I really thought I would generate more disagreement from last week’s post on critiques, which goes to show that I have no idea whatsoever about such things. In any case, it made me realize that the backbone project is really more about me putting myself and my opinions out there, regardless of whether doing so sparks disagreement. (Also, “weenie” has become my new favorite word. My favorite word before that was “insouciant.” I think this is clear evidence that I am getting stupider by the minute.) However, I promised you could disagree with me, and I feel like I failed to deliver. Which brings us to my backbone project post #2.
As you know, I’m a science fiction and fantasy writer, so it should come as no big surprise that I have accumulated some geek cred over the years. But like most geeks, I have some holes in my preferences. Sometimes even gaping ones. I blame it on hanging out with musicians and psych majors all those years. Totally different kinds of geekdom.
Now, I figure most of you will be able to find something to disagree about in my pet peeves of geekdom list. Seriously. Think of it as your mission. I know you can do it.
1. Dr. Who: I have to plead ignorance to all the old seasons of Dr. Who, as I began watching this show with the reboot. I was okay with Seasons 1 and 2, but Season 3? Are you freaking kidding me? I was simultaneously bored, jumpy in an unpleasant way, and disgusted by the new companion Martha until I just couldn’t take it anymore. And what’s with the plots? Deus ex machina after deus ex machina. I watched “The Doctor’s Wife” and read on the internet that it made everyone cry. Seriously? I was just disgusted that once again, all the episode was about was Amy Pond calling the Doctor and begging to be rescued. Maybe I’ve just been unfortunate about the Amy Pond episodes I’ve seen (which, to be fair, haven’t been many), but all she does is need to be rescued! Yet another companion wasted.
2. the novels of Neil Gaiman: particularly American Gods. I could barely finish it because the pacing was so slow. I expect this to generate actual hate mail, so you see how brave I am being. I just don’t get it all the hype. I mean, yes, Neil Gaiman is like the rock star of writers. And he’s done some stuff that I’ve appreciated: The Graveyard Book, parts of Neverwhere (although I wanted to kick the protagonist in the teeth), that short story about Snow White and vampires. But I just don’t understand the massive hysteria surrounding him and his work. Mind you, I keep trying. But so far, no dice.
3. Anime: My geeky friends first exposed me to anime via Cowboy Bebop, and I was okay with it. I think this made them overly optimistic, because they then showed me a bunch of random, really weird and twisted anime, and it’s ruined me. I’m not kidding. Someone suggests watching anime and I look at them like they’ve grown a third head. My poor husband suffers because of it, but there it is. I just have no interest. It took a huge effort for me to consent to watch Porco Rosso and I could see that it had merit, but the ennui is so overpowering, I kind of don’t care.
4. Agricola: Gah! Resource management at its most boring. The players seem to barely interact, and the whole game is about … wait for it … being a farmer? Yeah, because that’s what I’ve been dreaming about doing my entire life. There aren’t even any silly pictures of beans on cards so you can pretend that you’re collecting an exotic bevy of circus performers instead of farming. Plus I already ran a business for seven years. I don’t want my board games to feel exactly the same as what I could get paid to do. I just don’t.
5. WoW: Okay, I’ve never played WoW, and you know what? I hope I never play WoW because as far as I can tell, that game is crack. It will suck me in, and I will run around like a mindless little medicated drone from Brave New World, and I will never ever escape. Not only that, but I won’t even realize how much time I’m spending doing essentially boring and repetitive things. Because I don’t waste enough time on the internet as it is. Plus WoW steals my friends. It makes them too busy to do things like hang out with me and email me. Which gives it an extra black mark in my book.
6. Lord of the Rings (the books): I know Ferrett already blogged about this, but I still think it deserves a mention. I like the movies. I’ve been wanting to see them again, in fact. But I’ve never made it to the end of the trilogy of books. I read the first two when I was eleven, and then I had to wait for the next library trip to read the last one, at which point I’d lost interest. I tried reading them again before the movies came out, and The Two Towers killed me. I wanted something to happen so badly. But instead it just went on and on about the trees and the pain and the journeying, until Frodo’s pain became my pain. Literally.
7. D&D: I like RPGs. I miss playing them. But I don’t miss D&D. Why not? First, because the only way I could ever make it at all fun for myself was by playing a caricature of my class who was generally of lower than average intelligence. After awhile, that got pretty old. Second, the storytelling seems to have the same average depth as my own at age seven playing with my Barbies. There’s bad guys. Must kill. Slash, hack. The end. Now there’s more bad guys. Slash, hack. Etc. I mean, there’s not even the romantic subplots that my Barbies enjoyed. Third, with the newest edition, it seems that even more emphasis is placed on fighting (who knew it was possible?) and that grid makes combat last forever. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against some fighting in a campaign, but all fighting and no story makes me fall asleep.
All right, what did I get wrong? I bet you can give me several good reasons why the things above are actually super awesome. My tingling spider sense tells me so. And, for additional kicks, you can share your own geekdom pet peeves. I dare someone to lay into Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Or Star Wars Episode 4. Or Ender’s Game. Let the smack talk begin!
The Practical Free Spirit 
I am absolutely with you on Dr. Who, Gaiman, and Anime. I’ve never even heard of Agricola (and I hang out with some pretty serious board-game geeks!). I don’t care for WoW either, but only because I have other MMOs I like better, so that probably can’t count as a point of agreement.
I love Lord of the Rings. But I have to admit, I think I was in my twenties before I actually got around to reading that half of Two Towers that’s Frodo and Sam walking and feeling sad. Seriously. I had no freaking idea who Faramir was when he showed up in Return of the King. But before I ever picked up the books, I had watched the Bakshi and Rankin and Bass cartoons over and over again, so I was familiar with the story going in, and reading the books was more of an opportunity to see even more detail about a world I already felt invested in.
I think you can have a deep roleplay experience with D&D, but only in spite of the system — never because of. I’ve both run and played in some pretty epic D&D games over the years, where there was a lot of cool roleplay going on, but I think that was because our group was used to roleplaying more than anything D&D brought to the table.
So, there, I’ve sort of disagreed with you, a little bit. 🙂
Yony always says one of his best RPG experiences was D&D as well, so I believe it’s possible to have an amazing game in that system. However, I am deeply suspicious in practice. 🙂
It always makes me sad that I don’t understand Lord of the Rings properly. But I haven’t given up!
Although that said, the good RPG experience was most definitely despite the engine rather than because of it. This was the same group that tried to play through a boxed D&D adventure for the hell of trying it — Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil, of all things — and ended up negotiating a settlement with the hobgoblins occupying the ruined temple and getting useful intelligence information as a result, not to mention starting a romantic subplot involving the hobgoblin shamaness and a half-orcish cleric. Not, I suspect, what the designers of the module had in mind.
GET THE PITCHFORKS!
Kidding.
I actually don’t love Gaiman’s more acclaimed novels either. I found them rambly and slow. Exceptions for me are Neverwhere and Stardust (and of course Good Omens but I think Pratchett gets much of the credit for that.) I still count Gaiman among my favorite writers and the one I most want to emulate, but for his short fiction and comics, not his novels.
I’m also not a Dr. Who fan. Someone bought me the Season 1 DVDs with the absolutely certainty that I would LOVE them and I most definitely did not.
And I actively dislike anime, too. Yes, even Miyazaki’s work.
I read LotR when I was 11, too, on a road trip across the country, and despite terrible boredom and horrible parents I wanted to escape from I *still* couldn’t finish Return of the King. It seemed like nothing but boring politics and was totally uninteresting.
Other geek stuff I dislike: First-person shooters. Just about anything with a dragon in it (GoT excepted.) Penny Arcade. Most of BoingBoing. Most contemporary animated shows, from Cowboy Bebop to American Dad. (Futurama is the exception to that one.) Zombies (in general.) And–wait for it–Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 😉
The best thing about geeks is that whatever we’re into, were into pretty deep, but we’re not all into the same thing. It’d be a pretty boring community if we were.
Oh, I totally forgot to mention another thing I tend to dislike: werewolves. ARGH! I’ve tried to analyze it, but ultimately I don’t quite understand my deep dislike for most things werewolf. I mean, even when werewolves are done well, I tend to get a creepy crawly feeling.
I like the same thing about geeks. And then there’s that moment of excited recognition when you meet someone who does happen to like the same thing you do. 🙂
I read Good Omens thinking I was going to start loving Gaiman and found that all the humor was from Pratchett. I’ve become a hardcore Discworld fan as a result. 😀
The only notion I want to argue with here is the underlying idea that all SF/F geeks must like the same things. Maybe in the early days, it was easier for geeks of a genre persuasion to come to the table with certain likes, but we are complex and contain multitudes. We are legion!
I really prefer that people share their passions with me than the things they don’t like (which is odd for a die-hard pessimist like me I suppose). When I want to share a passion for some bit of media, and a friend tells me they loathe it, I move on until I find something we can talk about.
Nothing at all is universally accepted. Some things are popular with a lot of fans, but we’ve never at any time been under obligation to like popular things.
I think because so many geeks spend so much time being outcasts early in life, we put too much focus on consensus beliefs and likes as a subculture.
Congratulations on your dislikes! But in general, I think the world’s a more enjoyable place if people talk about what they _do_ like and not what they hate. (But I understand where you’re coming from with this).
