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>>24566253

>Thread Question:
What's your favorite novel that's a blatant rehash, but done so well you can't help liking it?

>>24576122
I always liked what a fuckup Raven turned out to be. You think he's a Gary Stu who has the skill and background to steal the show, and then you realize just how flawed he is.

Horse

>>24576167 (OP)
>What's your favorite novel that's a blatant rehash, but done so well you can't help liking it?
sune eater books. blatant is underselling it.

I know women authors hate it when their works are dismissed as YA, but more importantly: why do they keep writing YA? I don't get it.

Are they just retarded? Do they not even realize it? Or do they think that their particular take on the tired tropes, dialogue, and plot beats sets them apart?

>>24576223
does it get any better after the first book? because yeah it's not so much blatant as it is "this would have ended up in court if plagiarism cases weren't so difficult and expensive"

anyone have that copypasta of the marine owning the atheist professor but its seconda apocalypse themed

>>24576167 (OP)
I liked Double Star, which is just Prisoner of Zenda in space.

They're not /lit/ at all, but I had fun with T. Kingfisher's pulp retellings. They feel like Goosebumps books for adults, and I mean that as both compliment and insult.

I spawncamped someone's black company collection at half price books. Got original hardcover omnibuses so now I feel like I have to read the series.

>>24576286
> now I feel like I have to read the series
My condolences.

>>24576286
I own the paperback omnibuses. It's definitely an investment.

>>24576218
canon size queen btw

>>24576367
Darrow's carved cock probably changes shape at will like a razor. No man can compete with that

>>24576400
Darrow wasn’t even modified down there. He’s got a big massive red schlong

>>24575743
>Built up literally since book 1 and was throwing in your face since his first chapter in book 2
You might be misremembering but Jezal doesn't have a kingly lineage at all. The subversion is he's actually a random whore's son. Granted, this is one of the better and more subtle twists Joe pulls off.
>He was coming out on top for every single plotline during the entire trilogy
Not really. Book 2 ends with him failing miserably but "actually, it was all part of the bigger plan!".
>Nigger are you serious
Yes. I can't tell if you just don't remember but having this whole arc being built up for Logen only for it to be "actually, he's not any different after all that. And whoops, he also loses his king status and might die."
>The often repeated message for the entire trilogy was that people don't get what they deserve
I already pointed that out with subversion being the thematic element
>Bayaz being a mastermind
Why are you so fucking triggered, you retard? I told you that I expected most of le heckin twists in the First Law. I still enjoyed it.

>>24575841
Eat a cock, nigger

>>24576424
No way Mickey "I want to create a god" Violet left the penor untouched. It probably vibrates and drips ambrosia.

>>24576359
Anyone with half of a high-school education would see that the first law is not plot-twist slop and muh subverted expectationerinos, but that's asking a lot of /sffg/

It's funny how Bayaz becomes almost literally the concept of capitalism.

>>24576518
>muh subverted expectationerinos
I don't know about plot twists but that's literally what it is. The main plotline of book 2 is a fantasy quest for a magical macguffin, but the macguffin turns out to be useless and... that's it, there's nothing more to it. "You would expect there to be a point to this journey but there's actually no point" is literally the point.

Benefits to not reading tradpub AAA garbage is not having to deal with the associated normalfags and their spiteful vindictive spoiler ways.

>>24576553
Most stories have plot twists, that's what keeps stories interesting. There's a different between a useful, meaningful plot twist, i.e. the seed wasn't where it was supposed to be, and plot twist slop like "Logen was actually Khalul who was acting as a sleeper agent"
If you want a story without plot twists at all, might I suggest the very hungry caterpillar?

>>24576569
Reread the first six words of my post. I'm not talking about plot twists here.
But the First Law is absolutely about subverting expectations of what a traditional fantasy story is "supposed" to be in people's minds. It does so gleefully and with a large heaping of nihilism.

>>24576252
the first book is skimmable the second makes it it's own story, Hadrian is a fun protag. Silence in particular is derivative but I think Ruocoo finds his own voice the further books

>>24576581
I find it hard to categorize a book that does something different as "a subversion of expectations" but that's just me. Every good story should try to do that to some extent, I guess whether it is well done or not depends on how respectful the author is regarding the subversion.

