Quote (AchillesHK @ Tue, Dec 4 2007, 01:10pm)
The only torture involved in Goodkind is the process of actually trying to read his crap. No, I am not put off by the S&M scenes. I could care less about who has to eat a nutsack or whose a closet masochist.
Goodkind has alot of problems. First, he's not a good writer. His prose is weak and borders on painful at times. His story has magical swords, wizards, dragons, great evil and greater good, riddled with more fantasy cliches than you can shake a stick at...yet he arrogantly asserts that he doesn't write fantasy. In fact he goes out of his way to shit on the genre. There are a few too many coincidences between his series and WoT to be mere coincidence, though he'd go into a mouth foaming rage if you mentioned that to him. He is a poor writer and storyteller. A moron and asshole of the highest order if you've ever heard/read an interview.
But all of this I can forgive. There are after all alot of bad writers out there, even some with delusions of adequacy that Goodkind seems to have. Its the fact that his books amount to little more than thinly veiled attempts to push his own political agenda that annoys the hell out of me. And of course the fact that he does it really poorly.
There's some things you must know when reading Goodkind. First, Richard is always right. Any action, no matter how atrocious or downright wrong, is always right when Richard or Kahlan does it. Any act of brutality justified, anything he says will come to pass, and the exact opposite applies to the villains. They are always wrong and evil incarnate simply because Richard/Terry says so, even if their actions are near identical to Richard and Kahlan's.
Second, just about every foe will be a strawman proxy for an opposing political ideology. They'll be blatantly obvious, incredibly simplistic and outright dumb in their explanation and portrayal of the philosophy. They'll do things like makes speeches about why fire is evil...and actually convince people of this absurd 'fact', and only someone with the 'moral clarity' of Richard will see through this 'clever' ruse. They'll be evil generally because Richard says they are, and in case you're not clubbed over the head hard enough with the rightness of objectivism and wrongness of everything else, Terry will probably have them rape and murder small children just to reinforce that point.
His stories are riddled with absurd speeches, lame strawmen, false dichotomies, and any other bit of shit rhetoric he can find to drive the point home that all other political philosophies are wrong. And in case you have any doubt, the ultimate Gary Stu Richard will usually tell you they're wrong. And of course we need no further proof than that. And if you still have doubts, have no fear...the story will inevitably work out in a fashion that proves Richard was right all along. No matter how contrived the resolution or how absurd the other characters acts and reactions, the outcome will reinforce Terry's ideology...logical progression and organic storytelling be damned.
An author's politics often will come through to some extent in ones work, sometimes consciously sometimes not. I generally don't have a problem with that. But if they're going to turn the novel into a vehicle for propaganda, I insist that the author adequately test their theories with strong, thorough, and well thought out representations of opposing ideals. Terry does not do this. In fact he dumbs down, purposely misstates, grossly overgeneralizes, and paints with the blackest brush available any philosophy he purposely disagrees with. Its the height of intellectual dishonesty. His name should pop up in any dictionary search of disingenuous. There is no ambiguity in Goodkind's world. Things are good because he says they are and evil for the same reasons. If they're not evil enough, he'll have them engage in all manner of immoral perversions just to drive the point home.
I read these series conveniently after reading both "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand, the creator, so to speak, (she was the first to write it down, atleast) of objectivism. This was entirely by coincidence, but I still found the obviousness of his assertions towards objectivism to b e interesting, to say the least.
Ayn Rand did the same thing, though her books were much more based on philosophical ideology than action mixed in with speeches about how your personal life is the epitome of importance.
Nevertheless, I found the books to be mildly entertaining, in a condescending sort-of-way. I enjoyed thinking that the writer obviously had no regard towards an intelligent audience when he decided to create the series, and the plot was simplistic and repetitive. I still wish to finish the series, simply for closure.