I actually think this is hilarious: you consider yourself a pessimist and I consider myself an optimist, yet you prefer hearing about passions while I appreciate the value of a good heartfelt bitch session. But I do like hearing about things people are passionate about as well. 🙂
Also it’s only polite to find a topic of conversation that both parties can participate in. I find that if I’m talking about a piece of pop culture that one of us loves and the other one abhors, a certain amount of conversation can be interesting (Yony and I talk about what makes him like Dr. Who, for instance). But then sometimes there’s also the “Argh! I can’t handle hearing another bad thing about Buffy, because it’s the best TV series ever!” And then it can be good to change the subject, for the sake of everyone’s sanity.
(Steps onto soapbox).
What?! Tolkien’s MASTERPIECE doesn’t do it for you? The work that freaking defines the fantasy genre? And you call yourself a fantasy writer?
You read it WRONG. And, like most people, you probably read it when you were too young because you’d just finished “The Hobbit.” Yes; Book Four is tough going — especially if you don’t pace yourself. The best way to read The Lord of the Rings is one (and only one) chapter a night. Then reverently closing the book.
If you had said something like “Tolkien’s portrayal of women as trophy princesses or asexual oracles struck me as outdated and sexist,” or “Tolkien’s narrative of good verses evil seems stuck in Euro-centric modes of blond white civilization versus swarthy black savagery and comes off as racist” then I might have respected your argument.
But No! You don’t like it because the pace is too boring for you.
Fine. You _deserve_ Orlando Bloom AND a moral compass based not on good and evil but on Action! and boring.
PS: Elves. Don’t. Snowboard.
I know. You can see how it takes backbone to admit to such a travesty! Of course, my argument is pitifully underdeveloped, and probably deserved its own complete essay. But the pithy version, lacking all of the intellectual dressing I could provide, is perhaps more honest. 🙂
I will give thought to your suggestion to read only one chapter per night, though. Whether I like it or dislike it, I would really like to get to the end one day, because, as you say, it is such a pivotal work.
I am distressingly in agreement, or at least non-disagreement, about much of this. I have never seen the new Dr. Who (I still rather like Tom Baker though). Have also never played Agricola or WoW and they sound as you describe them — drudgery and addictive drudgery respectively.
I thought American Gods was entertaining, but marred by its last third, which was kind of a closure-addicted resolution-field-trip after the actual plot of the book was over. My favorite thing of Gaimain’s is “The Problem of Susan”, followed by bits of Sandman, and Coraline; but there are plenty of misses too, and he doesn’t come near the top tier of my personal pantheon.
I did love LoTR as a kid, but you will certainly get no argument that the pacing of it is excruciating; in fact now that I have an adult’s shorter attention span, I don’t know if I could still get through it.
D&D is a lousy RPG system, prioritizing, as you say, combat over story. Secondly, and even worse, it is chock-full of very disturbing essentialism; I don’t think you need to be wildly politically sophisticated to be squicked out by a world in which there’s an absolute consensus that individuals of certain races are Evil (and agree that they’re Evil!) And thirdly it’s just not all that *playable* — endless arbitrary rules and tables. It is really a thin veneer of role-playing on top of a miniatures wargame. Far prefer Chaosium games (Runequest, Call of Cthulhu), or minimalist games like The Window, or even GURPS, and I’d love to try White Wolf games sometime. Of course even D&D is fun with a fun group, but, for me, more in spite of its rule systems than because of them.
The only thing in your list I can strenuously refute is anime. Of course, “anime” is a huge set of things — it’s like saying you don’t like “fiction written in the US” — Sturgeon’s Law applies. Porco Rosso is not the best of Miyazaki, but have you seen Spirited Away?
As for Ender’s Game, have you read Kessel’s essay? http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm
White Wolf games are my personal favorite, although I occasionally stumble on some small game title that is fairly amusing (Spirit of the Century comes to mind). And I’d also agree that the gaming group is ultimately more important than the system.
I haven’t seen Spirited Away, although at some point I will probably allow myself to be persuaded to watch it. I think we own the DVD, in fact. Yes, anime is a huge category, but my mind persists in lumping it all together.
I’m going to read Kessel’s essay now, but the reason I mentioned Ender’s Game is because I know it has many troubling implications and many people who really hate it. And yet I persist in liking it, partly I think because of the age at which I read it, and partly because it explores other ideas and themes (beyond the ones surrounding genocide etc.) that I find genuinely interesting.
I just have to weigh in on the anime thing, which is kind of ironic because I’m not a huge anime fan (but I have seen a fair bit over the years, due to a wife and numerous friends who are quite into it).
I think there’s a widespread misconception that anime is a genre. It’s not. It’s a medium. As a such, taking the “I don’t like anime” position is a bit like taking the position that you don’t like live-action TV shows. Or, say, novels. Now, that said, there are certainly dominant genres within anime, which have their tropes that can be very distracting and take some getting used to–and this can make it difficult to get started.
However, there are anime shows and movies that manage to utterly leave behind the dominant genres with their clumsy shoujo heroines who crumple into a useless heap of goo at the sight of the love interest but handily dispatch planet-destroying monsters every day after school (for example). One of my favourite examples is called Monster. It’s a compelling (and disturbing) story about a top-tier brain surgeon, the life-and death choices he’s forced to make, their life-altering unforeseen consequences, and his quest to make things right (with a tremendous focus on the changes wrought on his character by all this). The only bad thing I can say about Monster is that it’s a bit of a commitment, being a TV series of something like 54 episodes.
Well, for the sake of argument, there are other medium that I also don’t care for. Comics come to mind. For a long time, I *didn’t* much care for live-action TV shows, although that is not the case anymore. Many people don’t care for musical theater (which I love love love!) and yet there is a lot of variety in that medium too. Sometimes people who don’t like a medium just need the right “entry drug” but I know some people who will probably never like musical theater. They might think Avenue Q is kind of funny, but they’re not going to be excited to get season tickets for a musical theater venue.
Yes! I love that essay, it really clarified a lot for me.
Hey, John!
Here’s my take on The Lord of the Rings. It’s not yours, and it’s not that of your hypothetical Ring-basher or Peter Jackson fan, and it is dedicated to every capital letter you used in the word ‘masterpiece.’
LOTR is a mess. It’s sloppy, it’s poorly-written, and it’s intensely personal in a way that seems uncomfortable rather than revelatory. I recently tried it again, and it frequently made me feel as if I was peering into someone’s diary.
I am certainly not arguing with those who love it, but it is one of those works, and Tolkien is one of those writers, where if you do not engage with them in a congenial fashion at a congenial point in your life, it and he will forever remain outside your ability to appreciate.
To be specific, the cutesy-wutesy ibbily bibbily jolly little rhymes and dances and merriment, all the cozy beds and mugs of ale and delicious cakes and singalongs are a problem.
If you are not able to submerge yourself in the text and live through those moments, you are left with the uncomfortable image of those words being written by a grown man for his own pleasure and comfort.
I find those passages simultaneously repulsive in the fashion of Strawberry Shortcake, the Wombles, or Winnie-the-Pooh, and uncomfortably revelatory of the deprivations of Tolkien’s childhood. I do not find this cozy.
(It was Tom Bombadil who put an end to my last attempt at at a re-read. I made it through, but was so fatigued I gave up on the initial slopes of The Two Towers.)
His fascination with the details of Middle Earth itself is another problematic area. I am in awe of the sheer labor of what he did, but it seems more like labor than art, more the desperate time-filling of the hobbyist than the obsession of a visionary. The two are not mutually exclusive, and there’s usually some of both in any novelist. But.
By the time I read LOTR, I’d already been exposed to the Arthurian and Scandinavian legends, and so Middle Earth lacked novelty and interest for me — he was telling a story on familiar terrain, and the story was pretty much The Hobbit writ large, beat for beat, right down to the eagles swooping in to rescue them at the end.
And to put it straightforwardly, as a member of the working class, characters like Samwise Gamgee (and Puddleglum the Marshwriggle) make me want to commence bloody revolution right now. They are patronizing and contemptible.
And the other members of the working class take the form of orcs and so on. The brutally relentless upper-middle-class viewpoint grows tiresome quickly. “Bless the squire and his relations, and keep us in our proper stations.”
I can see much of value in LOTR, and I don’t think people are idiots if it’s an important personal cornerstone. I am frankly jealous of those who are able to immerse themselves in Middle Earth, who are able to regard it as part of their interior landscape. More power to you.
But for me? It’s fan-fiction Tolkien wrote about his own world and characters, a personal tool for coming to terms with his life, and since I’m not able to enter into his world-view, my interests would be in the technical qualities of his prose and the originality of his vision, and there’s not much of either.
You don’t even want to hear what I have to say about Star Trek or Star Wars or the LOTR movies — okay, I’ll tell you anyway.
Yesterday I scored a couple of old Frank Frazetta collections that included some dreadful illustrations he did for LOTR. Here’s a hint — you see a lot more naked behinds than you’d expect from Tolkien.
And I wished that the LOTR movie had been directed by Robert Rodriguez, based on those illustrations, and that it had been eighty-five minutes long.
Chacun à son goût!
Sean, what did I do before I met you?
Sometime I’d love to hear a similar rant about Star Wars. Mind you, I really love Star Wars, but I am confident that your take on it will be vastly entertaining.
