/lit/ - Literature

Bump faget. I know you're lurking somewhere. I'm talking to you, guy who keeps recommending Pern's novels and other garbage. Show you are self!

>20047499
>bio-mechanical bodies
>built in fucking factories
>enough firepower to twist spacetime and cut through dimensions
>capable of supersonic flight
>evil, nihilistic, sadistic and hateful as fuck
>really smart and manipulative
>huge sense of their importance
>contempt towards lowly humans and faggoty elves
>unapologetically vulgar
Most reddit shit I've read all day

I remember being really keen on TES dragons as bio-mechanical time machines that speak a language with a 1to1 match with objective meaning as a weapon.

Then Skyrim came out.

For books, I guess Dragon Riders of Pern.

>>20047894
Oh, shut the fuck up, little mongoloid trying to fit in.
>"If I c-call things reddit I'll look c-cool!"

>>20047906
>Dragon Riders of Pern
IT'S YOU!
YOU FUCKING FAGGOT I FUCKING TOLD YOU I DON'T WANT ANY OF THAT PERN BULLSHIT!
I KNEW YOU'D COME OUT AND SUGGEST THAT RETARDED SHIT!

>>20047906
>speak a language with a 1to1 match with objective meaning as a weapon
...wat

>>20047499
Just look at your description, this is why you can't use dragons in anything, expectations are so high you gotta bust out the fireworks, even in Spenser the dragon fight takes like three days and God Himself has to intervene

>>20047499
They sound cringe

>>20047499
You should read Dragon Riders of Pern for the best spin on the dragon genre

>>20047499
Yeah sure, they’d be a great concept if he wasn’t such a shitty writer and his novels weren’t fucking trash

>>20047499
Sure Michael Sanwick is nice but he honestly couldn’t hold a candle to Dragons Riders of Pern

>>20048017
Not that anon but what's so bad about Pern
I vaguely remember reading half of Dragonflight when I was younger and being very confused

>>20049624
Good concept, not that well-written imo

>>20047906
TES has a funny way of hyping certain things up as some batshit crazy unique thing and then rarely delivering on it and giving you bland genetic fantasy shit instead
the empire was originally described as some weird mix of china, rome and japan with moth worshiping priests and giant, swirling rice fields. then oblivion came out and made it the most bland possible setting in any fantasy with no particular flavor or culture to it. a little bit of the more asian influences stayed with the akavari, and skyrim tried to retcon them to be more roman, but the damage was already done by then

>>20049686
Blame Bethesda for editing the fuck out of early TES lore because everyone thought the third game was weird.

>>20049000
>>20049372
>>20049624
STOP IT

THAT SHIT WAS SO FUCKING STUPID

BIDIMENSIONAL CHARACTERS

A CLICHE FEMALE PROTAGONIST THAT IS "STUBBORN AND INDEPENDENT AND SEXY-BUT-SHE-DOESNT-REALIZE-IT" THAT KEEPS DOING STUPID SHIT BUT EVERYTHING ALWAYS WORKS OUT FOR HER

CLICHE' MALE PROTAGONIST THAT IS COOL-AND-ALL-WOMEN-WANT-HIM-BUT-HE-IS-OBSESSED-ONLY-WITH-THE-MAIN-CHARACTER-FOR-NO-DISCERNIBLE-REASON

NO CONFLICTS, BECAUSE EVERYTIME THEY HAVE A PROBLEM THEY IMMEDIATELY DISCOVER AN INSANE MAGIC POWER TO SOLVE IT LIKE A PARAGRAPH LATER (HEY WE CAN TELEPORT, HEY WE CAN ALSO TIMETRAVEL AND BRING HERE AN IMMENSE ARMY FROM THE PAST)

DRAGONS THAT ARE AS SMART AS HUMANS AND MUCH STRONGER, BUT WHO ARE PERFECTLY HAPPY TO BE TREATED AS FARM ANIMALS

SHITTY BLAND PROSE

IT WAS ONE OF THE SHITTIEST THINGS I'VE EVER READ

>>20049356
He has a habit of writing a collection of short stories loosely tied together to form a novel, instead of a continuous plot. Every chapter feels a bit disconnected from the others. But his imagination is top tier and his characterization is amazing.

