The magicians – Further Annotations

Jack Crosbie, On The Magicians TV show

Posted on April 27, 2016 by blablablaandgabbler

“I love that they brought Julia into the series early, as her storyline is by far one of the most compelling in the books. Unfortunately, I think they really messed up the Free Trader Beowulf angle. The FTB crew are all very important to Julia’s life, and I think that the devastatingly brutal final scene would have resonated much more emotionally for viewers if the FTB characters had been more developed. I think that Julia’s conflicts with Marina (and Marina as a character) should have been cut entirely; if they were planning on including Reynard the Fox in season one then her storyline needed to focus on FTB much more heavily. I would have loved to see Julia blowing through the hedge leveling system by episode 3 or 4, before being contacted by FTB, and then beginning her real journey into magic, always with a foreboding edge that would have made Reynard’s reveal at the end that much more terrifying.”

[Via]

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]

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Critique My Critique: Lev Grossman and being “Subversive”

Posted on August 18, 2015August 18, 2015 by blablablaandgabbler

“Perhaps if one knows Lev Grossman they will understand the clever joke behind it all, but your reader shouldn’t have to know you in order to understand your intent.”

PINEkindling Wordsmithery

It has been pointed out that these critiques may suggest that I don’t understand what Lev Grossman was doing with The Magicians—that is, writing a “subversive” adult version of children’s high fantasy, in which the terrible realities of our world aren’t hidden, but rather that the “reality” of having magic and the world being magical, would actually not be so full of wonder and awe as it is in Narnia and Harry Potter.

Trust me, I understand. Grossman goes out of his way to hammer you over the head with how depressing and sad he thinks the world actually is. But let me be clear—simply because he was attempting to be subversive in fantasy, does not mean he succeeded. The main character being depressed and the reality of his dreams always being disappointing is not subversion—it’s a misunderstanding of the genre and it’s boring.

First, to be subversive in…

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Lev Grossman, on how sometimes you can fill in someone else’s blanks.

Posted on August 8, 2014July 3, 2015 by blablablaandgabbler

“Today’s fantasy writers feel as though the fictional worlds they create have to be full-scale working models. People talk a lot about the ecology of [George R. R. Martin’s] Westeros, for instance—how do the seasons work? What are the climate patterns? How does it function as an ecosphere? You have to think about the economy, too—have I got a working feudal model? It’s gotten so extreme that when characters do magic, it’s very common to see fantasy writers talk about thermodynamics—okay, he’s lighting a candle with magic, can he draw the heat from somewhere else in the room so that equilibrium gets preserved?

This is the school of thought that extends from Tolkien, and his scrupulously-crafted Middle Earth. Lewis was of a different school from that. Magic, to him, was a much wilder, stranger thing. It was much less domesticated. And when I re-read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I feel as though we’ve wandered too far from the true magic, the kind Lewis wrote. Maybe we want to worry less about thermodynamics and work harder to get that sense of wonder he achieves with such apparent effortlessness.”

Read the rest at The Atlantic.

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