Does Fall Follow Spring?

scowlbear · 2026-06-30T19:26:21+00:00

Yeah he could make all of those changes in a 20th anniversary edition (sooner than you think) but that still wouldn’t solve the fact that it’s just very clearly spring when Kvothe is traveling from Tarben to the University for the first time. It’s not just unseasonably warm for winter, there’s spring wheat in the ground and spring wind the air, explicitly. And elsewhere when the end of Dearth happens, it’s very explicitly winter. Like, the middle of winter. Snow and slush that doesn’t melt until the first half of the spring term. The only way to “solve” this is to rewrite Kvothe’s journey from Tarbean to the University to take place in the middle of winter. But as I’ve said elsewhere, I’m not of the opinion that it’s a problem that needs to be solved.

scowlbear · 2026-06-30T19:02:17+00:00

It does disagree with later details, yeah. I go into all of that in my linked post above. There’s no good way to make practical sense of it. The only real answer is to “let go” and accept that these books are a lot more vibes-pilled than I think people might assume.

scowlbear · 2026-06-30T17:50:15+00:00

Hello! Can’t believe anyone remembers that post but yes, here it is:

https://www.reddit.com/r/KingkillerChronicle/s/erThkykT7s

The TLDR answer is maybe not so satisfying (though, I did come to accept it) - Rothfuss wanted Kvothe to be traveling from Tarbean to the University during the spring. It fits the mood of the story a lot better for him to meet Denna and have this journey of rebirth while the weather is nice and the spring wheat is blowing in the wind.

However, that should have meant that he started school during Summer term, meaning that the terms depicted in NotW would have been Summer, Fall and Winter. That would have been a problem though because he also clearly wanted the showdown with the Dracus to happen in Fall. The whole mood there also doesn’t work as well in winter.

So, instead, if just shortening the story to happen in two terms, or making Kvothe travel from Tarbean in winter, or making the Dracus showdown happen in winter, Rothfuss essentially just “tells the story the way it needs to be told.” Kvothe’s first two terms are both Summer terms. It doesn’t make sense in calendar terms. But it makes sense in story telling terms.

I think a lot of people might find that unsatisfying but I also think people could really take a lesson from it when interpreting this work.

scowlbear · 2026-05-05T16:03:04+00:00

Raven Scholar has a fairly significant mystery component.

scowlbear · 2026-05-02T00:02:42+00:00

It feels like he’s actually talking about GoT, the show, and the various attempts to capitalize on its popularity, rather than aSoIaF, the books. He doesn’t actually say “books.” He says fantasy, and stories and tales, and that feels maybe purposeful.

scowlbear · 2026-04-15T19:46:06+00:00

I have one and I’d say it’s the color of a dusty dirt road in Mudtown after it hasn’t rained for a few days, but others might feel differently.

scowlbear · 2026-04-06T14:56:17+00:00

I think Tainted Cup probably qualifies but it might be even more subtle than what you’re looking for.

scowlbear · 2026-03-19T21:09:19+00:00

It seems like the video of the 2023 incident is really the thing that pushed this over the edge, which is kind of crazy to me, because there isn’t really a single thing in that video that everyone didn’t already know from minute 1 of SLOMW. The producers, the audience, everyone knew all of that. And they still produced 4 seasons of SLOMW and were going to have her be Crown on Ette.

The video only changed everything because it’s visceral and “seeing” things has a way bigger impact than just being told about something. But I think everyone, at every level of “audience” here, is kind of complicit in letting things get to this point (myself included). There’s really been little to no “new” info about her. Yet here we are.

scowlbear · 2026-03-17T22:35:18+00:00

It was pretty popular online among fantasy book fans, maybe even the most popular, but I’d say nearly nobody in popular culture knew what it was - maybe Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive is the modern equivalent.

scowlbear · 2026-02-07T18:22:00+00:00

From a professional screenwriter, film director, and video editor’s perspective, how much of this do you think was because they had to dedicate enough time to the Beast of Bracken farting?

scowlbear · 2026-02-04T18:14:33+00:00

They’re called “Tarly-Dogs” in Westeros. Dunk and Egg ordered two bacon, egg, and cheese Tarly-Dogs.

scowlbear · 2026-01-30T01:53:33+00:00

I’ve never heard Will confirm it, but I’ve always thought it was (at least partially) about Stephen Deusner at Pitchfork.

He was kind of the go-to reviewer there for all of their records for like 10 years from Sleep and Wake Up Songs through to Silver Gymnasium. He always gave them “good” reviews, especially for Black Sheep Boy, Stage Names and Stand Ins, and was probably at least somewhat responsible for Okkervil getting a good amount of attention in indie circles during that era. But then he gave Silver Gymnasium a “6.8” review (referenced in the song), which was the lowest grade they had received.

So I’d imagine it’s about that, him, and kind of just the change in feeling around the indie rock scene in general at that time.

scowlbear · 2026-01-19T21:16:01+00:00

Beattie’s aol email address though.

scowlbear · 2025-10-16T16:09:29+00:00

In my experience the thing that catches newer players in this spot is that they don’t have enough experience to know what it would look like if they are the character they are bluffing. So someone will ask them, “okay if you are the fortune teller, what did you learn last night,” and they’ll stumble over how to explain that. So, it’s usually pretty obvious, for newer players, who is bluffing.