>>20047499
Sounds like Warhammer retardation. I bet not a single one of these dragons are as memorable of a character as Smaug was.

>>20047499
>
sounds like a cool concept but I have no idea if the book is actually good, pic rel, Carol Funke Dragon Rider is the best dragon book there is full stop, far superior to to the Eragon trash, although I have read those books as well

>>20050705
Melanchthon is the best dragon ever created, none of that "I hoard treasure because... I just do ok?"

>>20050731
Imma be honest with you, anon. That cover doesn't really inspire much trust.

>>20050783
its a children's book but if a book is about dragons that should be expected

>>20047499
Hate to use the word "cringe" but that's really the only thing I can think of to describe how those dragons sound. Like he tried waaay to hard to make them cool and stand out from others only for them to become Reddit tier fantasy creatures.

>>20050643
>shitty bland prose
>no conflicts
My attempt at reading one of the most recommended dragon series began with me being frustrated by the prose and infuriated by the complete lack of stakes because Deus Ex Machina is the only way that idiot knows how to solve problems. I honestly don't understand how they got published, let alone popular. They suck.

>>20050866
You people are really stupid. "If a character is NOT the usual good boy and actually has a peculiar worldview that occasionally clashes with common morality and he can behave in selfish, cruel ways, then he's le cringe".
Keep reading your Pern and Eragon, I guess. You neither appreciate nor deserve more nuanced characterization.

>>20050879
>I honestly don't understand how they got published, let alone popular. They suck.
Didn't she write that Pern bullshit in the 60s? At the time, anything would get published. People were even less discerning than today.

>>20050866
>>20047894
>>20048997
Redditards would try to look cool and smart, but fail, because they don't really understand neither concept. Their characters would come off as edgy tryhards, but would ultimately be empty, they would follow the usual rules of morality and think like a normie (consider Rick from Rick and Morty, or Lucipher from the tv series: characters that are presented as cool and unusual and anti-heroes, but who at the end of the day always follow normie morality and normie thought processes).

Swanwick's dragons actually ARE cool and smart. That's the difference.

the are dragon ,

>>20051543
Indeed, my fellow /lit/erate. Indeed.

>>20048024
Magic words, literally. Or conjuring words aka a dragon says "fire" to produce fire out of its mouth. Better yet they spit hot fire by going on a rant describing the characteristics of the fire like a curse, poetry, or schizo stream of consciousness.

>>20050908
Cool traits:
>really smart and manipulative
>huge sense of their importance
Impartial trait:
>contempt towards humans and elves
Bad traits:
>everything else

The core idea of dragons utilizing a shrewd intellect to better express their presence in the world is solid. It's basically taking concepts of a type of dragon and making them active pieces of the world rather than reflexive scenery for the protag.

I can try to look past some of the chintzy details like the tech fetishization. It's the same vibe as grown men describing their cars with a sexual passion though. Vulgarity is out and out juvenile flavoring. It ruins what would otherwise seem like a sincere effort at exploring an expansion of the dragon's influence.

Why the fuck would the creature described as possessing such inhuman power be
>evil, nihilistic, sadistic and hateful as fuck
This does not square with a thoughtful expansion of the effects of above. Consider humans relationship with say a chicken. It runs the gamut from friendship all the way to cold capitalistic mass production farming. Mass production farming is nightmarish beyond belief. The chickens live in chicken hell, are genetically modified to manifest cancerous deformity, and their corpses are bathed in poisonous chemicals. All of this process is done by creatures who are also capable of befriending and loving an individual chicken. The perpetrators of the mass farming do not value chicken suffering at all. They aren't hateful or sadistic as their driving force, and yet their motives literally require chicken suffering. If, by some miracle, the output of chickens could be higher in the same sq. footage and the chickens lived in a chicken paradise the mass farming perpetrators would adopt chicken paradise. They wouldn't care about chicken happiness then either, the guiding principle is chicken weight go up, lol.

So unless this juvenile author was prescient enough to tap into the dragons needing the suffering of humans and elves to fulfill a higher order need this shit is cringe. The emphasis on vulgarity and car fetishization tells me all I need to know that he hasn't a spiritually attuned bone in his body.