>>24576243
My guess is that they sell better, at least in the sff field.

>>24576582
I'm enjoying the series greatly, but as of almost finishing book 3, it does not stop being highly derivative of New Sun. Hadrian is basically Severian, The Quiet are hierodules/hierogramates, so far the plot of Demon in White is broadly the first half of Urth.

>>24576604
Yeah, that's my gut feel as well. In fact I bet it's become a weird chicken / egg thing where YA receives a larger proportion of advertising by booktubers etc., so they sell more, so authors focus on YA more often

>>24576367
she'll take the 4.8 and like it

>>24576243
>>24576646
You don't seem to realize that the YA has a much higher sales floor and ceiling for women than there is for men quite possibly writing anything. That doesn't even get into romantasy which definitely has better financial prospects then literally anything a man could write. There's no reason whatsoever other than personal preference for women to write anything other than that.

>>24576629
>the plot of Demon in White is broadly the first half of Urth
What are you on about? The audience with Tzadkiel/the Emperor and Hadrian's vision quest maybe, but DiW is a mil-sf/space opera epic heavily grounded by battles and logistics whereas Urth is 400 pages of tripping balls

>>24576506
>>24576424
>>24576400
I don't love seeing discussions of cocks in my /sffg/ but if it makes bakkerfag seethe I'm all for it
then again, he's probably into it since his favorite author is a known closet case

>>24576776
>only one person dislikes <my favorite series>
As delusional as Bakkerfag but lacks self-awareness like all other newfags

>>24576711
Thanks for the suicide fuel. I'll keep working on my Dostoevskyan-McCarthyan high fantasy epic to stave off my yearning for the grave.

>>24576780
My favorite current series is Sun Eater. I just appreciate the camaraderie of the RRfags and don't like it when niggers sperg out about RR discussion here.

>>24576799
;-)

>>24576711
you'd think writing good books people want to read would take priority at least some of the time

Imagine being afraid of seeing the word "cock" in a book.

Couldn't be me.

What fantasy books to read after Tolkien? Leftist, Jewish, female, POC or LGBT authors are out of the question.

Crazy how tchaikovsky wrote a 10 book epic military fantasy in Shadows of the Apt but it seems like nobody read it. I thought the book was about bug people like a bugs life but I guess all the characters are human with bug like powers.

>>24576836
>good
Not necessary
>people want to read
They do this. Women and teens want to read derivative YA sff books, and authors and publishers are happy to cater to them. It seems like despite there being fewer and fewer sff books targeting men, it's still ever harder to break into that scene and market. Anecdotally, the YA section at my B&N has a floor to itself, and the adult scifi and fantasy sections are combined into a corner behind all the manga.

Light Bringer spoilersish
I love Casisus and Lyria's relationship in this book.

>>24576864
I'm not afraid of it, but its presence may indicate that a book won't suit my tastes

>>24576942
I didn't like Lyria until she became friends with Cassius.

>>24576891
Howard (Robert E.), Smith (Clark Ashton), Lewis (C.S., namely Space Trilogy and Till We Have Faces), Gene Wolfe. Nothing's really like LotR though. No fantasy author has planned out a world in such detail that it feels pulled from the pages of a lost epic cycle while also resonating with the imagination.

>>24576891
take the dying earth pill

>>24576424
He absolutely was. There's just no way everything else got bigger, but mickey left his dick the same.

>>24576367
This part made me really uncomfortable.

>>24576799
based sun eater anon
>>24576952
>when she called him a good man

>>24577100
It was just the author trying to make it clear that mustang is a whore since some people still doubted it

Sun Eater copied The Sparrow and the author lies about having read it

>>24577116
Victra is unironically as big a whore as Mustang, if not bigger.

She's also quite possibly a pedophile. She's 27 in Golden Sun, and it's implied that she fucked Cassius before the Academy, when she would have been like 24 or something.

Fucked Cassius, threw herself at Darrow to no avail, settled for Sevro, and is described as experienced in Golden Son, and that she knew what she was doing.

>>24577128
So? Victra is based while Mustang is a huge bitch all the time after the first book. Victra also doesn't pretend to be anything else and Mustang gave Darrow the "you can't judge me" speech in Golden Son, which is a PEAK whore trope. Victra is also completely irrelevant to Mustang's whorishness in general so bringing her up was pointless.

