why are all these comic book guys in love with this particular online arena shoot them all up franchise?
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there are absolutely certain kinds of purple prose that work for me in context. I have a new yorker subscription. tides of marinara goes for a weird balance of earnest (frequently to the point of grieving) in its subject matter and narrowly playful in its prose that, honestly, I can’t see many people without my tastes and consumption habits enjoying, but I don’t think any of the examples that tulpa picked out are terrible as such.
They’re pretty bad. “Exquisitely” twice in the same sentence isn’t clever playfulness, it’s just lazy.
well it’s what gary said
look, if you’ve got to turn in a million-some words for a game, reusing an adjective in an adjacent clause at least has an affect
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That effect is “making every single professional editor loathe you forever”
I think you’re taking the position here that you can’t break formal rules of writing, except I know that you don’t feel that way when it’s a more substantial or creative break, which is again why I am characterizing it as narrowly playful. I like it! why it turned out so much as something I’d like is a mystery!
Yeah honestly it is a mystery, because “exquisitely” twice in the same sentence is like chewing tin foil to me. If they were meaning to be intentionally playful with repetition it would be a lot more deliberate. At least, I would be a lot more deliberate.
Since it doesn’t feel intentional, the writing comes off as “we handed this to our teenage son who reads a lot of Brandon Sanderson novels”, which lacks the sort of mischievousness I’d want from pulpy, self-aware “taking the piss” writing.
i wouldn’t say “deliberate” so much as “belabored”
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yeah it’s basically the opposite of what people want from “good pulp” the way that’s usually thought of, and is nearer in tone to a lot of things that are widely accepted as bad by the same audience, which you would think is the audience most likely to buy the game
small wonder that “would you like a late-period Ian McEwan novel that was also like half ghostwritten if it at least had different and better things to say than Ian McEwan” was not a question on a lot of people’s minds
I guess this must be what it’s like to be on the other side of enjoying wotl &co.'s voice
or at least I’m trying to see it that way. I don’t feel like wordcount elevates writing this thin and stilted to “purple” and “playful” and I’m getting lost in the gymnastics employed to suggest that this is successfully targeting an apparently hyperspecific intentional-unintentional affect that nobody else can seem to even recognize or define generously other than Felix
I will pull out some other examples but they’re from an endgame save so I’ll be careful about it
Patrick Rothfuss is an adult now!
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Perhaps in body, but not… in spirit
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I was going to say, in order to not be entirely negative, that Erritis is pretty solidly written throughout. It felt like the only time the game allowed itself to be fun.
Feel like that was handled by someone else, not my fantasy fiction nemesis.
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oh and I liked exploring the loving passages of sphincterland
It’s the single tear that makes my jaw clench up, though the rest of it is treacly
^
Here’s the best writing in the game fyi
I’m actually pretty forgiving of said bookisms (my brain is rotten with old pulp), but “The frost that surrounds his words” paired with “suggests that” is just intolerable. The writer couldn’t trust me to understand a simple metaphor so they had to have an explanatory coda for the purple prose.
See, I like Erritis.
Erritis even had a @HOBO line once
This is the last bit of good writing I found in my screenshots folder. Might as well end my kvetching here
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Oh and just to explain why I had a screencap of the chalcedon, “corded bands” of muscle is a stock phrase used by Lester Dent in old Doc Savage stories all the time. It’s associated with the lowest grade of pulp in my mind. Many of the attempts to convey specific imagery through metaphor in the game come across as shopworn cliche to me because I’ve read too much absolute garbage in my life.
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“I’m gone.”
“I’ve updated my journal.”
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