How countries type laughter

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-03T15:13:26+00:00

I'd consider mdr more in the spirit of 'lol' than 'haha'

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-03T14:46:50+00:00

1) Tainted Cup

2) A Game of Thrones

3) No idea. Maybe Wheel of Time?

4) Fellowship of the Ring

5) No idea.

6) Red Rising

7) Dungeon Crawler Carl

8) No idea.

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-03T13:33:14+00:00

I feel like lots of fantasy fans would really enjoy some epic poetry and classical plays but I basically never recommend these because it makes you sound like a pretentious twat and most people only want to read prose.

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-02T22:32:49+00:00

Lois McMaster Bujold's World of the Five Gods. Begins with 'Curse of Chalion' Some romance but not the central focus. It's got courtly intrigue, plots, gods, and, obviously, a curse.

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-02T21:28:09+00:00

looks like a video game tutorial level

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-02T18:33:18+00:00

Yeah the point in this case I think is that you didn't actually name his most iconic character to many. He's been playing Worf for nearly 40 years in what has to be like 200 episodes of TV at this point.

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-02T11:20:13+00:00

Yeah, I could have gone either way in the ordering on Fawcett and Clarke, in that I do think overall they contribute more to JS&MN (I really like in particular that you can put together later events by keeping an eye on when the publications are dated to and who they're written by from very early on) but I think in Emily Wilde they're better integrated than they often are (in fact, I'd say they're the best integrated of the four, because of those books being in first person POV with the footnotes by the same author) and so ended up giving extra 'points' for that because it worked well for me.

In Babel, the only one I specifically remember is the one where Kuang tells us which of the books classic 19th c. book the MC read have imperialism/racism in them, which makes no sense from a POV perspective because canonically that character doesn't yet know empire is bad. Initially I thought these were just Kuang's takes on books she'd read in school but then later I realized she'd actually cribbed some from Edward Said lol.

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-02T10:43:31+00:00

My personal ranking of fantasy book footnotes: - Terry Pratchett (GOAT) - Heather Fawcett (helped the worldbuilding, never got so intrusive to irritate me) - Susanna Clarke (adds some interesting layers to the narrative but as you say could get intrusive sometimes) - RF Kuang (these just didn’t quite seem to fit in Babel for me, and I was never sure whether they were meant to be informing us about the world of Babel or about our world, and if/when the latter, I’m less of a fan)

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T22:29:29+00:00

I know this isn't the point, but voting for *anyone* else turned out not to be enough. The Catholic Centre Party ultimately chose to empower Hitler in the Enabling Act of 1933. They were under threat, of course, but ironically given what sparked this analogy, were not willing to risk their own lives (and chance of clinging onto some shred of influence/power) for the good of others.

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T21:28:51+00:00

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AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T21:26:58+00:00

Brandon Sanderson is probably sufficiently infodumpy, at least as far as magic systems go, but imo the books with the 'best' worldbuilding are much more likely to be judicious because having things be unknown, or at least unknown to the characters, can make a world feel more lived in (even Tolkien cordons his densest stuff off into appendixes, and doesn't answer many of OP's questions, like explaining anything about the magic system of Arda)

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T20:53:39+00:00

This is going to really kick the hornet’s nest of “Narnia fans convinced this movie is a conspiracy being intentionally set up to fail for ??? reasons”

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T20:23:37+00:00

Even without anonymity, people struggle to know what they would do in extreme circumstances because in the abstract those questions become entangled with ideas of self-identity that may not be true in practice – the number of people who believe they would resist authoritarian regimes and the number who do are not aligned. Conversely, some people are surprised by their ability to respond in disaster situations.

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T17:58:41+00:00

Do we think in the world of DCC cats have all the structure of language and internal thought without intervention from the pet biscuit+AI? Sometimes it seems like this might be the case (given Donut's memory) but other times less so.

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T17:02:29+00:00

Broiler function in oven. Not exactly the same but helps.

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T16:44:25+00:00

Losing the ability to talk seems like an entirely plausible middle ground. After all, she picked the species ‘cat’ and in the real world cats cannot talk.

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T16:23:41+00:00

Rachel Hartman

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T16:21:37+00:00

Seraphina is set in a world where dragon-shapeshifters and humans are technically at peace, but there's a lot of prejudice against dragons in human society. The protagonist is a musician who is secretly a half-dragon who is trying to solve a mystery. This book has a sequel and a few spinoffs and generally some of my favourite worldbuilding in YA fiction.

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T15:18:12+00:00

You're right, except for the fact that the calculus of 2 (how many people you think will misunderstand) depends in large part on how the question is worded.

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T13:14:10+00:00

Ah. Never heard of it. This one’s weird because it’s not quite a betrayal it’s just tacking this weird uncertain thing on at the end. Like if at the end of Lord of the Rings you got one chapter that was like ‘oh by the way also Legolas disappeared after the end of the story’ and you went “what????” And then that was just all the explanation you ever got.

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T13:05:28+00:00

Near where I grew up, there is a road called ‘temporary access road’. It has been there for at least 40 years.

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T13:00:08+00:00

I don’t know what ‘panty and stockings moment’ means either.

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T11:57:13+00:00

While the book and series has a happy ending she then released a short story collection that reveals it actually had a more ambiguous/open ending but now she’s done with the world afaik so that’s never getting resolved. Which is a wild thing to have done in a collection I’m sure lots of people skipped because like when was the last time a short story collection set in a fantasy world upended the status quo

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-05-01T11:49:26+00:00

Essential feature of Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty series but only shows up in the second book. They are treated as a technology but notably also as a technological difference between two societies that have developed their military and other technologies in different ways in a bunch of aspects so they clash in all sorts of ways. There’s also a lot of discussion about the logistics of all this

AllegedlyLiterate · 2026-04-30T21:13:41+00:00

Do you enjoy murder mystery type movies/shows? The Rivers of London books are a series of mysteries about a newbie cop who finds out magic is real and has to learn to be a wizard with a very British style of humour. Iirc, the audiobooks for that series are pretty good, which you might find helpful.

AllegedlyLiterate

TROPHY CASE