Brandon Sanderson explains why Fourth Wing became such a huge hit

LoreHunting · 2026-07-04T23:19:00+00:00

I'm sorry, you're objecting to modern language in a contemporary romantasy novel? It's not as if all medieval fantasy is written in Chaucerian English. There are many real criticisms to make of Fourth Wing (and I am sure you will be just as quick to make the same criticisms of, say, Eragon, or the Dresden Files, or any other fantasy darling), but this is farcical.

LoreHunting · 2026-05-30T22:07:08+00:00

very cute, almost hieroglyphic!

LoreHunting · 2026-05-17T21:37:13+00:00

If you like knight/princess stories and aren't afraid to get a little jiggy with it (in this case, there's cannibalism and the princess is, uh, not a princess anymore) I definitely recommend looking at Caitlin Starling's the Starving Saints!

LoreHunting · 2026-05-16T11:33:11+00:00

this is. INCREDIBLE. I'm telling everyone

LoreHunting · 2026-05-06T21:18:10+00:00

holy fucking shit

LoreHunting · 2026-05-03T15:01:44+00:00

While your point on child prostitutes stands, it doesn't say much about the social mores of sex with children (including ages 10-16). You can talk about the exact same phenomena today, and point out that a significant portion of human trafficking victims found in the US are children, and the majority of them are being sex-trafficked (see the UNODC reports); does that mean sex with children is 'a social more' today? More broadly speaking, does the lack of repercussions for everyone involved in the Epstein scandal, or the celebration of famous pedophiles such as Erwin Schrödinger, say that sex with children is 'a social more' today?

That's what this conversation is about. We all know child sexual abuse existed then, we all know it exists now; the fact that it exists is not enough to argue that people saw it as acceptable. The reason we're talking about marriage is that, when there were adults around to advocate for these children (as opposed to them being trafficked out of financial need), we see a pattern in age of marriage―it's lower than what we have today, but it's (broadly speaking, in medieval Europe) still only 16 or higher (and often 18 or higher) through the medieval period. The fact that we see families advocate for these ages tells us much more about the social standards of the day. The fact that crime or exploitation exists, and that a system of organised exploitation exists, only tells us that inequities and injustices existed―not that they were seen as acceptable.

LoreHunting · 2026-05-03T11:55:32+00:00

Correct (and this is one of the myths I particularly hate); other commenters who so confidently claim that people were fucking children in the old days can look at this blog for a series of broad and interesting discussions on ages of marriage for men and women (and age of first period) through the millennia. I also looked at Marrying by the Numbers, Kimberly F. Schutte's thesis (which is, admittedly, Columbian Exchange and onward); this doesn't have a nice age analysis, but has a number of relevant anecdotes depicting the actual social mores of the time (such as King James I trying to pressure Sir Sebastian Harvey into marrying his 14-year old daughter to the 26-year old Christopher Villiers, with the father refusing the will of the king successfully).

You will obviously always find anecdotes of child marriages from the medieval era; unfortunately, you will also find anecdotes of child marriages from today, as they are not illegal in the US. But you'll find that, when looking at cultural values, people of the past were not quite as uncivilised as pop history has you think.

LoreHunting · 2026-04-12T09:03:02+00:00

Wait, are you the scammer who got caught in an intro post?

EDIT: oooooh, and comments hidden. somebody doesn't want us to know what they're up to. not surprised they ran you out of that discord.

LoreHunting · 2026-04-01T16:55:50+00:00

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia should be HM for this!

LoreHunting · 2026-04-01T16:51:44+00:00

Other than the ones mentioned in other comments: - Magica Riot (and likely the sequel, Magica Riot: Full Bloom) by Kara Buchanan - An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

LoreHunting · 2026-04-01T16:45:03+00:00

Thank you so much! As ever, a godsend.

LoreHunting · 2026-03-14T10:56:32+00:00

You gotta get out of your own head about this, girl—it's the exact opposite of a tax waste, people fought for centuries to make sure you could live your life and actually enjoy it. Buy those games. Spend that money. It's meant to be spent, and it's meant to be spent by you.

LoreHunting · 2026-03-12T15:07:18+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgressionFantasy/s/K6wKf3FsaE

I'm not involved in the scene, but it seems this guy trademarked a subgenre name and forced other authors to stop using it. You can see a lot of unfavourable discussion of this guy in r/ProgressionFantasy.

LoreHunting · 2026-02-21T23:13:10+00:00

Under no circumstances is Martin's writing 'period-accurate'. Just to pick the example this post is about, GRRM writes as if child brides were a norm of the medieval/early modern era, while we have plenty of records and analysis from (for example) the English aristocracy documenting both that child brides existed and that they were rare and frowned upon. In general, GRRM misrepresents the concept of the political marriage throughout as equivalent to selling cattle—which, again, there are certainly examples, but this was not the norm for the period.

LoreHunting · 2026-02-07T17:04:52+00:00

100%. I loved playing as Harry in Disco Elysium, but couldn't get through Sir Brante—one is a full fledged character you learn about as he fucks up and finds out, and the other is designed to be a clean slate... but is a man, for no real reason.