You want a really good "edgy" take on dragons? Cool traits list and a dependence on human and elven fear, despair, and all other negative imagination. The dragons must feed on negative imagination to continue their existence. The cruelty they inflict and the terror they inspire with their presence is integrated into their need to survive or their will to grow. They don't consume flesh to live like a matter fetishist reductionist would believe they consume spiritual energy and the flesh cage just produces it. Which is why they hunt sentient prey and or manipulate the environment to manifest more sentient prey to better attune with their need. These hypothetical dragons would manifest chicken hell not to see chicken weight number go up, but to maximize chicken suffering.

>>20051750
That actually sounds quite cool.

What if they described something physically impossible? Would it happen?

>>20051944
Probably not, right? Something like Fire, cold, wet wouldn't work because cold and wet are insoluble with combustion. Unless you rewrite the guiding rules of the medium. Give forces made up properties but assert a consistency into your new classification. Then you could depart from matter ruled conception of associations and build a new web of associations. Basically regress into shamanistic thinking to redefine the properties of matter and roll with what new associations that opens up. But if you're going to do that you might as well go whole hog and follow the associations to imagine emergent new manifestations of matter based from your system rather than staying in the lines of renaming what already exists.

>>20051873
>Why the fuck would the creature described as possessing such inhuman power be
>>evil, nihilistic, sadistic and hateful as fuck
He's nihilistic and hateful because he openly hates life and existence itself, knows that there is no hope of improving it, and wants to murder the Goddess responsible for it. He's "evil" in the sense that he has no qualms about exploiting/torturing/killing other beings for his purposes, and he's sadistic because he actually finds pleasure in hurting others and asserting his superiority over them because, as said, he hates all existence, including the other living creatures around himself.
He's not simply indifferent to life and other creatures, he doesn't consider them simply tools or products like chickens, he hates them and wants to see them suffer and then disappear. He's sadistic for the same reason he's nihilistic and for the same reason he aims at the destruction of existence: he finds other living creatures repugnant.

Why would a smart and powerful being HAVE to be cold and indifferent? He can feel hatred and contempt and rage, he can have overwhelming instinctual feelings, nothing forbids it. This idea that smart villains need to be polite, cold, calculating and soft spoken is itself reddit tier, just a rehash of the usual argument that "institutions, corporations and bureocracies are evil in an impersonal way, really evil people only care about profits, you can do horrible things just with pen and paper in a 9-5 job, think of all the german bureocrats that allowed the lolocaust to happen", etc.
It's not as "grown up" as you seem to think it is. At this point, it's banal.

I prefer villains who, despite being smart, are not autistically cerebral and incapable of feeling anything strongly (which is itself a reddit stereotype, and a boring and untrue one at that, since geniuses are not devoid of irrationality and instincts). I prefer villains who are dominated by some unsuppressable urges and put their extreme cunning to their service. They're as goal-oriented as your hyper-rational chicken farmers, it's just that their goal is the destruction of an existence they find repulsive, instead of some sterile monetary profit.
This doesn't make them or the author juvenile, just your analysis.

>a dependence on human and elven fear, despair, and all other negative imagination. The dragons must feed on negative imagination to continue their existence. The cruelty they inflict and the terror they inspire with their presence is integrated into their need to survive or their will to grow. They consume spiritual energy and the flesh cage just produces it. Which is why they hunt sentient prey and or manipulate the environment to manifest more sentient prey to better attune with their need.
You're describing IT from the Stephen King's novel. Already been done, boring. Just a monster who creates fear because he feeds off it.
You're just not on Swanwick's level, not remotely.

>>20051873
>dependence on human and elven fear, despair, and all other negative imagination
Kek you're ripping off Harry Potter and thinking you're smart and original.

>>20051750
>>20051944
this doesnt sound cool at all, it sounds fucking reddit. GOING ON A RANT WOAHH CURSE POETRY. fucking reddit

>>20052033
>reddit reddit reddit
>if I repeat it often enough I'll fit right in with the big kids on the hacker known as 4channel

>>20051998
>I prefer villains who are dominated by some unsuppressable urges and put their extreme cunning to their service

And yet your reddit dragon has no unsuppressable urge. It is a juvenile manifestation of maladaptive will. Hatred of existence is not an urge, it is a whim. It is not compelled behavior integrated into the creature.

