#interesting that the blurb describing him starts by talking about incredibly well-liked people who are kind

[amaretigris]

Hi! Thankyou for taking on requests for Jonah! Not a lot people right for him! If you don't mind, would you do one for me too please?

I was going to request an imagine/blurb based on Jonah being in love with yn, but yn isn't ready? But he's really touchy with her (with neck kisses, cuddling from behind, stroking her back, couch cuddles, cheek kisses, etc) because he can't help himself, so eventually she just caves in and believes that Jonah isn't like the others?

Thankyou!!!! Xxxx

Hi love! Thank you so much for this request! It's adorable. I hope you enjoy 🥰💖

Gravity

1.3k words | Fluff with a splash of angst

If you had to choose a word to describe Jonah, that word would be steadfast. Jonah has always been devoted and consistent with you. Unwavering. That is why you fell for him, after all. But it wasn’t always this way.

When the two of you first met, you were very distant. Jonah was the newest member of your friend group, so you didn’t know him well. The two of you went out to a bar with everyone, and you noticed that Jonah started gravitating towards you. As time went on, Jonah became more and more interested in you. He showed it in several ways: physical touch, asking you on dates, and more physical touch.

It got to the point where, anytime you saw Jonah, he would loop his arms around your waist from behind, and gently nestle his chin on your shoulder. He was always touching you, whether it be rubbing your back, holding your hand, or kissing your cheek. You weren’t used to this at first. You had turned down Jonah’s offers for dates, so why was he always touching you? He would stop anytime you asked him to, but you noticed that somehow, some way, he was always touching you again by the end of the night. He didn’t even seem to notice. It was like a natural pull.

You eventually learned that Jonah is a very touchy-feely person. Physical touch is his love language. Obviously, with you, it’s a little different, but he does it with everyone. He’s the same way with his family and friends. He’s always hugging everyone or clapping them on the back. So, you started not to mind as much when he touched you. You now know it’s his way of connecting with another person.

This did become problematic, however, when you had to continuously explain to everyone that you were not, in fact, dating Jonah. People saw the way he looked at you, and the way he touched you.

“How are the two of you not together?" they would ask.

It was because you were afraid. Jonah is not only an incredible human being, but also a celebrity. The fame, the press, and the pressure have always been terrifying to you. How could you ever be enough for someone like him? Could you handle the constant scrutinization and magnifying glass on your relationship? Could you handle it if Jonah left you for another celebrity- someone more beautiful and talented than you?

These questions haunted you. Every time Jonah asked you out, and every time you said no.

But, every time, Jonah would affectionately squeeze your hand, and say, “Whenever you’re ready, love. I’ll be here waiting for you.”

The two of you had been friends for close to 4 months now. And suddenly, the question that popped into your mind, unbidden, was: how long would Jonah wait for you?

You knew that you couldn’t be selfish and keep him hanging like this forever. You had come to cherish Jonah. He had quickly become your best friend. The person that you texted every day, and the person that you wanted to tell everything to.

Finally biting the bullet one day, you texted Jonah, asking if the two of you could meet for dinner.

Jonah ❤️

Hey! Can we get dinner tonight?

Of course, love. Who all will be there?

Oh, I was hoping just the two of us.

Oh okay. Sounds great to me. Everything

okay, (Y/N)?

Yes, everything’s fine. I just want to

talk to you about something.

Nothing bad!

Okay! Let me know when and where you

want to meet. 😊

Pulling up at the restaurant, you fixed your hair in the rearview mirror, and tried to straighten out your dress. You were so nervous, but you needed to tell Jonah how you felt, once and for all. You didn’t want to wait anymore. Gathering up your courage, you also grabbed your purse, and headed into the restaurant.

When you entered, you saw Jonah’s back. He was facing the hostess stand with his hands in his pockets, lightly whistling. You could see that he was wearing a simple, white button-down shirt and black slacks. He was always effortlessly dreamy. Before you got too carried away with your thoughts, you tapped him on the shoulder.

Jonah turned around to face you, opening his mouth in awe.

“Wow, (Y/N).You look stunning,” Jonah kissed you on the cheek.

“I’ve already got a table for us,” he smiled at you, grabbing your hand, and leading you to the table for two in the back of the restaurant.

A dainty white candle burned in the middle of the table. Jonah pulled your chair out for you, waiting for you to sit down, before scooching you up to the table a notch. Taking his seat across from you, Jonah immediately grabbed your hand on the table, and started rubbing his thumb across it. He was about to start talking when the waiter popped up.

“Hi! My name is Vanessa. I’ll be taking care of you tonight. What can I get you guys started with?”

The two of you put in your drink orders, and Jonah ordered an expensive appetizer.

“You’re going to love it, (Y/N),” he winked at you.

You blushed and waited for Vanessa to leave the table. You cleared your throat before you began.

“So, Jonah, I’ve been thinking…” you trailed off.

Jonah looked into your eyes, showing you that you had his full attention. You felt him gently squeeze your hand, urging you to continue.

“I know that every time that you’ve asked me out, I’ve told you no. But there’s a reason for that. And the reason is that…I’m scared. Terrified even,” you looked up at Jonah, feeling his thumb still gently stroking the back of your hand.

“Of what, (Y/N)?”

You looked down at your joined hands. You felt all of your emotions swell up in your chest, and tears prick at your eyes.

“I’m scared that it’s too late. I’m scared that I’m not enough. I’m scared that our relationship will get torn apart by the media. I’m terrified that you’ll find someone better,” you choked out.

Without hesitation, Jonah was immediately by your side. He gently pulled your arms for you to face him, while he was kneeling on the floor.

“Hey, it’s okay, (Y/N),” he pulled you in for a hug and began stroking your back.

“You’re so hard on yourself. You don’t see how wonderful you are,” Jonah pulled away from you to look you in the eye.

“I will protect you from everything and everyone. I would do anything for you, (Y/N). And I will never find anyone better. Can’t you see? You’re it for me. I knew it from the moment I met you. I’ve always felt this pull between us. This gravity. You’re my sun, my moon, and all my stars. You’re everything. I was just waiting for you to realize it.”

Cupping your hand over your mouth, you sobbed at Jonah's words. He pulled your head back to his chest, letting you cry as much as you needed. After you were through, you sniffled, and wiped your face. Jonah pulled back to look at your beautiful (e/c) eyes again. The ones he fell in love with when he first met you. He put his hands on your cheeks to wipe away stray tears.

“You mean everything you said?” you whimpered.

Jonah smiled.

“Of course, (Y/N). Every word,” he whispered, leaning in to touch his forehead to yours.

He looked down at your lips, and you heard his breath hitch in his throat. When his eyes met yours again, you nodded. Jonah tenderly molded his lips to yours. You lost yourself in the kiss for a minute before Jonah pulled back. He laughed.

“Ah, can’t let myself get too carried away with that right now, can I?”

He rubbed the back of his neck before standing up and going back to his seat across from you.

You looked at the knees of his slacks and grimaced.

“I’m sorry about the pants,” you pouted.

Jonah reached across to stroke your bottom lip with his thumb, before giving up, and standing up to kiss you over the table. You giggled into the kiss. Jonah pulled back with a smirk.

“I told you, (Y/N). Gravity."

#jonah hauer king #jonah hauer king x reader #jonah hauer king x y/n #jonah hauer king imagine #the little mermaid 2023 #my stuff #answered

[theshadowsanctum]

Pulp column for The Spy Ring, promoting the upcoming “The Prince of Evil”

#the shadow #pulp shadow #Maxwell Grant #Benedict Stark #interesting that the blurb describing him starts by talking about incredibly well-liked people who are kind #and he's described as the opposite because he's evil #evil and well-liked are not opposites #Stark may have been a tad more interesting had they went with that angle #a horrible monster who's also incredibly popular and beloved #instead he's so obviously and viscerally awful that it's impossible to buy him as a deceiver #he is so deformed and stupidly evil half the time that he just straight up wouldn't have gotten anywhere in a 1930s society #but then again 90% of Shadow villains are evil businessmen pretending to be good #and wealthy respected billionaires who are disgustingly ugly and cartoonishly horrible are not unrealistic #actually that's most of them #so maybe Tinsley had a point

[not-a-perfect-metaphor]

J2 tinhat summary

For a while now I’ve been wanting to piece together a more comprehensive version of J2 tinhat facts/observations/thoughts/etc., and although the project is obviously an incredibly lengthy one, I figured I would at least create a kind of summary to post in the meantime. Even the summary however is VERY long, and I don’t have the ability to do cuts, so I apologize for that! But I am going to post the summary in a few parts, so here is the first!

This does not follow a linear timeline by the way, just as a heads up, and I’m not including many examples that I’ve already talked about recently to save space.

1. The Js spending holidays together and also vacationing together, like their skiing trip to Whistler, Canada for example and the Padackles family vacation to the Turks and Caicos among others. Recently the Js traveled to Europe, Dubai, and Australia.

2. Of course Jensen’s public move from Malibu to Austin (conveniently near Jared’s house) is a strong piece of evidence. Jensen’s comments about being closer to friends and family don’t make much sense as most of his friends live hours away, and he has also stated several times in the past that he loved living in Malibu and being on the beach, yet he still relocated (to be closer to Jared, we know).

3. This Js have used the word “we” instead of “I” on quite a few occasions while talking about things that should not involve the other J (again, as far as the general public is aware). They have also done the same thing with the word “our” instead of “my” and “us” instead of “me.”

4. Both Danneel and her brother Gino were nearly bankrupt when Danneel began her ‘relationship’ with Jensen. Jensen 100% supported (even way back then) both Danneel and her brother financially, which is often one of the main benefits a faux-spouse receives in the bearding arrangement (financial security and/or the recognition that comes with marrying a celebrity/someone who lives in the public eye).

5. We know for a fact that the Js share clothes and belongings very frequently (and have for many years). Not only do we have photographic evidence of this, but they’ve also both admitted that it’s true.

6. There is now a vast amount of evidence that Jared and Jensen spend a great deal of time with each other’s children, together and by themselves, and keep in mind that even the evidence we do have is likely only a small fraction of the actual reality. They really do seem to function in a lot of ways as one family, which of course makes sense from a tinhat’s perspective.

A few examples that I haven’t posted recently:

Jensen talking about how he used to wear a sherif’s belt and nothing else as a child and then when Jared makes fun of him, reminding Jared that Shep also likes to go nude and that Jensen has to remind him to put clothes on at the breakfast table.

Jensen: “[Jared] was out, so I was watching the kids.”

^ the above blurb by Fangasm

In 2015, Jensen said during a convention panel that he has “kids now,” realizing the error and correcting it to “kid” (he only had one at the time according to public knowledge).

Along the same vein, we can look at things that Genevieve and Danneel have said as well, such as Genevieve stating that one thing she loves about Jared is that “he shows up as a co-parent to our kids.” The definition of co-parenting is “the experience of raising children together as single parents like when a divorce or separation occurs,” or in this case, an agreement to parent together alongside the guise of marriage.

7. At this point the Js have accidentally mentioned so many things that relate to sleeping with each other/being with each other late at night or first thing in the morning etc. that I won’t even try to list them all. But just know that there are many of these examples (I’m happy to specify if anyone wants to send me a message about it).

8. The Js have been spotted dining together (or out at bars/other venues together) on many occasions, less in recent years, some of which have even been described as quite romantic/intimate settings. And of course, again, these are just the ones noticed by the public, not the likely many times the Js have booked private dining arrangements or something else of that nature. I just posted a few of these examples separately if you want to check them out.

9. Jared has forgotten the specifics of his ‘dating’ timeline actually a few times, probably the most well-known of those times being during his Live With Kelly interview where he claimed to have been single at the start of Supernatural when in reality (according to the information given to the general public), he and Sandra McCoy were very much together at that point. He also told an interviewer that he was single and then later on claimed to have been dating Genevieve two full months before that interview took place.

10. I already posted a fantastic humorous account of the many different stories told concerning the period of time Jensen publicly lived with Jared (again, message me if you’d like me to send it to you), but suffice to say…the lies became quite immense and tangled up in each other and the whole thing made many people wonder about what might really be going on between the Js.

11. Jared posed in front of a mural by himself (without Gen) that said “Love will win” in response to Jensen posing in front of a mural earlier that same day that said “Love is love,” a well known LGBT slogan.

12. Jensen has rotated between several different wedding rings, which I have yet to see anyone come up with a believable-enough reason for, but whatever the reason, it certainly is something that makes you wonder.

13. When asked about “finding the one,” Jensen gave a very long, beautiful, thoughtful response during which he never once used the word “she,” “her,” “wife,” etc. (or Danneel’s name). His reply also contained several things that he had previously said (and would say again) to describe Jared and/or his relationship with Jared:

Another similar example is when Jensen was asked about his favorite memory of SPN and he responded with his journey from single-hood to marriage, again not using female pronouns or “Danneel,” who hadn’t had anything to do with the show at that point anyway.

14. This one I remember having to hunt down and verify back when I first started “hardcore hatting,” and yes it is true. Sandy, Jared’s ‘girlfriend’ from years ago, favorited a tweet once in which she was referred to as Jared’s “ex-beard.” I mean, it’s pretty hard to misinterpret that…

15. Gossip columnist Ted Casablanca once pretty much accused Danneel of her relationship with Jensen being fake. Previously to that spat, he had also written an article in response to double engagement rumors saying that “Jensen and Jared would sooner marry each other than who they’re currently rumored to be getting hitched to. If I’m wrong I’ll get Taryn Ryder a date with Ryan Gosling.”

16. Speaking of the engagements, nearly everything about them was highly suspicious. Both occurred on the same weekend under the guise that each J had no idea the other was proposing, despite having said multiple times that they tell each other everything and showing that to be true through their actions as well. When asked on the spot what his proposal story was, Jensen retold the exact proposal story that had taken place a year earlier with Jared and Sandy, changing only the location.

17. Another well-known mishap was the ‘dinner in Italy’ story, told first by Jared in which he claimed to have been with his wife at the time and told second by Jensen at a different convention in which JENSEN was in fact the one who had been with Jared. Of course ironically, nothing would have even seemed strange about the whole thing if the story had been told truthfully from the get-go, but keeping up with lies is far from easy.

18. This one I think we all know. Joanna Krupa, known for her role in The Real Housewives of Miami, has admitted to bearding for someone in the past, and the only real celebrity she’s ever dated was Jensen. Which of course, like many of these observations, is not proof as much as it’s, well…an observation. Albeit quite an interesting one.

19. It was revealed by Ryan Seacrest (who has been at the center of many “gay or straight or other?” whispers for a long time now) that he used to live with Jensen, which wouldn’t be odd if Jensen had ever mentioned it while talking pretty extensively about his past roommates/living situations.

Like, for example, we HAD known that Jensen and Ty Vaughn lived together for a stretch, and some hats believe (due to the seemingly very intimate nature of their relationship at the time) that Ty may be an ex of Jensen’s.

20. I saw someone point out the fact that Jensen’s oldest daughter’s middle name is Jay (a nickname Jensen has for Jared and actually something they’ve each said they call each other). On its own, this could just look like either a coincidence or a testament to the strong friendship between the Js, but it’s an interesting bit of information alongside everything else.

21. Richard Speight Junior has flubbed pretty famously a few times and nearly given away sensitive information about the Js being together. I’ve posted a few of these examples recently so I’ll hold off on including them here, but-, you know by now, just ask me if you’d like them!

And he’s not the only one who’s said some interesting things!

#j2 tinhat

[jawllines]

Hi!! Just wondering if you ever had a chance to write that fake gf blurb!!! I know that was ages ago tho ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

i DID INDEED THANK YOU FOR REMINDING ME! THIS IS VERY LONG AWAITED LIKE I WROTE THE FIC TWO YEARS AGO AND SAID I WOULD WRITE A FOLLOW UP THEN WAS THE DEVIL AND IM VERY SORRY THAT IM THE WORST IN THE WORLD.

Three solid weeks after their cabin expenditure, Harry was still stupidly head over heels for his fake girlfriend.

Y/N doesn’t leave like he had feared she would once they finished up and she’d bid him his favor. He’d expected that they would have gone home, she would throw in the towel and they’d become but passing friends again while Harry conjured up some story about their breakup. Figured that he might bump into her in another science lab and have to mute the twinge his heart gives at the sight of her soft features, lips pulling up into that smile he’d grown so fond over. Or even worse, he’d not see her at all, and while that would be good on his heart in time, the immediate thought of it sounds dreadful and abhorrent and just downright upsetting.

Yet none of those things happen. After that first night home, when she’d knocked on his door and told him she wasn’t ready to leave yet, offering up a cuddle and a horror film their fates had been set in stone. They see each other so frequently and go out and about either by themselves or with the others so often, that they might as well still be playing a couple. Hell, even when they’re at one of their flats without anyone else around they fall into calling each other pet names, climbing all over into each other’s laps, and -- if Y/N’s had a few bevvies in her -- will kiss pretty, splotchy purpled love bites to mottle the skin at his throat (but never would she venture to his mouth). It was easy as breathing for them. . .like they’d been together for as long as Harry had told his friends in the first place; maybe even longer.  

Neither of them speaks on it or seal the deal though. Harry’s not even sure if Y/N likes him back or not, because while he could twist and turn her actions into loving embraces, longing glances, and passion behind those hickeys -- he knows she’s just a touchy-feely, lovie dovie type of person. Maybe it’s selfish of him to soak in all of these gestures and pretend that they meant more than they were, but that doesn’t stop him from doing it. It keeps him sane, to some degree, because it went from liking Piper and her being his top tier, biggest all-time crush, to Y/N being his whole world it felt like.

And it’s not even like he can chat with anyone about it! He’d gone and lied to all of his friends about being with her already, so he’d look like a right tosser to tell them the truth. They would all be so pissed at him -- brows set in deep furrows frowns dragging the corner of their mouths down. Would they even talk to him after? He’d started with the lie in the first place so that he could spend time wallowing in his own self-pity and laziness, so how could he very well explain that without seeming like an absolute dick for not just letting them know?

The worst of it though? When he can’t talk to his friends about something, he would instead tell Y/N but this time that just wasn’t an option. “Hey, so remember how we lied and said we were dating? Turns out I actually really fucking like you and can’t go a goddamn minute of my free time not daydreaming about kissing you, so what should we do about that? Try it out or am I just a friend? Jus’ lemme know for my own sanity’s sake ‘cos I’m proper stressed about this yeah?”

The thought of it makes him shiver from embarrassment.

All of it weighs heavily on him, as he sits beside her on the couch, watching her mouth curl and shape around her words as she tells him the intricacies of her shopping experience today. She’d gone with a few of her friends to the mall and they had all decided on a select few places to go, all of which Y/N had a weird feeling about, and all of which something odd had occurred. And he was listening to each of her points -- how the cashiers in the Helzberg Diamonds nearly got into a proper fist fight, when they were in Victoria’s Secret she’s fairly sure she saw a polyamorous relationship of at the very least seven, or even when she went to go purchase him a soft looking sweater she’d figure he would like (because his AC unit makes his flat the absolute zero and he loved it, actually, he's cozied up into it as soon as she’d handed it to him), a woman tried to fight her friend for a size medium when there were several other mediums. And he realizes, as he soaks in every word and revels in the way she speaks with her hands, blinks harder and shakes her head when she’s confounded by something -- he really is in love with her.