Also you’ve removed any need for me to write an entire intelligent essay on LoTR and some problems it has, for which you have my eternal gratitude.
I’ve just started on the Amy Pond episodes of Doctor Who now, and she’s kind of annoying me too. All she seems to have going for her is prettiness and insouciance. 😉 Martha Jones I liked, aside from the fact that she moons over the doctor. I was glad that they had a companion who was so heroic, and who also wasn’t white. But my favorite of the recent companions has been Donna Noble.
It’s a shame that we ruined anime for you! I think one reason that we only watch the weird stuff at LAX is because we fans tend to have watched all the serious, good stuff already, voraciously, and want something completely different for contrast? Anyhow, I never realized what that might be like for someone who wasn’t already subsisting on a diet of anime…
LOTR I have a certain reverence and nostalgia for, but I don’t think it’s Tolkien’s best. I prefer the writing in “The Hobbit” and “Farmer Giles of Ham.”
As for D&D and RPGs in general, I would actually like to play dumb hack and slash adventures more often. I feel like most of the campaigns I’ve played have been very dark and convoluted. That’s great, but every now and then I want what I call a chocolate cake campaign, for the kind of day where you’re at low ebb and just want to prop yourself up with a slice of chocolate cake or some other indulgence. For days like that it’d be fun to have a pretty simple game where we just play stereotypical high fantasy and beat up monsters. I especially crave this catharsis after a long day at work, where I’d get fired for beating up the monsters.
And I can’t agree with your enthusiasm for “Ender’s Game” or Buffy, at least not yet. I think I tried reading “Ender’s Game” when I was too young, or something…Anyhow, as a child myself, I didn’t find the protagonist believable or relatable. Everybody keeps on saying how great it is, so I keep on thinking I really *should* re-read it but, eh…Buffy I liked at first, but then I hit a particularly angsty pocket in the 2nd or 3rd season, and just sort of put it down and didn’t pick it up again. Again, I keep on hearing about how it’s the best thing since sliced OMGWTFBBQ, so I feel as if I ought to get back to it at some point, but in the meantime I keep on being distracted by other geeky things that I like more.
Yeah, mostly what I disliked about Martha was her Doctor mooning. Unfortunately that behavior is what ended up defining the character for me. I think I felt more disappointed because I was so excited that she was a DOCTOR too, and then I didn’t see the promise of that idea in practice.
Ah, LAX. Yes, I avoid that event with canny cunning. It makes my brain explode. I’m afraid that someday I’ll mean that literally. 🙂
Mmm, chocolate cake. No, wait… I can see the appeal of a hack and slash. For me, story is paramount. If I care about the story, then I’m all good. If I don’t, then I get restless and wish I could play iPhone games with all the other cool kids.
Honestly, if you tried Ender’s Game and didn’t like it, I don’t know that I’d bother trying again. It’s just not everybody’s cup of tea. I loved the character of Ender as a twelve-year-old, but then, I was stuck being the smart kid in a stifling middle school environment in which I learned very little of any value. Buffy, on the other hand… well, it definitely hits THE ANGST, but I love Buffy and cannot be rational about it. It has its flaws but for me they are more than made up for by moments of brilliance.
I have learned that unfortunately I have a very low tolerance for teen angst in fiction. Even when the characters would realistically be angsty, because they are teenagers going through trying circumstances, I seem to have less patience for it than other audience members. I blame my adolescence and my little brother’s adolescence for exhausting my tolerance for angst. 😉
Then I can definitely recommend that you steer clear of Vampire Diaries. It brings a whole new meaning to the concept of teen angst. Also of general character stupidity. For some reason, I am finding it to be highly amusing.
We all geek out on different things, right? And we’re shocked, just shocked when other geeks don’t like exactly the same things we like. they might even hate them.
Controversial things I like & hate?
I love Star Wars. All of it. Yeah, I recognize some parts of it suck. I don’t care. GL didn’t ruin my childhood.
Dr Who. Love it. Torchwood? Pretty meh. I think what makes Dr. Who work is the campiness, the sense of play. I like dark. I like Capt. Jack. But TW leaves me cold.
Anime. Very ambivalent. Some of it’s great. Some, not so much. Never got Akira, though. Love the soundtrack. Does that count? 🙂
MMOs: no time for writing if I play them. WoW is repetitive. Really they all are. it’s the social aspect that kept me going, not the rewards and loot. Now I have Twitter for the social stuff (can’t wait to get to 500 followers and unlock my next Avatar….)
RPGs: Still love them, though I admit I a love hate relationship with 4e. But have to agree with you that story trumps mechanics, and as long as the story is good, I’ll play anything (especially Star Wars. See point #1) 😛
Buffy. Sorry, but I just don’t get Buffy. You can take my nerd card if you must. I’ve been told it gets better in the second season, but the first season is pretty terrible. imo. I do love Firefly, though.
I could go on. I probably shouldn’t. Thanks for giving us a place to air our nerdy laundry, Amy. 🙂
I remember having a conversation with you on Twitter about geek cred, in fact! And I guess I won’t revoke your nerd card just yet. 🙂
I can’t watch Torchwood. I mean that literally. I am so terrified that I hide behind a pillow the whole time, and then I can’t fall asleep that night. I am totally a weenie. (Aha! See how slickly I worked that word in?)
I’d love to play in a good Star Wars RPG someday. My plan for my old age includes living in a community with lots of fellow geeks so I can play RPGs, bridge, and Dominion all day.
I will be in the RPGs and anime retirement home just across the street!
I’ve got pretty mixed reactions to things on this list, too. I love Doctor Who but freely admit that there is no rational reason for this; it’s awful in many ways, but it still somehow appeals to the kid in me. If I could ever decipher what it was that I liked about it, it would be interesting.
Gaiman, I have fairly mixed feelings about as well; some of his stuff I find excellent (many of his short stories, his picture books, The Sandman) and some of it I find dreadfully dull. (e.g. Anansi Boys) I actually don’t particularly like Good Omens, and think it mixes the worst of his work with the worst of Pratchett’s.
Agricola and WoW strike me as insanely boring activities, especially the former: one of the best things (to paraphrase Good Omens) about time is that it’s taking us further and further from being medieval peasant farmers. I’ll add Settlers of Cataan on my personal hate-list, as I find resource-management games to be about as exciting as planning capital resource deployments. I tend to dislike playing Robo Rally for the similar reason that it’s way too much like work, but at least it’s similar to the more fun parts of work.
LotR is a giant set of notes for a good story. (Well, at least for an interesting story) Reading it is fun in my mind if you can distill a story from it as you read. It’s sort of like reading medieval or antique literature; you have to do a lot of translating to get the fun out of it. But I actually think the movies are only OK; I really wanted to kick Sam and pretty much every single elf in the nuts pretty much whenever they showed up on screen.
D&D is… well, I think that the problem is that people mistake it for a role-playing game when it’s actually a tactical tabletop miniatures game, and the book text for versions 2.0 through 3.5 encouraged that misapprehension. 4.0 seems to have more blatantly gone to its roots and said that the point of this game is simulating fights between fighters and wizards and magical beasts. If you play it as that, it works pretty damned well. If you actually wanted a story, you’re probably in the wrong place. 🙂
Anime is the one I’d have to argue about the most, of course. 🙂 It’s a medium rather than a work, so it’s hard to paint it as all good or all bad. There is some which I think is excellent — I’d name Cowboy Bebop, Macross Plus, and the first Kenshin OVA as good examples — and a lot which is absolutely, mind-numbingly terrible. I think that there is a disproportionate amount of crap in the medium, which has a lot to do with the economics of how it’s being made (think low-budget TV series); and even among the good stuff, there’s a lot of stuff with a very different sort of pacing, more similar to European art films than to mainstream films. (And that’s a flaw, IMHO — I think that most European art films are boring because the writers mistake “realism” and “tedious pacing.”) And there’s a lot of serious surrealism going on. (Lain, anyone?) But that does leave some works that I’m passionate about, so I’ll leave it at that. 🙂
Urgh, humorous fantasy. It makes me feel like I mislaid my sense of humor.
Aren’t you glad I have game night so that you can watch as much anime as you want?
Zunger, on some other occasion we really should spend some time discussing the Doctor Who conundrum. I agree objectively that it can be pretty terrible, but I love it despite that. Or maybe because of that? Argh. For me, it might just be nostalgia.
I do feel a real sensawunda when watching good Doctor Who episodes, even more in the new series than in the old one. Like that the universe is completely full of strange and unexpected things, some of them terrifying, some of them beautiful. Maybe it’s a setting thing? Combined with the Doctor’s attitude about the whole world?
Okay, now I have to put some thought into this. Here are a few reasons I can come up with:
1: The manic energy of it. Especially the newer incarnations. Even the darker version played by Eccleston had a frantic “the world is huge and I want to see it all” attitude.
2: Inherent Britishness of it all. I’m an anglophile, thanks to my Mom being one.
3: It’s a box that’s bigger on the inside. For some reason, that physics impossibility has always captured my heart.
4: Despite evidence to the contrary, the Doctor is an eternal optimist. Even when he knows the humans will attack the aliens, etc, he still tries. Which I really admire, for some reason.
