of it, and so he would connect the words he could find and fill in the blanks, forming a story of his own that used the pieces that had been laid out before him.

(cont next post)

Where were you when it was objectively CONFIRMED that Borges is the Dark Souls of short stories?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaJb5juMiNY

(pay attention and you'll see a screencap of a /lit/ post claiming that metal gear solid 2 = pynchon. )

obv we don't now, but are we ever going to have great literary games?http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-07-27-where-literature-and-gaming-collide

"We need to break the stranglehold that every player has to understand everything; that's keeping game writing stagnant and making it very hard to be more literary in our writing and design," says Pinchbeck. "Lots of casual players would struggle with a game as difficult as Dark Souls. We're totally accepting of the idea that a game's mechanics may be too difficult for some players, but we expect all game's stories to be understandable or engaging to all players, and that holds us back, and it's weird because we're expecting one area of game design to have the freedom to target and hone for a subset of players, whilst another isn't allowed to grow."

Are there any books, especially in a fantasy genre, that are similar to Dark Souls?
Not in the amount of fighting, but in the bittersweet, mystical/philosophical atmosphere of a dark world devoid of hope, with its inhabitants locked in tragic stories, desperately searching for light?

Books better and more engaging than Dark Souls? Do they exist? I don't think Dark Souls is that great so I'm sure something better is out there.

What's the /lit/ equivalent to Dark Souls?

How do I quit video games to read more? It is a colossal waste of time, and after Dark Souls 3, I plan on reading. Any advice for a pleb like me?

> be on lit
> start Portrait
> get to bit where they talk about poets
> read this poem

How is this a good poem?

All Things will Die

Clearly the blue river chimes in its flowing

Under my eye;
Warmly and broadly the south winds are blowing

Over the sky.
One after another the white clouds are fleeting;
Every heart this May morning in joyance is beating

Full merrily;
Yet all things must die.
The stream will cease to flow;
The wind will cease to blow;
The clouds will cease to fleet;
The heart will cease to beat;
For all things must die.
All things must die.
Spring will come never more.
O, vanity!
Death waits at the door.
See! our friends are all forsaking
The wine and the merrymaking.
We are call’d–we must go.
Laid low, very low,
In the dark we must lie.
The merry glees are still;
The voice of the bird
Shall no more be heard,
Nor the wind on the hill.
O, misery!
Hark! death is calling
While I speak to ye,
The jaw is falling,
The red cheek paling,
The strong limbs failing;
Ice with the warm blood mixing;
The eyeballs fixing.
Nine times goes the passing bell:
Ye merry souls, farewell.
The old earth
Had a birth,
As all men know,
Long ago.
And the old earth must die.
So let the warm winds range,
And the blue wave beat the shore;
For even and morn
Ye will never see
Thro’ eternity.
All things were born.
Ye will come never more,
For all things must die.

Are there any videogames out there that have writing with legitimate literary value? Stuff like The Last of Us and Beyond: Two Souls gets away with being terrible because most gamers are philistines that don't know better, but has there been anybody successfully using the medium for the realisation of some serious artistic statement. The very best videogames, stuff like Morrowind, Deus Ex, and Dark Souls, seem to be at best very nuanced and powerful entertainments.

Hi /lit/, is there any books like dark souls?

Deep lore, interconnected worlds, great character progression.

How to write like in Dark Souls?

>We hauled forth our members and at it we went and the judge on his knees kneading the mass with his naked arms and the piss was splashin about and he was cryin out to us to piss, man, piss for your very souls for cant you see the redskins yonder, and laughin the while and working up the great mass in a foul black dough, a devil’s batter by the stink of it and him not a bloody dark pastryman himself.

So this is a meme book right?

Best Dark Fantasy books?

Or books that most closely resemble Dark Souls

would you say Dark Souls is based on Heart of Darkness?
I know a lot of you don't like video games but there's no point posting this on /v/

Who wrote the literary analogue of dark souls?

hey /v/, whose your favorite dark souls boss (bloodborne included)

Hey /lit/ I've been trying to get into reading but it's really hard for me to get myself interested in what I've been recommended by friends and family. Are there any high/dark fantasy books (not LOTR) that emphasize heavily on lore,backstory and world exposition? Most of what I've been recommended treats the setting and backstory as just the scenery. I'm thinking stuff like Berserk or Dark Souls where you can loose yourself in the many different aspects of the world and it's story. For example I loved the Nazgul , the dwarven mines or the ancient demons in LOTR but I feel like they were more plot devices than explored concepts

Thoughts on the narrative of Dark Souls? Similar books? Advices to write in that "ethereal" style?

Can someone recommend me some fantasy books that are similar to dark souls?
Minimal, dark, strange, empty, makes you feel small

What is the Dark Souls of /lit/ ?

Grimdark atmosphere, unsettling places and cryptic story.

hey /lit/ been really immersed in dark souls and berserk.
I'm already caught up in the berserk manga and i was just wondering are their any novels that have the same atmosphere as these two?

Just finished At the Mountains of Madness right now.

Please /lit/, recommand me now some books who smells like Zdzisław Beksiński or H.R. Giger's artworks.

Something atmospheric, unsettling, that feels out of this world.
A bit like Dark Souls universe, but too bad I'm not that much into vidya