He can feel it, from the depths of his chest, worming around his heart and hugging it tightly. There’s something he just can’t explain about it; such an immense warmth that overcomes him and the ever-present need to reach out and touch her was heavy and persistent at the forefront of his mind. He wanted to bring her to his chest and hold her close; tell her again and again that she was incredible and how much he liked her and how much he wanted to ravish her in sweet kisses that would leave the both of them feeling gooey and warm. How was he meant to focus on anything else in his life when all he could think about was cocooning Y/N in a fort of blankets and keep her all to himself?

Harry doesn’t realize he’s leaning forward until Y/N’s words have slowed to a stop and her eyes go wide some, looking from his mouth to his eyes and back before between each pupil like she could find the answer of what he was planning there, “Harry?” Her voice is inquisitive, yet soft -- gentle as a stroke of a feather, “Are we about to -- are we about to kiss?”

Had anyone else said something like that, it would’ve torn him from the moment and he would have drawn back and been at least a little pissy that they couldn’t have done it like a movie. However, it was Y/N who was looking at him with these big eyes, both trusting and wanting to some degree, and his heart hammered in his chest. Like two sticks at a tympani, it rumbled and rustled as he kept his gaze held to hers, “If you’d like to,” he had murmured carefully although his voice trembled just slightly around the corner of his words, “If you’d like to, I would really like to.”

If Toddy or Niall had seen this, they would’ve surely taken the piss. They’d always thought Harry to be some smooth talking lady killer but he would figure that’s the last thing he was. Maybe he’s got non-purposeful flirty eyes and he watches people’s mouths as they speak which has led one too many people on accidentally, but if he really likes someone. . .well, it isn’t as easy as complimenting their shirt. It’s something he mulls over so for days, weeks, months, and instead of being suave and calculated with how he pursued it he does it in a spur of the moment. He leans in as they tell a story because he’s so overcome with that feeling that it feels like he may burst.

“I want to,” she tells him and a wave of not only relief but sheer joy flutters through his body, “I’ve wanted to but I thought you liked Piper?”

“Liked, yeah but a sweet fake girlfriend of mine kind of pushed her way into my heart and planted her feet in my atria,” his lips quirk in a smile as her own do, “I -- one of the last night’s we had stayed there, Piper had come to our room. She wanted to hook up with me and. . .and well, hell, that had been my dream for how long? I used to get so upset that she’d never shown interest in me and then there she was, showing interest but I just -- God, all I could think about was you.” He scooted a little closer, his hand floating up to cradle her cheek and he sighed softly, “Then you came in all drunk and wanting a cuddle and it only cemented the fact that I like you far too much than someone should like their fake girlfriend.”

The smile that is stretching her cheeks, Harry only gets to see for a few moments, because after a second or two she’s leaned forward and smeared their lips together. It startles a squeak from his throat and a huffed laugh from his nose as he reciprocates the meshing of their mouths. Her hands skate against his forearm, gripping onto his bicep like she might be steadying herself before practically crawling her way into his lap and Harry accepts her more than willingly. He works with her, maneuvering his arms so that she was astride his thighs and he had one hand cradling her face as the other held onto the round of her hip tugging her impossibly closer to him.

It’s good -- fulfilling in a way he doesn’t exactly know how to describe apart from craving something for so long and finally having it. Her lips are warm and soft; they taste vaguely of the chocolate turtles she’d been eating earlier when she’d come over in the first place and he can’t help the way he suckles it into his mouth and nips at the plush skin. Their noses knock together and he can feel a puff of air warm his upper lip from her but she makes no move to part from him. If anything, she kisses deeper, using the tip of her tongue to gently flick at the seam of his mouth.

Harry parts his lips easily for her and Y/N wastes no time sliding her tongue against his own. He moans and it very clearly encourages her, her movements becoming even more confident than they had been previously. It’s in the way she moves so ardently that suggests to him that she has wanted to and as her hands reach to gently hold the side of his face with a few fingers splaying out across the skin of his throat, he wonders when it may have happened. Was it when they had first cuddled and he’d carried her up the stairs to their bedroom? Or was it when he’d given her that very first hickey? What if it even dated back to when they had met?

He knows when he’d wanted to kiss her the first time, though he doesn’t think past him knew at the moment. He would dare date it back as early as when she’d made him pancakes but that he’d often attributed to wanting to smooch her since she was acting so well. No, the first time he thinks he could have planted one on her and not felt one regret about it would be when she had bought those candles for him. Had gone out of her way to show genuine regard for him -- to do something so nice, just because he couldn’t sleep -- if he could have kissed her then, he’s sure he would have. He probably should have.

But that doesn’t matter, because here she’s sat, their tongues dancing and twirling around one another, heads tilting and the tips of their noses stroking together. It was playful and flirty and something Harry knows he’s going to think about long after they’d parted.

No matter how much he didn’t want to part, his lungs burned with the need to breathe and he eventually breaks away with a soft smack of their lips detaching. They’re both breathless, chests heaving, and when he looks down some he sees that her nipples had pebbled through the thin material of her shirt that beckons an interested twitch from his cock. Though the filthy thought that tries to slither into his brain is quickly muted by the way Y/N wraps her arms around him, hugging him close to her and nestling her face into the side of his neck, “I liked that.” She murmured, “Was getting tired of satiating my want to kiss you by giving you drunk hickies.”

Harry chuckles, moving his arms around her waist and stroking her back in soft, slow movements, “I hope those stay too though, I rather like them,” he admits and she giggles. Harry appreciates the comforting weight of her atop of him and he’s fairly sure he could nap like this, but he has to ask something before he can. Wouldn’t forgive himself if he didn’t take this moment to do so. “Y/N?” She hums in response, her face hidden still, “Would you do me the honors of being my real girlfriend? Not fake?”

She doesn’t miss a beat in her response.

“Of course I will, Dummy.”  

#blURB #OR #BLURBS #Anonymous

[zombiiesque]

In Memorium: Dear Laura, Decantress and Scribe Extraordinaire

Originally published 7/6/2017

I'm not really sure how to start this, as I'm still rather reeling with the shock. On Saturday, the indie perfume community found out that our dear friend Laura, who has been decanting for NAVA for more than 8 years, passed away suddenly due to an illness. I'm not sure there are enough superlatives for me to describe this incredible lady, who made such an impact on our little world, but I hope, today, to do some honor to her, from my very fond memories of the friendship that she gifted me with.

I met Laura more than 3 years ago, when I was just starting my incredible discovery of the Nocturne Alchemy brand. I wasn't really sure where to start, and some kind souls pointed me in her direction, as she was decanting the current Limited Collection, as she always did. I found her Facebook group and Livejournal, and sent her an email. Hah! Gods bless her, she was gracious from the very first time I spoke with her. I told her that I was very, very new to NAVA and that I had never joined a circle before, could she offer a little guidance? And she did, she made things so very easy for me, and we started speaking regularly. I remember that she told me she loved my username! She was a big fan of the show The Walking Dead (see photo above, we are both Daryl fans, and I told her that my fiance is rather Daryl-esque in character). Well, that started us on a little path of long emails, and eventually we had a few phone conversations too! I always wanted to speak more with her but our schedules were opposite, so we only got to have a few marathon conversations on the phone. But I felt instantly connected with her, like we had known each other for years. I think Laura was one of those truly gifted and intuitive people who were able to make everyone comfortable, to make people feel really good while they were speaking with her. How incredibly lovely. I so enjoyed talking to her, about anything under the sun. And she knew my struggles with depression, without me going too deeply into it - and it always seemed to me that Laura was shining a light in my darkness. She always had something sweet to say, some kindness to pass on, something to make me laugh out loud. That was another thing - she had an absolutely fantastic sense of humor. I always enjoyed her posts on her Facebook or in her group. I enjoyed the little blurbs she wrote at the top of each circle for us as well. I'm remembering so many things she spoke of with such fondness, but overwhelmingly, it's her kindness, and the light in the dark that she held, I'm sure not just for me, but for many.

And she was an incredibly busy lady. She was professional, and organized, and she kept notes on quite a huge catalogue of NA perfumes. She started the NA Wiki after their fan forum was closed, and that in itself is quite the undertaking. Her journal has provided so many of us with notes for perfumes that we couldn't find elsewhere on the internet, she's left quite a legacy behind in our small world. She sent out the most wonderful packages. Everything was done just so, and there was always a little sniffie of something interesting, as well as something fun in keeping with the theme of that season or collection. My first package had tiny little pink umbrellas! I still have them and so many other little mementos from her in a little box. And I bought many a bottle or partial bottle from her sales entries, which was absolutely chock full of treasures. That was absolutely invaluable in helping me learn what notes I liked from NA, and whenever someone new asked about them, I would send them her sales page, saying that it's an excellent way to dip your toes in and find out what you like - because it was true.

I actually made her the graphic you see in my sidebar. She sent me the original graphic - so cute! - and I sent her what I had made, and she loved it. I had planned to make a few more for her in a variety of sizes, but I got sick and seemed to stay that way for almost a month after we moved, and hadn't got back into it. I actually had my graphics program open the day I found out she passed away, as I was going to get back into making my graphics - as you see, I'd redone my header for the blog, but not the css yet. I was planning on writing her a nice long email, because I know she'd been behind due to her internet being down, but was getting ready to start the new decanting for the grand reopening. I'm a little upset with myself I didn't get around to it. I think that we always live with some regrets when someone we love passes, and Laura made quite an impact on me, she was more than just a lady I bought perfume samples from, she was a very good friend.

Laura was preceded in death by the love of her life, her husband Bob. She talked about him quite a lot with me, and I felt really honored that she would share her story with me. That was very sweet and touching that she trusted her feelings with me, and I truly valued that. I know, now, that she is with her love, and her precious cat, and she is happy. Her heart is full. Her body no longer aches, she's not tired, or lonely, or missing her husband any longer, she is at peace. And that's all I could truly wish for dear Laura. I will hold you in my heart, dear friend, and remember the gifts that you gave me, and I will hold the light now. Love you very much. Wish you peace, Laura.

[kadobeclothing]

15 of the Best ‘About Us’ & ‘About Me’ Pages and How to Make Your Own

Building a website is, in many ways, an exercise of willpower. It’s tempting to get distracted by the bells and whistles of the design process, and forget all about creating compelling content.

It’s that compelling content that’s crucial to making inbound marketing work for your business. So how do you balance your remarkable content creation with your web design needs? It all starts with the “About Us” page. For a remarkable about page, all you need to do is figure out your company’s unique identity, and then share it with the world. Easy, right? Of course not. Your “About Us” page is one of the most important pages on your website, and it needs to be well crafted. This profile also happens to be one of the most commonly overlooked pages, which is why you should make it stand out. The good news? It can be done. In fact, there are some companies out there with remarkable “About Us” pages, the elements of which you can emulate on your own website. By the end of this post, you’ll know what makes some of today’s best “About Us” and “About Me” pages so great, and how to make your own about page that shares your company’s greatness.

Best About Us Page Examples Yellow Leaf Hammocks Eight Hour Day Joe Payton Apptopia Moz Aja Frost Cultivated Wit Kero One Nike Refinery29 Sara Dietschy Marie Catribs Marc Ensign Bulldog Skincare Doomtree

1. Yellow Leaf Hammocks Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It tells us a story. When you have a great story about how your product or service was built to change lives, share it. The “About Us” page is a great place for it to live, too. Good stories humanize your brand, providing context and meaning for your product. What’s more, good stories are sticky — which means people are more likely to connect with them and pass them on. Yellow Leaf Hammocks tells users about its product by describing how the hammocks empower artisan weavers and their families. The company breaks down different pieces of the story into sections that combine words and easily digestible graphics, painting a picture instead of big chunks of text. They’re clear about why they’re different: “Not a Charity,” the page reads. And then: “This is the basis for a brighter future, built on a hand up, not a handout.” Every company has a story to tell, so break out your storytelling skills from that random English class you took years ago and put them to work on your “About Us” page. Using descriptive and emotive copy and gorgeous graphics, an “About Us” page with a story works harder for your business than a generic one.

2. Eight Hour Day Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It’s human. People tend to think that “About Us” pages have to sound formal to gain credibility and trust. But most people find it easier to trust real human beings, rather than a description that sounds like it came from an automaton. Trying to sound too professional on your “About Us” page results in stiff, “safe” copy and design — the perfect way to make sure your company blends in with the masses. Instead, Eight Hour Day showcases the people behind the company and humanizes its brand. Introducing the founders by name and featuring the photos of them on the “About Us” page drives home the point that Nathan and Katie are — as they so astutely put it — “two individuals with a passion for creativity — creativity makes us happy.” When you’re designing your “About Us” page,avoid industry jargon and replace it with an authentic voice — yours — to describe your product or service. Sure, it needs to be polished and free of errors, but it should always sound friendly and real.

3. Joe Payton Why the “About Me” Page Rocks: It’s confident, creative, and easy to skim. “About Us” pages might encompass the values of more than one person or entity, but they’re no more important to the image of a business than your personal about page. Take Joe Payton’s “About Me” page, below. Not only does Joe’s illustrative self-portrait give him a personal brand that customers will remember, but it also demonstrates his expertise as a designer and animator. His website visitors can learn not just what he does, but why he does it, in an easily digestible way. Being able to express his values as a creative professional in such a well-organized page is something to be desired by anyone creating their own about page.

4. Apptopia Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It skips the business babble. We know — no industry jargon. If you think it makes you sound super smart on your “About Us” page, think again. People want and appreciate straight talk about what your business does. After all, if people can’t figure out what you do, how will they know they need your product or service? So, skip the industry lingo — that’s what Apptopia does on its “About Us” page. The startup’s simple but polished language effectively communicates the company’s offering while still allowing the Average Joe to understand it. The moral of the story: Try to get rid of jargon on your “About Us” page whenever possible. Use short and punchy sentences to explain complex products and ideas in a way that isn’t patronizing, but rather, is empathetic. 5. Moz Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It’s humble. Instead of following the classic “About Us” script and writing a few paragraphs about the company’s mission and origins, try something different — there are plenty of ways to make your brand more compelling to someone who doesn’t know about you. Take Moz, for example. A lot has happened since it was founded in 2004, so the company chose to share those milestones using a fun and clean design that incorporates clear headers, concise blurbs, and little graphics to break up the text. We especially love the humble references to how Moz received funding, how it switched its brand positioning — and most importantly, how it switched back to its original model. This speaks volumes to the value honesty and humbleness can play to your customers. Don’t be afraid to talk about your ups and downs; your customers will trust what you say that much more.

6. Aja Frost Why the “About Me” Page Rocks: It’s data-driven. Alright, we might be biased in highlighting this professional, as Aja is our very own SEO strategist at HubSpot. Nonetheless, the ingenuity she brings to the company isn’t lost on her website’s “About Me” page. Being a data-driven professional, Aja knows her own clients as a freelance writer and strategist don’t just want to see what she’s written — they want to see how her content has performed. With that in mind, her “About Me” page tells a story of her career growth, which peaks — no pun intended — at an impressive line graph showing the result of an SEO strategy she implemented for the HubSpot Blog. (The graph’s sharp decline at September simply indicates when she stopped collecting data.) Following the impressive chart, Aja closes out her about page with a personal note on what she does in her spare time — always a good way to humanize yourself in the eyes of your potential customers.

7. Cultivated Wit Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It breaks the mold. Yes, this post is about, well, “About Us” pages. But sometimes, you don’t always need to wait for users to get there in order to make a statement. That’s part of breaking the mold to showcase your company’s personality. That’s exactly what Cultivated Wit — a creative agency and media company — does, with both an edgy name and an incredibly fun story told through video and parallax scrolling … right on its homepage.

Below is the actual “About Us” page, which is a gem once you get there. But it’s great to see a company embrace its own brand of quirk throughout the site.

Even if you have a dedicated “About Us” page, there are plenty of ways to creatively showcase your company’s personality throughout your entire website. And yeah, that’s harder than filling a stock “About Us” template — but it can have a significant payoff for your brand. 8. Kero One Why the “About Me” Page Rocks: It’s multilingual. Kero One is a hip-hop artist and DJ from San Francisco, and his “About Me” page carries a valuable lesson to personal brands who cater to more than one audience — especially if those audiences speak different languages. Kero One’s story starts at his childhood, when he was six years old and first discovered a passion for hip-hop. Knowing how old and genuine his love for the genre is adds tremendous value to his own music in the eyes of his listeners. While this entrepreneur’s childhood interests help to deepen his audience, the second screenshot below helps Kero One widen it. His “About Me” page first tells his story in English, then in Japanese, then in Korean, then in Chinese. Accommodating these Southeast Asian audiences makes his brand more inclusive of all the audiences he identifies with.

…

9. Nike Why the About Us Page Rocks: It knows its audience. Nike might seem like a company that’s too big to inspire smaller businesses. You might even wonder if Nike even still has an “About Us” page. As a matter of fact, it does, and it hasn’t forgotten the company’s roots. Nike began on the campus of the University of Oregon by the hand of the college’s track coach, Bill Bowerman. And even though he no longer works at the company, one of his beloved quotes still brands the bottom of Nike’s “About Us” page below: “If you have a body, you are an athlete.” This bold sentence, referenced by the asterisked “Athlete” in the words right above it, sheds important light on Nike’s audience. The brand may be big today, but Nike is all about the rising stars — who Nike depends on to, according to the rest of its “About Us” page, “expand human potential.” The takeaway for marketers? Know your audience, and make it obvious to that audience the instant they read about you on your website.

10. Refinery29 Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It tells you what’s most important. Here’s another instance where any area of your website — not just the “About Us” page — is an opportunity to break the mold. Many companies add just a simple mission statement or company profile, but people often don’t want to ready a wall of text explaining what you do. So, Refinery29 broke it down to convey the intangible qualities that are tough to include in a basic “About Us” page. Although Refinery29 does introduce its page with a description of its business, its goes out on a bang — four bangs, to be exact. The organization is on a “mission,” sure, but there’s also an “essence” of Refinery29, a “promise” it keeps, and a “vibe” it gives off. These aren’t company traits you’d think to include when starting out, but they’re what your customers often make gut decisions on when buying.

11. Sara Dietschy Why the “About Me” Page Rocks: It has variety but still aligns with her personal brand. This professional YouTube content creator has an eclectic collection of videos related to technology and culture, and expresses that diversity all over her “About Me” page. In addition to the vibrant self-portrait at the top of the page, Sara’s first sentence tells you just how many people subscribe to her channel: 350,000. This is an important number to know for her potential video advertisers and collaborators who want to know how much exposure they’d get by working with her or advertising on her channel. The colored tiles lining the page — starting with the red one, as shown below — also do a terrific job segmenting her work by the types of projects she takes up and for whom she’s done them. That Intel logo in the second photo of Sara, below, is sure to turn some visitors’ heads as they’re perusing her website.

12. Marie Catribs Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It’s unexpected. There’s a reason why these examples are exceptional — “About Us” pages aren’t always the most riveting parts of a company’s website. In fact, they often look like an afterthought. But even if you don’t have budget for juicy graphics, video, or parallax scrolling, there are other ways to make your “About Us” page unexpected with the copy alone. Marie Catrib’s is a restaurant, so you might think their “About Us” page would be your typical “here’s how we started, here’s what we believe in, and here’s our food” story. Marie Catrib’s “About Us” page does tells us that — but it does so in an unconventional way. Immediately, the user’s eyes are drawn to a header that says, “It’s okay to make a mess, experiments can lead to beautiful things.” Quite philosophical, for a place to have dinner. But next comes the story about the owner, which starts in an unexpected way — “It’s hard to imagine, but at one time Marie was banned from the family kitchen.” A line like that draws in the audience, because we know it’s not going to be typical.