I can buy that. There’s something about the attitude of the show that really makes it fun for me. But I can easily see how people would dislike it, too — the characterization and plotting have never exactly been profound.
My understanding is that Doctor Who is supposed to be a kid’s show, or at least one that the whole family can watch. That may be one excuse for bits that are silly or campy. Another excuse would be that fact that it’s a series, and has a long history of being silly/campy, and if it just suddenly changed drastically it wouldn’t really be the same show. That’s what I love about the new version of it. I feel like they reinvented it just enough, and just right. They made some bits new and shiny, and poked fun at some things that deserved it, like the fact that the doctor always travels around with nubile cuties who are way, way, WAY younger than he is. And they kept some of the right bits the same, like the good old creaky-swooshy TARDIS and the Daleks with their silly plunger arms.
But yes, mostly I love it because of nostalgia, and because of the core tenet (as opposed to a core Tennant) that the universe is a marvelous place that we should explore with curiosity and optimism.
[…] Amy Sunderberg seems determined to start flame wars in her comments today by pointing out popular geek things she doesn’t like. Go give her what for. Defend […]
Hi Sean,
Ah yes; the classism. I’d forgotten about that.
“Cutesy-wutesy sing-a-longs?” Well…. OK. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t sometimes skip over the songs. (I did go back and read them later.) But I’d like to point out that Tolkien was writing a meditation about (among other things) the transition from mythic legend (songs) to historical story (narrative), which would explain the use of song a bit.
As for the movie… I probably would have been satisfied with Sir Alec Guinness or Sir Sean Connery or Sir Ian McKellen sitting in a large red armchair reading the book while Tolkien’s (and others’) paintings appeared behind him. And… I… Must… Not… Opine… Any… Further… About… THOSE… films….
And “Farmer Giles” rocks!
OK. I lied. To borrow from Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy Stories”: The problem with Those Films is that they reduce the High Story of Faerie that LOTR is to a mere wonder-tale about a trinket of mass destruction.
1 – Doctor Who: Some companions work, some don’t. Any that start mooning over the Doctor are an instant turn-off. Ladies, have a look at him 500 years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Doctor Problem solved.
I was pleased that Amy Pond did have her moment of ‘Wow he’s so dreamy!’ and got over it. In fact, they did away with it pretty quick, thank goodness.
2 – AMERICAN GODS really is quite dull. Shadow is so damn passive. I mean, he’s sort of supposed to be, in know, but meh. I really prefer Gaimain’s shorts. (Shut it, Berger!) I think in short stories he does his best work. Novels pay the bills, but short stories are his true medium.
3 – A taste for anime has to be acquired. BeBop was a good start, but if they whipped out the Trigun or similarly insane works, then no wonder you’re burned on it. I have no suggestions to offer, just some sympathies. I can watch anime, but I’m picky. As soon as it starts wandering too far from the story, I’m out.
4 – Don’t know much about Agricola, though some friends have discussed it. I’ll give it a try if it’s around at a party, but I’m in no rush.
5 – Here, let me send you a buddy key. It’s free to play. You’ll be able to quit any time you want. No, really!
6 – Master Craven speaks it truly. LOTR defined the genre, but that’s as far as its laurels will take it. As a literary epic, I count it as significant, but not necessarily ‘one of the greats’. Now, SONG OF ICE & FIRE, on the other hand, that is superior work in nearly every aspect.
7 – You’re drunk, Sundberg. The latest D&D edition is the most streamlined combat system for the franchise to-date. You’re correct that story is not D&D’s strong point, though that depends largely on your GM. If you want a game that is almost entirely story, try some AMBER, though it has been known to turn friends into enemies and GMs into asylum inmates.
As ever this made me giggle!
Buddy key ftw!!!
2 – I also prefer Gaiman’s short stories. It seems that a lot of people feel this way.
3 – Hmm, acquired taste, huh? Those are always tricky. But maybe some great anime masterpiece will flick my anime switch to “Awesome” some day.
5 – Noooo, do not lure me to the dark side!
6 – Mmm, I really liked Song of Ice & Fire. Although now I can’t remember all the details of what happened so getting back into the series will be challenging.
7 – I’ve never heard of Amber. I will have to check it out. I haven’t played the latest D&D, only read parts of the book, but from what I’ve gathered from conversations from those who have, sure, it’s streamlined, but around fighting and pretty much only fighting. I’ll take your word for it, though, that the grid is less painful than it was in other editions. Probably not enough less painful to be tempting to me, though.
Also, vi. Totally better than emacs. ‘Nuff said. 🙂
I think you just got too geeky for me….
I wonder if there’s too much in this post – well, not in the post itself, but to encourage comprehensible replies. I’m already somewhat lost amidst the comments, since there’s so much to talk about in one space.
Let me see . . . okay, some of this is in response to your post, Amy, and other stuff towards what I get a sense of from the comments.
Doctor Who. Love Who, totally. Yes, Amy is the weakest companion ever, and some of the others weren’t far behind. But who cares about the companions? Their job is to let the Doctor get out exposition to the audience, and sometimes be sort of interesting. Amy is not interesting, but Amy+Rory together are not such a bad character if you pretend they’re one person – and River is much more than interesting in my view than anyone since the loud one. Anyway, the companions are just sidekicks; it’s the Doctor that matters.
Neil Gaiman’s comics are incredible. His books I like, but can see why others might not (yes, they’re slow and rambly. It is, I’d argue, sort of the point). But I hate American Gods. It’s like he missed the mark entirely. If the new gods had been interesting, maybe I wouldn’t feel so strongly against it. As it is, it’s not deep enough, not full enough of a mythology to be American. I can understand the wish to point out how materialistic the US is, but it’s deep and full and rich and materialistic and shallow *all at once*, and I never got that from Gaiman’s book.
WoW eats lives.
D&D used to be the sort of game you could configure however you liked to — maybe not easily, but it was the one game you could expect all RPG players to know, so it was the one game you could be sure you could role-play through, loosely or not, without having people spend half their time getting used to a new system. It’s sad that the newest versions has become a miniature combat skirmish games rather than an RPG.
And then there’s the big one: LotR.
In my view, Tolkien created the greatest modern epic when he wrote that series — but an epic is not a fantasy novel. A fantasy novel needs a focus on characterization, motivation, plot and tension. An epic can focus on setting and mood without much if any concern for the above — but most people don’t read epics anymore. I couldn’t get through The Two Towers, try as I might (three times, one of those recently). Less and less people want to read LotR, not because it’s bad but because it’s not the direction that modern fantasy has moved.
Tolkien said (in “On Fairy Stories”) that drama kills fantasy. To him, drama is about character interactions, and if all you do is have characters interact then you miss out on the nebulous, the sublime purpose of fairy stories, the part that Tolkien claims resides in the rocks and stones and things. All well and good, maybe, except I don’t feel the numinous quality of the LotR as much in the books as I do in the movies.
What Tolkien didn’t get is that the sublime comes through in the fundamentals, not necessarily in nature, and that the fundamentals can be inside characters as much as in setting. If a hand-made sword gains some specialness from being hand-made (and Tolkien suggests this) then it follows that humans bring this specialness through making the sword. So human interaction should carry that same specialness, that numinous character — at least, it should carry the numinous in the right context. Drama does not preclude fantasy, no matter what Tolkien may have thought.
Also Tolkien thought dramatic renditions of fantasy were poor because of the equivalent of bad special effects, which make fantasies laughable. Technology has changed a lot since then. It may still be really easy to destroy the numinous or sublime nature of a character shown on screen, but then it’s still really easy to efface the sublime moments in a novel or short story. Just the wrong word in the right place can do it.
I’m finding the mish-mash of replies to be rather sublime, myself. 🙂
If it’s the Doctor who matters, no wonder I’m having trouble. I’m always looking to be grounded in and enchanted by the companion because the Doctor isn’t enough for me on his own.
At some point in the future, I predict that I’ll take a look at some more Sandman. I’ve only seen one episode of it, but what I saw I liked.
As to your thoughts on LoTR, I’m getting the sense that for me to have a real discussion on this, I should probably read “On Fairy Stories” so that I’m not responding out of context. I will say, however, that one of the most important things I read for is character and character interaction, so if indeed Tolkien was trying to avoid such things in his work, that would explain why I bounce from it.
I overstated when I claimed Tolkien had a problem with character in stories.
His problem was with trying to treat literature — and particularly fairy stories — as if they were drama (stage-plays) on paper, saying that “[t]o be dissolved, or to be degraded, is the likely fate of Fantasy when a dramatist tries to use it, even such a dramatist as Shakespeare.”
It’s obvious from the LotR that he took his own advice quite literally, and did his best to make sure his books had a lot more going on than action and dialogue. Unfortunately he seems to have added description, exposition and asides so heavily in the LotR that the pacing suffocates. The character interactions are there — they’re just buried too deep to be worth my time.
_The Hobbit_ is a far superior book. If you want to say you’ve finished something by Tolkien, that one’s a fun, quick and easy read with a lovely writerly voice bolstering the narrative.
Oh, I’ve read The Hobbit more than once. Very enjoyable.
I recommend _The Doll’s House_ or _A Season of Mists_ as good starting points for The Sandman, if you don’t start with the first book (which is probably the weakest).