>>24577100
Why? Her brain had been fucked with.

>>24576518
>>24576569
>let me just make plot twists mean "le whacky crazy thing!!" so that I can be right
Nigga, you know exactly what we mean when we say plot twists. The fact that the seed was literally nothing and that the whole second book was for nothing is a "twist", even if it's an anticlimactic one. If you're getting anal about the word, sure, let's just call it "subverting expectations". A plot twist doesn't always have to be that Logen was actually dead through the whole trilogy

The only thing in Red Rising that has ever made me genuinely uncomfortable was when Darrow was about to be gang raped and murdered by the Gorgons.

>>24577168
Virginia has canonically only fucked two dudes. Calling her a whore when there's an actual whore right next to her is hilarious.

>>24577175
That's what made me uncomfortable.

>>24577217
yeah but like fucking Cassius as a way to get back at Darrow is pretty whorish behavior tbqfah

>>24577126
As one of the 3 anons that have actually read the Sparrow here its really not even a significant detail in Howling Dark and its done to the feet too not just the hands like with Emilio in The Sparrow.

>>24577235
She didn't fuck him to get back at him, she fucked him to get information on how to take his family down. And also to feed any information he divulged to Octavia so she could use somewhere down the line. It served both herself as the daughter of Nero Au Augustus, and as an agent to the Sovereign, and she couldn't very well continue in that role if she didn't put out at least once.

>>24577217
If your only measure of whoreishness is how many people she's fucked then we're not even having the same conversation.

>>24577261
Contemporary fantasy sounds like a mexican soap opera.

>>24577272
melodrama is one of the characteristics of space opera

>>24577271
you're basing this off of what exactly?

>>24576922
There's still a disconnect that I just can't grasp.

Yes, it's true that YA SFF and romantasy dominates. But what's more accurate is to say that like 3-4 authors dominate, and then there are 10,000,000 copycats who aren't selling anything.

The book that started this conversation has a combined ~100 reviews on GR and Amazon. She's a new-ish author, but is heavily connected, is (was?) considered an indie darling, had the likes of Janny Wurts and Emily Woo Zeller pushing her shit. To put that into perspective, Bayne's Climb, Book I of The Sword of Bayne, has nearly 200 reviews, and his Kobalos series has nearly 3,000.

So I get that people chase trends, and for whatever reason women authors are especially egregious about it - romantasy, YA SFF, cozy mysteries, etc. But I'm not at all convinced that your average writer chasing these trends is making more money or finding more success than some random guy from Kentucky writing swords & sorcery

Thus, even if your goal is say fuck the art, fuck creativity, I want to make the most money possible, it seems absolutely the wrong move to write a bad book in an incredibly crowded market.

>>24577201
this. pierce had so many humiliation rituals for darrow to that point that I was actually afraid for a second.

>Lysander could have continued to have comfy space adventures with Cassius and Pytha
>Instead chose to be space Hitler and to be molested by the woman who killed his parents.
Fuck Lysander. The only good thing that came out of his betrayal was Cassius linking back up with Darrow.

>>24577296
All because he got a boner looking at a girl who ended up fucking hating him and then getting ripped in half in an iron rain while still hating him

>>24577197
I honestly have a hard time describing the series as a "series predicated on subversion of expectations" but clearly there's a portion of /sffg/ that disagrees with me

>>24577293
You're right that most writers aren't making cash from sellings tons of copies. But they do get a payout from the publisher when they sell their book to them to put it on the YA shelf, and that's definitely more than they'd make if they were trying to join in and write sword and sorcery, for instance. It's a comparatively dismal amount next to massively popular series but it's still more than they'd make if they tried to cater to a different audience.

Should have figured the Athena shit was gonna be too good to be true.

>>24577293
The average guy from Kentucky writing s&s is making $0, or even negative.

>>24577293
Legends and Lattes begs to differ. A male audiobook narrator turned top seller for cozy fantasy. There are a lot more of these cases than you know, let alone would believe.

This is what you people are raving about?

>>24577456
FUCK nerds amirite

>>24577456
I wouldn't call them people

>>24577456
Stop biting your nails