So, how will you use copy to really draw readers in? It’s amazing what impression you can make on site visitors just by creatively telling your story with words alone. 13. Marc Ensign Why the “About Me” Page Rocks: It’s funny but professional. This branding expert does two things super well on his about page: He takes his work seriously, but doesn’t take himself too seriously. Marketers know there’s value to keeping a casual tone in the content they create, but in order to attract customers, you need to prove you have discipline and integrity. That’s a tough balance to get right. Marc Ensign nails that balance between friendly and formal with a confident opening statement, followed by an amusing smiley photo of himself to set an inviting tone.

14. Bulldog Skincare Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: It’s lovable and memorable. What’s the difference between “average” marketing and lovable marketing? It’s the difference between creating generic webpages that provide great information, but in a straightforward, black-and-white kind of way — versus creating webpages that provide great information and are infused with color, personality, and stay true to a company’s unique brand voice. When you create lovable marketing, you can start a movement of brand evangelists and advocates who will help you grow. Where does this fit into a company’s “About Us” page? The folks at Bulldog, a men’s skincare company that was named for the colloquial “man’s best friend” — a dog — could have typed up a few paragraphs about where the brand came from and how they were one of the first in the space to redefine and eliminate stereotypes around men’s grooming. But that text alone would have been a bit, well, average. Instead, the “About Us” page is pithy, colorful, and leads with the lovable mug of an adorable bulldog — fitting the name and the brand. And it states the purpose of the products — to help customers from waking up with the (admittedly adorable) wrinkly face you see when you visit Bulldog’s website.

Play on your own words — it’s okay to have fun and pun with your brand, as it helps to inject personality and humor into your “About Us” page. It primes visitors for a story in a way that makes them immediately feel something. That’s how you create memorable, lovable marketing. 15. Doomtree Why the “About Us” Page Rocks: Its shows, tells, and has a soundtrack. One minute of video is worth 1.8 million words, according to Forrester Research’s Dr. James McQuivey. But what about audio and visual, too, all combined with a really cool story? Well, that’s one way to tell your story in an engaging way — through multimedia. Doomtree is built on a bit of an innovative concept: That a group of talented artists can each have thriving solo careers, but can still come together on a regular basis to create great music. It’s not a band — it’s a crew. It’s an unconventional concept with an equally interesting backstory that “started as a mess of friends in Minneapolis, fooling around after school, trying to make music without reading the manual.” And as soon as you arrive on Doomtree’s ‘About Us’ page, you’re greeted with big, bold photos of those friends.

As you scroll down, users are treated to even more interaction with the crew’s tracks and music videos. That makes sense, because it gives visitors an instant sample of Doomtree’s product. What’s more, the entire “About Us” page is responsive, including the video. That’s important — not only because it offers site visitors a great mobile experience, but also for Google search ranking — especially now that such mobile usage has surpassed desktop.

How to Write an About Page Establish a mission statement. Outline our company story. Reveal how you’ve evolved. State your “aha!” moment. Explain who you serve. Explain what you’re offering them. Cite examples of who you’ve served. Describe your values.

It’s tough to establish one all-encompassing template for your “About Us” page — there are just so many ways you can go about telling your company story. But, per the real “About Us” pages we’ve just highlighted, there are some steps you should keep in mind when getting started. Here are five steps to writing an “About Us” page based on some of the things that impressed us about the examples above. 1. Establish a mission statement. Your “About Us” page can and will be much longer than a single mission statement, but in order to draw people in, you need to succinctly state your goal in the industry up front. What are you here to do? Why should your website visitors care? 2. Outline your company story. You might not have a long history of changes and growth your company has endured (yet), but it’s a nice touch to talk about where you came from in your “About Us” page. So, isolate the milestones prior your company’s founding, and use them to give readers some backstory on your current venture. 3. Reveal how you’ve evolved. Even if you’re a young company, there’s no shame in admitting your business strategy — or even personal way of thinking — has changed since you began. In fact, in about pages, these evolutions can improve the story you tell to website visitors. About pages are perfect spaces to talk about where you started, how you’ve grown, and the ideals that have helped your organization mature. Use these moments to further your company story and show people that you’re always ready to change and adapt to the needs of your industry. 4. State your “aha!” moment. Every good company was founded on an idea — something the current marketplace might not yet offer. What was your idea? Use this “Aha!” moment as a pivot point when telling your company story. What was a challenge you faced while developing your company? How did this challenge or discovery shape what you are today? 5. Explain who you serve. As much as you want as many eyeballs on your “About Us” page as possible, you won’t do business with every single one of them. That’s why it’s crucial that you identify and mention your core customer. Who should care you exist? Which eyeballs are you here to serve? 6. Explain what you’re offering them. As you’re explaining who you serve, make it clear what it is you’re offering. Too often companies generalize their product or service in the language of their website, making it hard to understand what it is the customer is actually paying for. They’re afraid literal explanations of their products aren’t interesting enough, or will sound unappealing in writing. And that’s a fair concern. However, by investing just a sentence or two into telling your potential customers exactly what they’ll receive can keep them on your website for longer and interested in learning more. 7. Cite examples of who you’ve served. Got some loyal customers in your portfolio? Use your about page to let the world know who already trusts and benefits from your work. Knowing about your company’s past successes can influence the purchasing decision of up to 90% of today’s B2B customers, according to Dimensional Research. Even if you don’t yet have case studies to expand on the problems you’ve helped buyers solve, it’s in your interest to briefly mention who you’ve done this for. And your about page is the perfect platform for it. 8. Describe your values. Customers want to be treated like human beings. For that to happen, they need to feel that they’re being treated by human beings. When finishing your “About Us” page, describe who you are as a person or a team, and what your personal values are. What’s your company culture like? What bigger picture in life drives your business? An LED lightbulb maker might sell 10 different lamp styles, for example, but that might not be the most important characteristic to its primary audience. Maybe this lightbulb developer was founded on a commitment to environmental protection, and every bulb the company makes was built by people who are dedicated to making the world more energy-efficient. Keep in mind a secondary audience of your company’s “About Us” page consists of your future employees. This is another reason describing your personal values is a good idea — the key to your job candidates’ hearts is to show them you have one too. At this point, we hope that creating an “About Us” page doesn’t seem like a daunting task — rather, we hope you’re ready to have some fun with it. With a good story to tell, creative copy, humility, and digestible visuals, you’re on your way to an eye-catching user experience. Even better? You’re becoming part of the exception — and standing out from a sea of “About Us” pages. What makes you different? We’re eager to learn more … about you. Want more inspiration? Check out 16 inspiring examples of beautiful blog design.

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The Wise Man's New Clothes

by Dan H

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Dan did not find the second volume of the Kingkiller Chronicles to be worth the wait~

I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. My name is Kvothe. You may have heard of me.

Thus begins the blurb on the back of the first volume of Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles, and it's repeated on the second.

This is partly because, like many Fantasy novels, the Kingkiller Chronicles is really just one massive, massive novel chopped roughly into three parts. I suspect, however, that it's also partly because the blurb on the back of a book is usually a summary of what happens in the book, and despite weighing in at just shy of one thousand pages of densely printed text, the Wise Man's Fear is actually rather short on the “things happening” front.

If I had to summarize the entire book in twenty-five words or less I would do it like this:

Kvothe is awesome. He meets people who tell him how awesome he is, and they teach him to be even more awesome. The end.

As I so often say at the start of these articles: I am almost tempted to leave it there.

I'm not going to break down the sequence of events in the book, explain how Kvothe goes from the University to Vintas to Faerie to Ademre back to Vintas and back to the University – it's not really what happens in the book (insofar as anything happens) that I'm concerned about, it's the way in which the whole book collapses into a godawful mess of juvenile wish-fulfilment which undermines any hope I might have had for the series.

Oh, I should also add that this wound up getting far longer and far angrier than I intended. Sorry.

A Little Context

The Name of the Wind was spectacularly well received. Like spectacularly well. It won awards, it was praised by the likes of Orson Scott Card and Ursula le Guinn, it was one of those books people admitted to disliking only with a note of shame in their voices.

The book has become something of a poster child for what is best in the Fantasy genre – rich worldbuilding, clever storytelling, intricate plotting and a knowing deconstruction of the tropes and assumptions on which it is based (although to be honest, even in 2007 I was a little bored of deconstruction – it's still worth doing, but people really need to stop pretending that it's a new idea, I mean hell Elric was a deconstruction of the tropes of the fantasy genre).

I was

sceptical but ultimately positive

about the first volume, ultimately concluding that it was doing a lot of interesting things with the medium, and cleverly analysing the intersection between reality and myth, people and legends.

I was disappointed, therefore, to find myself reading a book which, amongst other things, devotes eleven out of its hundred and fifty two chapters to describing how its sixteen year old protagonist spent three days having sex with a hot faery woman who by the way thought he was totally awesome at sex.

The Double Standard

This bit is going to be a bit high-horsey, for which I apologise in advance.

Ages ago I read Trudi Canavan's Age of the Five trilogy and

concluded

that when you put all of the protagonist's skills end to end they made her look like a godawful Mary-Sue. But ultimately this was forgiveable because when you get right down to it The Age of the Five was mostly an enjoyable bit of girly fluff which wasn't trying to do anything serious.

For the record, at the start of the book Kvothe is one of the greatest musicians the world has ever seen, fluent in several languages, a precocious magician, able to call upon magic of a kind few even believe exists, able to climb walls and pick locks, a master artificer, skilled in both arts and sciences, endlessly resourceful and never ever meets a woman who doesn't fancy him. By the end of the book he's all of that, plus he's even better at magic, has learned secret martial arts techniques that make him better at fighting than anybody he will ever meet except for the people who taught him, has gained the ear of several powerful people, and has been taught secret sex skills by a hot older woman who never the less thought that he was pretty amazing at doing sex even before she taught him to be more amazing at doing sex (I will come back to this a lot because I think it's probably the most stupid and juvenile part of what I now am convinced is a fundamentally stupid and juvenile text).

What annoys me about Kvothe is not so much that he's a gratuitous Mary-Sue, but that despite this fact he is taken incredibly seriously by critics. People bitch about how unrealistic it is that everybody fancies Bella Swan, about how stupid it is for teenage girls to indulge in a fantasy where powerful supernatural beings are sexually attracted to them. People laugh at characters like Sonea and Auraya because they're just magic sparkly princesses with super-speshul magic sparkle powers. But take all of those qualities – hidden magic power, ludicrously expanding skillset, effortless ability to attract the opposite sex despite specifically self-describing as being bad at dealing with them, and slap it on a male character, and suddenly we get the protagonist of one of the most serious, most critically acclaimed fantasy novels of the last decade.

Of course you can't ever really say, for certain, how a book would have been received if you reversed the genders of its author and protagonist, but something tells me that a book about a red-haired girl who plays the lute and becomes the most powerful sorceress who ever lived by the time she's seventeen, and who has a series of exciting sexy encounters with supernatural creatures, would not have been quite so readily inducted into the canon of a genre still very uncertain about its mainstream reputation.

Imre

I know I said I wasn't going to go through the events of the book in detail, but I am going to discuss my irritation with the book in a broadly chronological sequence. This is simply because the book is so huge and so lacking in structure (beyond the obvious detail that some events happen after some other events) that it's far easier to think of it in terms of “The Imre Bit”, “The Vintas Bit”, “The Felurian Bit” and “The Ademre Bit”.

So the book starts off with Kvothe in Imre, where it's a straight continuation of Imre sections of the first volume. Kvothe is unable to pay his tuition again, which I wouldn't object to if it weren't for the fact that I've already read that plotline in book one (about the first quarter of the book, indeed, could be seen as the end of the first volume as much as the beginning of the second). We're thrown pretty much headfirst back into the setting, which was kind of jarring because dude, I read the original two years ago and I sure as hell won't be going back and rereading it to remind myself who Simmon and Kilvin and Exa Dal are (I did eventually remember, but I spent quite a while choking on name soup).

I'm afraid this article is going to be something of a list of Things That Annoyed Me. There were two Things That Annoyed Me about Imre.

The first was an issue that I remember having trouble with in the first book, which I have taken to referring to as the “poverty wanking”. Kvothe spends a lot of time being poor. He spends even more time telling the reader that if they have never been truly poor, they cannot understand what it is like to be poor. This is true, and I could almost accept this as a brave attempt to challenge the class privilege of his readership (and Lord knows I've got plenty of that – I've never had to deal with real shortage of money in my entire life, and I do absolutely take for granted the fact that food and housing and hot water and broadband internet access will be easily within my reach from now until the day I die) but there's just something about the whole thing that rings hollow.

I think mostly it's the fact that while Kvothe only has two shirts, and has to worry about finding the money to pay for his University tuition (something which, in his world, is itself a massive privilege, and one which Kvothe barely even needs given his precocious talent and secret route into the Archives) but he has several easy sources of income which, by the standards of his world, are very lucrative (he makes and sells magic artefacts for pity's sake; a profession for which only a handful of people in the world are qualified, and which he does better than pretty much anybody else out there), and he gets free room and board from a local tavern in return for his services as a musician (he also makes money performing at a local music venue, and while it's not much by the standards of the nobility it's certainly enough to live on). I'm annoyed by enforced poverty as a fictional trope at the best of times (why hello Season Six Buffy, fancy seeing you here) but Kvothe's constantly reminding us that “if you have never been truly poor, you will not understand” makes me want to throw something.

I know I'm on thin ice here, because frankly I'm as middle class as they come. I've never slept a night without a roof except that one time I went camping, I've never missed a meal except through laziness, I spent a year unemployed but I was well supported by my friends and relatives and live in a country with an adequate (if not generous) benefits system. I have, however, read a great many first-hand descriptions of real poverty from people who really haven't know where their next meal is coming from. Kvothe's life is nothing like the lives of those people, and barring the (extremely forced) homeless sequence in book one, it never has been. Kvothe does not read like a poor man who is forced to scrabble for every penny just to pay for life's necessities, he reads like a middle class kid who is jealous of the fact that his rich friends have better toys than he does. It wouldn't be a problem on its own, but the smug, sanctimonious insistence that I “cannot understand” his plight because I have “never known poverty” made me want to scream. No, I haven't known poverty, but Kvothe isn't poor, he's just not rich.

Sorry, that rant's been waiting for two years.

The second thing that annoyed me about the Imre sections was – well it wasn't really a feature of the Imre sections themselves, so much as the way they were resolved and led into the next bit of the plot. Kvothe's university shenanigans go on for a long time. Like I say, this is a long book. A long, long book. Again (I have mentioned this before, I will mention this again) the book spends eleven chapters describing how Kvothe totally got to score with a hot chick. It's long. It's wordy. The author bio on the inside back cover describes Patrick Rothfuss as somebody who “loves words, laughs often, and refuses to dance” and he seems to have chosen to demonstrate his love of words by including a great many superfluous ones.

The Imre section ends with Kvothe being put on trial for malfeasance (using magic for harm), and Kvothe pointedly refuses to discuss it despite the fact that (according to the Chronicler) it's a major part of his legend. This didn't bother me so much since I was pretty sure a long courtroom sequence would be deathly dull. Then, however, he gets an offer of patronage from the Maer of Vint, which requires him to take leave of the University and undergo a hazardous journey to a foreign kingdom. Here is how this journey is handled in the book:

Several unfortunate complications arose during the trip. In brief there was a storm, piracy, treachery, and shipwreck, although not in that order. It also goes without saying that I did a great many things, some heroic, some ill-advised, some clever and audacious. Over the course of my trip I was robbed, drowned, and left penniless on the streets of Junpui. In order to survive I begged for crusts, stole a man's shoes and recited poetry. The last should demonstrate more than all the rest how truly desperate my situation became. However, as these events have little to with the heart of the story, I must pass them over in favour of more important things. Simply said, it took me sixteen days to reach Severen. A bit longer than I had planned, but at no point during my journey was I ever bored.

Now okay, I get it. I really do. Because this is a serious fantasy novel which deconstructs genre conventions and plays with your expectations Rothfuss is deliberately glossing over a segment in Kvothe's life which, in a lesser novel, would be highlighted. I get it. I even get that because Kvothe is narrating the whole novel in first person, his choice to skip over this section reveals something about his character, both his jaded unwillingness to revel in tales of adventure and his almost childlike delight in subverting the expectations of Bast and the Chronicler (which parallel Rothfus' delight in subverting the expectations of his intended audience oh do you see how many levels this works on).

But.

This section appears on page three hundred and sixty five. It comes at the end of three hundred and sixty four pages which have been taken up with scenes where Kvothe converses with infuriatingly quirky girls (all of whom are hot), or infuriatingly eccentric old men (none of whom are hot), or with sequences which rehash plot threads which were already covered in the first book, or with endless conversations in which Kvothe engages in self-indulgent wordplay with either a hot quirky girl or an eccentric old man. I'm sorry but you do not get to bore my tits off with trivialities for three hundred and sixty pages (for those of you keeping score at home that's twenty pages more than the entirety of The God of Small Things) and then score points by not describing a sequence of events that might have actually included some incident.

Also: funnily enough, I have no idea why a sequence in which Kvothe escapes from pirates has “nothing to do with the heart of the story” when a sequence in which he talks to an annoying quirky girl, or one in which he wanders around the Archives for ages finding no interesting or useful information, or one in which invents a new machine for catching arrows, or a scene where a hot woman offers him sex and a fortune in return for access to the Archives and he refuses, or a scene where he shows how totally awesome at playing music he is, or yet more of his pointless back-and-forthing with Ambrose, or any of the other things which take up the first third of the book are somehow totally vital to it.

This is because I have no idea what the heart of the story is or is supposed to be, and I am pretty sure I will have no way of knowing what the heart of the story was supposed to be until the last page of the last volume. I mean as I understood it the story was supposed to be about Kvothe's pursuit of the Chandrian, and how his chasing legends ultimately led him to become a legend, but all I got in the first three hundred and sixty four pages of The Wise Man's Fear was minutiae and pointless worldbuilding. If Kvothe wanted to focus on the heart of the story, he could have summed up half of the first book and a third of the second as “I went to the University looking for information about the Chandrian, but I didn't find any.”

Vintas

After Kvothe arrives in Vintas, things actually get a lot better (at least for a while) and I found myself getting back into the swing of things. I could have done without his having arrived penniless, necessitating yet another sequence in which Kvothe tricks his way into the towers of the great with nothing but the clothes on his back and his native wit but it's all dealt with fairly quickly and Kvothe's interactions with the court of the Maer of Vint are relatively well done (although once again, it basically consists of Kvothe being amazing at everything, and all the people who matter deciding that they will immediately like, trust, and respect him because of his obvious natural superiority – sorry this was in fact the section I liked, I just really think it's important to remember that Kvothe's social interactions make Bella Swan look well articulated).

In Vintas, Kvothe does many great things for the Maer, including helping him win the heart of his intended bride, which he manages to do perfectly despite the fact that at this stage in his life one of Kvothe's vanishingly small number of weaknesses is a complete unfamiliarity with romance and an inability to deal with women.