I guess one thing that makes not a Twoo Geek is: I don’t care about anyone’s specific tastes. Far as I’m concerned, anyone who thinks we Should like all the same stuff is committing yet another geek social fallacy!
I’m so used to not liking the same stuff other people do that I certainly don’t expect any such thing. I do find it interesting, though, to hear what people really like and dislike and why, even if my personal preference differs.
Om nom nom comments! <33
Don't get Dr. Who and I have zero interest in trying. It's overwhelmed me from the start.
I guess I understand how you could not like Gaiman? I mean I don't understand, really, because oh. my. god. I love Neverwhere to itty bitty pieces.
WoW is not totally crack. Mr. Kelley can attest that I've been playing for almost a year and am nowhere near addicted. I do like it – it's a great distraction. But it hasn't ended my world yet! Plus if you join you should play on our server 😉
NEVERWHERE was really my favorite novel of his. Quite well done. I also really enjoyed GOOD OMENS, but that one is also an acquired taste.
Yes, Amy, see? Danielle can play Warcraft without losing her house and living under a bridge. You should totally try it. (One of us! One of us!)
Great, now we’ve reached the brainwashing section of the comments….
There are some books I love like you love Neverwhere; I can intellectually understand that they won’t be to everyone’s taste, but at the same time it’s incomprehensible to me. 🙂
I applaud your WoW self control!
– Never liked Dr. Who, don’t plan to try — there is too much of it already.
– I like Neil Gaiman but not obsessively — his style pulls me along. Also, to my limited knowledge he was one of the earliest writers doing that style of fantasy; I think it’s called magical realism.
– Can’t get through Tolkien; it’s so slow. But I was really enjoying the movies…
– Anime is indeed a medium, not a genre. If you want to try it again, Miyazaki’s movies. I also really loved Escaflowne (particularly the series) and Utena (the series and manga). The Utena movie is beautiful but insane; don’t start there.
I see the opinions about writers not so much as a quality judgement as a taste judgement. Sometimes I will read something that I can feel is good…but it just doesn’t work for me. It drags. And then there are writers where even their less good stuff will pick me up and pull me along because of something about their writing style. It’s not predictable.
-re: Neil Gaiman. My husband mentioned that Gaiman might have been one of the forerunners of that particular subgenre of fantasy. If that is true, then I understand the frenzied excitement a bit better.
– That’s a great distinction you make between quality and taste. There are things that I know are of good quality but they are just not to my taste. And then there are things whose quality is more dubious. I know I can read really scathing reviews about a novel that I love, reviews that make good points, and yet I’ll continue loving the novel just the same, because it hit my happy taste button.
Gaiman was a forerunner of the second generation of fantasists to use postmodernism in fantasy (after Zelazny and a few others in the New Wave, who used similar techniques that then fell out of fashion or never really caught on until the 1990s). He’s also one of the first to work with something like magic realism within the fantasy genre, although magic realism as its own thing has been around since at least the work of Jorge Luis Borges in the 1940s.
So, no, he’s not really an innovator — but he did pull open the fantasy genre doors a bit further, letting some already great ideas trickle inside.
Excellent, I’m glad someone is more well-versed than myself. I was thinking maybe he had been responsible for a certain flavor of magic realism, and it sounds like that’s true. I think kudos are deserved for opening those doors wider.
LOL! Great post! 🙂 I love how you’re putting yourself out there.
Okay, Doctor Who – I haven’t seen it…any of it, in any form. Neil Gaiman – I haven’t read any of his work. Anime – I watched one of them (Howl’s Moving Castle or Spirited Away? Don’t know, can’t remember – that tells you how “meh” I was on it.). Agricola – Never even heard of it. LOTR – I love the movies, but the books are “meh”. WoW – Nope, never played and never will touch the crack. 🙂
I know, I know, I’m like a geek heathen. 🙂
Now on the other hand, D&D… That I played, and I wish I still had time to play. The right group and DM makes all the difference. The last DM I played with turned it into a real story that, I kid you not, gave me heebie-jeebies. 🙂 I’ve also played White Wolf and enjoyed that. When I was a teenager, I created my own RPG based on Dune. 🙂 I still have all my old maps, character sheets, and notes.
Does that earn me my geek card back? 🙂
No more a geek heathen than myself! But I have to say, you earn your card back and then some for designing your own RPG based on Dune. That makes me so happy just thinking about it. Combining two such wonderful things as roleplaying and Dune, how could anything possibly go wrong?
Hmm, famous last words…. 🙂
I think ol’ John and I could sit down with a beverage and have no serious difficulties…
Hey. Farmer Giles of Ham is a seriously underrated fantasy, and I think it is just plain good. The woman who story-directed Kung-Fu Panda is a pal of mine, and a few years back I sent her an email about that book, saying it was the missing Tolkien movie.
And Smith of Wooten Major is a very different beast, but likewise of very high quality. I’m not anti-Tolkien; I’m just a prose snob.
And so…
1. Dr. Who is someone else’s favorite fantasy, and it hasn’t intruded on my life enough to make an impression.
2. Neil Gaiman’s novels are like Bruce Sterling’s, in that half the fun is watching them wrestle with the form. As a reader? Not that enthusiastic. As a writer? I’m educated and enlightened as I watch him figure out how to work things one step at a time.
Gaiman’s best work comes in the form of single-issue comic book stories. In those episodes of Sandman, and the fourth book of Miracle/Marvelman, and his guest issue of Hellblazer and so on, he’s a perfect — if minor — writer, on the level of John Collier or Shirley Jackson, someone whose narrow observations go deep. Honestly, when he has Andy Warhol in the afterlife getting irritated with the way that asshole Dali rides around on a flaming giraffe? It’s hard not to fall in love.
Anansi Boys is a lot better than American Gods. It has better traction, more acceleration. But novels are not the place to go for choice Gaiman.
3. Anime per se is a drag, but a lot of my favorite movies fall into the anime file. For instance, My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service are both revolutionary, in the sense that they show entertaining — if slow — narratives that are not driven by the presence of evil, that show the construction of a worthy life as a worthy drama.
And hey. Cowboy Bebop!
3. I don’t know anything about Agricola, but the missus was into Farmville pretty heavily for a while, and that was a total Skinner box — the people who put those games together read studies on behaviorism, and they do not have the best interests of the public in mind. It’s recreational mind control, and is that SF or what?
4. WOW likewise.
7. D&D… well.
When I started playing, there were no other games. There were no modules. The dice were made out of some kind of weird, flaky plastic that I’ve previously compared to the venereal warts of a giant robot.
The game sucked — but that’s one of the reasons why role-playing games have suck a diverse range of approaches. There was no way to play D&D — you had to use it as a basis for making up your own game.
My, but you youngsters face a bleak cultural wasteland.
Back in my day, we didn’t have any of these fancy “dice” for our role-playing games! If you wanted to see if someone hit you, you took a swing at them, and if they hit you back, they hit you!
Damned kids these days.
Can you believe they actually PAD their swords too? Damned whippersnappers.
Back in the day, Berkeley had the SCA, and in Richmond we just hit each other with sticks while remembering Star Wars and Heavy Metal.
If we were ambitious, we’d put some nails through the sticks. Don’t try and tell me what fun is.
They had cold iron? Back in my day, they’d thrown you to the Firbolg for that sort of behaviour.
Now that’s what I call a proper club.
I actually kind of want to see Kiki’s Delivery Service. It’s a miracle! I might actually watch anime, and not just to be polite!
Recreational mind control kind of wigs me out. Perhaps because it works SO WELL on me. I have to avoid it like the plague, or all of a sudden I find that I’m getting excited that someone is giving me a computer plant to put in my garden.
You no longer have any geek cred with me. Yony will have to re-earn it by actually calling me. 😉
B
Oh, whatever. I didn’t say a word about Eve, did I? Nope, not one word.
I looked over this more deeply:
1) Dr Who. – It’s more nerdy than geeky and really the true fans (not the bandwagon 21st century ones) really get the whole thing. For me series 5 and 6 have been better than 1-4. I’m not a Rose Tyler fan. At. All. While Pond hasn’t been swooning over the doctor, she’s the best one to date. Her thing was more of a school girl crush she got over. We’ll see. I tend to look at Dr./ Who as a whole product and not get bogged down.
2. Neil Gaiman short storys – thumbs up. Novels – Meh.
3.Anime – No thanks. Never got into it. I think Animae isn’t that geeky. Maybe its for nerds who are for nerds are for normal people. Yes Yony I am looking at you.
4. Agricola – Board games.. ug. Especially resource management ones. This is not geeky. It’s a job one isn’t getting paid for. I get enough of that at work.
5.Tried WOW. Painful painful painful grind. I was done in less than a year and probably won’t play again. WOW is not geeky or nerdy. Once something is mainstream its no longer either.
6.LOTR – Finished all of them. Several times. Maybe I like babble. Or Rabble. Takes pure will to do it. Much like reading Ayn Rand.. except I won’t touch her books.
7.DND – I like DND. I play it. It’s fun. Again its a whole picture thing.. DND is what you make of it my friend, if it doesn’t fit make adjustments.
❤
5.
Okay, Ben, now you’ve done it. I have to ask you to define the difference between nerd and geek. I seem to remember that I used to have a clear idea of the difference between them, but that has faded into the mists of high school.
