Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7738777" data-attributes="member: 4937">That's always a really weak thin excuse.  Before that holds any water at all, you have to be able to show that in fact the creative license enhanced the story rather than subtracted from it.  Usually in fact what it does is remove depth from the story, so that it is no more or less enjoyable for someone who doesn't intellectually engage with the text, but it is less enjoyable for someone that does.But fortunately, we don't have to engage in that silly argument with respect to this particular text, because this particular text eliminates that as a possibility simply by virtue of the overriding themes of the story.   This is literally a story that celebrates the seemingly excessive attention to detail that nerd fandoms have.   This is a story that equates moral goodness with the ability to recall the most seemingly trivial of facts with respect to its celebrated fandoms.   It is a marker by which in the story you can distinguish protagonists who are on the side of good and right, from the characters like I-Roc which are in fact morally deficient poseurs.   The act of obsessively memorizing details and getting them right is a sort of discipline that proves the worth of the person.   In the story, the characters are tested in their ability to recite the scriptures of fandom as a way of separating the worthy from the unworthy, as a sieve designed by its creator as a means of determining who cared enough to be worthy to inherit the world.At no point does the story judge obsessive attention to detail as pathetic and pedantic.   Rather, in the story itself to be pedantic is to be heroic.  All those trivial facts that you memorized as an obsessive fan help you save the world.  It's the members of that culture who share that as a commonality, and who can recognize each other from those common markers, and who are part of the potlatch culture of amateur fandom who rally together to defeat evil.  So in that context, it's natural to suppose that the story itself will be one that thrives on obsessive attention to detail so that it's (supposed) intended target audience, the very culture that it is celebrating, the very culture it's author claims to be a part of, will see themselves in the text.  And the problem I have is that it's rather clear that I'm not the target audience precisely because the story doesn't survive that sort of attention to detail, either from a technical sense or in terms of the intellectual property (like D&D) it's supposedly celebrating.  Rather than give us details to see ourselves in, the vast majority of the text just name drops long lists of nerd stuff - usually some of the most obvious nerd stuff.  But the story itself is rarely about the actual experience of those things, it's just rattling off things that there exists some sort of fandom for.To me it becomes a very fair question.   Is the author actually his self-projection into the story of Parcival, the uber-nerd who really gets all this stuff deep down and has done the hard work to earn it, or is the author actually I-Roc, the poseur that he scorns?To me, the answer that he has Acererak in place of the second false lich in the chamber of pillars speaks for itself.   To me, the fact that it is a critical plot point of the setting that not only did no one in the game ever build a Tomb of Horrors instance except the creator (as if Tomb of Horrors wasn't one of the first mods someone builds for any extensible game), but that the protagonist uses a image scanning algorithm to find that one instance using an obsolete laptop and no one but himself and the love interest has attempted that in the years that the Easter Egg hunt has been on speaks for itself.   Anyone that acts like that image scanning can't be handled by a well behaved divide and conquer algorithm is not the nerd he's pretending to be.   And all of these objections could be easily handled without harming the story, because to a non-nerd it's all just gobbly-gook and techno-babble anyway.   But if you are going to write for a nerd audience celebrating a nerd culture in a story where the nerd pension for pendantry is a heroic virtue, it does bloody well matter whether you get that jargon somewhat correct.</blockquote>

Verification