Kvothe's final service for the Maer of Vint is to go north with a motley band of mercenaries and sort out some bandits. This they do, chiefly because Kvothe is able to call down lightning from the sky and kill a whole bunch of them. Now in the previous book Kvothe is remembered as calling down lightning from the sky, when what he really does is throw some flashpowder at some people. This provided a nice illustration of the book's central ideas about the difference between myth and reality and the way tales grow in the telling. In the bandit encounter in book two, Kvothe really does just blow them all up with a lightning bolt. Now yes, it takes a lot out of him and yes, he actually does it using “sympathy” not what Kvothe thinks of as “real” magic but since to a real-world reader as well as to pretty much everybody in the actual setting, sympathy is real magic anyway, the distinction is somewhat lost.

On the way back from his victory over the bandits, Kvothe encounters Felurian.

Felurian

Oh Felurian. Where to begin.

Felurian is that staple of fantasy novels, the deadly naked sex monster. She's the most beautiful, most alluring, most sexually attractive woman you'll ever see, and she will totally kill you with sex.

Felurian is the sirens, and Artemis and pretty much every other sex-death-nudity chick from mythology or fiction rolled into one. Kvothe catches her, bones her, breaks free of her sex-death-nudity mind control, completely whips her ass in a straight fight, then bones her again, then plays music that makes her think he's awesome, then writes half a song about her that is so awesome that she agrees to let him go so that he can finish it, then disses her sexual prowess, which prompts her to get really insecure and tell him what an amazing lover he is, then they have sex some more, then she sews him a magic cloak, while he goes away and talks to a prophetic tree which turns out to be evil.

Then they have sex some more, then he comes back to the real world and is all “bros, I totally did it with Felurian” and everybody is all like “no way, you'd be mad or dead” and he's like “no I totally did it with Felurian” and then the hot barmaid from earlier is all like “no he's definitely telling the truth because I am a woman and I can see that he has got totally sexed up since we last met, because I tried to sex him and it freaked him out, but now it looks like he wouldn't be freaked out and also he would be totally awesome at sexing.” Then Kvothe does sex with the hot barmaid and he is totally awesome at it, and he explains how doing sex with the hot barmaid is totally as good as doing sex with Felurian, because women are like music and sometimes you want to listen to a beautiful symphony and sometimes you just want a nice simple jig, and by the way this definitely isn't sexist, and if you think it is then you know nothing about music or love or him.

This last line, apart from being switched from the first to the third person, is a direct quote from the book.

So yeah, Felurian.

I should repeat that apart from a few misgivings, the Vintas segments of The Wise Man's Fear did actually convince me that I'd misjudged the book, that pacing issues aside it was going to turn out okay. The Felurian section convinced me that what I was dealing with was the worst kind of third-rate wish-fulfilment crap.

Here is the exchange between Kvothe and Felurian after he finishes his half-finished song (a song, I should add, which is included in full in the text, and which both Kvothe and Felurian describe as having beautiful words – a claim I would hesitate to make about anything I had written myself, particularly if it was incidental music for my fantasy novel):

Some of the fire left her, but when she found her voice it was tight and dangerous. “my skills 'suffice'?” She hardly seemed able to force out the last word. Her mouth formed a thin, outraged line. I exploded, my voice a roll of thunder. “How the hell am I supposed to know? It's not like I've ever done this sort of thing before!” She reeled back at the vehemence of my words, some of the anger draining out of her. “what is it you mean?” she trailed off, confused. “This!” I gestured awkwardly at myself, at her, at the cushions and the pavilion around us, as if that explained everything. The last of the anger left her as I saw realization begin to dawn, “you...” “No,” I looked down, my face growing hot. “I have never been with a woman.” Then I straightened and looked her in the eye as if challenging her to make an issue of it.” Felurian was still for a moment, then let her mouth turn up into a wry smile. “you tell me a faerie story, my kvothe.” I felt my face go grim. I don't mind being called a liar. I am. I am a marvellous liar. But I hate being called a liar when I'm telling the perfect truth. Regardless of my motivation, my expression seemed to convince her. “but you were like a gentle summer storm.” She made a fluttering gesture with a hand. “you were a dancer fresh upon the field.” Her eyes glittered wickedly.

That's right, Kvothe was so amazing at doing sex that the ancient sex goddess of sex and death was actually unable to believe that he was a virgin because he was so amazing at doing sex.

Once again, I say this. The next time you hear anybody complain about the fact that – in certain popular novels targeted at young women – hundred year old vampires fall for sixteen year old schoolgirls, point out to them that in one of the most critically acclaimed fantasy novels of the twenty-first century a faery creature of unbridled sexual potency, as ancient as time itself, who lures men to their deaths with her irresistible beauty and insatiable lovemaking has her mind blown by the sexual prowess of a sixteen year old virgin.

There is a part of me, a tiny part, which respects the sheer brass bollocks of this. Not only does Kvothe get to live out the adolescent fantasy of being taught how to be amazing at sex by a fantastically hot older woman (and I understand and appreciate this fantasy, and don't think there's anything wrong with it – adolescent fantasies are important, even for grownups, hell that's why I play RPGs and read genre fiction) but said hot older woman takes the time out at the start of the whole sequence to make it very clear both to him and to the reader that he was already amazing at sex and that all her tuition will be doing is making him even more amazing at sex.

Also what is up with her not using capitalization. What does that even sound like?

As part of the Felurian interlude Kvothe encounters a prophetic tree, which Bast interrupts the story to tell us is the most dangerous thing ever because it has absolute knowledge of the future and is utterly malicious, and therefore if you encounter it your every action will bring nothing but destruction (this is clearly a nonsensical idea, and is dropped into the middle of the text without ceremony or foreshadowing and I have no idea if we're even supposed to take it seriously). The whole faery interlude just came so totally out of left field and turned the story on its head in ways that felt annoying and unsatisfying. It introduced a whole bunch of concepts that didn't really have any buildup, and it transformed Kvothe's story from a story about a clever, resourceful man whose reputation grew far beyond the reality to the story of a man who really was just all that and a bag of chips. Suddenly he went from being somebody who did great things, and to whom legendary powers were attributed, to somebody who really did just have access to ancient powerful magic for no clear reason.

To put it another way, at the start of this review, I quoted the “I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings...” section from the first book. In The Name of the Wind we see that when Kvothe “burned down the town of Trebon” what really happened was that the town was burned down by a rampaging Draccus (a creature which itself was the mundane source of a fantastical rumour) while Kvothe was in the area for other reasons. This engaged cleverly with the novel's central themes.

In The Wise Man's Fear we deal with the “I have spent the night with Felurian” section of the speech. Unlike the town of Trebon, where the truth behind the story is both more mundane and more interesting than the version that is repeated in legend, the story of Kvothe's night with Felurian is just – well – exactly what it says on the tin. There's no clever twist or double meaning, no unexpected subversion of our expectations. He just really did do something which he totally shouldn't have been able to do, and looked awesome while doing it, and got to have loads of sex with a really really hot woman who by the way thought he was awesome at sex. It's not clever, it's not illuminating, it's just pathetic.

Ademre

I really do think that the Felurian sequence broke the book for me. Part of this is that my perception of Kvothe and the text in general shifted so fundamentally after the utterly facepalm-worthy faery sequence. Part of it is that once he's been initiated into the mysteries of womanhood by Felurian, Kvothe suddenly starts to have a whole lot of sex.

Once Kvothe has been taught to be awesome at sex by Felurian (but just so it's clear, he was already awesome at sex, this is very important) he then gets taught to be awesome at fighting. Thus becoming the best man ever.

In the world of the Kingkiller Chronicles there exists a kingdom (or an area of land at least) called Ademre. Ademre is one of those spurious fantasy cultures that seems to have a totally martial-arts based economy. They follow a philosophical thingy called “the Lethani” and study awesome martial arts that, of course, make them better at fighting than everybody else in the world. They then go into the world as mercenaries where they make a fortune being awesome at fighting, most of which they send back to their homeland, where it goes to support their otherwise extremely poor countrymen.

Kvothe travels with an Adem mercenary as part of his work for the Maer of Vint and, because everybody who meets Kvothe either takes an instant irrational dislike to him or treats him like he's the most important person in the universe, this mercenary initiates Kvothe into the secrets of the Lethani, and begins to instruct him in Adem martial techniques. It is worth pointing out at this point that doing either of these things is about the most horrific cultural taboo his society has, and is punishable by death or excommunication from the Adem (which the Adem, being the Noble Warrior Culture naturally consider to be a fate far worse than death).

The Adem discover that Kvothe has been taught their secrets, and he and his mercenary friend are summoned to Ademre to face judgement. They talk to Kvothe and he impresses them with how completely awesome he is and how he totally groks the Lethani even though he was only introduced to the concept about three weeks ago.

So because it's totally forbidden to share the secrets of the Lethani with people outside the Adem, but because Kvothe is apparently totally “of the Lethani” because he totally understands what this complicated philosophical concept is all about because of how awesome he is the only option that the Adem have open to them is to teach Kvothe to be totally awesome at fighting.

Of course.

The Adem, as it turns out, have a matriarchal society, for which Rothfuss scores precisely one point (he did not, at least, assume that it was impossible for women to have a prominent role in a warrior culture). He promptly loses that point for explaining that the reason the Adem have a matriarchal society is that their martial art is all about control and women are so much calmer and more sensible than men, because men are just so aggressive.

It also turns out that the Adem have no cultural taboos about nudity or sex. This of course leads to an intricate and profoundly well realised exploration of the ways in which our cultural notions of … oh who am I kidding. This is an excuse for Kvothe to have sex with a bunch of hot women who want to have sex with him because he is so awesome. Also there are no STDs in their culture because they all have sex with each other all the time, and obviously if your culture is based on rampant unprotected sex, it must be impossible for anybody in your culture to get an STD, because then STDs would spread around your population really fast, and obviously that couldn't happen, so they must all just be totally disease free. QED. Just to be clear, I'm not extrapolating here, this is exactly how it is explained as working in the book. At no point does Kvothe ever receive a sexual proposition from anybody he does not find attractive, and there is no engagement at all with the question of homosexuality.

So Kvothe gets taught to be awesome at fighting. To be fair, he does very clearly wind up being much less good at fighting than any of the actual Adem, there's a comedy sequence in which he gets his ass handed to him by a ten year old girl (although I kind of felt that this undermined the earlier point about how women in Ademre are better fighters than men – because we're clearly supposed to find the fact that Kvothe is beaten up by a girl funny and faintly emasculating, which makes the Adem's supposed respect for women warriors ring rather hollow). At the same time it's very clear that his two months of training in Ademre are going to make him better at fighting than anybody he is ever actually likely to get into a fight with, except for supernatural beings.

I think what bugged me most about the Ademre section was that it felt like this entire culture existed purely to provide an excuse for Kvothe to get good at fighting. These people who are utterly mistrustful of outsiders, incredibly paranoid about their secrets, and grounded in a social and philosophical ideals that Kvothe clearly finds completely alien never the less happily teach him their greatest secrets and formally initiate him into their society, and they do all of this despite the fact that he never shows even the slightest sign of having internalized (or even of remotely respecting) the ideals of the Adem. He never, for example, seems to get over his habit of assuming that women are inherently less capable fighters than men (he feels particularly embarrassed at being beaten up by a young girl and later on he massacres a group of bandits and feels particularly guilty about the fact that they had two women with them).

To put it another way, the overwhelming impression I got from The Name of the Wind was that while over the course of the novel, Kvothe acquired a great many skills, he didn't actually learn anything. He acquires awesome sex skills from Felurian, but doesn't learn anything about interacting with women except how to get what he wants out of them. He acquires awesome martial-arts skills from the Adem, but doesn't learn to really appreciate or understand their culture (except insofar as he comes to appreciate the benefits of being surrounded by hot women who treat sex as little more than a handshake). He doesn't really grow or change or develop in any meaningful way, he just gets more powerful – he's like the protagonist in a CRPG: he wanders around doing arbitrary-seeming quests and unlocking more powers. In every meaningful sense, the Kvothe who returns from Ademre at the end of The Wise Man's Fear is exactly the same as the Kvothe who was homeless on the streets of Tarbean in The Name of the Wind.

Denna

Something I've avoided talking about thus far is Denna. Denna is Kvothe's love interest.

I'm really not sure what to say about Denna. Kvothe meets her early in the first book, and then she's in and out of his life like the wind (oh do you see). Kvothe's love for Denna is pretty much his biggest drive in the book – even more so than his pursuit of the Chandrian, which is frankly lacklustre at times. Basically it's your traditional Nice Guy Protagonist in love with Mysterious High Class Prostitute story – it's sort of like Moulin Rouge or Mal/Inara in Firefly. They have lots of conversations in which she tells him how much she values him and how brilliant it is that he isn't like other guys who just want to control her and tie her down, and Kvothe spends a lot of time narrating to himself how brilliant it is that he isn't like other guys who just want to control Denna and tie her down. Meanwhile he spends the majority of his free time fantasising about how great it could be if he could control her and tie her down.

Okay, that's slightly unfair, but only slightly. In this type of narrative in general, the mistake writers wind up making is always in presenting the problem as strategic in nature. Try to tie the girl down, and she'll run away, so it's more practical to take a softly-softly approach so that you can get what you want. The notion that what the girl herself wants might enter into the equation is always rather a side issue. It is taken for granted that Kvothe will only be able to truly “be with” Denna if he can get her to stop running and stay with him – he never even considers the possibility that they could have a relationship in which she simply retains the independence she seems to value so highly.

I don't think the Denna thing would bother me if it weren't for the fact that Rothfuss' women are so uniformly … fneh. Pre-Felurian, they're basically all desexualised and childlike (like Auri, the quirky pixie girl who lives in the Underthing) or else Mysterious Gatekeepers Of The Mystic Lands of The Sex (like Fela, Devi, and all of the other hot women who fancy Kvothe without him realizing). Post-Felurian, the Mystery has gone out of the non-childlike women, but the Gatekeepers of the Lands of The Sex they remain.

I don't want to make too big a thing out of this (particularly since if I did this would apparently be evidence that I knew nothing about music, or love, or Patrick Rothfuss) The Kingkiller Chronicles is just generally not great for women. It has a fair few female characters in it who are interesting, but their interestingness is somewhat undermined by their total obsession with (which always includes sexual interest in) Kvothe.

In Conclusion: Follow Through

The Kingkiller Chronicles is a serious Fantasy series for serious Fantasy readers. I know it is, because it keeps telling me it is.

Each volume opens and closes with a section called A Silence of Three Parts, this chapter is always slightly different, but it always ends with the following line:

It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.

It's this line that sets my expectations for the series. It will be serious, it will be melancholy, it will chart the tragedy of a man who did great and terrible things.

But it has no follow through.

So he gets expelled from the university, but it in no way stops him accessing the university. He's poor, but never so poor that he can't afford everything he could possibly need. He's of low birth, but nobody who isn't clearly evil reacts badly to him because of it. He wanders blithely into faerie and is none the worse for wear. He encounters a society in which everybody has casual, unprotected sex with everybody else, and this apparently creates a society completely free of sexually transmitted diseases. He rescues two girls from a gang of rapists, and briefly muses that they will now be unable to find husbands, but when he returns them to their home village virtually everybody expresses a twenty-first century, non-victim-blaming attitude.

The Wise Man's Fear is nine hundred and ninety four pages of setup, foreshadowing and copout. Kvothe wanders a world which exists only as a backdrop for him, and interacts with people who exist only to flatter him (either with their irrational hatred or their equally irrational adoration). It is a shallow, superficial text pandering to shallow, superficial fantasies. If it was three hundred pages shorter, and less portentously written, I'd recommend it unreservedly as a way to indulge your inner fourteen-year-old.

I have no doubt that The Wise Man's Fear will take its place alongside The Name of the Wind in the canon of modern Fantasy. I'll just sit here with my palm over my face.

Themes:

Books

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Sci-fi / Fantasy

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Wardog

at 19:27 on 2011-04-13I, wow, fail.

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Melissa G.

at 20:25 on 2011-04-13*facepalm*

No, really, that's kind of all I've got. I'm just sort of sitting here going, "I-what-but-it..." *throws up hands and walks away*

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Orion

at 20:48 on 2011-04-13My first reaction was to smugly proclaim that I've already written the story Name of the Wind evidently pretended to be--which is true. I was 14, so it was terrible for other reasons, but I like to think I stuck to the "myth is less than reality" thing pretty effectively.

My second was to realize, to my shame, that I also wrote most of the story Wise Man's Fear apparently is. This has me wondering: is the "wish-fulfillment" angle separable from the "sexism" one? If you've committed yourself to a hypertalented male protagonist whose powerset explicitly includes charisma, do you just stop pretending to care about authentic depictions of women, or what?

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 20:52 on 2011-04-13Why does the cover appear to feature a Jedi?

I'm sorry but you do not get to bore my tits off with trivialities for three hundred and sixty pages (for those of you keeping score at home that's twenty pages more than the entirety of The God of Small Things)

Oh my god

The God of Small Things.

A viable die-able age. HOW EVERYONE SHOULD BE LOVED AND HOW MUCH. Fffffffuuuu that book.

See, I never read the first Kingkiller book because it sounded precisely like the stuff I'd hate, but people keep raving on and on about it and I don't get it. Even the backcover bit sounds incredibly obnoxious: "oho look how clever I am by LAMPSHADING my GARY STU qualities. SEE? SEEEEE."

Jesus that post-coital exchange. No one can convince me to read Rothfuss. Ever. Ever. This, this right here? This is shit writing. This is stupid writing. Anyone who praises Rothfuss as whatever can go take a leap.

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Dan H

at 22:20 on 2011-04-13

Oh my god The God of Small Things. A viable die-able age. HOW EVERYONE SHOULD BE LOVED AND HOW MUCH. Fffffffuuuu that book.

Is that a "I hated God of Small Things" or an "I really liked God of Small Things"? I kind of can't tell.

See, I never read the first Kingkiller book because it sounded precisely like the stuff I'd hate, but people keep raving on and on about it and I don't get it. Even the backcover bit sounds incredibly obnoxious: "oho look how clever I am by LAMPSHADING my GARY STU qualities. SEE? SEEEEE."

It's very clever-clever, I thought that the first book just about got away with it, but the second just spiralled into a pit of stupid.

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Dan H

at 23:47 on 2011-04-13

This has me wondering: is the "wish-fulfillment" angle separable from the "sexism" one? If you've committed yourself to a hypertalented male protagonist whose powerset explicitly includes charisma, do you just stop pretending to care about authentic depictions of women, or what?

The glib answer to "is wish fulfillment separable from sexism" is "only if you have sexist wishes."

To be more specific and hopefully more helpful, I think it depends on how your handle your character's charisma. Just because somebody is charismatic, that doesn't mean that women have to throw themselves at him (any more than it means men have to throw themselves at him - assuming your character isn't so supernaturally gorgeous that they overcome people's sexuality, it seems reasonable that they wouldn't overcome people's general preferences either). Writing charismatic characters in *general* is really hard, because they can easily come across as somebody people like for no particular reason (like John Sheridan or for that matter Kvothe).

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http://koboldwhisperer.livejournal.com/

at 02:32 on 2011-04-14Uhg, this sounds horrible. And surprise, surprise, the guys at Penny-Arcade

loved it.