While you’re at it, you can define “mainstream.” Is WoW really mainstream? What does that even *mean*?
I will concede that D&D depends a lot on the players and GM. But I think RPGs generally each have a flavor and guide you in a particular direction or to a particular focus. If the group (and probably particularly GM) doesn’t want to GO that direction, then maybe the flavor of that campaign will change. But the base focus of D&D is not my favorite.
PS: Battlestar Galactica the Board Game is awesome.
Like Sean, I really love Tolkien’s Farmer Giles of Ham and Smith of Wooten Minor. I also reread Leaf by Niggle last year because I was on the Tolkien’s Short Fiction panel at ReConStruction. It really resonated with me as a writer struggling to “make it”.
I don’t do WoW. I have only watched a little anime and I can’t give an opinion yet. Used to play D&D in the ’80s and haven’t since.
Loved LotR. Read it back in the ’70’s and watched the Bakshi cartoon in the ’80’s and thought oh, if only I will live long enough for movies tech to be able to make a live action version. And then I did!
I loved American Gods, Neverwhere, Good Omens, Starlight. Loved/Creeped out by Sandman. Have read half of Anansi Boys and can’t seem to get any further.
I heart Tom Baker Dr. Who. It’s never been as good for me with the other guys. It’s like when you hear other people’s covers for songs.
I think being a geeky means never having to say you’re sorry about liking or not liking what other people like or don’t like.
I myself am a Lewis Carroll geek. In fact, I am such a geek, that my name appears in a footnote in the Annotated Alice. (In Through the Looking Glass, Looking Glass Insects, where Alice is in the Forest where things have no name and she thinks her name starts with L.)
“I think being a geeky means never having to say you’re sorry about liking or not liking what other people like or don’t like.”
I love this, Ada. Very well said indeed.
Also, wow, I had no idea you were a Carroll geek, let alone that you’re mentioned in a footnote! I feel heaps of geeky glee at this piece of information.
I’m afraid I must ask… I pulled my copy of the Annotated Alice off the shelf, and I’m having trouble finding your footnote, unless it was a later edition (mine is the 1965 printing…)
I missed the boat on Dr. Who, haven’t read American Gods (On my list, somewhere. . .), have a very brief selection of Anime I’ll actually watch (My current sound bite about anime is “I don’t call myself otaku because of OTHER otaku.”), agree on Agricola (There are so many better resource management games out there!), and don’t play WoW.
I like Tolkien, but will agree he’s long winded and gets caught up in details.
As for D&D, it’s my go to for light weight role playing. Fourth Edition specifically a real game with a lot of tactical depth. And it doesn’t get in the way of role playing at all! All comes down to play groups, and some emphasize that combat to exclusion of all else.
So, two disagreements?
Two disagreements phrased in an impressively nice way. 🙂
It looks like I might join a game of Rifts in the not-too-distant future, and from what I hear, that should be pretty entertaining.
I have a certain weird fondness for Cuba because I won the first game I played. Obviously this is not why I *should* like the game, but there it is.
Not the first person who loved a game because of an early win! I noted you mentioned Pandemic, one of my highest rated games! And the expansion really makes it better (Haven’t played with the Bio-Terrorist yet, but virulent strains and mutations alone make the game a lot more fun!)
I could list a bunch of board games I love, actually. They’ve become more my ‘nerd out of choice’ recently.
It’s agreed, then. Farmer Giles is awesome.
I forgot to mention other popular geek things that I dislike:
-Board games. Almost all of them leave me cold. Now, Betrayal at House on the Hill, on the other hand, or Boggle…
-Song of Fire and Ice. I keep on hearing that the stories are amazing and everyone loves them. But something about the writing style made me put it down before I could get into it. But it did lead to some interesting discussions between Luke and I about the difficulty of establishing the right voice for a fantasy novel. We did not reach any conclusions. 🙂
-Sandman. I also keep on hearing that this is amazing, but the few times I have had copies handy, I picked them up and started flipping through at random, and the art style lost my interest. Actually, I have this problem with a lot of comics/graphic novels.
It’s a shame; there are lots of things that I’d like to like better, but the art or writing style is too distracting. I’ve been told, though, that the art in Sandman varies so much that I may have just looked at the wrong parts and gotten the wrong impression.
-WoW. I think I’d enjoy it, but I know from my brief experience with EverQuest that I’d spend more time than I want to.
We recently purchased Betrayal of House on the Hill. Huzzah!
I will brave the geek outcry to say that while I like the Song of Ice and Fire books, I could see how they aren’t for everybody. So very many POVs, for one thing.
I have the same trouble with comics. There is so very little story in your typical comic, and I lack patience. Also I have trouble following the dialogue, which I know I’d learn eventually but is another barrier to entry.
Couldn’t even last in the first episode of season 1 of Dr. Who so you lost me on season 3.
LotR–don’t know about it either. Fell asleep during the movie of the first one. Barely managed to hang on to my consciousness on the next two movies.
Haven’t read Neil Gaiman but a friend of mine swear by it.
Except for Anime I’m clueless with the majority of these.
And unfortunately, I’m in no position to recommend them, since I don’t particularly care for them. 🙂
– Anime: I find it interesting that you think anime is a staple geek thing, because most geeks I know view it as a juvenile guilty pleasure to be enjoyed in secret, even a secret from other geeks. So you are far from alone in thinking that anime can be kind of boring or silly, haha. I think it’s something that you only enjoy if you grew up watching it. I can really only watch the series that I grew up with, and even then it’s hard. :I
– Neil Gaiman: Coraline was the only Neil Gaiman book that I enjoyed (and there’s a movie version by the director of the Nightmare Before Christmas on it too). The others are just… so slow-paced. And I hate his male protagonists.
– Doctor Who: THANK YOU. I keep trying to get into Doctor Who, but it’s just so boring. I can watch the really good episodes with my friends, but I don’t think I’ll ever be assed to watch a whole season on my own. Maybe if I’m really sick in bed one day.
Really? I had no idea it was considered juvenile or a guilty pleasure. Different group of geeks, I guess.
Yes, I’ve put more effort than usual into Doctor Who, probably because my husband loves it so much. And yet my blind spot persists.
Eh, your husband is quite fine with you not liking Doctor Who. I figure that if I can’t explain why I like it, I can’t really expect anyone else to like it either. 🙂
Also, as for the popular geek thing that I don’t get: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
– I hate high school settings in general.
– The characters are kind of trope-ish for me.
– I hate Joss Whedon dialogue.
– The episodes are *so* formulaic.
– I don’t really see how Buffy’s character is terribly empowered. I don’t know, I was born in 1988, maybe I’m just used to seeing tough female characters with swords and shit, but from the few episodes of the first season that I saw, it still seems like she needs to be rescued by Angel and she’s still guided by Giles, an older white male. And she’s still a thin blond straight white woman acting as a main character. I just didn’t see how there was anything really shocking or unique or even all that strong about the female characters on this show, or any of Whedon’s shows.
I dunno man, I tried to watch it, but I just can’t get into it.
Season 1 is especially bad in the trope-ish character and formulaic regard, I will concede. But if you hate the dialogue, then yeah, it’s probably not going to do it for you.
I’ve recently been reading some essays on the show, and there is debate as to how to read its feminism. In any case, she doesn’t often need to be rescued by Angel (and sometimes rescues him) and she doesn’t follow all of Giles’ orders and eventually she decides to quit the Council altogether, partly because she realizes it’s a patriarchy that she wants nothing to do with. But I also think it seems less ground breaking now than it did at the time of its release. Sure, she’s little and blond, but even the fact that a little blond girl was the kick-ass hero protagonist who called the shots (subverting expectations of who she would be) was noteworthy at the time.
Re: anime–I actually really don’t care for Miyazaki’s stuff. I watched it and meh. It’s okayyyyy, but I find it cutesy and boring.
For someone who doesn’t like anime, just to show how it really is a medium rather than a genre, I would suggest the following:
1. Serial Experiments Lain. Trippy, yes, but wonderfully smart, melancholy, atmospheric and achingly beautiful. The first ep is slow, the show picks up its pace considerably as it goes on.
2. Escaflowne. Medieval otherworld fantasy done really, REALLY well, for any medium. Great worldbuilding. Nice balance between the male and female characters, it is girl-focused without specifically being girly, and all the characters undergo wonderful character growth. Has Atlantis! And science! And philosophy! And absolutely the best villain ever. The pacing of this one is pretty damn tight, as well.
3. Revolutionary Girl Utena, the series. Is it insane? Yes. But awesome. It may scare you off at first by being pinky-girly, but it basically acts as a deconstruction of all such pinky-girly magical girl anime, and it is intense. I would get into this last, because the insanity/intensity might scare you off.
I also second the 1st Kenshin OVA.
Excellent. I love how your passion for the medium shines through.
P.S. Vision of Escaflowne the series, NOT the movie.
Oh, what fun! There are so many different kinds of geek now that the stereotypes no longer fit. I’m a big SF/F, history, and gamer geek and always have been.
1) I hate Dr. Who. I just won’t watch it.
2) Neil Gaiman – I liked his “Good Omens” book that he did with Terry Pratchett, but I suspect that’s because I like Terry Pratchett. I haven’t read his other stuff despite having friends who love him.