Whereas IT passes your test and you disparage it why? Because it is popular. It is popular because IT nails your requirement and your reddit dragon is disparaged for failing your own test. Don't let "popular thing bad" have that much rule over your thinking.

For the record I've never read IT, I've never read a single King novel, and I've never watched any IT films. This is not a disparagement of King, just tacit admission I was oblivious what I was describing was his IT character.

Your conception "cold and calculating" couldn't be further from the truth. You ever spent any time around cats? Have you seen their bloodlust, their pupils dilate, and heard their chattering? They revel in the act of killing. They are living in sync with their need. They play with their prey to enjoy their suffering and terror. And then, and only then, they terminate their victim's negative imagination production with a coup de grace. Killing is a kindness. Cessation of fear and terror is a literal act of grace. Your will focused mind cannot perceive the role of the predator. It is the farthest state from a maladaptive teenage death drive power fantasy.

>>20052018
It's either the dragons just need to consume flesh or they need something else. If flesh the question of why not eat docile prey is always present. If you make the necessary resource something humans and elves are adept at producing the dragon's behavior and predatory impulse makes more sense. If the dragon doesn't need humans or elves to exist the looming question is why the fuck is it there? Why participate in an ecosystem you don't have any tie to? It's stupid.

>>20052065
>And yet your reddit dragon has no unsuppressable urge.
Not only you insist on your pathetic little roleplay as a true 4channer that uses "reddit" for everything, you can't even read. I clearly said that he's dominated by his revulsion towards existence and by his unsuppressable urge to destroy it. Clearly and repeatedly. Still wasn't enough.

>Hatred of existence is not an urge, it is a whim.
His "whim" completely dominates him and is the foundation of his identity and goals. Eating chocolate is a whim, you can resist it. His is an unsuppressable urge.

>It is not compelled behavior integrated into the creature.
It's exactly that. Take it away and you get a completely different creature, unrecognizable.

>j-juvenile
You can keep repeating it just like "reddit", it doesn't make you sound cool. It doesn't make your arguments any more valid. You're just not on the level you think you are on.

>IT passes your test and you disparage it because it is popular
First: IT doesn't pass "my test" because as a monster IT is quite boring and unoriginal. Harry Potter's dementors do something very similar, and it's not the only example I've encountered.
Second: I wasn't disparaging IT, I was disparaging you and your stereotyped way of thinking.
Third: reddit loves popular shit, so accusing me of being reddit because I hate what's popular is absurd. I don't let popularity decide whether or not I appreciate something. That's done by people like you: 20-somethings desperate to look cool and smart. (Pic related: you're the virgin.)

>I was oblivious what I was describing was his IT character
If you can't immediately recognize the utter banality of your description of "a creature that feeds off the fear and desperation of its victims and so manipulates them to feel them", it means you're a child who hasn't read NEARLY enough to come here and start preaching about originality and coolness.
Once again, you're not at the level you think you're on.

(And that paragraph about cats was the most cringeworthy shit I've read here in a while, apart from missing the point. Jesus.)

>>20052084
>It's either the dragons just need to consume flesh or they need something else.
Swanwick's dragons are not mere animals concerned only with the need to eat to survive. Those are IT and Harry Potter's dementors. Iron dragons consume fuel to survive, and they can get that fuel pretty much anywhere. They're not dominated by the need to hunt and eat (which would make them A LOT less interesting, since predators and monsters don't reflect about the world and don't have existential crises) they're tormented by their own worldview and by the urge to escape an insufferable existence.

>If the dragon doesn't need humans or elves to exist the looming question is why the fuck is it there?
Because it was created by powerful kingdoms to be used as a weapon. The most destructive weapon in that world.

>Why participate in an ecosystem you don't have any tie to?
Hence, his desire to escape it.

>>20052099
Want to tally the amount of times I used reddit vs. You mr projector? I've used it twice. I didn't use it at all in my first response. You can go through the effort to count your invocations. It might be a revelatory exercise in self reflection. I dislike even engaging in this level of the argument. It is inane and distracting. Put it to rest.

Death drive and hatred of existence is not an inborn goal. It is a fabrication, a development. Just as any other "whim" can be made. An urge cannot be made, an urge makes. It's a vital distinction.