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 07:10 on 2011-04-14I hated

The God of Small Things

like burning, random incest and all.

koboldwhisperer: hurrgh Gabe and Tycho. What a pair of toxic wads.

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Arthur B

at 10:02 on 2011-04-14

Now yes, it takes a lot out of him and yes, he actually does it using “sympathy” not what Kvothe thinks of as “real” magic but since to a real-world reader as well as to pretty much everybody in the actual setting, sympathy is real magic anyway, the distinction is somewhat lost.

Wait, is Rothfuss seriously suggesting that there's nothing magical about

sympathetic magic

? Or is sympathy something different from that?

Either way: wow, this sounds shit. At least Moorcock (on his better days) had the decency to give his wish-fulfilment figures a hard time. Yes, Elric is teh sex and is good at fighting and magic and is really smart, but early on in his career he's really kind of a terrible person, later on he wants to change but is already too dependent on Stormbringer to rid himself of it, and eventually he's completely unable to protect anyone or anything he loves when it really counts. Is there any sign or hint that Kvothe is ever going to

fail

at something in a manner which he can't recover from within a hundred pages or so?

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Dan H

at 10:24 on 2011-04-14

Wait, is Rothfuss seriously suggesting that there's nothing magical about sympathetic magic? Or is sympathy something different from that?

There's a little bit more to it than that - Rothfuss' "sympathy" is quasi-scientific in a way that's actually quite interesting (it obeys conservation of energy, involves calculus and is treated by the people who study it as a form of engineering which it sort of is). "Real" magic is Naming, which is the proper "do anything and blow anything up" type of magic.

Uhg, this sounds horrible. And surprise, surprise, the guys at Penny-Arcade loved it.

To be fair, the actual cartoon looks more like it's mocking the book than praising it. I mean the title is "when Larry met Mary" which I sort of assume is implying that Kvothe comes out as a Mary Sue version of Leisure Suit Larry.

They might have *also* really liked it, but the cartoon is actually pretty spot on.

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Wardog

at 10:28 on 2011-04-14If you have sex with two ninjas have you come before you even knew they were there...*boom-tish*

Generally very much NOT a fan of PA but I did like the cartoon - even if they liked the book, at least they were vaguely aware of its absurdity.

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Dan H

at 10:37 on 2011-04-14Actually what I find really weird about the reaction on Penny Arcade is that Gabe at least seems to have been unremittingly positive about the book despite not actually liking anything about it.

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Arthur B

at 10:41 on 2011-04-14

>Actually what I find really weird about the reaction on Penny Arcade is that Gabe at least seems to have been unremittingly positive about the book despite not actually liking anything about it.

Sort of justifies the title of this article, doesn't it?

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Dan H

at 11:00 on 2011-04-14

Sort of justifies the title of this article, doesn't it?

One might almost have suspected it of being deliberate...

I'm rather pleased that Thomas Wagner over at SFReviews.net

shares many of my misgivings

- he also opens with a particularly cringeworthy list of quotes from other reviewers which would have been hilarious if it wasn't so indicative.

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Ash

at 11:09 on 2011-04-14I'm really, really glad I decided to not read these books after I learned they involved 'demons' called

skraelings

.

Seriously, how hard can it be to put your made-up and not-so-made-up names in a search engine and see what turns out?

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Dan H

at 16:09 on 2011-04-14

I'm really, really glad I decided to not read these books after I learned they involved 'demons' called skraelings.

Ooh dear, that isn't good at all.

Worse, I doubt that it was wholly accidental, Rothfuss is clearly interested in etymology, so it makes me think he *probably* did it at least semi-deliberately.

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Ash

at 18:45 on 2011-04-14How the hell do you do something like that accidentally on purpose? WHY the hell do you do something like that?

It just baffles me that no one called him out on his shit.

He's not getting a penny from me until he apologises. And maybe not eveen then.

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Dan H

at 18:48 on 2011-04-14I suspect the way you do it accidentally on purpose is you find out that there's a term that appears in Icelandic sagas which means roughly "thin, scrawny things" and is used in lines like: "After the first winter summer came, and they became aware of Skrælings, who came out of the forest in a large flock" (thanks Wiki) and you think "hey, that's a cool name for my thin, scrawny alien creatures that are going to come out of the forest in a large flock in the first book". You just forget that it's also basically a racial slur.

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Ash

at 19:58 on 2011-04-14I don't think the term itself is a racial slur (although I admit I only knew of the 'written skin' etymology), it's just its use in this context that's particularly wtf.

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Arthur B

at 21:36 on 2011-04-14To be fair, he could be setting up some sort of reveal that the Skraelings are totally human after all.

Though it doesn't sound like it's worth reading through thousands of pages of that stuff to find out whether that's the case.

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 22:22 on 2011-04-14

To be fair, he could be setting up some sort of reveal that the Skraelings are totally human after all.

Lord, even if there weren't--I'm guessing each book averages at over 900 pages each--nearly 3,000 pages between you and that reveal, I'd still be hard-pressed to imagine anything more asinine. It's not even a major part of the plot after all, is it?

Ash: heh, pennies. I've torrented books by terrible writers before for lulz, but when I actually loaded up the files to read, I discovered I had no interest in going past page two. There is such a thing as authors so off-putting that they aren't even worth reading for free. Also considering Rothfuss is currently a genre darling, the chances of anyone calling him out on either this thing or his female characters is slim to none. But hell, the latter happened to Joe Abercrombie, so maybe there's hope (and he even wrote slightly better female characters after the fact, though that's not saying much).

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Dan H

at 22:59 on 2011-04-14

To be fair, he could be setting up some sort of reveal that the Skraelings are totally human after all.

Since the Skraelings are eight-legged and crablike, that would be quite the twist, particularly since they're a throwaway in book one.

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http://kellicat.livejournal.com/

at 01:05 on 2011-04-15I've always wondered about all the praise people heap on this series because to me it sounds just like another example of male wish-fulfillment in epic fantasy and epic fantasy suffers from no lack of it.

What gets me is when people rush to squeal and drool over male epic fantasy authors like Rothfuss for their originality and bravery and marginalize the women who write epic fantasy and dark medieval fantasy by refusing to discuss their books or dismissing them as "women's stories" which is so ignorant it makes me want to scream.

Carol Berg has three complete epic fantasy series to her name, but how many people have heard of her? K.J. Taylor has written a dark fantasy trilogy with a villain protagonist, a unique medieval setting, and successful deconstruction of the special animal companion/chosen human relationship so prevalent in fantasy (It benefits the griffins as much is does the humans, politics and class play an important role in who a griffin chooses as their human companion, they don't adore human beings unconditionally, etc.), but how many people even know that it exists? What about Michelle West and her Sun Sword series? I only found out about it by reading a blog post by the author herself linked by Carol Berg to her own blog.

All the series above have their flaws, but while most critics either play up the flaws and ignore the things that the author does right (Michelle West) or ignore them altogether (K.J. Taylor, Carol Berg for a long time), they rush to gloss over the flaws of male authors like Rothfuss and Martin and I'm just sick of it.

Of course you can't ever really say, for certain, how a book would have been received if you reversed the genders of its author and protagonist, but something tells me that a book about a red-haired girl who plays the lute and becomes the most powerful sorceress who ever lived by the time she's seventeen, and who has a series of exciting sexy encounters with supernatural creatures, would not have been quite so readily inducted into the canon of a genre still very uncertain about its mainstream reputation.

Sarah Micklem's books

Firethorn

and

Widlfire

are books about a red-headed peasant girl who manages to have a knight fall in love with her, has fire magic gifted to her by the gods and has an extensive knowledge of herbs and healing. It's also a dark medieval fantasy that isn't afraid to hurt its protagonist and make her and everyone around her suffer. it's well-regarded critically, but it's not nearly praised as Martin or Rothfuss's fantasy series. Just a warning, there is a rape early on the first book, but I thought that the author handled it well. It's one the few fantasy series that manages to tackle medieval misogyny without making me want to throw a cluebat at the author. YMMV though.

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http://cofax7.livejournal.com/

at 05:54 on 2011-04-15

What gets me is when people rush to squeal and drool over male epic fantasy authors like Rothfuss for their originality and bravery and marginalize the women who write epic fantasy and dark medieval fantasy by refusing to discuss their books or dismissing them as "women's stories" which is so ignorant it makes me want to scream.

Or like Sherwood Smith and Kate Elliott, both of whom are writing the kind of complex, meaty, plot-heavy stories with strong world-building that the fans and critics purport to love. Except neither of them get anywhere near the kind of press that people like Rothfuss and Martin do.

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 10:47 on 2011-04-15Since we're going there, what about NK Jemisin's

100K Kingdoms

? Yeine doesn't tick all the boxes: she only gets the "hot sex with creator god," "chosen for special destiny before she was born" and "chieftain of her tribe despite exhibiting no leadership skills whatsoever" down (can't recall her age but I think he's in her early twenties, tops? Nineteen maybe?), but by the end of her story she turns into an honest-to-goodness creator deity. Jemisin is taken pretty seriously by critics as well as sf/f fans, and was nominated for the Nebula. Popular opinion of her writing is overwhelmingly, absolutely positive; she's praised for amazing world-building and characterization and super-duper-clever framing narrative.

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Dan H

at 11:06 on 2011-04-15So we're rapidly coming to the conclusion that, in fact, the SF/F community will embrace silly Mary-Sue characters regardless of gender?

That's fairly positive, I suppose.

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 11:37 on 2011-04-15It's more progressive than "the SF/F community will embrace silly Sues when they're male but decry their female counterparts," I guess? Yeine's even black!

(Despite my low, low opinion of Jemisin's novels I didn't actually think Yeine was a Sue--my problems with those books lay elsewhere--but when you sit down and list all her characteristics...)

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Ash

at 12:57 on 2011-04-15I was under the impression that The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was successful because it was a novel with a PoC protagonist written by a PoC author that came out just after RaceFail09.

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http://gareth-rees.livejournal.com/

at 13:45 on 2011-04-15An alternative theory. The fan fiction community skews female, and it's the fan writers and critics who put the spotlight on Mary Sue. So it should not surprise us that Meyer's audience were quicker to identify and comment on the wish-fulfilment aspects of her work than Rothfuss's audience.

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http://cammalot.livejournal.com/

at 16:09 on 2011-04-15

Yeine definitely is not black

, but she is a person of color, so the point still stands. (I'm linking to the article that underlines why I felt the need to point that out.)

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Dan H

at 17:10 on 2011-04-15

Yeine definitely is not black, but she is a person of color, so the point still stands. (I'm linking to the article that underlines why I felt the need to point that out.)

I really can't get my head around the idea of an African-American fiction section *at all*. I mean maybe I'm hopelessly naive but I'm pretty sure we don't have anything like that in this country (although to be fair and less laurel-resty that might be because of a tendency to leave black writers and characters out of bookstores entirely, rather than as a result of a more enlightened view of race politics).

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http://cammalot.livejournal.com/

at 17:18 on 2011-04-15Once upon a time it was useful. Now it's just an excellent way to make sure that black writers only get read by black readers -- less than 12 percent of the U.S popluation -- and therefore have a drastically reduced shelf like, reinforcing the idea that "black books don't sell." It is THE main reason I'm not weeping over the closure of Borders here -- they seem to be the last bastion of such a section, where I live.

Barnes and Noble have an "African-American Interest" section, but it's in with all the other sociology and anthroplogy sections, like Native American History and Judaica. Their fiction is categorized by, y'know,

category,

not race of author.

At one point, my local Borders was lumping Zane's erotica and "urban fiction," James Baldwin's novels AND essays, Octavia Butler, and Barack Obama's memoir together on the same shelf. (One shelf that was very close to the register to keep Us Folk from stealin'. Sigh.)

I went to a manager about it, and she gave me the most crestfallen look ever and told me that they had all tried, but it was a decision of the higher-ups.

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http://cammalot.livejournal.com/

at 17:37 on 2011-04-15(Oh, and yeah, I never saw that kind of thing in the U.K. either, not even in Borders. Granted, I haven't made an exhaustive study of the U.K. or anything.)

The funny thing about Borders here, too? Black British authors -- and Afro Caribbean, if I remember correctly -- were shelved right in with the "normal" fiction. (As were South Asian authors, Korean authors, South American, et cetera...) I definitely found Mike Gayle and the novel "Small Island" in with the mainstream fiction.

But I'm betting the U.K. publishing industry has undergone an entirely different sort of evolution. You'll still find, here, that some of the loudest advocates of having an Af Am section are African Americans, who want to have a shelf that "our children can look at, and feel proud, and know that they can accomplish things."

Which

was

in fact useful when I was a kid in the '70s. But now it hits the writers in the pocket and stands in the way of some of the social advances we need -- a greater variety of people writing a greater variety of experience (rather than depending on white writers to "get it right" all the time). We touched on that in the "Demon's Covenant" discussion.

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http://kellicat.livejournal.com/

at 20:56 on 2011-04-15I remembered N.K. Jemisin after I posted my comment, but unfortunately I can't remember any other women writing epic fantasy who's been embraced by fans and critics to the same extent so for now she stands as an exception to the general rule. Whether she represents a new trend or whether the fans will just go back to praising white men epic fantasy remains to be seen.

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Robinson L

at 15:06 on 2011-05-25

He rescues two girls from a gang of rapists, and briefly muses that they will now be unable to find husbands, but when he returns them to their home village virtually everybody expresses a twenty-first century, non-victim-blaming attitude.

The really depressing part is that even in the twenty-first century, such an attitude is still the exception rather than the rule.

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http://conquestsong.blogspot.com/

at 23:29 on 2011-07-01Excellent rant, you summed up everything I disliked about WMF and TNotW. I think Rothfuss has that gift where his writing is easy to read / easy to get sucked into -- thus, people rarely recognize or shrug away how shopworn and/or stupid the content actually is.

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Dan H

at 01:11 on 2011-07-02He's certainly very readable (he'd have to be given how *stupidly long* his work is) and I'd feel much, much more positive about his books if they weren't so critically acclaimed. Which I suppose boils down to a churlish sounding "I'd like this more if other people like it less" but - yeah, it's quite good for silly wish-fulfillment, but it's not the great work of lit-ter-at-ture that people are claiming it is.

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Steve Stirling at 07:47 on 2011-07-13Michelle West is definitely an awesome fantasy writer. Very cool person, too.

Yeah, Kvothe is a wish-fulfillment, but so what? So are Odysseus and Beowulf. The question is how well it's done.

BTW, the really creepy thing about TWILIGHT is not that the sixteen-year-old girl can totally charm the centuries-old vampire.

It's that a guy centuries old is still hanging around high school. Christ, I shook the dust of secondary education from my feet just as fast as I could.

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Arthur B

at 11:42 on 2011-07-13

Yeah, Kvothe is a wish-fulfillment, but so what? So are Odysseus and Beowulf. The question is how well it's done.

I think Dan has made a very coherent case here that it's not done very well at all. :)

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Dan H

at 15:00 on 2011-07-13

Yeah, Kvothe is a wish-fulfillment, but so what? So are Odysseus and Beowulf.

That's a fine soundbite, but I strongly suspect that it's also meaningless nonsense.

How, precisely, are Odysseus and Beowulf wish-fulfillment? Unless you're defining "wish-fulfillment" as "any narrative in which the protagonist possesses admirable qualities". For that matter I'm not even sure if the Ancient Greek or Anglo-Saxon mindset could even *accommodate* the concept of "wish fulfillment" as you or I understand it.

Whose wishes is Beowulf supposed to be fulfilling? Those of the Anglo-Saxons who originally told the story? Those of the monks who transcribed it and put in all the spurious Jesus references? Those of Ray Winstone?

I'd also point out that you're not really presenting an argument here. My complaint about the book is that it is NOTHING BUT juvenile wish-fulfillment. Even if we accept for the moment your assertion that Beowulf and the Odyssey contain ELEMENTS of wish-fulfilment that doesn't address the problem. If you make me a sandwich with no filling, and I complain that it contains nothing but bread, saying "all sandwiches contain bread" doesn't really address my complaint.

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Orion

at 18:21 on 2011-07-13Yeah, I can't get behind Odysseus as a wish fulfillment character either. He gets very little of what he wants over the course of his life, he solves only a handful of crises with his own talents, and frequently has to give up appealing things in the name of duty.

Okay, he does get to sex up a few supernatural women, but even those sex scenes are framed as disturbing and unpleasant experiences.

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Steve Stirling at 19:00 on 2011-07-13

I think Dan has made a very coherent case here that it's not done very well at all. :)

-- sure. Actually I agree with that; my point was that a Mary Sue isn't a bad thing -as such-.

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Steve Stirling at 19:04 on 2011-07-13

How, precisely, are Odysseus and Beowulf wish-fulfillment?

-- "Me, but much better". Odysseus is the "man of cunning mind", the omnicompetent all-rounder who can do everything pretty well, even if not as well as the specialists.

Of course, Achilles is wish-fulfillment too (Alexander the Great consciously modeled his life on him) but in a rather different sense. You might say that between them they encompassed different aspects of the Greek ideal man.

Beowulf is what a noble Anglo-Saxon of the warrior class wanted to be -- lucky, strong enough to rip a troll's arm off, fearless, honored by all men, faithful to his oaths...

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Cammalot

at 19:32 on 2011-07-13Isn't the Mary Sue phenomenon a function of bad writing by definition? Competence or even superness isn't Sueness by default. The plot warping its way around the character in defiance of logic, believeability, and reasonable genre conventions makes a Sue. If it's well done, it's not a Sue situation anymore.

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Wardog

at 19:58 on 2011-07-13

"Me, but much better". Odysseus is the "man of cunning mind", the omnicompetent all-rounder who can do everything pretty well, even if not as well as the specialists.

You seem to be looking at fictional constructs, who perform symbolic and cultural functions as well as literal ones, as RPG characters. I'm not sure you can look at characters from other times through a modern day lens - although you might argue that there's century-spanning human trait, which involves looking at imaginary people and wishing we were like them, ultimately it's neither a helpful nor a useful way to interpret ancient texts. They're not actually the superhero comics of their day.

Beowulf is what a noble Anglo-Saxon of the warrior class wanted to be -- lucky, strong enough to rip a troll's arm off, fearless, honored by all men, faithful to his oaths...

The who? The what? For what it's worth, Beowulf - in the form we have it - was archaic even its day. If it was about a warrior culture, which I think, on balance it probabably wasn't, it was about a warrior culture already long gone. And although I'm personally amused by the idea of a bunch of thanes sitting around the camp fire going "Hey, shaper, tell us the one about the guy who failed to kill a dragon like all the other mythic heroes, and who left no legacy whatsoever because in the face of time all men are futile and weak because we totally want to be that guy" I can't readily imagine it.

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Orion

at 20:20 on 2011-07-13I've always thought that the important part of a wish fulfillment character wasn't that they had astounding personal qualities, but rather that they were able to use those qualities to, well, fulfill wishes. In fact I'd go so far as to say that having the positive qualities is only a means to the end, because there are wish fulfillment characters with no discernible positive qualities who get to live the dream through luck or contrivance (Bella Swan).

So show me an omnicompetent person, and I'm not going to call them a wish-fulfillment character unless they also gets to live a good life. Now, I recognize that what counts as a good life is a little complicated. Plenty of wish-fulfillment heroes spend most of their time in dire circumstances having supposedly horrible things happen to them, but because it's fantasy violence and fantasy suffering we don't care overmuch. What matters is whether the scenes where they get to live the dream are there and how those scenes are presented.

