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This is a fun article that should have been a tenth the length, used no italics or bolding, and dropped 3/4s of the commas. tl;dr: It's a telenovela instead of

This is a fun article that should have been a tenth the length, used no italics or bolding, and dropped 3/4s of the commas. tl;dr: It's a telenovela instead of being a historical fantasy.

jiggawatts 4y ago
I had the same feeling but I couldn’t exactly articulate why. The blog post while long and pedantic is simply illuminating in detail why I didn’t like the show either. He’s putting words to my vague reasons for dislike. This quote really nails it: "If the story itself doesn’t have to obey any real rules of cause and consequence and thus the creators can merely opt to have anything happen for any reason then there is no reason to invest in any of it at all. If there are no consistent rules to this world then nothing matters and if nothing matters… why should I care?" Fundamentally the show is sloppy work done by people that don’t know what good work looks like. They’re unable understand to root cause of their errors due to a type of Dunning Kruger effect. People that don’t know any of history, logistics, physics, politics, races, finance, or anything else of import often go into the arts. In other words, they go to work for Amazon writing TV shows. Or NetFlix, or Disney. Truly great works of fiction are written by authors who aren’t just writers. They have some other real world experience they draw on. Having lived through a war is a common one. Tolkien fought in WWI, for example. It turns out that English Lit alone is insufficient to write a multi-hundred-million dollar epic series in the same way that having only an MBA does not qualify someone to manage a deeply technical team working on cutting edge technology.
tuatoru 4y ago
Bret's blog is called "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry". You want to read a blog called "Bullet Points". Others of us like prolix, Victorian-in-spirit prose.
- StrictDabbler 4y ago
  In general I am down with and even enthusiastic about recreational sesquipedalianism. I'm even on board when the elaboration verges on ponderous. I've voluntarily read Moby Dick twice! In this case a good chunk of the text is both informationally redundant and ineffective as ornamentation. "I'm going to say a thing. Here's the thing I'm going to say. These are examples of the thing I'm talking about. Do you see the thing that I said? The examples I offered support my point. The point I made is *definitely true*. And this is just the beginning! There are *so many more examples* I could use. Here are four more." Any editor would say "please go through this, flip a coin at the start of every sentence, and erase the sentences where the coin comes up heads."

This is a fun article that should have been a tenth the length, used no italics or bolding, and dropped 3/4s of the commas. tl;dr: It's a telenovela instead of being a historical fantasy.

jiggawatts 4y ago

I had the same feeling but I couldn’t exactly articulate why. The blog post while long and pedantic is simply illuminating in detail why I didn’t like the show either. He’s putting words to my vague reasons for dislike. This quote really nails it: "If the story itself doesn’t have to obey any real rules of cause and consequence and thus the creators can merely opt to have anything happen for any reason then there is no reason to invest in any of it at all. If there are no consistent rules to this world then nothing matters and if nothing matters… why should I care?" Fundamentally the show is sloppy work done by people that don’t know what good work looks like. They’re unable understand to root cause of their errors due to a type of Dunning Kruger effect. People that don’t know any of history, logistics, physics, politics, races, finance, or anything else of import often go into the arts. In other words, they go to work for Amazon writing TV shows. Or NetFlix, or Disney. Truly great works of fiction are written by authors who aren’t just writers. They have some other real world experience they draw on. Having lived through a war is a common one. Tolkien fought in WWI, for example. It turns out that English Lit alone is insufficient to write a multi-hundred-million dollar epic series in the same way that having only an MBA does not qualify someone to manage a deeply technical team working on cutting edge technology.

tuatoru 4y ago

Bret's blog is called "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry". You want to read a blog called "Bullet Points". Others of us like prolix, Victorian-in-spirit prose.

StrictDabbler 4y ago
In general I am down with and even enthusiastic about recreational sesquipedalianism. I'm even on board when the elaboration verges on ponderous. I've voluntarily read Moby Dick twice! In this case a good chunk of the text is both informationally redundant and ineffective as ornamentation. "I'm going to say a thing. Here's the thing I'm going to say. These are examples of the thing I'm talking about. Do you see the thing that I said? The examples I offered support my point. The point I made is *definitely true*. And this is just the beginning! There are *so many more examples* I could use. Here are four more." Any editor would say "please go through this, flip a coin at the start of every sentence, and erase the sentences where the coin comes up heads."