>>20052116
Exactly. Then it just leaves. Or it hoards a valuable resource for its survival and goes to sleep. Sound like a familiar dragon?

>>20052131
To be dominated by a fabrication is a trick. To be dominated by an urge is vitality. For the young and inexperienced a trick will do. Age and the search for meaning reveals that tricks are meaningless and merely distorted and imperfect urges. Nothing suffices for the real thing.

god. shouldn't you guys stick to your containment thread?

>>20052131
>>20052135
>Then it just leaves
Leaves where? He hates EXISTENCE, not his neighborhood. Only way out is to destroy existence itself.

>Or it hoards a valuable resource for its survival and goes to sleep.
And that would solve what? When he wakes up he feels himself in the same exact predicament. Still stuck in an insufferable faggot... no, that's you. I meant "existence".

>this unsuppressable instinctual feeling is an urge and this other one is... uuh... a fabrication, yes, and it's just a whim even though it entirely defines a character and it's impossible to fight or ignore, yes. Because I say so. I'm so smart.
>here, let me add some cool-sounding pseudo-deep sentence about juveniles and inexperienced and tricks and hoes. That will make me win this discussion, even though I exposed myself as an imbecile 4-5 replies ago.

The most annoying thing about arguing online is when you get some pretentious little twat with too much time on his hands that will attach himself to your thread like a mussel and keep posting reply after reply after reply, completely missing the point or twisting it in a desperate attempt to look and feel "cool" and "well-read" and "cerebral" and all that jazz. He doesn't understand that his strategy is transparent and that said transparency is already evidence of his intellectual mediocrity. He doesn't realize that he comes off as a cringe wannabe intellectual. No, he's convinced that he can "win" the argument if only he keeps replying and replying until he gets the last word, providing absolutely nothing of value and polluting every thread he steps foot in with his ignorance, mediocrity and arrogant pretentiousness.
Maybe in 10-15 years, when he's in his thirties, he'll realize that he was a stupid kid, just a poser, and that everyone could see right through him, but in the meantime, we have to suffer his idiocy.
It's so tiresome.

>>20052191
I'll stick it in your containment MOM!

>>20052187
>To be dominated by a fabrication is a trick. To be dominated by an urge is vitality.
Retarded, foggy distinction from somebody who doesn't understand that some urges are conducive to survival because they're hardwired in your genes (to eat, to fuck) while other urges are a result of other mechanisms and interactions with the environment but are just as powerful and valid. Your distinction is meaningless and worthless both from a scientific standpoint and a literary one. You're a kid trying to sound cool. Just give it up, you're 102 IQ at best.

>>20052237
Prove to me other urges exist that fall outside elaborate abstractions of fulfilling survival urges. Should be easy with your assumedly >102 IQ

>>20052187
>"I will make an arbitrary distinction between 2 kinds of urges: the first kind is the ones that arise directly from our genes, and the second one is the ones that also arise from our genes, but in a more indirect way."
>"I will then label the second category as "fabrications", as if they were planned by some organization that then instilled them into somebody's mind with propaganda, instead of being just as urgent as the first category, and will disparage this second category as "juvenile" in order to look cool and smarter than the individuals who have urges of this second kind (i.e. everyone, but I don't realize it, because I'm an idiot)."
>"I will do all this while talking about books I haven't read and characters I don't know anything about."
>"I'm confident I'll come off as very smart in this anonymous chilean llama-cooking forum."
Go back to your liberal arts degree and stay in it.

>>20052255
Easy. My disgust for shitwits like you has nothing to do with survival urges. Yet, it's very powerful and definitely urgent -- as you'd discover if your face was within range of my fist.

>>20052213
Can he kill himself? That is a valid solution. Or he can approximate death through sleep.

>impossible to fight or ignore
again suicide IS an option. This is why a willed death drive is so lacking as a motivation.

All of this:
Because I say so. I'm so smart.
>here, let me add some cool-sounding pseudo-deep sentence about juveniles and inexperienced and tricks and hoes. That will make me win this discussion, even though I exposed myself as an imbecile 4-5 replies ago.