3) Anime – my first anime was some teenage humor thing, rated PG, so I was cool with it. I don’t like hentai (tentacle porn). Some anime is really boring, some is really stupid. Some is funny. I suppose it’s like any other kind of television.
4) Agricola – I like Agricola, but I’m weird, and it’s too complex for most of my friends. I prefer Russian Rails, Ticket to Ride, Pandemic, and other games like that. (I don’t do resource management, but I do teach.)
5) WoW – WoW will suck. you. in. Don’t start playing it.
6) Lord of the Rings – The movies rocked. The books are mostly nature porn. Boooooring. I read them in 4th grade and hated them. Then I reread them after the first movie came out and still hated them.
7) D&D – I like D&D. I have run a lot of D&D games. I am very fond of the Pathfinders variant. My stories usually involve plots and character development and moral choices and stuff. Most RPGs focus mostly on combat rules.
Geek things I can’t stand – carbonated beverages/energy drinks. Munchkin. Console gaming.
Ooh, I love Pandemic! I really want to try it with the expansion where someone plays the terrorist bad guy.
I also love love love moral choices in role playing. They always feel so dramatic to me and I get all into it.
What, no Mountain Dew? (laughter)
And yes, zombies. Zombies suck, are boring, are overdone, and anyway would rot into a billion pieces within the first month of their existence. I do not give a bent fig about zombies and I wish everyone would shut up about them already.
Pirates, too. I hate pirates. But I don’t think pirates are as geeky as the other stuff I listed.
One thing that drove me approximately bonkers with new Doctor Who was (is!) the whole “Let us moon over the doctor!” nonsense. Bah. I am eternally in hearts with Donna Noble (companion, 4th season, to my recollection) for this exchange between her and the Doctor:
* The Doctor: …With Martha, like I said, it got… complicated. And that was all my fault. I just want a mate.
* Donna: You just want to mate?!
* The Doctor: I just want a mate!
* Donna: You’re not mating with me, sunshine!
* The Doctor: A mate! I want a mate!
* Donna: Well, just as well, cos I’m not having any of that nonsense! You’re just a long streak of nothing!
She was never interested in him romantically, she just wanted to travel forever.
In re WoW, any time I’m tempted, I remember this article:
http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html
I love this piece of dialogue. I have heard great things about Donna, and the few episodes I saw with her seemed better. I was just so disheartened after Martha that I couldn’t bring myself to re-invest.
I remember that article! It simultaneously super creeped me out and fascinated me.
Donna was awesome; I think she’s my favorite companion from all of the 30-odd seasons. And this sort of dialogue is exactly why; for all that the Doctor is full of cosmic knowledge and whatever, she’s clearly the common sense and brains of the operation at least half of the time.
(Well, that and the fact that Catherine Tate is an absolutely top-flight comic actor. That definitely helps.)
“Ladies luuuvvvvv the Doctor!” has become a kind of catch phrase in our house, said as smarmily as possible, as Luke and I roll our eyes when yet another woman swoons over him. I mean, I get that he is way more interesting than a lot of other men you could meet on Earth, but still, *every* woman?
Ha! He may be interesting, but that doesn’t mean he’s not without drawbacks. Even though I haven’t been overly impressed by Amy Pond, I’m glad she’s married to someone ELSE.
It occurs to me that in all of this, I haven’t listed any of my things which I’m “supposed to like” and can’t stand. Probably my top item is high fantasy; no matter how well-written it is, I find it just plain boring, and can’t get more than few pages into it. I would rather watch paint dry than read the latest GRRM or Sanderson opus.
I actually can’t play most video games, (the 3D rendering makes me very, very motion sick — which is odd, because actual motion almost never makes me motion sick) but even apart from that, I’m not particularly excited by them. The only ones I like tend to be the sort of sidescrollers or spaceflight games which nobody has made in a few decades anyway. (Despite this, I have noticed that people sufficiently into such games will discuss them at as much length as people who want to tell you about their great RPG character.)
I like certain kinds of board game, generally coop or semi-coop games with a strong narrative bent. BSG: awesome. Betrayal at House on the Hill: awesome. Resource management games of any sort: Dear flipping Cthulhu, no. Especially ones which require 6 or more hours to play and involve trains. Many people I knew in grad school seemed to have trouble believing that I did not like these.
And speaking of Cthulhu, while I find Lovecraft vaguely amusing, I actually think he was a terrible writer, the sort of fellow who would overuse unusual adjectives in order to get around the fact that there’s no way to make the monsters nearly as terrifying as he was trying to build them up to be. (How many damned things can be “eldritch” per ten pages? Really?) And all of the mythos stuff which has followed on post-Lovecraft is about as interesting, although mercifully less heavy on the racist overtones.
Yet I will smile and nod when people discuss these things at great length with me. As one must, since otherwise they will not smile and nod when I discuss my own favorites with them.
But hopefully I won’t tell them about my RPG characters.
[…] crowd is crazy about. Which is why I rejoiced when Amy Sundberg announced her entertainment preferences (though I didn’t know half the things she was talking about). It’s hard to admit we like […]
I’ll preface by saying I self-define as a geek.
1) I enjoy what I’ve seen of Dr Who after it came back in recent years (technically sequels not a reboot, although the seasons did get numbered at 1). The companions at times are annoying. There’s a certain charm to the show, mostly stemming from the eccentricities of the title character. There’s also the matter of it being BRITISH sci-fi, something that sets it apart in style from all the other major sci-fi franchises.
I know two big fans of Dr Who that I might ask for an explanation on the true appeal of the show, but I think their views on it are muddled by thinking that all three of the last Doctors are hawt (Eccelston, Tenent, and Smith) so knowing them they’d be watching the show regardless of it’s merits and would probably have trouble filtering out their inner fangirl.
I’ve barely seen any of the older stuff other than clips and I think alot of it is dated in the same way the original Star Trek is: there are gems, social commentary, interesting characters, but lots of bad effects and outdated stuff.
2) Other than seeing the movie version of “Stardust” (which I really liked) I’m not sure I’ve seen or read anything by Gaiman. I tried to read “Sandman” and got bored with it superfast (and hated the art style). “American Gods” is on my To Read list so some day I’ll see what I think of that.
3) I was introduced to anime back when it first really broke through into America a decade ago with Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim showing Cowboy Bebop and Trigun. I slowly fell out of anime for the most part over the years due to all my friends who are bigger anime fans usually watching it by themselves whereas I prefer to watch anime with others. (It’s related to my habit of watching very little TV.) It’s further complicated by my dislike of subtitles (I’m a heretic who prefers dubbed). There is alot of strange stuff out there.
Anime reminds me of metal (the music genre). It has a big following though for the most part isn’t particularly mainstream. Some people love a really wide range of it, some like a more narrow range of it, and many can’t stand it at all nor understand it’s appeal – most often because it comes across as very strange.
4) I don’t even know what Agricola is. Your description makes it sound like Farmville which I also don’t play.
Geek / Facebook gripe: if the only games you play are Facebook apps you are not actually a gamer in the cultural sense.
5) I have never played WoW and have no interest in doing so. I’m not big on RPGs (Diablo II – that’s about it) nor the addictive nature nor the basic premise of the game: “I’m going to raid…so I can get better gear…to go on better raids…to level up…to go on better raids…to get better gear…to go on better raids…to level up…” It’s the same reason I gave up playing SimCity. “Build a city…to raise revenue…to build a bigger city…to raise revenue…”
Geek gripe: WoW has created a number of females who describe themselves as “gamer girls” but who upon questioning will reveal the only game they play is WoW. If the only game you play is WoW you’re a crack addict with a computer deal, not a gamer.
6) I watched the movie trilogy before I ever read the books. Then I read the books and finished the whole trilogy…and wasn’t that impressed. Tolkien is a good worldbuilder and character creator – if he was alive today I’d hire him to design RPG systems – and I even like some of his poetry. But his plot is average, his action terrible, and his style slow and dull. I think the movies are easily better – though I do hate the deus ex machina of the Ghost Army.
7) D&D generally bores me. I know lots of people who get hooked on long campaigns but unless I have a great DM it’s hours of sitting around without a great deal of stuff happening. A good DM and good party members are important, but I don’t think any combination of them in any RPG system will really keep me hooked. It’s simply too slow, like watching a baseball game.
I find it more entertaining to watch a D&D game and make snarky comments while I paint minis or something.
In my opinion, D&D and snark are a must-have combination. 🙂
… I can’t help it. I have a couple of cents to toss in, too.
First a clarification. ‘Nerd’ is a lifestyle. See Weird Al’s ‘White and Nerdy’ for an idea of what that means. But to be a ‘Geek’ all it takes is something over which you ‘geek out’. Po from ‘Kung Fu Panda’ is a Martial Arts Geek. A geek tends to delight in the minutia, not only of their subject, but also in the personalities involved and the events and editorials that are stirred up in their wake.
1.) Dr. Who – I became a fan as a teenager when Tom Baker was the Doctor. And as an intelligent teenager it was refreshing to see a protagonist who fought for humanity (or a version thereof) and won by being clever. It was completely the opposite of my middle school experience, where being bigger and stronger or more popular practically gave you the right to be obnoxious. And contradicting a teacher with the inconvenient facts made you a snot-nosed kid.