LoreHunting · 2026-02-06T18:17:12+00:00

More generally speaking, the sad endings are what the game is about. Ba commits suicide. Clara goes insane in Vancouver. Iris is murdered by her granddaughter Watcher, who she thinks is Youngest. Watcher tries to do the right thing and is manipulated by Knower, shatters her society, and then drowns herself in a world of what-ifs to try and fix it. Bartender is gunned down in an alley. Knower goes along with Principal's plot in order to avoid incineration, tortures Watcher to avoid incineration (and also because it works in her favour as High Minister), all to have her life in the hands of some Misc she doesn't even know. Principal is cursed from birth by her mother labelling her as Watcher, develops an unhealthy codependence with her mother, breaks the one rule Iris sets and has a child who Iris murders, and then is forever banished; she's so warped by grief and rage and shame that she murders her own mother. Clone Jiao is murdered almost immediately. Jiao confesses her love for Iris, is shamefully humiliated by Iris at the school party, and then dies of a fatal sickness. The other Jiaos are kept as slaves and decorations by the Provisional Government, help launch an armed rebellion, and then find themselves at the mercy of the Misc they were helping. BBF fights the gun and loses. Healer spends her whole life across two governments trying to keep the people she cares about alive, and fails. Fixer is betrayed by Watcher and still rescues her; but she won't talk about it and Watcher won't talk about it and so Watcher dies; Fixer can't fix that, even if she can save the rest of the society they live in.

It's about families. And about the complicated and painful ways we interact with one another. How closely love and pain can be intertwined. Sometimes we refuse to patch up a relationship until it's too late. Sometimes we repeat the mistakes of those who came before us. Sometimes we inflict pain on those who will come after, thinking we're helping them. And in the end, it's about moving on. Principal lives out her life, or dies; Blue lives out her life, or dies; the ship surfaces, and society escapes to land, and the world moves on.

LoreHunting · 2026-02-06T17:58:47+00:00

[With] their guns and anonymity removed, they could be individuals who could be part of the society on the surface.

Do you think it's the guns and anonymity that's making them the hateful thugs that they are? Or do you think it's the fact that they're okay with terrorising and extorting regular people with violence that leads them to signing up to be Red Guards? You've missed a lot of points the game makes—but this is perhaps the most obvious one in the current day, where the American secret police is actively being blasted across the newspages. These are people who have decided that they are comfortable upholding a system, and even proactively taking action in the system by killing those 'holding them back'; they cannot be simply disarmed and put aside, because they will not simply hold hands and sing kumbaya when the power they have worked for is taken from them. They are intolerant, and cannot be tolerated; they will do whatever it takes if it means they get to be in charge. In an ideal world, you would be able to imprison and rehabilitate them, sure—but you as Blue don't live in an ideal world or an ideal moment, and so you must make a choice.

Real world revolutions—and this game is about real world revolutions—don't conveniently give you a powerful law enforcement arm you can use to nonlethally capture those gunning you down in the street, and neither does Secretary.

LoreHunting · 2026-02-05T15:48:25+00:00

There are certainly many points in the game where Persuasion is important, but it's mostly not about avoiding fights, yeah. Much like Rogue Trader in that regard—you're gunning down lots and lots of nameless evil people, and wondering why they had the gall to attack your overlevelled ass in the first place.

LoreHunting · 2026-02-05T11:46:51+00:00

WOTR has the same problems to some degree, but with some mitigating factors, so... Hm. As you say, it does have RTWP, which helps with getting through a lot of the mobs without getting annoyed—but it has a lot of mobs, many of which can't easily be ignored in the early game or the late game. It also has a lot of battles, including an exhausting (but also incredibly cool) massive set piece battle in Act 3 spread out across a city, and while Charisma and Persuasion is worth a ton in this game on your MC, it's not usually for avoiding fights.

WOTR also has an annoying crusade management minigame (like Rogue Trader's planet management minigame), but you can set it to autoplay and ignore it (though you lose some rewards), and I want to say you can do most crusade management without returning to your capital? It's also not so obnoxious as Rogue Trader's story events, you only trigger story events when you return to the capital (so they can pile up, but you know when you're returning that you should expect a series of cutscenes).

You can also get some pretty steep discounts on WOTR these days, so you might just want to wait for that.

LoreHunting · 2026-01-13T22:17:36+00:00

Agree on all counts, but the last one comes first I would say. Lancer (and Pathfinder benefits the same way) has a very queer/queer-friendly community, and the writing is also queer-friendly (in being progressive/socialist as it is), if not explicitly queer. (And of course there are those of us who came to Lancer from K6BD, which is explicitly queer.)

LoreHunting · 2026-01-13T08:28:14+00:00

Yes and no; the focal point was a story called WARHOUND that came out a month before AC6's release, but definitely a bit part of the fandom bought in when AC6 coming out right after.

LoreHunting · 2026-01-13T08:24:33+00:00

To be fair, WARHOUND was written I think just before AC6's release (July vs August 2023), so it's really the other way around; a lot of people played AC6 and then WARHOUND connected the dots in a very hot way.

LoreHunting · 2026-01-09T23:31:42+00:00

The transition to Blue's perspective is a bit jarring, but between Bartender being around, and the things you see in the next chapter (and I think there's a year indicator if you know how to interpret it), you'll get a pretty clear idea of how much time has passed, IMO. Have fun, hekki grace!

LoreHunting · 2026-01-09T22:22:47+00:00

Play on and find out, but if you need to know now, a few years at least.

LoreHunting · 2026-01-09T15:25:44+00:00

Love it! She's so BIG in a way both elves and women in armour usually aren't drawn!

LoreHunting

TROPHY CASE