Any setting where the elves have weaker booze than the dwarves isn’t committing to the bit
I mean, we’re talking about people whose lifespan is Yes.
“Oh, the weak wine? That is for children. I am two thousand years old, and I daresay one sip from this highball would knock you on your ass for a week.”
Look, there’s this weird thing people do with high fantasy where they want elves to be immortal/extremely long-lived snooty aristocrats and also somehow incapacitated by imagining the taste of salt too hard. “Orcs and dwarves have the hardest booze” no they don’t, they have work in the morning! In any of these settings, elves would pregame harder than hobbits party and everyone else has shit to do tomorrow.
The average high elf builds up the drug tolerance of a mid-70s Hollywood producer and then spends three centuries studying alchemy. While humans seek immortality, the Immortals seek the elusive “philosopher’s cocaine.”
why do you have bad memories from helping landlady take care of kofu when he was a baby? what did he do?
my brother started calling our cat “doobie brother” which he then lengthened to “dubious brother” and has since morphed into “brother dubious” like he’s some sort of fucked up little monk
brother dubious
Brother Dubious can often be found wandering the halls late at night it seems
did you ever consider becoming a literary writer rather than a fantasy writer? w
I don’t think I ever wanted to be anything more than a storyteller and a writer. Other people can decide where the books get shelved.
@eurphrasie That felt rude. Since when is fantasy not literature?!
You know, It’s kind of fitting that It was Sir Terry Pratchett himself who answered this question in an interview, just going to paste this up real fast:
O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?
Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.
O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.
P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell okay. But in the UK I think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series— since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.
O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.
P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? I thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections— That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala. Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghvad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy.
Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like, the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that. What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf a few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.
(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.
Have to say I agree with the man.
It’s the casual death threat for me
Rude ass interviewer who also doesn’t know what they’re talking about: “I mean, you’re obviously a clever man, so why bother with this lowly fantasy drivel.”
Sir Terry Pratchett: “I’ll break you in half like a stick.”
wish ppl understood the power nowadays in not giving something attention. things today are so focused on attention and reaction and #memes that the best way to shut literally anything down is simply not give it exactly what it wants. like you arent going to own that bigot on twitter youre going to boost their original message whether thats your intent or not and you arent just playing with ai for shits and giggles you are giving it free learning and data. just stop engaging with things that dont deserve it
...and with strange eons, even Tumblr may be redeemed.
28 | NYC | Software Engineer | Trying to love my neighbor as myself.
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