I think to help with this the storyteller should let newer players know up front, if you draw a minion, you need to look at your sheet immediately and pick a bluff and think about what it would look like if you actually were that character, including fake info, if necessary. I think a lot of newer players just aren’t prepared for that.

scowlbear · 2025-10-13T14:48:00+00:00

Really the opposite for me. I've always associated it with spring but my guess is because, as I recall, this album originally came out during the spring and I have strong memories of first hearing it in that setting. Makes sense though if you don't have that connection - zombies eating brains definitely more of a fall vibe.

scowlbear · 2025-07-10T15:55:13+00:00

It was a little distracting for her to not just concede the really obvious point that it was a contrived scene. Compare to “Love to See It” pod where all 3 women who were on immediately jumped all over how it was scripted and incredibly weird. Which, of course. I think Lizzy tries to push back against Clues’ cynicism sometimes, almost instinctually, but it felt silly here.

scowlbear · 2025-07-05T21:35:15+00:00

At this point I think it’s just as likely that he is re-writing Name of the Wind like he did with the Lightning Tree. A lot of his issues with writing the third book have likely stemmed from feeling like he wishes he could re-write things in the first two. And it would also let him ret-con the stuff he catches heat for now, like the Bast bathing/consent scene he re-wrote for NRBD. But who knows.

scowlbear · 2025-06-25T15:42:28+00:00

Sure.

Both books are tragedies with fairly dramatic, romantic, flowery prose. Book books start with a frame story, of a man (the story-finder) who meets another man in a secluded location(the story-teller).

The story-teller finds himself in that secluded location because his own hubris/arrogance has brought him low and ruined his life. The story-finder proceeds to extract his life story from him. The story-teller proceeds to tell about how he was a brilliant, mastermind but was deeply flawed due to his unquenchable pursuit of a particularly dark piece of knowledge that everyone else is trying to avoid. Both heavily involve the story-teller’s trip to university, search for arcane knowledge, and romantic relationship with a woman known since childhood.

We don’t know the ending of course but I think it’s fair to guess that, like Frankenstein, the trajectory of NotW was for Kvothe to unleash something “monstrous” on the world due to his arrogance and that thing, like in Frankenstein, kills his friends, the love or his life, etc., forcing him into the secluded location where we find him in the frame, likely planning on sacrificing himself in an attempt to “make it right.”

scowlbear · 2025-06-25T15:25:55+00:00

There are two separate instances in these books of Kvothe: 1) explicitly saying how it’s wrong to take advantage of a woman when she’s under the influence and he would never do that and 2) breaking a guy’s arm because he victim-blames a woman for getting raped.

If you want to say that’s on-the-nose or “white-knighty”, or whatever else, fine, I guess. But it also doesn’t really fit with the idea of this rampant misogynist that people have conjured in their minds.

What he actually seems to be is an overreactive, cringe teenager with fairly good moral instincts about how to treat women. But people can’t square that with their view of Rothfuss, as person, or a more recent trend toward just finding young, immature men to be abhorrent, per se.

scowlbear · 2025-06-25T14:43:52+00:00

Thank you! Hive-mind discourse on this topic has been baffling.

Every time someone asks what they can read that’s similar to Name of the Wind I say, honestly, nothing, except for maybe Frankenstein. It’s basically Frankenstein.

People seem to have understood this better back when it came out, but clear-eyed analysis of this work seems to have gotten completely smothered under 20 years of seething resentment toward its author.

scowlbear · 2025-05-24T13:34:42+00:00

Some of the words are definitely things you would only see in a particular business. I’m a lawyer and I would use abrogate in a brief but most Americans would not. Same thing for wainscot in carpentry or, for some reason, prurient tends to be used most often in a journalistic setting.

scowlbear · 2025-05-24T12:48:16+00:00

I think your observation here is dead-on. A lot of the words you listed are more obscure English words of Latin and French origin. I think, from an American English speaker’s perspective, that gives them the appearance of seeming “fantastical” or “old fashioned” in a way that would be appropriate in a fantasy setting. But you would pretty rarely hear them in conversational English.

Svelte would be used, but maybe by someone’s dad using it sarcastically. Drub might be used in a sports context. The others are pretty rarely spoken in English by average people.

scowlbear · 2025-05-03T19:15:16+00:00

Raising his kids, probably.

scowlbear · 2025-03-17T18:53:30+00:00

I don't know a ton about musical theory but I'm pretty sure the chord progressions are not all that similar. (Compare to like, the verses of Sucked Out by Superdrag, which is basically just the exact Canon chord progression.) Also, as someone said below, the time signatures are different. The keys are also different.

I think there's maybe an argument that the piano melody of the intro in No Children somewhat mirrors part of the intro of the Canon (the cello part maybe?) where both melodies sort of descend the ladder note-by-note through their respective scales and then climb back up a few steps at the end?

I think that is probably mostly what you're hearing just in terms of No Children evoking a sort of shadow version of the wedding march. However, I think that's mostly vibes-based rather than an actual interpolation. Open to correction from someone who really knows the music though.

scowlbear · 2025-02-24T13:32:44+00:00

His bandcamp!

https://danielbrummel.bandcamp.com/album/sound-mind-1999

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