2.) Neil Gaiman – He is certainly much better in the short form. ‘Death – The High Cost of Living’ impressed me. I agree with the previous poster who said that Gaiman failed to understand the depth and complexity of the American Character. It reminds me of the reaction I had to the announcement that Steven Fry was going to do a series touring the American States – in six episodes. How was he supposed to cover in any depth all fifty states, each with their own unique character, in Six episodes. Needless to say the answer was, ‘not well’.
3.) Anime – What I find interesting about Anime is what it reveals about the Japanese culture and their cultural assumptions. Beyond that I judge it with the same criteria I look for in any good story. Which is why I generally read the translated manga. It goes faster and is easier to just drop a series that has failed to deliver on its promises.
4.) Resource management games – (sorry, not familiar with Agricola.) I once found these briefly interesting. But not entertaining. My interest was held only until I understood the system or engine that drove them, and often not even that long. These days I decide if the system can be quantified or if it’s a matter of luck and just drop it, or don’t bother in the first place.
5.) WOW – When our gaming group got scattered hither and yon it was a way to get to play with friends while stuck in the wastelands of nowhere. Having been introduced to it I found it an interesting experience in observing comprehensive, if not always well thought out, world building. But I will still acknowledge that it is designed to persuade the customer to invest personal time and money into their product.
6.) LOTR – What is there to say about this that hasn’t already been said… They started out as bedtime stories told to his son. That’s why ‘The Hobbit’ is so good. He was an academician. That’s why the story of the LOTR is so annotated and quantified and qualified with the text. And, no, I don’t care to try to read it again. I succeeded once.
7.) D&D – I’m not going to try to tell you that it is something it is not. Especially 4th. That was a blatant marketing stunt to try to bring MMORPG players into tabletop gaming. We have one(1) player in our group that will play it and he is an admitted RPG Geek. What we have learned over time is that real characters can only be brought to the table by players dedicated to real role playing. And all the efforts of the players will be futile if the GM is a hack-and-slash GM. That the most fascinating characters are the ones that go against the mold or that have a significant weak area… if that weakness can be covered by another’s strengths and if they have a strength that they are allowed to play to.
I could write up a list about as long as my arm of the many RPGs we have tried out but we keep coming back to D&D 3.5/Pathfinder being our fallback system for fantasy campaigns, Shadowrun 3rd for cyberpunk campaigns and Starwars for space opera. Though Mechwarrior does from time to time get revisited and L5R has it’s unique flavor and place.
As for Geek Cred, somewhere in the comments someone mentioned my favorite bit. DUNE! Someone who appreciates this masterpiece as Frank Herbert wrote it gets instant geek cred in my book.
Oh, I adore Dune. Completely adore. It’s one of the novels that most makes me love science fiction. I even like the Dune series, as long as I skip books 2 & 3 (and I should qualify, the series that Frank Herbert wrote, not his son and other people).
Also, you have made me crave a Star Wars space opera game. I have never successfully played in a space opera game that lasted more than a few sessions. This makes me sad.
The Star Wars system was fun. (The old d6 one, that is, not the d20 mess) Especially if you had the alien races and tramp freighters books. You could just tool around the galaxy getting into amazing amounts of trouble… I would love to play in and/or GM a game of that sometime.
Absolutely the old d6! Now there are some fun memories.
[…] and less careful, as you can see from the amazing comment threads on all three of the Backbone Project […]
I’m late to the party here, but I highly recommend the anime series “Wolf’s Rain”. It’s by the same people who did Cowboy Bebop, and it’s not full of weird brain-hurting stuff that doesn’t make any sense. It’s actually pretty easy to follow (while still having a lot of secrets that aren’t revealed until later in the series).
Also, it’s about wolves, and they’re fuzzy and cute (though the show isn’t fuzzy and cute, heh). But be warned that you will cry more than once during the series. Still, it’s my favorite anime series ever. I have the DVDs; let me know if you’re interested in borrowing them. 🙂
Late to the party as always, but I just wanted to chime in agreement on a few points.
-Gaiman. I am convinced that Gaiman is a great idea man: someone who can provide a beautiful structure within which a collaborator can bring worlds to life. However, when he works alone, all you’re left with is the structure and a few neat ideas. The style and color are missing from the pictures. That’s why he’s a great comic book writer. I was even mildly offended by American Gods and his attempt to locate the heart of America in our tackiest roadside attractions. Practially the only thing missing was a visit to the world’s largest ball of twine. I’m also not a fan of Good Omens as, in the end, the entire story is about people running around in circles, accomplishing nothing, only to have the armageddon cancelled on a whim by someone the main characters never met. Making the entire story POINTLESS.
-LotR Count another score in the “just couldn’t get through it” camp. I’m a tenacious completist… in my entire life there’s only one book I started but didn’t finish, and even I couldn’t make myself pick up Return of the King after dragging myself through the final pages of the Two Towers.
-Anime. Going to distinguish myself by NOT suggesting somewhere you can get back into a hobby you’ve already expressed a dislike of. Was a rabid fan of the medium for… hell, nearly twenty years? and now I’m just burnt out. Japan doesn’t seem to be producing much interesting in the entire medium for the last four years or so, and has drifted wayyy too far into creepy territory for my tastes.
-WoW I actually like WoW… because it so consumes so many of my friends that I am now capable of keeping up with a lot of their other endeavors… I can catch up to the book series they’re reading, catch up on the tv they’re watching… because all their time is spiraling down this sink. Similar with Agricola
-D&D Blame your DM for not writing a good story. The system doesn’t dictate the story, it’s only supposed to supply a structure for resolution of the story conflicts. That said, I can’t exactly say I’ve encountered a legacy of good storytelling in my D&D games, and the recent system revisions only reinforce the hack&slash storytelling techniques.
-Dr.Who … I’m conflicted. I’m actually a rabid Whovian from way back, but I can’t exactly dispute any of your points in the new seasons. The old seasons have the low-budget appeal and absurdly convoluted (and sometimes totally faulty) plots, along with a literal moustache-twirling villian (The Master)… it’s very much a childish kitsch love, but I wouldn’t force any of them on someone who wasn’t interested. The new seasons have stepped up the game on the effects and the character, but the stories have wavered badly between brilliance and utter wretchedness, especially following the first two seasons. There’s a feel of the slow compression of everything that made Dr. Who unique being slowly crammed into a conformity press as they overuse the most popular monsters (the overuse of Daleks and cybermen is patently absurd at this point), and by the end Rose became one of the most obnoxious Mary Sues in memory. Oh well… when the plot craters, I can approach it with a nostalgia for watching people in rubber monster suits in unsteady sets meander around spouting british witticism at two in the morning on PBS… but it’s not like I could transfer that love to you…
Oh! And I just remembered the most perfect illustration of Doctor Who’s trouble with female companions:
(can’t seem to locate the original in DA)
Heh. Drawn circa 3rd or 4th season of the new run. If you look close you’ll note there’s only maybe one or two (besides Rose) even remotely romantic towards the doctor in the initial 27 year run. Now there’s been how many in the 5 seasons thus far?
Your comment on anime is hilarious! The best part is, anime was *never* a hobby of mine. I was willing to try it, and it didn’t stick well pretty much from the beginning. Perhaps if I tried really hard I could get into it? But there are so many other things I’m already really interested in, so that effort is unlikely to be made. 🙂
And yes, there are so many Daleks in new Dr. Who! Even though they were supposed to be extinct. I can see bringing a group back for shock value, but I agree, those villains seem to cycle through all the time. I’d prefer to see a new iconic villain to add to the stable (although given I haven’t watched most of Seasons 3-5, it’s possible this has happened and I’m just unaware).
While I think a good DM can massively impact a campaign (and vice versa), I also think D&D doesn’t support good storytelling as much as some other systems. And since I’m in it for the story more than anything else (by a lot), I’m going to be trying to play with systems that encourage that as much as possible.
They did in fact add some new iconic villains in Doctor Who, like the Weeping Angels and the Silents. What they mostly have in common is that they’re scary, in a way that Daleks and Cybermen never really were. And as a result, there are fewer of the recycled (and slightly campy) old ones.
I am glad to hear it. I think I haven’t watched enough of the old shows to have a clear idea of what is old & what is new, too.
I’m not afraid to say that I thought the LOTR books were boring, too. Also I liked the movies. I did really American Gods and Neverwhere. I guess I can’t get worked up about the differences, though.
Except… anime is a whole market of media. It’s not even a genre — it’s bigger. It’s pretty much just everything that happens to come from Japan and be animated. Maybe you could find something to enjoy in it? 🙂
Hey Roy! I’m not sure if I can get too horribly worked up about any of this, to be honest. But it’s pretty fun.
And yes, the anime one does seem to be a particular hot topic, since it does cover so much. I’m not completely dead set against it, certainly. But it’s nice that I get to pick and choose my own interests, even if I like things that other people don’t or vice versa. And as I said earlier in this massive thread, for awhile I didn’t watch any live action TV. Could I have found something to like in that genre? Apparently so, and yet, I can’t get too worked up about having not done so for those years. 🙂
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Howdy just wanted to give you a quick heads up.
The text in your article seem to be running off the
screen in Chrome. I’m not sure if this is a formatting issue or something
to do with web browser compatibility but I thought I’d post to let
you know. The style and design look great though!
Hope you get the issue resolved soon. Thanks