So looking at whether the Odyssey would work as a wish-fulfillment story for a modern audience (setting aside the question of how the Greeks would have read it), the evidence breaks down something like this:

Pro: Rules a kingdom, wins a war, has a beautiful and devoted wife, has the favor of the gods.

Con: Separated from his home for 20 years, rather more cursed than blessed on the whole, doomed to leave home AGAIN after returning and die in a foreign land.

Pro: Sexes up goddesses, outwits monsters, wins archery contest through special gifts.

Con: Doesn't seem to be attracted to most of the women he meets, has to give up the one potentially appealing one (Nausicaa), and genereally feels harried and put upon more than triumphant and cocky.

Ultimately it's a judgment call, but I'm swayed more by the con points.

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Steve Stirling at 20:40 on 2011-07-13

The plot warping its way around the character in defiance of logic, believeability, and reasonable genre conventions makes a Sue. If it's well done, it's not a Sue situation anymore.

-- I see your point, but disagree.

What's logical or "believable" in the career of any of the epic heroes?

You're valorizing the conventions of Modernist fiction; but those are just conventions.

They're not even particularly "realistic" in any real sense; just pinched, narrow and self-obsessed in a sort of pickle-up-the-ass way.

Take a look at the careers of Genghis Khan or Tamerlane or Cortez or Pizzaro. Leaving aside the supernatural element, they're every bit as fantastic and full of outrageous coincidences and victories against incredible odds and acts of insane daring and so forth as most fantasy fiction.

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Cammalot

at 20:45 on 2011-07-13

What's logical or "believable" in the career of any of the epic heroes?

But you're leaving out the part where I *very deliberately* said "reasonable genre conventions." I'm not privileging anything -- Beowulf and the Odyssey very much follow the conventions of their art form/folkloric patterns, etc.

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Steve Stirling at 20:50 on 2011-07-13Kyra:

although you might argue that there's century-spanning human trait, which involves looking at imaginary people and wishing we were like them,

-- when archaelogists dug the site of Mari, a city destroyed by Hammurabi of Babylon in around 1800 BCE, they found an unopened (clay envelope around a clay tablet) letter.

Breaking the envelope, they read the words that no human eye had seen for over 3000 years.

It began: "This is the third letter I have written you about the silver you owe me for the sheep..."

Different cultures are different, but some things are eternal. Wishing you were luckier, smarter, stronger, braver and better-looking than you are is one of them.

For what it's worth, Beowulf - in the form we have it - was archaic even its day. If it was about a warrior culture, which I think, on balance it probabably wasn't, it was about a warrior culture already long gone.

-- certain -aspects- of it were archaic; it's obviously been de-paganized a bit.

(Incidentally it can be dated to the mid-sixth century by references to historical events that got written down.)

But the basic social system was that with which a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon audience would have been familiar; the lord, his sworn companions, the hall, the symbolic exchange of gifts, and so forth. The dragons and trolls were just cool exciting stuff to make it more exotic and exciting.

Yeah, it has a doom-laded ending. Well, ancient Germanic poetry, natch.

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Steve Stirling at 20:57 on 2011-07-13Life Imitates Art division: when Cortez' men came over the pass and saw the Aztec cities below them, with their pyramids and canals and palaces and hummingbird-feather cloaks, the first thing they said to each other was:

"This is just like "Amadis of Gaul"!"

"Amadis" was a late-medieval romance full of valliant knights, wicked sorcerors, heroic quests, and beautiful princesses. The sort of thing your average penniless would-be hidalgo whiled away the hours with.

These guys were living out a heroic-fantasy, sword-and-sorcery adventure in their own heads (complete with evil priests). LARPing fanboys with Toledo swords shedding real blood.

Art Imitates Life: The Kull/Conan story that Howard wrote about the assassination attempt with the mad poet and so forth is taken, almost word for word (right down to the hastily-donned armor not laced up at the side) from the death of Pizzaro.

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Steve Stirling at 21:08 on 2011-07-13

Ultimately it's a judgment call, but I'm swayed more by the con points.

-- well, there's where the target audience comes in.

I found the book this all started with a little boring; not because the hero was so super, but because he wasn't -tested- enough.

(Incidentally, this is the basic reason you have to be careful in what abilities you give your protagonist -- you have to have the appropriate kryptonite waiting. It's also a drawback when you finally make him/her the ruler or whatever; after that, life is mosty meetings and reports. Not that Aragorn exits stage right after Gandalf crowns him.)

In the case of Homer, the target audience would be people who'd fought with shield and spear to the death. (An ancient Greek proverb went: "Even Hercules can't fight two.")

To be believable enough for the wish-fulfillment element to be -satisfying-, he had to put the hero through the wringer.

Also, a lot of the wish-fulfillment element was the desire to BE a hero; and a hero had to do mighty deeds and overcome terrible trials. The Greeks were just as aware as us that "adventure" was "someone else in deep shit, far away".

Because the Man from Ithaka is a mythic hero, everything he does is heightened; he doesn't just fight Illyrian pirates, he fights a Cyclops, and so forth.

Reading through the book, I did get the very strong impression that the author had never had to actually fight, for example.

Again, I'm not saying this is a good book; I'm saying it's a badly written one in some respects but that the hero's abilities aren't necessarily one of them.

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Cammalot

at 21:11 on 2011-07-13Steve, I'm not following what you're actually criticizing about the original article at all anymore.

You seem to be saying that lots of literature across time and culture contained outsized exploits and larger-than-life heroes, and so the presence of these things... makes any book good? Because I do not see Dan arguing that the presence of these things automatically makes a book bad.

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Wardog

at 21:19 on 2011-07-13

Different cultures are different, but some things are eternal. Wishing you were luckier, smarter, stronger, braver and better-looking than you are is one of them.

You can argue this point if you like, it's neither provable nor disprovable, like most of the generic statements you have brought to this discussion. However, attempting to support it by a "one size fits all" application of historical texts strikes me as absurd.

(Incidentally it can be dated to the mid-sixth century by references to historical events that got written down.)

The story can, the manuscript is not, but ultimately we can't really make judgements about an oral tradition to which we don't have access because, um, it was oral.

Yeah, it has a doom-laded ending.

I would point out that the ending of a text has something on an impact of the general atmosphere. And actually it's doom-laden throughout. The ending is merely the culmination of all the futility that has gone before.

But the basic social system was that with which a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon audience would have been familiar; the lord, his sworn companions, the hall, the symbolic exchange of gifts, and so forth. The dragons and trolls were just cool exciting stuff to make it more exotic and exciting.

Well, yes, these are familiar tropes - but surely the way they are deployed in in the text supports my point, not yours? If you take all these elements - standard elements of heroic literature - and set about showing them to be hollow, I fail to see how this makes Beowulf the sort of dude any anglo-saxon would aspire to be? You'll be trying to tell me Brythnoth was a great king next.

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Orion

at 21:42 on 2011-07-13To be believable enough for the wish-fulfillment element to be -satisfying-, he had to put the hero through the wringer.

You seem to be conflating two types of story which, while often overlapping, ought to be conceptually separate.

Some stories get their punch from a structure that for lack of a better term I'll call redemption. (I don't mean that in a moral sense; I considered catharsis but that word has too much baggage.) In this kind of story, the protagonists main function is to suffer though a great deal of shit, which causes us to feel sympathetic towards them and be invested in finding out what happens to them. Only after the tension has been raised by setback after loss after betrayal are they allowed to win out, in an ending which the reader experiences as a euphoric relief/release.

Other stories are primarily about vicariously enjoying good things and experiences in the protagonist's life. They get to have and do the things the reader wants, and it's that pre-existing desire in the reader that makes the story compelling. This is what I would call a wish-fulfillment story.

Obviously it's possible to both in the same story. You can tell a story about someone suffering ignominously for 90% of the text and then getting a big house with a fast car and a hot spouse at the end. To some degree you can even mix techniques in the middle of a story, having your character take a quick break to shag a sex demon in between episodes of torture and failure. But I think to a certain degree they undermine each other because identifying with and sympathizing with a character are very different levels of distance.

Anyway, despite the frequent overlap, you can find examples of "pure" types if you look. Although I've never watched an entire James Bond film straight through, what I've seen leads to me think they are nearly pure wish-fulfillment stories. I've heard he gets captured and tortured occasionally, but whenever I've watched he's been confident and unfazed essentially the entire time, and he gets to enjoy fine drinks and casual sex throughout, not just at the end.

My example "pure redemption" story would be the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The main character is a bitter divorced leper who is thrown into a fantasy world where he spends most of his time being cursed or tortured, helplessly watching people die, or committing rape and then feeling bad about it. Watching him finally choose good, find his power, and defeat the big bad is satisfying because what went before was so horrible. But his reward for doing so is... going back to Earth to be a slightly less bitter but still ostracized leper. He never gets anything the typical reader wants.

I think the Odyssey is an almost pure redemption story with minor wish fulfillment elements.

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Wardog

at 22:06 on 2011-07-13

So looking at whether the Odyssey would work as a wish-fulfillment story for a modern audience (setting aside the question of how the Greeks would have read it), the evidence breaks down something like this:

I like this game! I was very amused - I come down on Team Con as well. I do not aspire to Odysseus despite his aparently decent starting stats. Let's do Jesus next!

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Cammalot

at 22:21 on 2011-07-13

Let's do Jesus next!

Depends on if you buy the deus ex machina ending. ;-)

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Steve Stirling at 22:23 on 2011-07-13Cammalot:

You seem to be saying that lots of literature across time and culture contained outsized exploits and larger-than-life heroes, and so the presence of these things... makes any book good? Because I do not see Dan arguing that the presence of these things automatically makes a book bad.

-- Well, I got the impression that Dan -was- saying that enough outsized exploits -did- make it automatically bad.

My slant wasn't complete disagreement; simply that the reason the book was bad was that the hero's trials and challenges weren't -in proportion- to his abilities.

Hence the wish fulfillment element failed on its own terms because (to my mind) it's the overcoming of serious obstacles which makes the hero's ultimate triumph (or heroic death) satisfying -as- wish fulfillment.

Basically, it seemed to me that Dan was criticizing the book for not being more like a Modernist (anti-heroic) text. Perhaps I was wrong about that?

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Steve Stirling at 22:27 on 2011-07-13

The story can, the manuscript is not, but ultimately we can't really make judgements about an oral tradition to which we don't have access because, um, it was oral.

-- Beowulf isn't the only example of ancient Germanic heroic poetry to which we have access.

The continuity over broad areas of time and space indicates that, "originally" (say in the Migration period, which is when Beowulf is "set" to the extent that it happens in the real world at all) we're looking at a single interacting culture sphere, with stories and storytellers moving from area to area.

Eg., the very late Icelandic poems contain persons and stories dating to the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries; Ermannaric the Ostrogoth, for example, or Theodoric. Or the Niebelungen legend and the breaking of the Burgund kingdom by the Huns, which originates in the Rhineland.

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Steve Stirling at 22:33 on 2011-07-13

I think the Odyssey is an almost pure redemption story with minor wish fulfillment elements.

-- I see your point, but I think you're missing the essence of the "heroic quest".

The hero doesn't just have bad shit happen to him, he has bad shit happen and deals with it -in a heroic way-.

Odysseus suffers shiprweck, etc., and meets each challenge with heroic courage, heroic cunning, etc.

That's what -makes- him a hero, and worthy of identification. That's why the audience would want to "be" him.

At the end, he gets a reward. But it isn't any the less a wish fulfillment/identification story if he dies a heroic death; because the wish is to BE a hero. And heroes die.

It is genuinely possible to ardently desire a heroic death; it just isn't as common in this culture, currently.

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Steve Stirling at 22:34 on 2011-07-13

My example "pure redemption" story would be the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

God, how I hated that book. DIE, ALREADY, YOU LOSER! was always my reaction to Covenant.

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Orion

at 22:45 on 2011-07-13I thought the article criticized the way Kvothe's abilities are presented and justified more than the fact that he has extraordinary abilities. Let's look at the two big example: fighting skills and faery interludes.

Kvothe and Achilles are both young men of mysterious origin with legendary fighting skills and powerful magic. But Achilles is the iconic hero of his culture. His fighting skills are something he would reasonably have the opportunity to learn, and his use of them (his behavior in general, in fact) is constrained by the customs and standards of his culture. Kvothe, on the other hand, somehow obtains skills which properly belong to another culture and thereafter wanders the world endowed with asskicking which his rivals have no access to and which does not come with any significant obligations.

Or look at the handling of the supernatural. The Homeric heroes may be extremely good at what they do, but when there's a god or curse or prophecy in play they have to abide by it. Achilles will die if he fights in this war, just as Kvothe will supposedly die is he sleeps with Felurian. One of them escapes their fate and the other doesn't. And when Odyseeus hooks up with Calypso, she uses him until he falls into a deep sleep and he only escapes due to divine intervention.

I don't know, maybe that's what you're getting at when you say Kvothe doesn't face big enough challenges? That Calypso is obviously "more powerful" than Felurian and Paris more skilled than anyone Kvothe fights? I guess that works, but I'd rather think of it not in terms of facing bigger challenges, but rather having to follow the rules while doing it.

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Wardog

at 22:47 on 2011-07-13

Beowulf isn't the only example of ancient Germanic heroic poetry to which we have access.

Yes, I know, but you specifically cited Beowulf as an example of historical wish-fulfillment fantasy. I have, I hope, explained why it isn't.

Eg., the very late Icelandic poems contain persons and stories dating to the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries; Ermannaric the Ostrogoth, for example, or Theodoric. Or the Niebelungen legend and the breaking of the Burgund kingdom by the Huns, which originates in the Rhineland

Indeed, these are examples of late Icelandic poems. Congratulations.

However, this is a *different* heroic tradition - and although it is referenced pretty explicitely in Beowulf, it is only to emphasise how Beowulf himself *differs* from these heroes.

And a list of texts is not an argument as to why any of them may be interpreted as historical wish fulfillment fantasy either.

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Dan H

at 23:00 on 2011-07-13

Basically, it seemed to me that Dan was criticizing the book for not being more like a Modernist (anti-heroic) text. Perhaps I was wrong about that?

Ah, I think this is the heart of our disagreement. To an extet I *was* criticising the book for not being a modernist, anti-heroic text, because I felt that the book was *setting itself up* to be a modernist, anti-heroic text and was being treated by the SF/F community as if it *was* a modernist, anti-heroic text. I felt that only by *being* a modernist, anti-heroic text could the book begin to deal with the themes it so promisingly raised in book one.

I have absolutely nothing against pure wish-fulfillment (although I prefer it to come in packages rather smaller than 997 pages) but I don't personally find it terribly interesting, or worthy of attention.

I'd also suggest that we might be using "wish fulfillment" slightly differently. A lot of what you call "wish fulfillment" is what I would simply call "myth" - it is true that a great deal of mythology presented figures who the audience was expected to admire or aspire to be like (as do, for example, morality plays) but that is not the same as wish fulfillment, which is a more modern concept to do with appealing to the personal fantasies of its target market. It's not about providing you with a satisfying narrative in which a sympathetic character with whom you identify overcomes aversity, it's about provding you with an avatar who you can imagine yourself being, and having that avatar go through the motions of doing things you wish you could do.

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Steve Stirling at 23:12 on 2011-07-13Orion:

I don't know, maybe that's what you're getting at when you say Kvothe doesn't face big enough challenges? That Calypso is obviously "more powerful" than Felurian and Paris more skilled than anyone Kvothe fights? I guess that works, but I'd rather think of it not in terms of facing bigger challenges, but rather having to follow the rules while doing it.

-- I think we're saying pretty much the same thing here, just using different terminology.

Kvorthe's abilities are so out of proportion to the background that they break the narrative frame of the story.

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Steve Stirling at 23:19 on 2011-07-13

However, this is a *different* heroic tradition - and although it is referenced pretty explicitely in Beowulf, it is only to emphasise how Beowulf himself *differs* from these heroes.

-- I'd say it's different flavors of the same tradition.

Obviously they're drawing on a common pool of tropes and styles and stories, with which the creator and the audience are assumed to be familiar. Beowulf is, after all, set in what's now Sweden and from the internal evidence was hundreds of years old when the manuscript was written down, whenever that was.

This necessarily implies that at the time Beowulf was circulating in Anglo-Saxon England, a lot of -other- stories deriving from the same corpus were too, versions of the Niebelungen story or the tale of Wayland, and quasi-historical stuff like "Burnt Finnsburg". Doubtless there were versions of Beowulf circulating in Scandinavia.

We have a (fairly) complete text of Beowulf essentially by accident; we don't have most of the others, also essentially by accident.

Beowulf is in a coversation with the other stories. It differs in some respects, and shares others, and obviously the audience enjoyed listening to it.

And the others as well.

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Steve Stirling at 23:23 on 2011-07-13

it is true that a great deal of mythology presented figures who the audience was expected to admire or aspire to be like (as do, for example, morality plays) but that is not the same as wish fulfillment, which is a more modern concept to do with appealing to the personal fantasies of its target market. It's not about providing you with a satisfying narrative in which a sympathetic character with whom you identify overcomes aversity, it's about provding you with an avatar who you can imagine yourself being, and having that avatar go through the motions of doing things you wish you could do.

-- I really don't see a fundamental (as opposed to flavor) difference here.

Eg., in what way is "Amadis of Gaul" fundamentally different from the books we're talking about?

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Orion

at 08:14 on 2011-07-14Jesus:

Pros: foot rubs, vintage wine, and cheap seafood. Speak before adoring audiences and travel with a dozen groupies.

Cons: celibacy, poor fashion sense, and agonizing death.

I think I have to vote "con" again.

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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/

at 10:52 on 2011-07-14I think the discussion might be suffering from a confusion of terms used. Wish fulfillment as I understand it would refer to a more specific narrative ploy, which appeals directly to the reader's wish to insert themselves into the story through charecterization and titillation and whatnot. It might be a mistake to do, as Steve does to effortlessly widen wish fulfillment to mean any sense of recognition with a character in a story. Sure, if we allow this, Steve is right, because it seems clear that most(though perhaps not categorically all) stories depend on the audience's interest in the story and their recognizing the character as a person.

I don't think that such a wide use of the term is very useful or a strong argument though. If, for example we discuss the Odyssey, as somewhere above, it is surely a heroic epic where the hero is very resourceful and strong, but the very point of the story is its tragic tone in Aristotelian terms, that is a great person who is unable to escape their fate as gods or the worlds plaything. While the intended audience of Odysseia(or Ilium) are no doubt meant to be impressed by the hero and his prowess, it is very doubtful whether any one would wish to be like him. He tries to reac home after a ten year war which he was tricked into going to and because he manages to anger a godd takes ten years to reach it, while suffering horrible hardships and losing all his men and possessions besides, spending years on end as a plaything to one immortal or another. Meanwhile his son grows into a man and his wife is sieged in by suitors. Sure it has a happy ending, but the focus is not on how Odysseus is great, but rather on see how even the greatest of heroes is tossed around by the whims of powers beyond him.

And anyways as said, even if we allow that wish fulfillment is present in all stories, this just proves that it is a useless term to describe how some stories are more appealing than others. Because really if it is present in all stories, its presence is important like the words themselves, it has to be there, but it does not tell anything about the story.

