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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 2649280" data-attributes="member: 5171">As I said earlier:I wasn't making a complete list of the only possible reasons to like the novel. I was making a list of reasons to like the novel that might differentiate it from other well-known popular novels -- a list that might, for example, come up with reasons that people might like Martin's work but not Goodkind's, or Goodkind's work but not Eddings's.I apologize if I did not make that sufficiently clear. I could also have included "People who like things that are awesome", but again, that doesn't narrow it down much.I'd go with "general human-spirit triumph", "clever historical integration", and "full-life biography stories" off the top of my head, but it's been a long time since I saw the movie. Those are more specific reasons that somebody might like that movie in particular and not others.Was that an actual attempt for you to look critically at Forrest Gump, or was that just a reductio ad absurdum argument?Any discussion of a novel is opinion. That said, there's a difference between "This story was totally lame" and "The author of this story did not focus on creating realistic, fully fleshed-out settings." Both are opinions, yes, in the sense that "breakfast is always late because the people at the drive-through must totally hate me" and "objects in motion tend to stay in motion" are both theories.I do think that "Wizard's First Rule" was totally lame. That's my opinion. I thought that the setting was stupid, the characters were unlikeable, and the plot was inane. That's all my opinion, as valid as anybody else's, but not any more valid than anyone else's. Your mileage may vary -- and in a thread asking what people thought of Goodkind, it's really good for both of us to show up. If you believe that I have a negative opinion of you because I have a negative opinion of a book that you like, you might possibly be taking an internet discussion of a fantasy series a bit seriously. I ALSO, having analyzed the novel critically because I was determined to finish it despite the fact that I knew by the end of the first chapter that I wasn't enjoying the book, have the critical opinion that, as a literary work, Goodkind was more interested in abstract ideas than concrete, gritty details. And that, intentionally or not, he wrote a romantic fantasy novel. I say this after having read the novel carefully as though it were an assigned novel in one of my classes.Goodkind's settings were not described with the intensity and attention to detail that, say, Guy Gavriel Kay's "Sailing to Sarantium" has. (The trade-off here is that GGK's book doesn't spend as long on the characters as Goodkind does. He gets close, by sacrificing a depth of plot, and in my non-critical opinion, he uses his ammo better and does more with fewer lines for his characters. But that's just personal preference, unless we want to start comparing degrees, and that rarely goes well for anyone.) This isn't to say that it's wrong for you to dislike his settings -- I personally disliked them, but a critical assessment that the author isn't focusing on the setting isn't a statement that the novel was objectively bad.His characters tended to feel things in an all-or-nothing way, and the progression of the relationship between the hero and the heroine is much closer to the romantic fantasy ideal (as seen in Melanie Rawn, Mercedes Lackey, and Kristen Britain, among many others) than it is to a traditional fantasy novel that happens to include a romance (such as the Belgariad, the Farseer trilogy (although this one's close to romance territory as well), or Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire"). I came up with this opinion based on looking at each scene and determining what was advanced or focused upon in that scene, in order to determine that he's spending a lot more time on the feelings of the characters than he is on the advancement of the whole sword-of-truth plot. In my PERSONAL opinion, that was bad. That wasn't what I wanted to read. In my CRITICAL opinion, that's what it was -- a romantic fantasy novel. I welcome alternate interpretations of the first novel, if you disagree. A critical opinion can in fact be wrong, but it requires more than "That's just your opinion" to make it so.His fight scenes were not detailed. Going through the first novel, there are only a handful of fight-scenes in which actual fight choreography comes into play (as in, people fencing, blades flashing, anything like that). Goodkind was thus not writing gritty military or fighting-focused fantasy. That's my CRITICAL opinion. (My PERSONAL opinion is that the few fight scenes he did describe weren't done terribly well, and I read fantasy at least partly for fun fight scenes. If you're writing a novel in which the big magical thingie the hero gets is a SWORD, my personal opinion is that you ought to have better fight scenes.)Very little that is not expressly written on the page can be proven as FACT when discussing a novel, but I have over the years learned enough critical reading skill to come up with critical opinions that can stand some scrutiny.And the book is filled with extended and slightly overwrought emotional description. That's my critical opinion on the matter. That opinion is what led me to the conclusion that Goodkind was writing romantic fantasy. I based it partly on seeing how many scenes focused on the romance and how many focused on the main bad-guy plot, and partly on the language that Goodkind used. In my personal opinion, the overwrought emotional description wasn't done terribly well -- I found the emotional overwrought-itude better in the Farseer trilogy (which was emotionally overwrought as a coming-of-age teen-angst fantasy story, not a romantic fantasy story). I found the emotional overwrought-itude about at the level of Jordan (who uses emotional overwrought-itude of the "hero fighting his destiny" variety, rather than the teen-angst or romance varieties, for his heroic-destiny series).You'll note that I've listed one series I greatly liked as being emotionally overwrought… because, well, it was. Just like Buffy had emotionally overwrought elements. I liked it in Buffy. I don't like it in daytime soaps. Buffy having it is my critical opinion. Me liking Buffy is my personal opinion.Ah. The problem here appears to be projection. You evidently have trouble with people not liking something that you do like. Perhaps you think less of me for not liking Goodkind's books. In any event, you've evidently decided that I have a personal opinion about you because you did like the books.You are incorrect. I have no opinion about you whatsoever. That's not an insult. I don't know you. I haven't knowingly met you. I am not qualified to make a value judgment about your character based on our internet interaction, except to judge that you don't seem to make a distinction between personal and critical opinions.As I said before, it's great to get all the personal opinions out there. I was attempting to get away from my personal opinions and look at the novel critically to suggest other books that people who liked Goodkind might also like. That's evidently not going to happen, given that you reacted by insisting, "It's only an opinion, not a fact!" as though you were trying to get Intelligent Design taught in the ENWorld classroom. All opinions are not equal. Personal opinions are, but critical opinions can be demonstrably proven wrong. I welcome your efforts to do so with any of the critical opinions I have voiced.</blockquote>

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