The most annoying thing about arguing online is when you get some pretentious little twat with too much time on his hands that will attach himself to your thread like a mussel and keep posting reply after reply after reply, completely missing the point or twisting it in a desperate attempt to look and feel "cool" and "well-read" and "cerebral" and all that jazz. He doesn't understand that his strategy is transparent and that said transparency is already evidence of his intellectual mediocrity. He doesn't realize that he comes off as a cringe wannabe intellectual. No, he's convinced that he can "win" the argument if only he keeps replying and replying until he gets the last word, providing absolutely nothing of value and polluting every thread he steps foot in with his ignorance, mediocrity and arrogant pretentiousness.
Maybe in 10-15 years, when he's in his thirties, he'll realize that he was a stupid kid, just a poser, and that everyone could see right through him, but in the meantime, we have to suffer his idiocy.
It's so tiresome.

Is purely you dude. You waste a lot of time not actually engaging with the ideas we're discussing and feeding into this literal strawman nonsense. Cease this shit. I'd actually like to discuss the interesting topics.

>>20052255
>urges exist that fall outside elaborate abstractions of fulfilling survival urges
The iron dragon wants to destroy existence and cease to exist at the same time. That's clearly outside of fulfilling survival urges.

>Can he kill himself?
He wants to die, yes, but he also wants to kill everyone else while he does it.

>willed death drive
This implies that he could stop having that death drive simply by willing it. You can't will away an urge or a phobia.

>no u
Amazing retort.

>>20052270
>You waste a lot of time not actually engaging with the ideas we're discussing
I replied to every single one of your "points" (and disproved them). Then, since I still had time before your sister came here to suck me off, I exposed you as a pretentious little shit. >"If I accuse him of projection I win!"
Still not original. Your tactics are at the same level of your literary analysis.

With as much seething as this is causing, it must be a good book. Fuck the contrarians.

>>20047499
Cringe desu, but in any case I suggest Dragonriders of Pern

>>20052303
Are you even reading? The only one seething is the guy who read the book. I'm the other autist just engaging with the ideas he brought up and getting more bored of the seethe taking up useless space with each post. So many fucking wasted words of insults and strawmen that contribute nothing relevant.

>>20052283
My guy, I'm not consciously employing tactics. I did not claim you didn't engage with my points. Disprove is up to interpretation. I'm pointing out my annoyance to continue THIS part of the discussion because it is fucking irrelevant. But this is the only part you seem to passionately want to engage with. It's not about win or lose to me. It's sussing out what is true through conversation. You seem fixated on win/lose and this conversation is choked out by the disparity in effort you put forth towards our divergent aims. You: to win. Me: to arrive at a better approximation of truth. I'm not asking for agreement. Your conflicting views if convincing will modulate my beliefs. That's why I'm even bothering to continue engaging with you. The hard headed notion that you might have something interesting to say to change my view in the 10% despite the 90% win/lose wasted space.

>>20052279
It's not no u, it's burden of proof.

Why go through the effort to kill everyone else if you are dooming yourself to die too? It's not in line with genetic urges. Reflection reveals suicide is the base urge. Harming others is a willed perversion of suicide urge. Because it implies the others act upon you. Suicide is wholly contained within the victim. It is an urge. Genocide is dependent and relies on the environment. It's a whim. Urges exist regardless of setting. Whims are setting dependent. You absolutely can cast off any whim through environmental change. You can't do fuck all about urges because of their continuity. An urge makes a whim is made. One is vital the other is a cheap trick.

>>20052372
Suicide with extra steps is a pointless urge to consider meaningful. It will exit the world and cease contributing spiritual energy. It won't continue effecting anything. It is already dead once the death desire takes root even if the suicide itself is delayed. When you deal in urges there is no intervening time. The bs of time is completely cut out. Pure manifestation energy. The antics of the already dead are meaningless.

>>20047499
You could always try the Pit Dragon Trilogy. IIRC (and this is a very hazy memory from 20 years ago, mind you) the dragons are not intelligent, they cannot be ridden because of spine placement, and they're fought and bid on in pits like fighting dogs. I remember finding that an interesting take on the dragon trope.

>>20047499
>>huge sense of their importance
>>contempt towards lowly humans and faggoty elves
>>unapologetically vulgar
Sounds like your dragons are autistic

>>20047499
Sounds cool