I wouldn't treat the term with such a wide applicability though. Its use is more specific, as I said. In other news, the few extant germanic tales which differ from each other is hardly enough to claim such sweeping generalizations on what the audience though or expected from the stories.

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Wardog

at 10:57 on 2011-07-14

I'd say it's different flavors of the same tradition

But "tradition" in this context is so broad as to be meaningless. Do you mean texts written in Anglo Saxon? Texts from an oral tradition? You might as well say Pride and Prejudice and The Blade Itself are from the same tradition because they're written in English and printed on paper. And, yes, it's arguably true but I don't see the value in asserting it? You can find superficial similarities between any texts you like but this doesn’t make Beowulf any more historical wish-fulfilment fantasy than it was previously. Which is not at all.

Obviously they're drawing on a common pool of tropes and styles and stories, with which the creator and the audience are assumed to be familiar

See above.

Beowulf is in a coversation with the other stories. It differs in some respects, and shares others, and obviously the audience enjoyed listening to it.

See above.

Eg., in what way is "Amadis of Gaul" fundamentally different from the books we're talking about?

You seem pretty desperate to talk about Amandis of Gaul so here we go. The same argument applies here. I’ve already tried to explain why I think arbitrarily assigning 21st century perspectives to historical contexts is reductive and foolish. I mean, as Dan has stated, the very idea of wish-fulfilment, in the terms we understand it, is quite a modern idea. Not to get all philosophy of language about it but when you read historical texts – especially those written in other languages – we have accept a degree of distance between those texts and ideas of selfhood, self-expression and society that are so embedded in our thinking we take them for granted.

The thing is, as far as I’m concerned you can interpret texts however you like, and if you want to look at these a collection of complex historical texts in a reductive and tedious way ... well ... feel free.

In short: what Ruderetum said :)

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Dan H

at 15:13 on 2011-07-14

-- I really don't see a fundamental (as opposed to flavor) difference here. Eg., in what way is "Amadis of Gaul" fundamentally different from the books we're talking about?

I haven't actually read Amadis of Gaul (were I feeling glib, I might suggest that I see no evidence that you have either) so I can't comment on the content but I can certainly comment on the context.

Amadis of Gaul, Wikipedia informs me, is an Iberian Knight-errantry tale of uncertain authorship and has its origins in the traditions of chivalric romance. It is not actually a novel *at all*.

The Wise Man's fear, by contrast is a work of twenty-first century genre fiction. It was written by a single author, and published for the mass market and targeted at a clearly defined demographic whose preferences and habits its publishers will have invested both time and money in researching.

They are fundamentally different *sorts* of text and people read them for fundamentally different reasons.

I'd also point out that I see no reason for the burden of proof to be on me to demonstrate that Amadis of Gaul *is* different to the Wise Man's Fear when you have made no effort to demonstrate that it *isn't*.

That said the other important difference between Amadis and Kvothe is this.

Yes, both Amadis and Kvothe are highly skilled at what they do, but the crucial difference is how the two characters are supposed to relate to their *target audience*.

Amadis the Gaul was a chivalric romance. Its target audience would have been very broad, since it was almost certainly based on an existing popular narrative, and while there may be a narrow section of people who heard or read the story who really were, or really aspired to be, knights, the vast marjority would not have been, and would not have ever thought they could be (the fourteenth century was not, after all, known for its vast social mobility). He may have had individual virtues which individual readers might have recognised in themselves, but I see no evidence at all that he was supposed to be a stand-in for the reader.

Kvothe, by contrast, has a variety of qualities which his target audience (teenage geeks) are *extremley* likely to possess, and which grant him amazing abilities with little or no effort on his part. For example:

* He is extremely clever and this makes him excellent at schoolwork

* He is particularly skilled at technical subjects

* His supernatural powers come largely from understanding concrete technical laws (many of which are specifically derived from real-world physics and engineering)

* He is awkward around women

* He has had a very small amount of martial arts training

* He was picked on as a child but came into his own at university

All of these are qualities which the book's target audience are *extremely likely* to identify with *specifically*. You don't look at Kvothe and admire him for his cleverness, you look at him and you recognise in him your *own* cleverness, all of his skills parallel skills which geeks have in the *real world*. He's not somebody to look up to, he's *you*. Even his flaws are really virtues (his awkwardness with women, for example, actually makes him *more* attractive to the opposite sex).

That's the difference between a mythic or an inspirational story and wish fulfilment. A mythic hero embodies virtues to which you aspire, but which you know that you do not truly possess. A wish-fulfillment character has all of the same qualities you already have, but they work the way you *want* them to work instead of the way they really work. So your creepy inability to speak to women is transformed into an endearing shyness, your six months of kendo really does make you brilliant at fighting, and your nerdboy hobbies are the secret to saving the universe.

It is, in fact, an important and fundamental difference.

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Steve Stirling at 18:01 on 2011-07-15

A wish-fulfillment character has all of the same qualities you already have, but they work the way you *want* them to work instead of the way they really work. So your creepy inability to speak to women is transformed into an endearing shyness, your six months of kendo really does make you brilliant at fighting, and your nerdboy hobbies are the secret to saving the universe.

-- well, you have a point there.

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Steve Stirling at 18:05 on 2011-07-15

He may have had individual virtues which individual readers might have recognised in themselves, but I see no evidence at all that he was supposed to be a stand-in for the reader.

-- well, no, but that's not quite the point of wish-fulfillment. You don't think you're Superman, you -wish- you're Superman, and for the duration of the story you -imagine- you're Superman, able to do these amazing things.

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Dan H

at 10:27 on 2011-07-19On Superman: The really, really important thing about Superman is Clark Kent. Superman works as wish-fulfilment because Superman actually *isn't* Superman most of the time, he's this mild-mannered nebbishy guy with glasses (again, much like the intended target audience).

And of course the other thing to remember is that wish-fulfilment isn't a binary - as Orion and others have pointed out above, a lot of stories have wish-fulfilment *elements*, whereas Kvothe comes across to me as *pure* wish-fulfilment.

(Sorry I know Steve's been banned, but I thought this discussion might have been getting somewhere)

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Orion

at 06:18 on 2011-07-20Dan,

I never really read/watched Superman, but I'm interested by your comment, because it doesn't really match up with my experience of other secret identity setups. As a child, anyway, I never demanded that my protagonists have a "normal" life for me to identify with them; I had no trouble projecting myself onto the superhuman character directly.

I always assumed that the primary function of Clark Kent was as a narrative device. Superheroes generally and Superman in particular are just too effective when on stage in costume, so you have to give them human lives and duties to stretch out the plot and prevent them from solving everything immediately. Secondarily, I would imagine that Clark kent would actually pull the story toward the "redemption" end of my "redemption/wish fulfillment" spectrum by making the protagonist suffer.

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Dan H

at 12:13 on 2011-07-20

As a child, anyway, I never demanded that my protagonists have a "normal" life for me to identify with them; I had no trouble projecting myself onto the superhuman character directly.

I don't think I made my point clearly enough. It's not the fact that Superman has a secret identity that's the issue, it's the fact that despite his superpowers (and superpowers are really a red herring here) Superman is basically an ordinary guy with parents and a hometown and a job. (It is, I believe, often said in DC comics fandom that the difference between Batman and Superman is that Superman is really Clark Kent, whereas Bruce Wayne is really Batman).

Without Clark Kent, Superman would basically be Dr Manhattan, and while you can certainly imagine that it would be *cool* to be the Big Blue Guy, you aren't really invited to imagine that he *is* you, which I would argue is a necessary part of wish-fulfilment.

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Orion

at 15:40 on 2011-07-20That makes a lot of sense. In the general case, we could say that wish-fulfillment only works when the character basically thinks like the reader, so that they tend to do with their opportunities the kinds of things the reader would want to imagine doing.

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http://sprizouse.blogspot.com/

at 07:37 on 2011-08-21There was a

long comment thread

running over at Crooked Timber and I ended up bringing up this critique. Anyway, the post was about NPR's list of Top 100 Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels and I thought you should take a look at both the CT post (and comments thread) and the NPR list. Your input would probably be appreciated.

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http://sunnyskywalker.livejournal.com/

at 01:49 on 2011-09-01I had some fun running the Wikipedia entries for both books through Regender.com.

http://regender.com/swap/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Wind

http://regender.com/swap/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wise_Man%27s_Fear

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to handle compound words well, so it didn't manage to rename the series

The Queenkiller Chronicles

, but otherwise... very interesting!

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/EcqJaTxyotMBIWa7wHjFXrVfJz29#49b9a

at 02:24 on 2012-06-15

Is there any sign or hint that Kvothe is ever going to fail at something in a manner which he can't recover from within a hundred pages or so?

You mean, aside from the fact that his sympathy no longer works, he's lost his ability to fight, he no longer plays music at all.......?

Yes, there is a sign. Perhaps you could call it a hint. Or perhaps the biggest unanswered question in the entire story.

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Shim

at 08:13 on 2012-06-15

You mean, aside from the fact that his sympathy no longer works, he's lost his ability to fight, he no longer plays music at all.......?

I haven't read the book, but those sound like pretty general, narrative losses rather than actual failures, if you see what I mean.

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James D

at 18:01 on 2012-06-15

Some of the fire left her, but when she found her voice it was tight and dangerous. “my skills 'suffice'?” She hardly seemed able to force out the last word. Her mouth formed a thin, outraged line. I exploded, my voice a roll of thunder. “How the hell am I supposed to know? It's not like I've ever done this sort of thing before!” She reeled back at the vehemence of my words, some of the anger draining out of her. “what is it you mean?” she trailed off, confused. “This!” I gestured awkwardly at myself, at her, at the cushions and the pavilion around us, as if that explained everything. The last of the anger left her as I saw realization begin to dawn, “you...” “No,” I looked down, my face growing hot. “I have never been with a woman.” Then I straightened and looked her in the eye as if challenging her to make an issue of it.” Felurian was still for a moment, then let her mouth turn up into a wry smile. “you tell me a faerie story, my kvothe.” I felt my face go grim. I don't mind being called a liar. I am. I am a marvellous liar. But I hate being called a liar when I'm telling the perfect truth. Regardless of my motivation, my expression seemed to convince her. “but you were like a gentle summer storm.” She made a fluttering gesture with a hand. “you were a dancer fresh upon the field.” Her eyes glittered wickedly.

I haven't read the book, but this dialog is waayyyyy too over-narrated for my tastes. I was rather surprised, given the author apparently has a sterling reputation. Seriously, there is more description of the characters' expressions than actual dialog there, and a lot of the expressions would be evident from the dialog alone. Do we really have to be told he's exploding when the next words out of his mouth are "how the hell am I supposed to know?" That whole scene just seems to fall into the same "more is more" trap a lot of modern fantasy authors are in. More description, more worldbuilding, more detail, less left up to the imagination, less engagement of the reader in the storytelling process.

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

at 05:23 on 2012-06-16It doesn't help that the narrator sounds like a complete tool.

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valse de la lune

at 08:34 on 2012-06-17His voice a roll of thunder, no less. This is the brilliant writing all the fanboys praised?

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Dan H

at 14:29 on 2012-06-17

Seriously, there is more description of the characters' expressions than actual dialog there, and a lot of the expressions would be evident from the dialog alone.

There does seem to be a peculiar bit of received wisdom amongst a certain type of reader (and therefore a certain type of writer) that "just" dialogue isn't proper writing. I'm largely making this up, but I think it's born out of a prejudice against things which seem "simple" or possibly a desire to seem intellectual. It might also be a misplaced reaction against books which fail by trying to emulate films (or conversely, it may be that it appeals specifically to an audience accustomed to visual media, who expect every line of dialogue to be accompanied by some visual cue). It might also (I really am just guessing here) overlap with that nonsensical "use all the senses" advice you get in mediocre writing guides.

I don't like to be too smug about this sort of thing, but I do sometimes feel that a lot of Rothfuss' reputation for great writing stems from his adopting a style which overlaps with his audience's preconceptions about what good writing ought to look like. It's the kind of writing which makes you feel clever, and I suspect that his audience are particularly fond of feeling clever. Of course *criticizing* this sort of writing also makes you feel clever, so the audience kind of wins either way on this one.

I actually don't think Rothfuss' writing is that bad - The Wise Man's Fear wasn't hard to read because it was badly written, it was hard to read because it was nearly a thousand fucking pages and nothing fucking happens in it.

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Michal

at 18:20 on 2012-06-17Hmm, I'm not sure if it's fair to base your opinion of whether it's well-written or not on a single passage, since just about every book has its awkward bits. I agree that what's there isn't all that impressive and painfully overwritten, but I think the situation described would've made me throw the book against the wall, not the writing-style.

From what I've read of

The Name of the Wind

(which admittedly isn't that much) I also didn't quite understand the praise Rothfuss's prose; I mean, there were some nice passages but there's quite a lot of space between them filled with not-so-great stuff. It's better than Paolini or Brooks or Goodkind but that's setting the bar really fucking low. I didn't quit reading because of the prose. I quit because I found Kvothe insufferable.

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Arthur B

at 18:29 on 2012-06-17

Hmm, I'm not sure if it's fair to base your opinion of whether it's well-written or not on a single passage, since just about every book has its awkward bits. I agree that what's there isn't all that impressive and painfully overwritten, but I think the situation described would've made me throw the book against the wall, not the writing-style.

This. There's a world of stuff to howl at in that extract before you even begin to consider the prose.

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James D

at 20:05 on 2012-06-17

I actually don't think Rothfuss' writing is that bad - The Wise Man's Fear wasn't hard to read because it was badly written, it was hard to read because it was nearly a thousand fucking pages and nothing fucking happens in it.

As a reader, I tend to value a writer's style pretty highly, and given that his style is so often praised, I was just rather surprised at how overwrought the snippets you quoted were. If they're not representative of the whole book, well, you should've picked better ones!

Honestly I'm not sure there's anything tremendously wrong with the plot of the sex goddess bit though - isn't the book presented as basically an egotistical liar's autobiography? Couldn't he just be making it up to make himself look good? It's just too absurd for me to believe that Rothfuss expected people to take it seriously. Not to say that simply using an unreliable narrator is an instant ticket to literary quality, but maybe the problem isn't so much that the stories are filled unbelievable self-aggrandizement, but that Rothfuss failed at making Kvothe egotistical and charming, so he ended up insufferable instead. I imagine the book might be pretty fun if it were clear that Kvothe was just a loser who made up absurdly flattering, highly improbable stories about himself. And if it were maybe 300 pages long.

Just as an aside, The Wise Man's Fear recently won the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel of 2011.

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Arthur B

at 20:41 on 2012-06-17

Honestly I'm not sure there's anything tremendously wrong with the plot of the sex goddess bit though - isn't the book presented as basically an egotistical liar's autobiography? Couldn't he just be making it up to make himself look good?

I dunno about other people here, but my usual response to egotistical tossers bragging about their unlikely sexual exploits is to disengage from the conversation ASAP, by whatever means necessary. Smarmy bullshit is smarmy bullshit, regardless of whether you're intended to believe it or not.

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Michal

at 20:52 on 2012-06-17

isn't the book presented as basically an egotistical liar's autobiography?

Well,

The Name of the Wind

certainly wasn't, since the frame story made it clear Kvothe really was just that awesome. Any cracks in the narrative this time around, Dan?

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

at 21:25 on 2012-06-17

I dunno about other people here, but my usual response to egotistical tossers bragging about their unlikely sexual exploits is to disengage from the conversation ASAP, by whatever means necessary.

Yeah, I don't really see what other response there is. The kind of wish-fulfillment this book seems intended to provide seems like it would be better delivered through, say, a video game. Hearing some douchebag talk about fucking hot chicks doesn't quite make me feel like I'm in his place.

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James D

at 21:32 on 2012-06-17Maybe I am being too generous then. I'm just trying really hard to understand what people see in the books beyond typical fantasy wish-fulfillment+adventure, but maybe that's all it is, minus the benefit of a tight plot books in that style need.

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Dan H

at 23:21 on 2012-06-17

As a reader, I tend to value a writer's style pretty highly, and given that his style is so often praised, I was just rather surprised at how overwrought the snippets you quoted were. If they're not representative of the whole book, well, you should've picked better ones!

They're fairly representative (although Felurian speaks in a *particularly* flowery way) - it's just that I don't think the writing is particularly *bad*, just not especially *good*. Or perhaps to put it another way, what flaws there are in the writing are just a specific instance of the far more general problem of the book being smug, up itself, and nowhere near as smart as it thinks it is. I might also suggest that amongst fantasy readers "well written" is code for "overwritten" four times out of five.

Honestly I'm not sure there's anything tremendously wrong with the plot of the sex goddess bit though - isn't the book presented as basically an egotistical liar's autobiography?

Very much not. It's the autobiography of somebody *extremely self-deprecating*. As evidenced by the awful bits where Kvothe point blank refuses to narrate all of the bits where he actually does interesting stuff. Framing-story Kvothe is a broken man, and he is extremely reluctant to acknowledge his own triumphs - Bast actually has to explicitly instruct the Chronicler to encourage him to focus on them, because Kvothe's own sense of guilt over the Terrible Things That Happen In Book Three is such that he no longer trusts himself.

Effectively it's *exactly the opposite* of the Baron Munchausen story - Kvothe isn't a fantasist or a teller of tall tales, he's a genuine hero who is uncomfortable with his own heroism.

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James D

at 00:04 on 2012-06-18

Effectively it's *exactly the opposite* of the Baron Munchausen story - Kvothe isn't a fantasist or a teller of tall tales, he's a genuine hero who is uncomfortable with his own heroism.

Yech. Why the fuck do so many people like this book again?

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

at 02:03 on 2012-06-18Because nothing tops off a douche sandwich like a nice juicy glob of emo.

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http://omarsakr.wordpress.com/

at 08:23 on 2012-08-22Hey Dan,

I've recently stumbled across a few of your articles and I'm currently experiencing the giddy highs of a high-school girl's crush, or what I imagine that would feel like anyway. Still, I'll refrain from allowing that to develop further just yet because a) it's creepy as balls and b) the interwebs are full of disappointing traps and a few well written articles that espouse similar ideas and opinions to my own doesn't preclude you from being say, I don't know, a rabid Tea Partier (no matter how many times I write that or look it, it just seems wrong).

Anyway, I just wanted to comment to say thank you! I've felt like, for the longest time, I've been alone in my dismissal of Rothfuss and my dismay at the critical acclaim he's received. Don't get me wrong, he seems like a great guy and he's a passable writer, but he in no way deserves the absurd praise that's been heaped on him. I remember writing an article years ago about how overrated he and GRRM are as authors today (although the latter is certainly more deserving). So, it's been great to read your articles (albeit belatedly) and the comments that so accurately carve these books up.

In WMF you correctly pointed out a passage that utterly ruined the book for me. I was willing to overlook a lot of what you pointed out, due to its light entertainment factor, until I read the 'I was on my way to X when this and this and this happened to me but I don't have time to tell you about any of those exciting things because the story must go on'. What thoroughly pissed me off about the ensuing billion-page section was that NOTHING HAPPENED. There's a stupidly long section where Kyvothe and his band are sitting around the woods telling each other stories just so Rothfuss could indulge in meta-wankery, his constant wink-wink nudge-nude can you see that I'm telling a story about a guy telling a story about how he and some other guys told stories once and the way stories within stories are blah blah blah.

That section of the book filled me with rage. Goddamn.

Okay, just had to get that off my chest. He writes easy, simple prose that's really engaging and this could have been a much better series but for all the reasons you pointed out, he, the series itself, and his fans need to get over themselves and be a little less pretentious about the whole shebang. Serious fantasy my ass.

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Arthur B

at 10:03 on 2012-08-22

a few well written articles that espouse similar ideas and opinions to my own doesn't preclude you from being say, I don't know, a rabid Tea Partier

If it's any reassurance, Dan's preferred coffee for about as long as I've known him.

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

at 17:07 on 2012-08-23

his fans need to get over themselves and be a little less pretentious about the whole shebang

Well, the rabid Nice Guy geek contingent has tried every other personality flaw, so it's about time they tried pretentious literary snobbery.

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http://everstar3.livejournal.com/

at 03:17 on 2013-06-12I realize I am quite late to this discussion, but I write now to thank you for saving my Kindle, because if I'd read that speech of Felurian's on it, I most likely would have thrown it across the room.

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Robinson L

at 10:36 on 2013-07-19Found this via a friend of mine, who's a major fan of the books:

looks like the Kingkiller Chronicles is being adapted into a TV series

.

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Dan H

at 22:47 on 2013-07-19What is it with people making TV shows of interminable fantasy series that the authors have shown no signs of actually being able to finish?

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Arthur B

at 22:54 on 2013-07-19

What is it with people making TV shows of interminable fantasy series that the authors have shown no signs of actually being able to finish?

Because brick-sized open-ended novels with silly numbers of characters and no end in sight make for great soap operas?

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Melanie

at 06:37 on 2013-07-20

What is it with people making TV shows of interminable fantasy series that the authors have shown no signs of actually being able to finish?

The more books the author writes

without

finishing it, the more the tv show can be dragged out?

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Jules V.O.

at 13:30 on 2013-07-20There's a bit in the last Twilight movie where things go completely off-the-rails awesome because the director decided to be all sarcastic and show the threatened climactic showdown action scene, before revealing it to be a dream or something; 'you could have been watching a story where things happen,' is the none-too-subtle subtext. It is by far the best part of the entire series, and includes more decapitations than the entirety of Master of the Flying Guillotine.

In that vein, I suspect the best part of the KC show would be the 'storm, piracy, treachery, and shipwreck' segment, where the lack of specificity would give them the freedom to fill in some conventional(ly satisfying) content.

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Arthur B

at 14:01 on 2013-07-20

There's a bit in the last Twilight movie where things go completely off-the-rails awesome because the director decided to be all sarcastic and show the threatened climactic showdown action scene, before revealing it to be a dream or something; 'you could have been watching a story where things happen,' is the none-too-subtle subtext. It is by far the best part of the entire series, and includes more decapitations than the entirety of Master of the Flying Guillotine.

I do love the fact that the

Breaking Dawn

director was like "Fuck it, I'm just going to do exactly what the text says rather than presenting whatever it is people think they see in the text", so lo and behold

an adult werewolf falls in love with a baby.

#Ferretbrain #The Kingkiller Chronicle #Patrick Rothfuss #Twilight #Dan H

[lindyhunt]

15 of the Best 'About Us' & 'About Me' Pages and How to Make Your Own

Building a website is, in many ways, an exercise of willpower. It’s tempting to get distracted by the bells and whistles of the design process, and forget all about creating compelling content.

It's that compelling content that's crucial to making inbound marketing work for your business.

So how do you balance your remarkable content creation with your web design needs? It all starts with the "About Us" page.

For a remarkable about page, all you need to do is figure out your company's unique identity, and then share it with the world. Easy, right? Of course not. Your "About Us" page is one of the most important pages on your website, and it needs to be well crafted. This profile also happens to be one of the most commonly overlooked pages, which is why you should make it stand out.

The good news? It can be done. In fact, there are some companies out there with remarkable "About Us" pages, the elements of which you can emulate on your own website.

By the end of this post, you'll know what makes some of today's best "About Us" and "About Me" pages so great, and how to make your own about page that shares your company's greatness.

Best About Us Page Examples

Yellow Leaf Hammocks

Eight Hour Day

Joe Payton

Apptopia

Moz

Aja Frost

Cultivated Wit

Kero One

Nike

Refinery29

Sara Dietschy

Marie Catribs

Marc Ensign

Bulldog Skincare

Doomtree

1. Yellow Leaf Hammocks

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It tells us a story.

When you have a great story about how your product or service was built to change lives, share it. The "About Us" page is a great place for it to live, too. Good stories humanize your brand, providing context and meaning for your product. What’s more, good stories are sticky -- which means people are more likely to connect with them and pass them on.

Yellow Leaf Hammocks tells users about its product by describing how the hammocks empower artisan weavers and their families. The company breaks down different pieces of the story into sections that combine words and easily digestible graphics, painting a picture instead of big chunks of text. They're clear about why they're different: "Not a Charity," the page reads. And then: "This is the basis for a brighter future, built on a hand up, not a handout."

Every company has a story to tell, so break out your storytelling skills from that random English class you took years ago and put them to work on your "About Us" page. Using descriptive and emotive copy and gorgeous graphics, an "About Us" page with a story works harder for your business than a generic one.

2. Eight Hour Day

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It's human.

People tend to think that "About Us" pages have to sound formal to gain credibility and trust. But most people find it easier to trust real human beings, rather than a description that sounds like it came from an automaton. Trying to sound too professional on your "About Us" page results in stiff, “safe” copy and design -- the perfect way to make sure your company blends in with the masses.

Instead, Eight Hour Day showcases the people behind the company and humanizes its brand. Introducing the founders by name and featuring the photos of them on the "About Us" page drives home the point that Nathan and Katie are -- as they so astutely put it -- "two individuals with a passion for creativity -- creativity makes us happy."

When you’re designing your "About Us" page,avoid industry jargon and replace it with an authentic voice -- yours -- to describe your product or service. Sure, it needs to be polished and free of errors, but it should always sound friendly and real.

3. Joe Payton

Why the "About Me" Page Rocks: It's confident, creative, and easy to skim.

"About Us" pages might encompass the values of more than one person or entity, but they're no more important to the image of a business than your personal about page. Take Joe Payton's "About Me" page, below.

Not only does Joe's illustrative self-portrait give him a personal brand that customers will remember, but it also demonstrates his expertise as a designer and animator. His website visitors can learn not just what he does, but why he does it, in an easily digestible way. Being able to express his values as a creative professional in such a well-organized page is something to be desired by anyone creating their own about page.

4. Apptopia

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It skips the business babble.

We know -- no industry jargon. If you think it makes you sound super smart on your "About Us" page, think again. People want and appreciate straight talk about what your business does. After all, if people can't figure out what you do, how will they know they need your product or service?

So, skip the industry lingo -- that's what Apptopia does on its "About Us" page. The startup's simple but polished language effectively communicates the company's offering while still allowing the Average Joe to understand it.

The moral of the story: Try to get rid of jargon on your "About Us" page whenever possible. Use short and punchy sentences to explain complex products and ideas in a way that isn't patronizing, but rather, is empathetic.

5. Moz

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It's humble.

Instead of following the classic "About Us" script and writing a few paragraphs about the company's mission and origins, try something different -- there are plenty of ways to make your brand more compelling to someone who doesn't know about you.

Take Moz, for example. A lot has happened since it was founded in 2004, so the company chose to share those milestones using a fun and clean design that incorporates clear headers, concise blurbs, and little graphics to break up the text.

We especially love the humble references to how Moz received funding, how it switched its brand positioning -- and most importantly, how it switched back to its original model. This speaks volumes to the value honesty and humbleness can play to your customers. Don't be afraid to talk about your ups and downs; your customers will trust what you say that much more.

6. Aja Frost

Why the "About Me" Page Rocks: It's data-driven.

Alright, we might be biased in highlighting this professional, as Aja is our very own SEO strategist at HubSpot. Nonetheless, the ingenuity she brings to the company isn't lost on her website's "About Me" page.

Being a data-driven professional, Aja knows her own clients as a freelance writer and strategist don't just want to see what she's written -- they want to see how her content has performed. With that in mind, her "About Me" page tells a story of her career growth, which peaks -- no pun intended -- at an impressive line graph showing the result of an SEO strategy she implemented for the HubSpot Blog. (The graph's sharp decline at September simply indicates when she stopped collecting data.)

Following the impressive chart, Aja closes out her about page with a personal note on what she does in her spare time -- always a good way to humanize yourself in the eyes of your potential customers.

7. Cultivated Wit

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It breaks the mold.

Yes, this post is about, well, "About Us" pages. But sometimes, you don't always need to wait for users to get there in order to make a statement. That's part of breaking the mold to showcase your company's personality.

That's exactly what Cultivated Wit -- a creative agency and media company -- does, with both an edgy name and an incredibly fun story told through video and parallax scrolling ... right on its homepage.

Below is the actual "About Us" page, which is a gem once you get there. But it's great to see a company embrace its own brand of quirk throughout the site.

Even if you have a dedicated "About Us" page, there are plenty of ways to creatively showcase your company's personality throughout your entire website. And yeah, that's harder than filling a stock "About Us" template -- but it can have a significant payoff for your brand.

8. Kero One

Why the "About Me" Page Rocks: It's multilingual.

Kero One is a hip-hop artist and DJ from San Francisco, and his "About Me" page carries a valuable lesson to personal brands who cater to more than one audience -- especially if those audiences speak different languages.

Kero One's story starts at his childhood, when he was six years old and first discovered a passion for hip-hop. Knowing how old and genuine his love for the genre is adds tremendous value to his own music in the eyes of his listeners.

While this entrepreneur's childhood interests help to deepen his audience, the second screenshot below helps Kero One widen it. His "About Me" page first tells his story in English, then in Japanese, then in Korean, then in Chinese. Accommodating these Southeast Asian audiences makes his brand more inclusive of all the audiences he identifies with.

...

9. Nike

Why the About Us Page Rocks: It knows its audience.

Nike might seem like a company that's too big to inspire smaller businesses. You might even wonder if Nike even still has an "About Us" page. As a matter of fact, it does, and it hasn't forgotten the company's roots.

Nike began on the campus of the University of Oregon by the hand of the college's track coach, Bill Bowerman. And even though he no longer works at the company, one of his beloved quotes still brands the bottom of Nike's "About Us" page below: "If you have a body, you are an athlete."

This bold sentence, referenced by the asterisked "Athlete" in the words right above it, sheds important light on Nike's audience. The brand may be big today, but Nike is all about the rising stars -- who Nike depends on to, according to the rest of its "About Us" page, "expand human potential."

The takeaway for marketers? Know your audience, and make it obvious to that audience the instant they read about you on your website.

10. Refinery29

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It tells you what's most important.

Here's another instance where any area of your website -- not just the "About Us" page -- is an opportunity to break the mold.

Many companies add just a simple mission statement or company profile, but people often don't want to ready a wall of text explaining what you do. So, Refinery29 broke it down to convey the intangible qualities that are tough to include in a basic "About Us" page.

Although Refinery29 does introduce its page with a description of its business, its goes out on a bang -- four bangs, to be exact. The organization is on a "mission," sure, but there's also an "essence" of Refinery29, a "promise" it keeps, and a "vibe" it gives off.

These aren't company traits you'd think to include when starting out, but they're what your customers often make gut decisions on when buying.

11. Sara Dietschy

Why the "About Me" Page Rocks: It has variety but still aligns with her personal brand.

This professional YouTube content creator has an eclectic collection of videos related to technology and culture, and expresses that diversity all over her "About Me" page.

In addition to the vibrant self-portrait at the top of the page, Sara's first sentence tells you just how many people subscribe to her channel: 350,000. This is an important number to know for her potential video advertisers and collaborators who want to know how much exposure they'd get by working with her or advertising on her channel.

The colored tiles lining the page -- starting with the red one, as shown below -- also do a terrific job segmenting her work by the types of projects she takes up and for whom she's done them. That Intel logo in the second photo of Sara, below, is sure to turn some visitors' heads as they're perusing her website.

12. Marie Catribs

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It's unexpected.

There's a reason why these examples are exceptional -- "About Us" pages aren't always the most riveting parts of a company's website. In fact, they often look like an afterthought. But even if you don't have budget for juicy graphics, video, or parallax scrolling, there are other ways to make your "About Us" page unexpected with the copy alone.

Marie Catrib's is a restaurant, so you might think their "About Us" page would be your typical "here's how we started, here's what we believe in, and here's our food" story. Marie Catrib's "About Us" page does tells us that -- but it does so in an unconventional way. Immediately, the user's eyes are drawn to a header that says, "It's okay to make a mess, experiments can lead to beautiful things." Quite philosophical, for a place to have dinner.

But next comes the story about the owner, which starts in an unexpected way -- "It's hard to imagine, but at one time Marie was banned from the family kitchen." A line like that draws in the audience, because we know it's not going to be typical.

So, how will you use copy to really draw readers in? It's amazing what impression you can make on site visitors just by creatively telling your story with words alone.

13. Marc Ensign

Why the "About Me" Page Rocks: It's funny but professional.

This branding expert does two things super well on his about page: He takes his work seriously, but doesn't take himself too seriously. Marketers know there's value to keeping a casual tone in the content they create, but in order to attract customers, you need to prove you have discipline and integrity. That's a tough balance to get right.

Marc Ensign nails that balance between friendly and formal with a confident opening statement, followed by an amusing smiley photo of himself to set an inviting tone.

14. Bulldog Skincare

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: It's lovable and memorable.

What's the difference between "average" marketing and lovable marketing? It's the difference between creating generic webpages that provide great information, but in a straightforward, black-and-white kind of way -- versus creating webpages that provide great information and are infused with color, personality, and stay true to a company's unique brand voice. When you create lovable marketing, you can start a movement of brand evangelists and advocates who will help you grow.

Where does this fit into a company's "About Us" page? The folks at Bulldog, a men's skincare company that was named for the colloquial "man's best friend" -- a dog -- could have typed up a few paragraphs about where the brand came from and how they were one of the first in the space to redefine and eliminate stereotypes around men's grooming. But that text alone would have been a bit, well, average.

Instead, the "About Us" page is pithy, colorful, and leads with the lovable mug of an adorable bulldog -- fitting the name and the brand. And it states the purpose of the products -- to help customers from waking up with the (admittedly adorable) wrinkly face you see when you visit Bulldog's website.

Play on your own words -- it's okay to have fun and pun with your brand, as it helps to inject personality and humor into your "About Us" page. It primes visitors for a story in a way that makes them immediately feel something. That's how you create memorable, lovable marketing.

15. Doomtree

Why the "About Us" Page Rocks: Its shows, tells, and has a soundtrack.

One minute of video is worth 1.8 million words, according to Forrester Research's Dr. James McQuivey. But what about audio and visual, too, all combined with a really cool story? Well, that's one way to tell your story in an engaging way -- through multimedia.

Doomtree is built on a bit of an innovative concept: That a group of talented artists can each have thriving solo careers, but can still come together on a regular basis to create great music. It's not a band -- it's a crew. It's an unconventional concept with an equally interesting backstory that "started as a mess of friends in Minneapolis, fooling around after school, trying to make music without reading the manual." And as soon as you arrive on Doomtree's 'About Us' page, you're greeted with big, bold photos of those friends.

As you scroll down, users are treated to even more interaction with the crew's tracks and music videos. That makes sense, because it gives visitors an instant sample of Doomtree's product. What's more, the entire "About Us" page is responsive, including the video. That's important -- not only because it offers site visitors a great mobile experience, but also for Google search ranking -- especially now that such mobile usage has surpassed desktop.

How to Write an About Page

Establish a mission statement.

Outline our company story.

Reveal how you've evolved.

State your "aha!" moment.

Explain who you serve.

Explain what you're offering them.

Cite examples of who you've served.

Describe your values.

It's tough to establish one all-encompassing template for your "About Us" page -- there are just so many ways you can go about telling your company story. But, per the real "About Us" pages we've just highlighted, there are some steps you should keep in mind when getting started.

Here are five steps to writing an "About Us" page based on some of the things that impressed us about the examples above.

1. Establish a mission statement.

Your "About Us" page can and will be much longer than a single mission statement, but in order to draw people in, you need to succinctly state your goal in the industry up front. What are you here to do? Why should your website visitors care?

2. Outline your company story.

You might not have a long history of changes and growth your company has endured (yet), but it's a nice touch to talk about where you came from in your "About Us" page. So, isolate the milestones prior your company's founding, and use them to give readers some backstory on your current venture.

3. Reveal how you've evolved.

Even if you're a young company, there's no shame in admitting your business strategy -- or even personal way of thinking -- has changed since you began. In fact, in about pages, these evolutions can improve the story you tell to website visitors.

About pages are perfect spaces to talk about where you started, how you've grown, and the ideals that have helped your organization mature. Use these moments to further your company story and show people that you're always ready to change and adapt to the needs of your industry.

4. State your "aha!" moment.

Every good company was founded on an idea -- something the current marketplace might not yet offer. What was your idea? Use this "Aha!" moment as a pivot point when telling your company story. What was a challenge you faced while developing your company? How did this challenge or discovery shape what you are today?

5. Explain who you serve.

As much as you want as many eyeballs on your "About Us" page as possible, you won't do business with every single one of them. That's why it's crucial that you identify and mention your core customer. Who should care you exist? Which eyeballs are you here to serve?

6. Explain what you're offering them.

As you're explaining who you serve, make it clear what it is you're offering. Too often companies generalize their product or service in the language of their website, making it hard to understand what it is the customer is actually paying for. They're afraid literal explanations of their products aren't interesting enough, or will sound unappealing in writing. And that's a fair concern.

However, by investing just a sentence or two into telling your potential customers exactly what they'll receive can keep them on your website for longer and interested in learning more.

7. Cite examples of who you've served.

Got some loyal customers in your portfolio? Use your about page to let the world know who already trusts and benefits from your work.

Knowing about your company's past successes can influence the purchasing decision of up to 90% of today's B2B customers, according to Dimensional Research. Even if you don't yet have case studies to expand on the problems you've helped buyers solve, it's in your interest to briefly mention who you've done this for. And your about page is the perfect platform for it.

8. Describe your values.

Customers want to be treated like human beings. For that to happen, they need to feel that they're being treated by human beings. When finishing your "About Us" page, describe who you are as a person or a team, and what your personal values are. What's your company culture like? What bigger picture in life drives your business?

An LED lightbulb maker might sell 10 different lamp styles, for example, but that might not be the most important characteristic to its primary audience. Maybe this lightbulb developer was founded on a commitment to environmental protection, and every bulb the company makes was built by people who are dedicated to making the world more energy-efficient.

Keep in mind a secondary audience of your company's "About Us" page consists of your future employees. This is another reason describing your personal values is a good idea -- the key to your job candidates' hearts is to show them you have one too.

At this point, we hope that creating an "About Us" page doesn't seem like a daunting task -- rather, we hope you're ready to have some fun with it. With a good story to tell, creative copy, humility, and digestible visuals, you're on your way to an eye-catching user experience.

Even better? You're becoming part of the exception -- and standing out from a sea of "About Us" pages. What makes you different? We're eager to learn more ... about you.

Want more inspiration? Check out 16 inspiring examples of beautiful blog design.